Notes today on inhuman other & interest in this as a mode of being or subject to imagine.

Not really my fantasy which runs to rescue and is tedious a shore. But sufficient as I understand passion for others could be care.

Not ironic that this belongs here filed under gender.

Durga, like Athena, sprung from a man’s mind.

We are after what we put our desire into, be it a daughter or slim; to make artifact fetish is the same porn business is one suspicion that’s hard to shake. Ponge or Sartre after the war trying to become before reflection thought to be thing and thus among instead of stained… a grain in a photo of murdered peasants. I could be field. I could possibly recover, somewhere, among all this wheat, there might be a coin, the carpet hid.

Once walking in the Blue Hills I turned left away from Grimm trees into a meadow and first step shot through my leg “We are with you forever” I said “Sometimes I am permitted to return to a meadow” in the open lea between houses, a place to slip between clothes line and hedge Peter Rabbit wise into the open field tossed.

And since that happened.

Think fields are oil-stained or sepia in hunched a place a man could hide an hour in the sun between roads, perhaps alone an hour under the sky. Took that from the war the years put it in my pocket. Keep that with mine, folded up love letter.

A field sprang out of his forehead, no feldspar in mineral leapt and so still daughter I am imagined: energy in things levitates. The old story about owls and this not so different & in between sheep rocks thrust what’s more beautiful chalk.

Forced out like antlers she was in the ear. See? The same move makes shells, husks and awns.

Dogon said mountain has mind, mill has mind, smoke has mind, talk has mind, winter has mind, all weather as mattered or thought makes peace hence projects a where to be considered. Must moon and snow. Deep cold creek.

Makes mind in-human knot. Inked relation as what same reduces echo.

***

Alongside Lecture on Feldspar and other Sardine Cans

no-human.
gives weight to intention/desire
Sartre arguing
the non-haunting exists as a rational possibility
absolute difference of Pierre and his objects

is repetition

non-haunting as a need given the absolute weight of the war

solid object as way of showing materiality of difference (I am not my fountain pen)

co-relation—we never have access to either thinking or being outside of their relation to each other

pre-critical idea? posing categories without being overwhelmed by problem of mind or mediating consciousness

divergent series marked by inanimate object where Eve is mediating form

attribute of a thing that is not material; thinking of a second order as an actual mode of being

difference between object and thing, where thing is outside the mode of positing

***

what is weight I give truth, walking into world to say, listen to whom. born among the priesthood I spend to long attempting to resolve their problems, which are theirs and not mine, and not the sky’s or skies

what weight to give grasp in sense we are saying back and forth knots in the cloth takes me back I am also oh depth I cannot bring s heer

so many times s typed instead of a and drift to misspelt wood or were and as aster I say star a starte.

***

interest is in non-existent orders—a true reading—and not vitalism or relations of power

***


Before the Notes

to understand self as thing (monad) that emerges in relation to other things, to critique the author, to write so as to efface the author and or allow something else to be author, to be interested in displacing authorial relations…

there are different aspects to this… a desire to evade responsibility—so understandable in the post war era, with heavey weight of terrible responsibility and we did this to each other… but as a practice, a self-mutilation, an overly violent self-regulation, a dysfunctional regulation like the catastrophic rheostatic structures built by children to control desire when they grow up in a world bereft in some way…

but also a desperate narcissism in this, and a bad mimetics, since a mimetics would find the difference and say it, allow it to be across… a narcissism in the sense of wanting to be a thing instead of being with a thing… a false egalitarian… if

in this century things become interesting, or we begin to notice them as such, if a real consideration of an other requires we also understand things, or relate/perceive thematize things in relation to us as something other than our desire, wouldn’t it be nice to cross that threshold into just being a thing among other things, wouldn’t this be a way of becoming what it appears we love,

to be what’s loved then, and still a narcissism…

when Rilke writes the sonnet about being a flower with the other flowers, he is saying this hope… and its so dear, it says so well our desire, and yet its just a page among a series of poems and feelings, and perhaps even that creschendo says our love but is still narcissistic

and if we decide not things but machines, if we decide the other is also a machine, perhaps also because we recognize that to be an other is to be part of a system beyond our interest, if we decide not things but machines…

how do we pass beyond narcissism? not into things, not into machines, but in relation?

Freud and Kristeva want to make a place for narcissism, a kind of primary narcissism that is necessary to project self

how does one project self without this? not by becoming thing or in a theory of egalitarian, proletariat monads arising as protean wiggles…. that is still narcissism writ so large like Stalin’s face across the sky

Akhmatova, Rilke turn to things in some relational way to ladle in a sunset or ghostly goldleaf tracery, like slipping sheats of paper into a surface and turning it slightly as a result and thereby building up a layered, rich surface and depth.

so to chase this thought out, something about being a machine, about the loved other that is the machine, the android in Blade Runner or sleek homoerotics of steel, something about this then as well a kind of narcissism

we so need this attention to project ourselves, to prosper; and in the post-war era, since our parents were trying not to look too close, were shutting their eyes (hence Jehanne’s grief work and work with Gulag) this became a broad condition… all slouching Gap Ads towards orphaned Bethlahem

the desire to be something other that does without an apparent author is still under the twist of positivism, the thought there is an actual other out there, a place where I am not. It is what Buber calls an I It relation until I am at stake in the object, not just by loving it, but by allowing its difference alongside me (a difference I want to gender by saying sister, but could be brother, hides under the trope of the mixed sex twins & thus is buried in the African material Mackey draws from about a series of same sex twins and their making, they who are arranged or in a family relation of tensions and firsts and thus could be laid out sephiroth)

***

There must God, which is a fissure done.

****

Rilke turns to the dead, because this is what it means to be a thing. When we are dead we are things, just things, and so our hope, our longing to be what’s liked has led us through the portals into death…

Orpheus as story of the effort to walk into death, into the other signing, but can’t bring back love who leaves forever lost…

thought parallel instead of an issue of depth and return, he walked across the hall, she stayed behind

and so also, the machine is a thing “come to life”

***

among the dead I am just a thing and all egalitarian finally be

that’s the hope, there resolved, I could be what’s loved, we love the dead at least (or last)

***

then dead I’ll be

***

seen there effigy I am at last visible, know I am seen gone wood

am seed gone would am salt

***

we are of course present without witness and make a press on passing
altered craft but still departed abject

trust does not equal


Still Waiting for the Lecture

I am thinking that to have an object is to have a relation to a possible self and that what we think about as “other” is a self we are imagining somewhere, even in the depth or still of stone.

Or it is a way of tying self down, each object like a knot on a prayer cord or a twist that makes barbed wire. Twist prick and spur.

Obsessions tangle as shrines to Pluto, God of undistributed wealth. Each knot an image in a sequence suggesting depth that is a reminder of the way back. The look over the shoulder she disappears back down the stairs.

What the Chinese call stagnant blood I suspect is left by war. Here and there we want to be like as a best theory to finding even temporary solutions. Hence old men grow increasingly like half-lit, morning, ally garden walls.

When Daphne became a loom it was already dark. He became a Mill Wheel in the same way that Hercules became a set of summer stars. Many people are just cars since love makes self we begin to theorize.

***

Machine makes repetition and doubling the same duplex
whose order becomes coyote to say a fat place
small engine of eddying wind lays a palm over a north ridge shadow
its absence later still lit by sun as it lasts—it’ll be back.

***

I build up a tonal resonance that says stays knot keen I keep
arguing back to—hung on what star or sky hook is fire—

Promethean chora

***

Machine aesthetic as a means of keeping up with and/or at times leading the “spirit of the times”. Hence, tied to a notion of encapsulation in a time and a reference/accommodation to taste and power (since “spirit of the times” can be a way of indicating a new fashion).

In this sense, Benjamin’s sense of the loss of an aura is relevant as a narrative, a story, that bodies out a line that’s been crossed, a light dwindling in the rear view mirror.

Or Chaplin critique of machines where pastiche requires a glove. A sense of a new totalizing form of power. Hence to be wrestled with.

A curious folding, like the top and bottom of an airplane wing, that seems to rend subject at terrible juncture.

It is a mistake to take threat prophesy as condition/limit of the real. To take the aesthetic staging of machine and aura in Benjamin as a descriptive rather than a projection of a loss.


***

What is behind the censure of the subject? Sometimes it seems to me it’s a desperate desire to deny a being at stake that involves us in conferral. Our long complicity in the rule of kings alongside a fantasy of some different open. Freedom in absolute negation writ Cobain.

Abstract notion of special interiority/hence designation as subject to (emplaced) is rough topic for an ethic of care not written in norms but specifics.

Allied to Marxist utopian materialist self no longer needs a mind or subject-to as shelter of a flock—hence allied to terrible rending of subject as progress I dispute.

On shape-shifting


A poetics organized not in relation to light or precision but in relation to shape and change.

Shape & not image per se, or image as wave.

Shape from Indo-European roots for scraping, sketch, scratching, cutting (Sanskrit klp) gone cut

or figure from dheigh, dough—go figure, riddling fingered shadows.

In my dim hands not a stained glass of your body, but palpate. Rhythm in breaths and
rhyme of hamstring to patella shin—your deep wells of essay

Which rises in fluids.

A sentence or poem that wanders along a trace in the arm, a stir hid. Part of our best suggestions.

Body is after-all dream. Slips left and wakes. Endless surfacing and surge.

As foot, body tells dream we are steeped in. Step in and out of worlds.

What surprises in dreams are occurrence and resolution or solution as figure, space, room—and the insistence of narrative.

I have been altered as bird, turned to boat-wood, made small inside a book’s spine, gone upstairs into deserts, been bear, returned to ever changing homes I am still managing.

I’d write poems that whispers this drift, marks change. Deep currents and deeper. Structures of heart and sun’s circle and breath and light—repeat and deep inflect.

In precise relation to shadows, blackbirds begin to rattle—in the last weeks, I’ve noticed a sudden peal of nostalgia among my 30 year-old friends for a childhood that wasn’t theirs. This sudden haunting that descends like a cold front, sinks wells and circulates along paths scried in the airs.

Habit is both grass, small knell cupped north into the darker sky and beyond immediate sources of warmth, and what dreams between haunts grass that some call aura.

What changes this way is fast.

***

A poem thought this way runs angled shorelines suffused
aught between “knot” and “was” and nevertheless strung
deflate form flows fill forward, fury
aspect assonance leant bell
mouth incident to domed carapace or chalked
as echoes test this cupped vocative to your yoked chalice
as resonant suggestion of affordance, a room you could
borrow, ask after weddings slit sun
as all air these slim once was I can’t say
acre acre

***

to bend sound to make it slip where meaning almost aspirates

already transport, this lace in you, her needle


***

Some musing about gender (about which I am already displaced):

° Gender is a relational/transactional factor. It is not a property. That said, it is hard to talk about gender in ways that admit this transactional status.

° Our behavior is structured by organic factors but also by transactional dynamics.

° Human beings use the difference between male and female as a way of managing a possible violence given when relations occur and an order is essayed.

° Not sure why we order or sequence relations, but we do. The ability to order and sequence relations appears to be a necessary adjunct to all kinds of skill sets. May also be hard-wired feature of cognition. Order and sequence appear to be meaningful features of the appearing world and not simply an effect of our attention. But, it might be that order and sequence are an effect of our attention.

° I don’t know if the biological differences between men and women are sufficiently significant such that desire and affect are necessarily different. There is perhaps no way to say what that difference could be.

° Human beings appear to have multiple interests—in power, in care, in being touched, in truth—at stake in our other-relations. The dialogical status of interest is generally masked by the thematization of one interest as a master interest. The error here is much like the error that occurs when one attempts to model all five senses on sight.

° We regulate each other by the assertion of gender expectations. This goes on inside same-sex groups and in mixed-sex groups. Boys jostle each other into being proper guys and, at the same time, doing this, make little performances of what a guy should be. Gals do the same thing.

° A given person’s behavior may or may not reflect gendered norms. We cannot assume that because “x” is a man, his emotional behavior is a function of his having been gendered in normative terms. People get oddly gendered by their families all the time, and gender norms do not work for every person. Rather we read that person to the norms or against/away from the norms.

° Like all normative structures, gender patterns are both deep and shallow.

° Gender structures give men and women different kinds of access to social power and organizational affect. It is difficult to say if this is strictly unequal since the kinds of access are different and may occur within different topoi.

° Gender is one of the ways in which human beings regulate desire and interest.

° When a person says “you are acting just like a girl”, they are making a regulatory assertion.

° Despite utopian fantasies that human beings can function without regulation, we need regulation. [Think of the end of the Third Elegy where Rilke says “restrain me”.]

° It is always appropriate to review and adjust regulatory stances.

° It is not clear that supposed gender types reflect natural kinds or reflect the only adaptations possible for natural kinds. Gender is a cultural construct, however deeply patterned or evolutionarily reproduced. It is a writing across what occurs at each generation.

° Because cultural constructs always have an element of play (think “play in the wheel”), there is a certain amount of play in gender patterning from generation to generation, and, it will be possible to “play” with gender.

° I find I want to pursue a gender critique or draw attention to gender when I sense a regulatory apparatus is in place that is not being examined and/or whose relations involve an indirect assumption of power. Gender is a social mechanism by which the violence of ordering is hidden/deferred or suspended by the performance of gender codes. That is, the performance of a gender code/norm performs “an order” as a social fact. It is harder to protest unequal allotment and ordering in the face of this fictive display of a false order. One is supposed to play by the rules.

° When a person says, “you are acting just like a man” they are making a regulatory assertion.

° Making assumptions or speaking in gendered terms is reflexive and pervasive. The thought of the other is rapidly inflected in terms of gender. In conflict, is this because conflict leads us to draw boundaries and to polarize? If so, gender is just one of a range of terms we might use as we attempt to get a grip on the other.

° It would be useful to tease apart any bifurcation of interests as characteristically feminine or masculine. Not doing so allows us to ignore the specific ethical dimensions of our own interests.

° The thought that a person has both masculine and feminine aspects/dynamics may be a way of attempting to recover the full range of interests at stake in our other-relations. This might be what Jung was getting at, and might be why Jung is, after all, a Freudian.

° The hysterical, slender femme-fatale of the twentieth century whose anger erupts and who, alternately appears as Mary on the fields of genocide, might be a desire/interest being said a man says.

° Getting her a chance to speak is not as simple as passing the mic around. It is a more difficult demand that we break back against our love of power. Gal or Guy.

After Rilke I Try to Change into Laurel

And so here again talking in veils, as if this were the only thing permitted, struggle as I do to say “pineapple” (do you see how the daily already slips away?) “coffee”, “yard” (again). Do you see how the day is interrupted by its facts, displayed like merchandise in this era, stapled to the sky in others?

despite thrashing about, wrestling with the quilts, having to talk in quilts, having to let these fall over me, having to talk sideways, or in stars, masked, not among you

we get brief glimpses of the sky perhaps, certainly we can follow logics’ path to imagine it must be something we all share, a common business in veils and touch, but I say it falls again, there is no shore, at best a hem

her skirt, perhaps a wedding gown (or a flag, that falls over us, July fourth, a girl of ten with her younger sister, disappearing under it, circa Robert Frank)

****

solution = quilts and veils again, as explanation for what to do with desire with voice

equal sign as knot (nautical), perhaps a means of measuring the sea, a parse like moons

or bites—I believe in facts, but their relationship to us is less clear; we repair the daily according to one strategy, whispering, “gentian”, “cord”, “pineapple” (but already our grip is slipping)—day interrupted by facts, displayed like merchandise in this era, stapled to the sky in another (Hegelian) waltz

even this can become a tent in the open, since surely shared, we both swathed in yards of silk, Draupadi, who cannot be disrobed, veiled face who makes a real sign

covered in marigold dye at Holi or a drone, are we equally ever//there’s no shore, though there appear to be hems

her skirt, perhaps a wedding gown (or a flag, that falls over us, July fourth, a girl of ten with her younger sister, disappearing under it, circa Robert Frank)

sea, why do you seem to leave me on the shore? since my desire must be said, would woo, I will always be drawn further into your waves

***

and the boys called her “silence,” or spouse if they wanted

to imagine fucking her

as a way to remain unwilling

and apart

****

boy-self that speaking unsays

no wonder you imagine language a virus

or consider it bounded (oh Saussure, oh chiefs

trading women, oh sign we are stained by

that already leaks) your skin

****

skin mottled by the moon

the way she drove or looked out a window

we are just able to endure

being so different

****

because if its silence

because if its mind (listen)

we can displace these stains

write them on walls

GET THEM OFF US

****

just grammatically feminine (a little torture of

the facts) means we can identify

are not abject between

sea and sky (two firmaments

****

the way the I-Ching puts it, equal to sky and earth

and between them, and linking,

a foot and this supplemental dream

****

too too masculine subjects worn tight-wired

De-Kooning girl-phase—she slips birch white

out of the owl’s fright—image of shame,

anemone arm too ever flung to return

why do you say these things about my sisters?

****

we can perhaps marry what we already wear

this means many fences and scenes behind

the billboard arras, and seeming difficult, and

putting ourselves aside, the way dogs

are animals, so naturally

****

stained fright I am spotted by, mall

touch my mother had to whisper

along with stars, and the sun

Emily cut from paper,

to tell truth,

her inevitable love

despite hate

****

I’ve been wrestling for some time with the notion of a hard/clean/steel/spare poetics—a poetics that emphasizes clarity—and some more elaborate, bulky, flaccid poetics that this is contrasted to, as well as with the use of “masculine” and “feminine” to describe these.

Part of what I have wrestled with is the tension between the simplicity and clarity and power by which an image can be established and my satisfaction with this, and an ethic or posture of the hard and spare that simply and mechanically attempts the simple and spare in a crude flattening or attenuation—in other word the difference between a close practice and a rule or vector that becomes tyrannical and, like all rules, brings with itself a set of secondary performances required to make ritual witness of the preference.

I have nothing against close practice and am always looking for it, and I militate in different ways against any rule that’s become a fashion.

Surely the use of masculine and feminine to describe this difference is a sign that the conversation has shifted to fashion, for gender is precisely a very old rule that we perform and are ordered by. And so, a sorting out that returns us to the same old.

Over the last few months, I’ve been thinking about a different set of terms—still incomplete—by which something new could be said about the issues at stake in taking about clarity or elaborate and cluttered, and I am trying out the difference between what I call a lyric attention to light, and a lyric attention to shape-shifting.

A lyric attention to light is attentive to what light does, which is clarify and still, make real, reveal, shine, shine across the top of, glint off of and so on.

A lyric attention or impulse to shape shift I awareness of change/dynamic and unfooting that occurs and clear things change and become something else.