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.