art you say?

Here’s a couple of pieces from the awesome conceptual artist Dominic Wilcox:

Bird Cage

Glove

Bed

Check out his other stuff here.

down the hatch

Sometimes I talk to myself. Actually, that isn’t an accurate representation of the situation. I talk to abstracted forms of individuals who are or have been a part of my life. I tell them things I never actually told them, or intend to, and they probe me in ways they never would probe be had I told them those things. Their questions come from an omniscient perspective of my entire and ongoing historical identity, every flap of discarded memory, every secret loathing and desire. Often these abstracted individuals take the form of a collective, a collaborative entity that do not represent physical being/s but an Idea, a Concept, a Point Of View. But this isn’t the crazy part. The crazy part is that in the course of these discourses new and often illuminating information is stumbled upon, the type of knowledge otherwise only a infinitely prolonged session with a particularly perceptive, polymath of a psychoanalyst would reveal. The data is often self-reflective, charting particularly difficult crevices of my being, the ones most resistant to the glaring halogens of reason. Because of this I often find these ‘imaginary’ (projective) conversations pleasing, and work hard to follow their strange logic to a natural culmination.

From a certain perspective I am simply holding dialog with a part of myself, no different from the self-questioning (of motives, desires, ideations) that accompanies a healthy and critical mind. In this viewpoint the correlative information unearthed in the interrogation process is exactly that: unearthed. It remained buried and dormant in a secluded, rarely visited plateau of self-hood, waiting for the right mode of questioning to reveal itself.

However one must consider the beings whom I engage with are carefully principled concepts; they are mental anthropomorphisms of abstracted ideals (I mean ‘ideals’ in a non-moralistic sense – the ‘ideal of aggression’ and the ‘ideal of malice’ are just as valid as the ‘ideal of beauty’ and the ‘ideal of love’). They are the undiluted ‘pure forms’ whose only manifestation is in projective mentality, a meticulously directed (willed) imagination. If this is so, then what a powerful tool we have at our disposal! I suspect that this is what is meant by the Intelligences, the Spirits that various magicians have ’summoned’ and rigorously questioned in order to gain knowledge otherwise impossible to understand. Of course the various Intelligences or Spirits charted out in the many Goetia books are of a particularly potent kind. My unconscious manifestations have hitherto been of quite minute and specific natures. The Gods of Lingering-Regret-Over-Not-Hanging-Out-With-High-School-Friends-More are nothing compared to the Gods of the Purest Feminine or even the Gods of Lost Things.

 

 

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, here is an absolutely fascinating article about duck phalluses.

 

I have been absent from these plains. I apologize.

Or rather, I make amends. Apologies for vacancies are much like shoes for a snake: unnecessary, futile, and possibly dangerous.

Nevertheless it does bear mention that my prolonged absences from most things electronic is because I lack most things electronic. I haven’t had a computer for about one and half years, and I only got a cell-phone a few days ago. It’s black. It beeps a lot. I like it. 

I have come to realize that left to my own devices I very rarely go out of my way to meet people. I am not anti-social, merely sociable in the sphere of my immediate and necessary environment. Being a resident of the Cineforum one merely has to descend to the kitchen to meet and converse with a wide variety of ragged souls, drifters, losers, autodidacts, drunks, potheads and abusers of all kinds. It is a continuous revolution of merry troupes that I am glad to partake in. Now, however, my necessary environment involves a cell-phone, so I grant I shall pitch my radii to farther intersections.

Curious moments imprint themselves in memory. Yesterday I had neglected to bring any lunch with me to work, so I headed out to Subway, the only place nearby and open on the freshly minted holiday. The side-walks were free of snow; my feet slid almost imperceptibly in my boots. The wind chaffed my cheeks. Walking over a steam vent I am assaulted by the hot, stale air. I smell sweat and grease and exhaust, then the crisp sting of half-crystallized air. Wetness. It is snowing. I stick out my tongue and wait for the first flakes. 

What joy in this pure stream of the phenomenal!

What calm bliss in the loss of words, the dissolution of the monologue called consciousness, the causeless surrender to the enveloping grace of experience! In this great loss is the only peace worth knowing. Tiphareth.

Of course, the mystics of all the great Mystery Traditions have known this for centuries, have cried their exultations to all who would listen in vain. That they cried out all was their error. This bliss is incommunicable. It is beyond (below, above, in, with, without) language; its source cannot be grasped with symbols. It, as Spinoza says, is that ‘which requires for its conception the conception of no other thing’.

Rumi caresses its boundaries:

 

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:

This place made from our love for that emptiness!

Yet somehow comes emptiness,

This existence goes.

Praise to that happening, over and over!

 

For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.

Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,

That work is over.

Free of who I was, free of presence, free of

Dangerous fear, hope,

Free of mountainous wanting.

 

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece

Of straw

Blown off into emptiness.

 

These words I’m saying so much being to lose meaning:

Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw: words

And what they try to say swept

Out the window, down the slant of the roof.

  

Words are tricksey things. In my writing I try always to be aware of this fact, the double-edged sword, the necessity of both communication and, more importantly, comprehensibility to myself on the one hand, and the fatal limitation of all symbols on the other. Do not confuse the blue-print for the house. The map is not the territory.

The map is not the territory. 

This is why I have an aversion to the cunning linguists of post-modern panache, the self-indulgent pedantic of post-[insert movement here] word games. They are like tying knots on an infinite piece of string. All such knots are called ‘Tom Fool Knots’ and unravel with just the right pressure. They are the fools who see a sign-post called ‘GOD’ and then worship that signpost. In this category I include all the religions, all those rigid dogmatists who take orgasmic delight in constructing their elaborate, self-referential toothpick houses, living in them, then arguing amongst themselves regarding the addition of a new room. They draw up plans and committees, inaugurate prizes with ponderous, pompous names, slap each other heartily on the back at the unraveling of yet another toothpick conundrum.

The map is not the territory. 

Lovers, if you only knew the leaps my mind has had to take to remain in academia. I will remain, if only because it offers me something beyond itself, some little power perhaps to be wielded in unwieldy ways. We shall see.

What matters when there is this air, and the lungs that breathe it? 

All writers are magicians. Magick, Crowley says, is the “Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” His illustration is as follows:

“It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take “magical weapons”, pen, ink, and paper; I write “magical incantations” – these sentences – in the “magical language”, i.e. that which is understood by the people I wish to instruct. I call forth “spirits” such as printers, publishers, booksellers, and so forth, and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution is thus an act of magick.” 

This then shall be my goal: to convey the blueprint of my Way, and to do so in such a manner as to influence a large number of unhappy people living in toothpick houses. What is that darling? Presumptuous, you say? What right do I have to impose my Will on others? I impose nothing. If my Will comes to fruition it will have been only because it conforms to the wills of those it wishes to will. It will, in truer words, align itself to a Higher Will.

We.

Shall.

See.

Here is a series of poems about unhappy people called “Cast-Aways”. The title is in media res; it remains silent as to what they are cast from and where they are cast to. In other ways too these beautiful, awful people are mediations and in-betweens. They are, in some ways, awake, and in others comfortable somnambulists.

 

 

Cast Aways

 

I.

 

Brow beaters. Close charlatans of an

Unheeded succession. At the apex of a

Joint venture into the Yu Shan he looks

Up idiot faced from an empty pocket,

 

As if hoping the oxygen tank he had

Forgotten three kilometers down would

Materialize, likes loaves or fish, from

Our snow shielded compassion.

 

All this never happened, but he was marked

Nonetheless with the slip shod light of

Gutted campfires, gossiped into being

As one of those men,

 

One of those who slicked their bones in

Axle grease, quiver slid through the bolt

Holes of an otherwise secure hull-life,

And free, didn’t bother with apologies.

 

II.

 

Distant purveyor of freight trains. Their

Oily piston clack over half-buried ties,

Parallel lines of sun coshed metal ticking

Faintly in the aftermath of that great forward.

 

Sayer of goodbyes, of good riddances and the

Temperate accommodations of lonely keepers;

She was never there to begin with, only the

Crimped movements of shadow cast from

 

A meeting many leagues ahead, subtlety of

Permanence flattened to a garish masquerade.

She doesn’t understand circles, prefers the

Projections of asphalt and gruff conversation

 

From calcified truckers. Relies on the quick

Spurt of a switchblade, the promise in every

City of an anonymous relinquishing.

She is not running away.

 

III.

 

The broad sweep of gallivant, its

Meaty arms in poised embrace, ready

To squeeze away small sentiment,

Inhibited motion, the whispered excuses

 

Of solitude. Has the girth of a planet,

Belts himself in acquainted debris, moves

Quickly to assimilate all that orbit too

Near. Gets drunk in the afternoon and

 

Picks fights with invalids, vocalizes split

Lip harmonies to a pair of slightly amused

Balinese cats, amazed at their quiet dignity,

The alert sobriety of snow.

 

If only he could be a reflection. If only

He could pitch his radius to farther

Intersections, encompass the sad center

Of spilled inkwells and unlined hands.

 

IV.

 

No, never mind, I don’t care, talk

To the hand. Overseer of fixed points.

Manages well in real estate, owns houses

In Laos, Alberta, Berlin and Karachi;

 

Confuses travel with the liquidity of assets.

Compulsive hoarder of bulb filaments,

Their tungsten wave suspended between

Two stubborn wicks, his ability to

 

Burn inside sealed globes, mistake a

Little light held for the incandescence of

Bone fires. Gains comfort in the sight of

A felled tree, a man of retrospect, short

 

Sentences, the ring lined map of a

Widening death laid out in the fifty

Three suits he will wear, the one place

He will see anew with each shedding.