"Nils Runeberg proposes an opposite moving force: an extravagant and even limitless asceticism. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, degrades and mortifies the flesh; Judas did the same with the spirit. He renounced honor, good, peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, as others, less heroically, renounced pleasure. With a terrible lucidity he premeditated his offense.
In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendor. Judas elected those offenses unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence (John 12 :6) and informing. He labored with gigantic humility; he thought himself unworthy to be good. Paul has written: Whoever glorifieth himself, let him glorify himself in God (I Corinthians 1:31); Judas sought Hell because the felicity of the Lord sufficed him. He thought that happiness, like good, is a divine attribute and not to be usurped by men."
"The general argument is not complex, even if the conclusion is monstrous. God, argues Nils Runeberg, lowered himself to be a man for the redemption of the human race; it is reasonable to assume that the sacrifice offered by him was perfect, not invalidated or attenuated by any omission. To limit all that happened to the agony of one afternoon on the cross is blasphemous. To affirm that he was a man and that he was incapable of sin contains a contradiction; the attributes of impeccabilitas and of humanitas are not compatible. Kemnitz admits that the Redeemer could feel fatigue, cold, confusion, hunger and thirst; it is reasonable to admit that he could also sin and be damned. The famous text He will sprout like a root in a dry soil; there is not good mien to him, nor beauty; despised of men and the least of them; a man of sorrow, and experienced in heartbreaks (Isaiah 53:2-3) is for many people a forecast of the Crucified in the hour of his death; for some (as for instance, Hans Lassen Martensen), it is a refutation of the beauty which the vulgar consensus attributes to Christ; for Runeberg, it is a precise prophecy, not of one moment, but of all the atrocious future, in time and eternity, of the Word made flesh. God became a man completely, a man to the point of infamy, a man to the point of being reprehensible - all the way to the abyss. In order to save us, He could have chosen any of the destinies which together weave the uncertain web of history; He could have been Alexander, or Pythagoras, or Rurik, or Jesus; He chose an infamous destiny: He was Judas."
(Borges' Three Versions of Judas)
"Understand? Rabbi, you broke my heart. Sometimes I curse the day I ever met you. We held the world in our hands. Remember what you said to me? You took me in your arms, do you remember? And you begged me. "Betray me, betray me. I have to be crucified. I have to be resurrected to save the world.”I am the lamb," you said. "Death is the door. Judas, my brother, don't be afraid. Help me go through the door." And I loved you so much I went and betrayed you"
Judas to the ailing Christ in Scorcese's The Last Temptation of Christ, based on Nikos Kazantzakis's Novel.
P.S.
So what say you? Reader.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Sunday, January 1, 2006
Selection from Kristeva's Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
Compared to most contemporary French theorists that gave me most delicious of headaches trying to make a sense out of their text, Kristeva remains essentially simple, though thoroughly enjoyable... Her criticism being heavily inflected by Lacan and Derrida, still remains decipherable ( It remains a relative comparison ) without much head banging on the walls ( Which ofcourse made Derrida my masochistic love)... The casual readers of this blog, alien to her or Derrida, may find this a difficult read , but I guess still worth the pain. It, to date remains the only post for which I am looking forward for comments/interpretations of all who give it a read.
No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity,
No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not
Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce.
--Victor Hugo, La Légende des siècles
NEITHER SUBJECT NOR OBJECT
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful - a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-ject, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object - that of being opposed to the I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is racially excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. A Certain "ego" that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter's rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master. Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out. To each ego its object, to each superego its abject. It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bodies, nights, and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that "I" puts up with, sublime and devastated, for "I" deposits it to the father's account: I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other. A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.
THE IMPROPER/UNCLEAN
Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them. Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk - harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail pairing - I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire; "I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it, "I" expel it. But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which "I" claim to establish myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that "I" am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death. During that course in which "I" become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symptom, shattering violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects. The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A would with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death - a flat encephalograph, for instance - I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit -- cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel. "I" is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you - it is now here, jetted, abjected, into "my" world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue's full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior. . . . Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality is not abject, there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law - rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sets you up, a friend who stabs you. . . . In the dark halls of the museum that is now what remains of Auschwitz, I see a heap of children's shoes, or something like that, something I have already seen elsewhere, under a Christmas tree for instance, dolls I believe. The abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case, kills me, interferes with what, in
my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things.
THE ABJECTION OF SELF
If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is one other than abject. The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being. There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded. One passes too quickly over this word, "want," and today psychoanalysts are finally taking into account only its more or less fetishized product, the "object of want." But if one imagines (and imagine one must, for it is the working of imagination whose foundations are being laid here) the experience of want itself as logically preliminary to being and object - to the being of the object - then one understands that abjection, and even more so abjection of self, is its only signified. Its signifier, then, is none but literature. Mystical Christendom turned this abjection of self into the ultimate proof of humility before God, witness Elizabeth of Hungary who "though a great princess, delighted in nothing so much as in abasing herself." The question remains as to the ordeal, a secular one this time, that abjection can constitute for someone who, in what is termed knowledge of castration, turning away from perverse dodges, presents himself with his own body and ego as the most precious non-objects; they are no longer seen in their own right but forfeited, abject. The termination of analysis can lead us there, as we shall see. Such are the pangs and delights of masochism. Essentially different from "uncanniness," more violent, too, abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory. I imagine a child who has swallowed up his parents too soon, who frightens himself on that account, "all by himself," and, to save himself, rejects and throws up everything that is given to him - all gifts, all objects. He has, he could have, a sense of the abject. Even before things for him are -- hence before they are signifiable - he drives them out, dominated by drive as he is, and constitutes his own territory, edged by the abject. A sacred configuration. Fear cements his compound, conjoined to another world, thrown up, driven out, forfeited. What he has swallowed up instead of maternal love is an emptiness, or rather a maternal hatred without a word for the words of the father; that is what he tries to cleanse himself of, tirelessly. What solace does he come upon within such loathing? Perhaps a father, existing but unsettled, loving but unsteady, merely an apparition but an apparition that remains. Without him the holy brat would probably have no sense of the sacred; a blank subject, he would remain, discomfited, at the dump for non-objects that are always forfeited, from which, on the contrary, fortified by abjection, he tries to extricate himself. For he is not mad, he through whom the abject exists. Out of the daze that has petrified him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother, a daze that has cut off his impulses from their objects, that is, from their representations, out of such daze he causes, along with loathing, one word to crop up - fear. The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, "fear" - a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess - no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of
memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.
BEYOND THE UNCONSCIOUS
Put another way, it means that there are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based on exclusion. They are clearly distinguishable from those understood as neurotic or psychotic, articulated by negation and in modalities, transgression, denial, and repudiation. Their dynamics challenges the theory of the unconscious, seeing that the latter is dependent upon a dialectic of negativity. The theory of the unconscious, as is well know, presupposes a repression of contents (affects and presentations) that, thereby, do not have access to consciousness but effect within the subject modifications, either of speech (parapraxes, etc.), or of the body (symptoms), or both (hallucinations, etc.). As correlative to the notion of repression, Freud put forward that of denial as a means of figuring out neurosis, that of rejection (repudiation) as a means of situating psychosis. The asymmetry of the two repressions becomes more marked owing to denial's bearing on the object whereas repudiation affects desire itself (Lacan, in perfect keeping with Freud's thought, interprets that as "repudiation of the Name of the Father"). Yet, facing the ab-ject and more specifically phobia and the splitting of the ego (a point I shall return to), one migt ask if those articulations of negativity germane to the unconscious (inherited by Freud from philosophy and psychology) have not become inoperative. The "unconscious" contents remain here excluded but in strange fashion: not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object, and yet clearly enough for a defensive position to be established - one that implies a refusal but also a sublimating elaboration. As if the fundamental opposition were between I and Other or, in more archaic fashion, between Inside and Outside. As if such an opposition subsumed the one between Conscious and Unconscious, elaborated on the basis of neuroses. Owing to the ambiguous opposition I/Other, Inside/Outside - an opposition that is vigorous but pervious, violent but uncertain - there are contents, "normally" unconscious in neurotics, that become explicit if not conscious in "borderline" patients' speeches and behavior. Such contents are often openly manifested through symbolic practices, without by the same token being integrated into the judging consciousness of those particular subjects. Since they make the conscious/unconscious distinction irrelevant, borderline subjects and their speech constitute propitious ground for a sublimating discourse ("aesthetic" or "mystical" etc.), rather than a scientific or rationalist one.
AN EXILE WHO ASKS "WHERE?"
The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing. Situationist in a sense, and not without laughter --since laughing is a way of placing or displacing abjection. Necessarily dichotomous, somewhat Manichaean, he divides,, excludes, and without, properly speaking, wishing to know his abjections is not at all unaware of them. Often, moreover, he includes himself among them, thus casting within himself the scalpel that carries out his separations. Instead of sounding himself as to his "being," he does so concerning his place: "Where am I?" instead of "Who am I?" For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines - for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject - constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding. He has a sense of the danger, of the loss that the pseudo-object attracting him represents for him, but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays, the more he is saved.
TIME: FORGETFULNESS AND THUNDER
For it is out of such straying on excluded ground that he draws his jouissance. The abject from which he does not cease separating is for him, in short, a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered. Once upon blotted-out time, the abject must have been a magnetized pole of covetousness. But the ashes of oblivion now serve as a screen and reflect aversion, repugnance. The clean and proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame. Then, forgotten time crops up suddenly and condenses into a flash of lightning an operation that, if it were thought out, would involve bringing together the two opposite terms but, on account of that flash, is discharged like thunder. The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth.
No Beast is there without glimmer of infinity,
No eye so vile nor abject that brushes not
Against lightning from on high, now tender, now fierce.
--Victor Hugo, La Légende des siècles
NEITHER SUBJECT NOR OBJECT
There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful - a certainty of which it is proud holds on to it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. When I am beset by abjection, the twisted braid of affects and thoughts I call by such a name does not have, properly speaking, a definable object. The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-ject, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is abject is not my correlative, which, providing me with someone or something else as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The abject has only one quality of the object - that of being opposed to the I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is racially excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. A Certain "ego" that merged with its master, a superego, has flatly driven it away. It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the latter's rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master. Without a sign (for him), it beseeches a discharge, a convulsion, a crying out. To each ego its object, to each superego its abject. It is not the white expanse or slack boredom of repression, not the translations and transformations of desire that wrench bodies, nights, and discourse; rather it is a brutish suffering that "I" puts up with, sublime and devastated, for "I" deposits it to the father's account: I endure it, for I imagine that such is the desire of the other. A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A "something" that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture.
THE IMPROPER/UNCLEAN
Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me toward and separates me from them. Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk - harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail pairing - I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream, separates me from the mother and father who proffer it. "I" want none of that element, sign of their desire; "I" do not want to listen, "I" do not assimilate it, "I" expel it. But since the food is not an "other" for "me," who am only in their desire, I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which "I" claim to establish myself. That detail, perhaps an insignificant one, but one that they ferret out, emphasize, evaluate, that trifle turns me inside out, guts sprawling; it is thus that they see that "I" am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death. During that course in which "I" become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit. Mute protest of the symptom, shattering violence of a convulsion that, to be sure, is inscribed in a symbolic system, but in which, without either wanting or being able to become integrated in order to answer to it, it reacts, it abreacts. It abjects. The corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile and fallacious chance. A would with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death - a flat encephalograph, for instance - I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit -- cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel. "I" is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? That elsewhere that I imagine beyond the present, or that I hallucinate so that I might, in a present time, speak to you, conceive of you - it is now here, jetted, abjected, into "my" world. Deprived of world, therefore, I fall in a faint. In that compelling, raw, insolent thing in the morgue's full sunlight, in that thing that no longer matches and therefore no longer signifies anything, I behold the breaking down of a world that has erased its borders: fainting away. The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite. The traitor, the liar, the criminal with a good conscience, the shameless rapist, the killer who claims he is a savior. . . . Any crime, because it draws attention to the fragility of the law, is abject, but premeditated crime, cunning murder, hypocritical revenge are even more so because they heighten the display of such fragility. He who denies morality is not abject, there can be grandeur in amorality and even in crime that flaunts its disrespect for the law - rebellious, liberating, and suicidal crime. Abjection, on the other hand, is immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sets you up, a friend who stabs you. . . . In the dark halls of the museum that is now what remains of Auschwitz, I see a heap of children's shoes, or something like that, something I have already seen elsewhere, under a Christmas tree for instance, dolls I believe. The abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case, kills me, interferes with what, in
my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things.
THE ABJECTION OF SELF
If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject, one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is one other than abject. The abjection of self would be the culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all its objects are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being. There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded. One passes too quickly over this word, "want," and today psychoanalysts are finally taking into account only its more or less fetishized product, the "object of want." But if one imagines (and imagine one must, for it is the working of imagination whose foundations are being laid here) the experience of want itself as logically preliminary to being and object - to the being of the object - then one understands that abjection, and even more so abjection of self, is its only signified. Its signifier, then, is none but literature. Mystical Christendom turned this abjection of self into the ultimate proof of humility before God, witness Elizabeth of Hungary who "though a great princess, delighted in nothing so much as in abasing herself." The question remains as to the ordeal, a secular one this time, that abjection can constitute for someone who, in what is termed knowledge of castration, turning away from perverse dodges, presents himself with his own body and ego as the most precious non-objects; they are no longer seen in their own right but forfeited, abject. The termination of analysis can lead us there, as we shall see. Such are the pangs and delights of masochism. Essentially different from "uncanniness," more violent, too, abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory. I imagine a child who has swallowed up his parents too soon, who frightens himself on that account, "all by himself," and, to save himself, rejects and throws up everything that is given to him - all gifts, all objects. He has, he could have, a sense of the abject. Even before things for him are -- hence before they are signifiable - he drives them out, dominated by drive as he is, and constitutes his own territory, edged by the abject. A sacred configuration. Fear cements his compound, conjoined to another world, thrown up, driven out, forfeited. What he has swallowed up instead of maternal love is an emptiness, or rather a maternal hatred without a word for the words of the father; that is what he tries to cleanse himself of, tirelessly. What solace does he come upon within such loathing? Perhaps a father, existing but unsettled, loving but unsteady, merely an apparition but an apparition that remains. Without him the holy brat would probably have no sense of the sacred; a blank subject, he would remain, discomfited, at the dump for non-objects that are always forfeited, from which, on the contrary, fortified by abjection, he tries to extricate himself. For he is not mad, he through whom the abject exists. Out of the daze that has petrified him before the untouchable, impossible, absent body of the mother, a daze that has cut off his impulses from their objects, that is, from their representations, out of such daze he causes, along with loathing, one word to crop up - fear. The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, "fear" - a fluid haze, an elusive clamminess - no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of
memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.
BEYOND THE UNCONSCIOUS
Put another way, it means that there are lives not sustained by desire, as desire is always for objects. Such lives are based on exclusion. They are clearly distinguishable from those understood as neurotic or psychotic, articulated by negation and in modalities, transgression, denial, and repudiation. Their dynamics challenges the theory of the unconscious, seeing that the latter is dependent upon a dialectic of negativity. The theory of the unconscious, as is well know, presupposes a repression of contents (affects and presentations) that, thereby, do not have access to consciousness but effect within the subject modifications, either of speech (parapraxes, etc.), or of the body (symptoms), or both (hallucinations, etc.). As correlative to the notion of repression, Freud put forward that of denial as a means of figuring out neurosis, that of rejection (repudiation) as a means of situating psychosis. The asymmetry of the two repressions becomes more marked owing to denial's bearing on the object whereas repudiation affects desire itself (Lacan, in perfect keeping with Freud's thought, interprets that as "repudiation of the Name of the Father"). Yet, facing the ab-ject and more specifically phobia and the splitting of the ego (a point I shall return to), one migt ask if those articulations of negativity germane to the unconscious (inherited by Freud from philosophy and psychology) have not become inoperative. The "unconscious" contents remain here excluded but in strange fashion: not radically enough to allow for a secure differentiation between subject and object, and yet clearly enough for a defensive position to be established - one that implies a refusal but also a sublimating elaboration. As if the fundamental opposition were between I and Other or, in more archaic fashion, between Inside and Outside. As if such an opposition subsumed the one between Conscious and Unconscious, elaborated on the basis of neuroses. Owing to the ambiguous opposition I/Other, Inside/Outside - an opposition that is vigorous but pervious, violent but uncertain - there are contents, "normally" unconscious in neurotics, that become explicit if not conscious in "borderline" patients' speeches and behavior. Such contents are often openly manifested through symbolic practices, without by the same token being integrated into the judging consciousness of those particular subjects. Since they make the conscious/unconscious distinction irrelevant, borderline subjects and their speech constitute propitious ground for a sublimating discourse ("aesthetic" or "mystical" etc.), rather than a scientific or rationalist one.
AN EXILE WHO ASKS "WHERE?"
The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself), separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays instead of getting his bearings, desiring, belonging, or refusing. Situationist in a sense, and not without laughter --since laughing is a way of placing or displacing abjection. Necessarily dichotomous, somewhat Manichaean, he divides,, excludes, and without, properly speaking, wishing to know his abjections is not at all unaware of them. Often, moreover, he includes himself among them, thus casting within himself the scalpel that carries out his separations. Instead of sounding himself as to his "being," he does so concerning his place: "Where am I?" instead of "Who am I?" For the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic. A deviser of territories, languages, works, the deject never stops demarcating his universe whose fluid confines - for they are constituted of a non-object, the abject - constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh. A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding. He has a sense of the danger, of the loss that the pseudo-object attracting him represents for him, but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays, the more he is saved.
TIME: FORGETFULNESS AND THUNDER
For it is out of such straying on excluded ground that he draws his jouissance. The abject from which he does not cease separating is for him, in short, a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered. Once upon blotted-out time, the abject must have been a magnetized pole of covetousness. But the ashes of oblivion now serve as a screen and reflect aversion, repugnance. The clean and proper (in the sense of incorporated and incorporable) becomes filthy, the sought-after turns into the banished, fascination into shame. Then, forgotten time crops up suddenly and condenses into a flash of lightning an operation that, if it were thought out, would involve bringing together the two opposite terms but, on account of that flash, is discharged like thunder. The time of abjection is double: a time of oblivion and thunder, of veiled infinity and the moment when revelation bursts forth.
Thursday, December 29, 2005
Thursday, December 22, 2005
1979 Smashing Pumpkins
Shakedown 1979, cool kids never have the time
On a live wire right up off the street
You and I should meet
Junebug skipping like a stone
With the headlights pointed at the dawn
We were sure we’d never see an end to it all
And I don’t even care to shake these zipper blues
And we don’t knowJust where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below
Double cross the vacant and the bored
They’re not sure just what we have in the store
Morphine city slippin dues down to see
That we don’t even care as restless as we are
We feel the pull in the land of a thousand guilts
And poured cement, lamented and assured
To the lights and towns below
Faster than the speed of sound
Faster than we thought we’d go, beneath the sound of hope
Justine never knew the rules,
Hung down with the freaks and the ghouls
No apologies ever need be made, I know you better than you fake it
To see that we don’t care to shake these zipper blues
And we don’t know just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below
The street heats the urgency of sound
As you can see there’s no one around
On a live wire right up off the street
You and I should meet
Junebug skipping like a stone
With the headlights pointed at the dawn
We were sure we’d never see an end to it all
And I don’t even care to shake these zipper blues
And we don’t knowJust where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below
Double cross the vacant and the bored
They’re not sure just what we have in the store
Morphine city slippin dues down to see
That we don’t even care as restless as we are
We feel the pull in the land of a thousand guilts
And poured cement, lamented and assured
To the lights and towns below
Faster than the speed of sound
Faster than we thought we’d go, beneath the sound of hope
Justine never knew the rules,
Hung down with the freaks and the ghouls
No apologies ever need be made, I know you better than you fake it
To see that we don’t care to shake these zipper blues
And we don’t know just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed into the earth below
The street heats the urgency of sound
As you can see there’s no one around
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Hymnhum. Suckmarrow [ashtory next chapter]
[This to the lord of the void.]
I submit meself in thy puppetual servitude—A Sonsinking dreams of a patern with velvet wavelets and shimmering darkness—semper in angaria, Of Slavation that beasts upon thesires, haramonizes infinite nymphs within a single rhapsody and all creation hymns the song of solomoan. A metamorphic metaphor in search of themeaning in an impassable impasse, the words and mazes, stretches its implications from pestilence to damnation. This fading façade will soon disappear love and there’ll be nothing left of me, nothing but the carving on that wall [eia, quis me amabit], where you stand and watch me dig holes, souls. And you hymnhum litanies of your god’s love oblivious of the luciferous waltzes of those forsaken souls… Of one soon I’ll be. Who will then cherish the memory of embrace, of hands in hands, of bodies pressed into eachother, of lips inseparable for that moment that lapsed eternity, and travel on wings of abaddon? What death this life conceals in its lap, shroud, enigma and mythology?
[But this again is a story, only a story…]
We slashed our palms, blended bloods, and farewelled, up till the moment of readiscovering, with healed scars and charred faces, clothed in paper—suicidal notes written in each other’s name. And curled us into a homogenous conglomerate, annuled individualities, abandoned for an embrace—for ambrosia.
Please believe there is no falling apart.
Please… Believe … These rivers of fate on my hand, this palmystery doesn’t nourish a judas within its depths.Ma chere, you were of faith, remember? I was of little; I needed to touch the flesh to believe. And how you resurrected me, sundered me from Thomas, inch by inch, limb by limb… What isn’t a story, you and me as functions of time and space, the age old question of form and substance, written by the mighty creator on pages of eternity?
I submit meself in thy puppetual servitude—A Sonsinking dreams of a patern with velvet wavelets and shimmering darkness—semper in angaria, Of Slavation that beasts upon thesires, haramonizes infinite nymphs within a single rhapsody and all creation hymns the song of solomoan. A metamorphic metaphor in search of themeaning in an impassable impasse, the words and mazes, stretches its implications from pestilence to damnation. This fading façade will soon disappear love and there’ll be nothing left of me, nothing but the carving on that wall [eia, quis me amabit], where you stand and watch me dig holes, souls. And you hymnhum litanies of your god’s love oblivious of the luciferous waltzes of those forsaken souls… Of one soon I’ll be. Who will then cherish the memory of embrace, of hands in hands, of bodies pressed into eachother, of lips inseparable for that moment that lapsed eternity, and travel on wings of abaddon? What death this life conceals in its lap, shroud, enigma and mythology?
[But this again is a story, only a story…]
We slashed our palms, blended bloods, and farewelled, up till the moment of readiscovering, with healed scars and charred faces, clothed in paper—suicidal notes written in each other’s name. And curled us into a homogenous conglomerate, annuled individualities, abandoned for an embrace—for ambrosia.
Please believe there is no falling apart.
Please… Believe … These rivers of fate on my hand, this palmystery doesn’t nourish a judas within its depths.Ma chere, you were of faith, remember? I was of little; I needed to touch the flesh to believe. And how you resurrected me, sundered me from Thomas, inch by inch, limb by limb… What isn’t a story, you and me as functions of time and space, the age old question of form and substance, written by the mighty creator on pages of eternity?
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
Monday, December 5, 2005
Friday, November 18, 2005
Metamorphosis
Life is about to be changed forever, once again. Tomorrow at the stroke of midnoon, I would have finished the last paper before I graduate... And then mundanities will never be the same again.
Last four years have been eventfull if not anything, and though love came to heal all in the end, i still cherish the old flagellations. 'The transition is beautiful', Someone said 'There is a softness about you which was missing forever til now. ' And I laughed. Laughed my heart out. The cynical rogue learned to laugh, and to cry, and to feel.For all the bitterness I collected over the first three years [Vestige of which still lingers, may linger on forever], at the end of it all, I am happy. Regrets are nothing compared to this elation.
Thank You, my-wish, thank you my love.
Last four years have been eventfull if not anything, and though love came to heal all in the end, i still cherish the old flagellations. 'The transition is beautiful', Someone said 'There is a softness about you which was missing forever til now. ' And I laughed. Laughed my heart out. The cynical rogue learned to laugh, and to cry, and to feel.For all the bitterness I collected over the first three years [Vestige of which still lingers, may linger on forever], at the end of it all, I am happy. Regrets are nothing compared to this elation.
Thank You, my-wish, thank you my love.
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Reading an unusually sesquipedalian testimonial one sophomoron wrote to another, I couldn’t help admiring the farrago of all so many alien words in 10 lines. It was amusing to see that there were some six/seven words I never heard of. Proud in my own verbiage at language [Of course before 11th May Happened], I wondered at that person’s eloquence, though detested how she tried to jumble up all her verbosity in a single testimonial. Googling for meanings, when my faithful Oxford and even http://www.m-w.com/ betrayed me, I came across a page of supposedly Superior Words. Haha, all of those alien words were borrowed from a single webpage. I wonder who is fooling whom and why … The incorrigible supposed-superiority-complex is such a fun thing to observe, though hard to stay away from.
P.S
Few visit this page, but for benefit of all, who may consider them seperior this way, if not another, here is the link.
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/writing/Resources/essays/superiorwords.html
P.S
Few visit this page, but for benefit of all, who may consider them seperior this way, if not another, here is the link.
http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/writing/Resources/essays/superiorwords.html
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Ash-tory. Unfinished yet
Prologue:
This is where I asked myself, if I knew myself. Along minuscule vicissitudes in tender hearts, I placed the seeds of a catastrophe.
I owed death a life: I became my death.
It’s a fun memory, reminiscence has never been so pleasant, never had the past—the past been so beautiful.
Wait. This is not the apt course; I have to start from where it began. There had to be symmetry. Chronometry. I have to seek origins, and the roots. I have to. I have to find those first, or at least construct those—assemble the assemblage of origins. The genesis of this narrative shall be chronicled in an order. Nostalgia with the benefit of innovation is creativity. So let me think, Oh no, let me recollect, let me go down back in the forgotten lanes. Yes! That is scary, but still so soothing. Yes! Its dark yet so illuminating. In the cul-de-sacs of my conscious amnesia… life before I find the end, and the beginning, I find the origins.
The beginning begins with Sin, like the Original beginning. Moist. Rosy. Creamy. Irresistible... What if the devil was still the angel? Yes, there’d have been no story—no colour. Somewhere, I’d say, the drunken old bitch was right. I hailed him: The devil be damned. An Aeolian harp he played and we danced along, it was such ecstasy, it was so divile. Its such a fruitful doom, for devil to be damned. Apples and taste. Now everything turns to ashes in the mouths. Isn’t it malady? For nothing compares to forbidden fruit you offered and I devoured. I am trapped with the booby Nightmares.
Nudity. I wonder whether divinity needs clothing. But that’d be dreaming in dreams, the extermination of the facts, the truth. Four deserts in the way, dues still to pay, yet there’ll be days, I tell you my dear, there will be days. Days of heavy breaths, bodies enveloped in sweat—in mist. That’s what I ride upon, the panacea of pain. The end of a beginning, and beginning of eternity.
[And I fucked chronology again.]
I am not sure I want to tell the story, I am not sure that I shall be Lazarus. But I have been raised, I have been touched.
Ah! The devil be damned.
Its not my choice, never was, never will be. Lazarus doesn’t have choices.
Abracadabra, lightening and blizzard:
This was supposed to be a song: a catchy tune and melodious rhythm. I am so sorry for this disappointment, converse is the case. This is the shrieking of hounds juxtaposed scrannely with howling of wolves in the moonlit nights, when hunters hunt and moaners moan: Everyone owns a personal Shaam—e—Ghareeban . But it was about the spell. Not howls, not moans. Of abracadabra…
The words didn’t mean a thing. Every one could sing it. There was a secret of which I had known very late and still I remain incapable of exploiting it—I could be messiah otherwise.
Let me shoot it straight, I am bad with suspense: The eleven words of abracadabra sung with the eleven words of nothingness with ten iterations. Twenty two words in total. Ten iterations. I know that seems outrageous. It is so. But singing those eleven words of nothingness takes all the breath your body can gather. Try that, and you’d see, like Lazarus, Messiahs are chosen too.
What happens when the sorcerer… I mean messiah ofcoarse, off-course … anyway what happens when the spell is complete? Bingo, you guessed it right. Thunder rubbles, Lightening strikes. They hang here, they don’t burn them on the chair, and so what knoweth thee of the burning veins? And of thunder? Terrible screams of devils in hell, or of hell? And what will explain to thee what this is? Fire Blazing fiercely!
Sadomized—Me. I needed hell to run ‘into hell and back’. And a thread so thin to pull me from me, to her.
Out of the frying pan into the freezer.
C’mon don’t frown. Yes that is the most appropriate analogy I can juggle. [Pardon my frailties, my lost eloquence was washed away in the downpour of sin, and I don’t even miss it.] The coldness, the pain, the peace; Indescri—bable. From hell into the hands of blizzard. You know what happens when you burn and freeze simultaneously? No, you don’t get brittle.
You Live Again.
Haha. It seems so exhilarating right—reviving from the dead to the undead? It is not. ‘To be born again’ means a newer death. Death, again. New arrears to pay or be held in contempt forever. Forego. And there you sniff, dogs are incorrigible. They’d be loyal, and trade off their loyalty by sniffing your air. Men’d sniff too. Poke their noses in none-of-their-business, waiting to trace a hint of bad air, a vestige of filth. For what? Curiosity? Since I was the dead I know what they kept clandestine: The reality of Avagon, the transfiguring of souls—all men are dogs, all dogs are men. Our race is the despicable farrago of manhood and doghood, no wonder angel scorn us for kicks.
But I am losing the track again. I must, yes, I must relate the relevant. Yes the realevent.
But I guess, I fucked chronology again.
A-soul and Holes:
[Begone and forgotten, the gods of ancient cry out aloud for a little attention]
For the lovers of innumerable taboos, forbidden fruits will ripe out again. The inherent incongruity of paradise will haunt you and me for ages, seven ages my love and thus I’ll write immaculate dreams of illicit passions: imaginations. Heavens mock us if that closeness be. Regret drinks from our blood if that closeness be. Isn’t it mocking the inability to be close? The rays will fall again and melt us away. No matter what the want wants from two souls, the fear of dissolution will dissolve us away—anyway.
Lets master the art of letting go everything—everything but an us, a-soul, my soul. Let the two be Donned, into the two arms of a single soul.
[But that was the monologue my dear. Erase it if you may, for the story continues from HERE. I seem to be carried away in my soliloquy, and let that be a lone voyage, because it was one always. ]
The next significant honorable mention shall be the holes. Black-holes. True blackholes the suckers of energy, the seekers of light. It’s a great calamity to have one in you, believe me the void generating voids, the holes digging holes can be a pain. Lazarus died with the hole. And the messiah came and touched it then. An insertion, the act of completing—the kiss of life. Calmity is even a greater calamity and I induced one, received one.
You know what is the greatest pain of being complete? Submerging into each other? You can’t get enough, you can’t let go and the scissors in the hands of Sol will cut your fiery wings again, a flight too high will be blasphemous you see, and then the sense of incompleteness will prevail. Rebirth is a disease with symptoms of fear—of death, of voids, of incompletion. Rebirth is rapacious, the hunger to be born again, again yet not die is cruel. Can we be born again, if we never die? Miracles need no explanations messiah. All is plausible with the touch, with the sin.
The unfilled holes are excruciating, they stink with the moist air and seep puss; they are loathsome. What of filled holes, one of which I conceal under the hideous scars? What of the absence of pain inducing pain? The looming fear within ecstasy, the violent mutiny of being against what it loves, originating from a jaded inside, devoid of all colours it once absorbed. The fear lies there, lurks and lingers. And yet it resuscitates the dead—the desire, beseeches the unfilled holes to be filled.
And then the rebirth finally shapes up, takes its form, the inevitability to take forms clasps desire and shakes it through.
I become A soul without holes. Dependable, weak and shuddering for the touch, again, again. Forever. Forever.
But that’s too fast; I haven’t yet told you the story of death. What will you understand of rebirth if you won’t know/told of death? I am fucking chronology again.
Forest of fabrication and Pyramids of promise:
I was lost, lost was I. I have been in this hiatus since long, long enough to lose my sense of time. The interim between death and the after life, only few would know that it is the wait of ages. Dumped in a forest of fabrications, you see yourself infront of you without a mirror, disintegrating slowing until you face becomes mush and you become another fragment in the forest. It sounds horrific, it sounds frightening but believe me so you don’t feel a thing—dead don’t feel a thing. And there you came, I looked at you and you held my hand. It was you who sang a song and promised me pyramids of promise. You promised me it’d last longer than this intermission, longer than life, longer than eternity.
I took you hand, I had to take you hand. You crept under and over the pulp of my existence and swayed, asked me to sway along. I remember the song, love, I remember the tunes, and the stories you told. You said you’d be behind me, and I trusted you. I trusted you—never looked back. Orpheus never looked back and Eurydice sung him songs. You did that, your methodology rewrote mythology and I gave in as you caved in.
You brought me here at the foundation of this grandeur—this pyramid of promises and poemised immortality. What of the tremors in this remunerated febrile body that still shakes in disbelief—the slaves be buried as pharos.
[You said] ‘Tell me what scareth thee? ’
[I said] ‘Memories’
‘Tell me what shaketh thee?’
‘The fallacy of dreams ’
‘What mocketh thee? ’
‘Hope ’
‘What deceiveth thee?’
‘Touch’
You touched and made the tremor disappear.
‘Till when’ I said
You said ‘Forever’ and made my necromimesis gone.
The Mountain:
[Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity]
The mountain where I sojourned for centuries was written in moments. I flew to the top, on wings of thirst: the unbearable thirst of the ancient vampires. With exaltation of immortality, the pride of strength, I built myself a castle there in less then seven days, and murdered the sheep, castrated their self righteous shepherd. To demonstrate [much to myself, than anyone] the impossibility of reversal, I made there a huge fire, and burnt the bodies, and sprinkled the ashes in the in the arid air. The temple had its first immolation. I planned to live forever in the castle, never to die, never to feel dying. I buried my head in the infinite lap of the solitude and started the worship. It wasn’t easy you see it’s never easy, to choose one side, abandon other dimensions, whatever you choose to abandon, whatever you choose to cherish… One way or the other, the agen bit of inwit, clutches even the most blackened of hearts. Then finally when I thought the rituals were complete, the salvation accomplished, death came incognito to crumble the whole fabrication of salvation. I remember the stern face, the solemn imploring request for the shelter of one thousand and one nights. With eternity on hand, such little was the time, and the craving for a momentary cohort was irresistible. I offered her in, to share the taste of eternity with me... The mountain stood, so did the temple, yet Eternity crumbled. The same treasured lap of solitude became stench with the unholy blood, called itself loneliness. Incarcerated in the chains of self conscious choices, I embraced death, held her close and made love to her. She imparted me with the Red blackened with acrimony, and played with my toes, made them ashen.
I cant tell till when we lay together, I cant tell when I realized that I had died, but I did sometime, in one of those perpetual nights and she forsake me craving with desire of deathlove. And then the earth shattered below my lovebed, the mountain fragmented to petite figments of imagination and thus began TheFall.
This is where I asked myself, if I knew myself. Along minuscule vicissitudes in tender hearts, I placed the seeds of a catastrophe.
I owed death a life: I became my death.
It’s a fun memory, reminiscence has never been so pleasant, never had the past—the past been so beautiful.
Wait. This is not the apt course; I have to start from where it began. There had to be symmetry. Chronometry. I have to seek origins, and the roots. I have to. I have to find those first, or at least construct those—assemble the assemblage of origins. The genesis of this narrative shall be chronicled in an order. Nostalgia with the benefit of innovation is creativity. So let me think, Oh no, let me recollect, let me go down back in the forgotten lanes. Yes! That is scary, but still so soothing. Yes! Its dark yet so illuminating. In the cul-de-sacs of my conscious amnesia… life before I find the end, and the beginning, I find the origins.
The beginning begins with Sin, like the Original beginning. Moist. Rosy. Creamy. Irresistible... What if the devil was still the angel? Yes, there’d have been no story—no colour. Somewhere, I’d say, the drunken old bitch was right. I hailed him: The devil be damned. An Aeolian harp he played and we danced along, it was such ecstasy, it was so divile. Its such a fruitful doom, for devil to be damned. Apples and taste. Now everything turns to ashes in the mouths. Isn’t it malady? For nothing compares to forbidden fruit you offered and I devoured. I am trapped with the booby Nightmares.
Nudity. I wonder whether divinity needs clothing. But that’d be dreaming in dreams, the extermination of the facts, the truth. Four deserts in the way, dues still to pay, yet there’ll be days, I tell you my dear, there will be days. Days of heavy breaths, bodies enveloped in sweat—in mist. That’s what I ride upon, the panacea of pain. The end of a beginning, and beginning of eternity.
[And I fucked chronology again.]
I am not sure I want to tell the story, I am not sure that I shall be Lazarus. But I have been raised, I have been touched.
Ah! The devil be damned.
Its not my choice, never was, never will be. Lazarus doesn’t have choices.
Abracadabra, lightening and blizzard:
This was supposed to be a song: a catchy tune and melodious rhythm. I am so sorry for this disappointment, converse is the case. This is the shrieking of hounds juxtaposed scrannely with howling of wolves in the moonlit nights, when hunters hunt and moaners moan: Everyone owns a personal Shaam—e—Ghareeban . But it was about the spell. Not howls, not moans. Of abracadabra…
The words didn’t mean a thing. Every one could sing it. There was a secret of which I had known very late and still I remain incapable of exploiting it—I could be messiah otherwise.
Let me shoot it straight, I am bad with suspense: The eleven words of abracadabra sung with the eleven words of nothingness with ten iterations. Twenty two words in total. Ten iterations. I know that seems outrageous. It is so. But singing those eleven words of nothingness takes all the breath your body can gather. Try that, and you’d see, like Lazarus, Messiahs are chosen too.
What happens when the sorcerer… I mean messiah ofcoarse, off-course … anyway what happens when the spell is complete? Bingo, you guessed it right. Thunder rubbles, Lightening strikes. They hang here, they don’t burn them on the chair, and so what knoweth thee of the burning veins? And of thunder? Terrible screams of devils in hell, or of hell? And what will explain to thee what this is? Fire Blazing fiercely!
Sadomized—Me. I needed hell to run ‘into hell and back’. And a thread so thin to pull me from me, to her.
Out of the frying pan into the freezer.
C’mon don’t frown. Yes that is the most appropriate analogy I can juggle. [Pardon my frailties, my lost eloquence was washed away in the downpour of sin, and I don’t even miss it.] The coldness, the pain, the peace; Indescri—bable. From hell into the hands of blizzard. You know what happens when you burn and freeze simultaneously? No, you don’t get brittle.
You Live Again.
Haha. It seems so exhilarating right—reviving from the dead to the undead? It is not. ‘To be born again’ means a newer death. Death, again. New arrears to pay or be held in contempt forever. Forego. And there you sniff, dogs are incorrigible. They’d be loyal, and trade off their loyalty by sniffing your air. Men’d sniff too. Poke their noses in none-of-their-business, waiting to trace a hint of bad air, a vestige of filth. For what? Curiosity? Since I was the dead I know what they kept clandestine: The reality of Avagon, the transfiguring of souls—all men are dogs, all dogs are men. Our race is the despicable farrago of manhood and doghood, no wonder angel scorn us for kicks.
But I am losing the track again. I must, yes, I must relate the relevant. Yes the realevent.
But I guess, I fucked chronology again.
A-soul and Holes:
[Begone and forgotten, the gods of ancient cry out aloud for a little attention]
For the lovers of innumerable taboos, forbidden fruits will ripe out again. The inherent incongruity of paradise will haunt you and me for ages, seven ages my love and thus I’ll write immaculate dreams of illicit passions: imaginations. Heavens mock us if that closeness be. Regret drinks from our blood if that closeness be. Isn’t it mocking the inability to be close? The rays will fall again and melt us away. No matter what the want wants from two souls, the fear of dissolution will dissolve us away—anyway.
Lets master the art of letting go everything—everything but an us, a-soul, my soul. Let the two be Donned, into the two arms of a single soul.
[But that was the monologue my dear. Erase it if you may, for the story continues from HERE. I seem to be carried away in my soliloquy, and let that be a lone voyage, because it was one always. ]
The next significant honorable mention shall be the holes. Black-holes. True blackholes the suckers of energy, the seekers of light. It’s a great calamity to have one in you, believe me the void generating voids, the holes digging holes can be a pain. Lazarus died with the hole. And the messiah came and touched it then. An insertion, the act of completing—the kiss of life. Calmity is even a greater calamity and I induced one, received one.
You know what is the greatest pain of being complete? Submerging into each other? You can’t get enough, you can’t let go and the scissors in the hands of Sol will cut your fiery wings again, a flight too high will be blasphemous you see, and then the sense of incompleteness will prevail. Rebirth is a disease with symptoms of fear—of death, of voids, of incompletion. Rebirth is rapacious, the hunger to be born again, again yet not die is cruel. Can we be born again, if we never die? Miracles need no explanations messiah. All is plausible with the touch, with the sin.
The unfilled holes are excruciating, they stink with the moist air and seep puss; they are loathsome. What of filled holes, one of which I conceal under the hideous scars? What of the absence of pain inducing pain? The looming fear within ecstasy, the violent mutiny of being against what it loves, originating from a jaded inside, devoid of all colours it once absorbed. The fear lies there, lurks and lingers. And yet it resuscitates the dead—the desire, beseeches the unfilled holes to be filled.
And then the rebirth finally shapes up, takes its form, the inevitability to take forms clasps desire and shakes it through.
I become A soul without holes. Dependable, weak and shuddering for the touch, again, again. Forever. Forever.
But that’s too fast; I haven’t yet told you the story of death. What will you understand of rebirth if you won’t know/told of death? I am fucking chronology again.
Forest of fabrication and Pyramids of promise:
I was lost, lost was I. I have been in this hiatus since long, long enough to lose my sense of time. The interim between death and the after life, only few would know that it is the wait of ages. Dumped in a forest of fabrications, you see yourself infront of you without a mirror, disintegrating slowing until you face becomes mush and you become another fragment in the forest. It sounds horrific, it sounds frightening but believe me so you don’t feel a thing—dead don’t feel a thing. And there you came, I looked at you and you held my hand. It was you who sang a song and promised me pyramids of promise. You promised me it’d last longer than this intermission, longer than life, longer than eternity.
I took you hand, I had to take you hand. You crept under and over the pulp of my existence and swayed, asked me to sway along. I remember the song, love, I remember the tunes, and the stories you told. You said you’d be behind me, and I trusted you. I trusted you—never looked back. Orpheus never looked back and Eurydice sung him songs. You did that, your methodology rewrote mythology and I gave in as you caved in.
You brought me here at the foundation of this grandeur—this pyramid of promises and poemised immortality. What of the tremors in this remunerated febrile body that still shakes in disbelief—the slaves be buried as pharos.
[You said] ‘Tell me what scareth thee? ’
[I said] ‘Memories’
‘Tell me what shaketh thee?’
‘The fallacy of dreams ’
‘What mocketh thee? ’
‘Hope ’
‘What deceiveth thee?’
‘Touch’
You touched and made the tremor disappear.
‘Till when’ I said
You said ‘Forever’ and made my necromimesis gone.
The Mountain:
[Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity]
The mountain where I sojourned for centuries was written in moments. I flew to the top, on wings of thirst: the unbearable thirst of the ancient vampires. With exaltation of immortality, the pride of strength, I built myself a castle there in less then seven days, and murdered the sheep, castrated their self righteous shepherd. To demonstrate [much to myself, than anyone] the impossibility of reversal, I made there a huge fire, and burnt the bodies, and sprinkled the ashes in the in the arid air. The temple had its first immolation. I planned to live forever in the castle, never to die, never to feel dying. I buried my head in the infinite lap of the solitude and started the worship. It wasn’t easy you see it’s never easy, to choose one side, abandon other dimensions, whatever you choose to abandon, whatever you choose to cherish… One way or the other, the agen bit of inwit, clutches even the most blackened of hearts. Then finally when I thought the rituals were complete, the salvation accomplished, death came incognito to crumble the whole fabrication of salvation. I remember the stern face, the solemn imploring request for the shelter of one thousand and one nights. With eternity on hand, such little was the time, and the craving for a momentary cohort was irresistible. I offered her in, to share the taste of eternity with me... The mountain stood, so did the temple, yet Eternity crumbled. The same treasured lap of solitude became stench with the unholy blood, called itself loneliness. Incarcerated in the chains of self conscious choices, I embraced death, held her close and made love to her. She imparted me with the Red blackened with acrimony, and played with my toes, made them ashen.
I cant tell till when we lay together, I cant tell when I realized that I had died, but I did sometime, in one of those perpetual nights and she forsake me craving with desire of deathlove. And then the earth shattered below my lovebed, the mountain fragmented to petite figments of imagination and thus began TheFall.
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
I promised her chocolates last Eid. She was angry whay i dont come to see her. She was 15, the only younger sister i ever had.
I wasn't there even when they buried her. The quake had her.
Mishi, I am sorry. I had been such a bad brother.
Forgive me.
I'll not call this Eid like it had become a tradition: I was always the first one who called. You were always the one who piched up and said'Eid Mubarak Badar bhai', and i always asked'What if it wasn't me?' . And you always said 'Its always you Badar Bhai'.
Mishi I love you, I am coming to see where you lay now. And I am crying.
Forgive me.
I wasn't there even when they buried her. The quake had her.
Mishi, I am sorry. I had been such a bad brother.
Forgive me.
I'll not call this Eid like it had become a tradition: I was always the first one who called. You were always the one who piched up and said'Eid Mubarak Badar bhai', and i always asked'What if it wasn't me?' . And you always said 'Its always you Badar Bhai'.
Mishi I love you, I am coming to see where you lay now. And I am crying.
Forgive me.
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