Guest Post: episode V of Hunter's Trance: Cunt Estreat b/w Sur Face

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Conjunction V

We are always constrained by some sort of social apparatus (or prison if you are such a mindset), even to the point of the language we use, one of our most primal relationships to each other and the world (and hence recalling the famous phrase, the prisonhouse of language or the fly in the fly bottle, from another tradition.)

Nevertheless.

We have intimations, even from the sometimes apparently impregnable view of 'knowledge; something which has been called 'non-knowledge', that peculiar relationship of blindness and insight,each apparently relying on each other.

In a most interesting book by George Didi-Hubermann called Confronting Images he refers to 'spontaneous philosophy', that is, when we view an image it immediately sorts our orientation of the world without any effort on our part. A certain amount of work is then needed to find openings and gaps in the image. IF we do live in a local region of many, for lack of a better term, parallel universes we must find a way to a non-knowledge (which immediately becomes a knowledge) which has power in its powerlessness (a Blanchotian/Levinasian/Batailleian position). Did-Hubermann glosses the location of this spontaneous ordering:

"Where is its motor, where does it lead, on what is it based? It is based on words, only words, whose specific usuage consists of closing gaps, eliding contradictions, resolving, without a moment's hesitation, every aporia proposed by the world of images to the world of knowledge. So the sopontaneous, instrumental, and uncritical use of certain philosophical notions leads the history of art to fashion for itself not potions of love or oblivion but magic words lacking conceptual rigor; they are nevertheless efficacious at resolving everything, which is to say at dissolving or suppressing a universe of questions the better to advance, optimistic to the point of tyranny, a battalion of answers."
Georges Didi-Hubermann, Confronting Images

Here is to the grinding of one bit of knowledge against the other, creating, if nothing else,
here below a bit of phosphorescent dust as a result of the grating:

"It would be unfortunate [....] to confuse the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies. This may seem obvious enough on the level of sight and sound, but it is less so with regard to the more general phenomenology of place, time or especially of the self; no one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word 'day,' but it is very difficult not to conceive of the pattern of one's past and future existence as in accordance with temporal and partial schemes that belong to fictional narratives and not to the world. This does not mean that fictional narratives are not part of the world and of reality; their impact upon the world may well be all too strong for comfort. What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism. It follows that, more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in the accounting for their occurence. Those who reproach literary theory for being oblivious to social and historical (that is to say, ideological) reality are merely stating their fear at having their own ideological mystifications exposed by the tool they are trying to discredit."
Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory

"Why the fairies took infants and children was also subject to considerable discussion. Not all agreed with the most popular theory that it was to improve the elfin breed, though many noted that female fays appeared to have difficulty bearing children. Some, including Hugh Miller, Lady Wilde, and many collectors of Scottish lore reported that folk belief that human infants were used as substitutes for fairy offspring in the elfin annual or septuannual sacrifice or tithe to the devil. Another motive for abducting children, especially boys, in Scotland, was said to be the belief that a champion of mortal strength but fairy indoctrination would one day emerge to lead the forces of Elfland against human beings. Yeats, Lady Gregory and others argued that fairies needed mortals for their physical strength. As one of Yeat's informants told him, the sidhe were shadows and spirits who could not move objects. 'But they have power over mankind, and they can bring them away to do their work.' Some even argued that, since the salvation of fairies was questionable, they needed mortals to be with them at the Day of Judgment. Canon J. A, MacCulloch indicates how frequently this case was made in stating that fairies stole human beings 'to share in the spiritual benefits of the religions from which ....[they] are supposedly excluded.'"
Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness

"It was with the introduction of the theory of evolution that fantasy was free to grant invention or other sudden changes and chances the power to switch channels on evolutionary progress and fast-forward plant-life or machines to the top of development. As soon as Darwin's theory was out, his fans were hit by fantasies of parallel fast lanes of development that relocated the missing link to interpecial relations between humans and machines (see Samuel Butler's Erewhon). Evolution provided the context for imagining that thought can or must go on beyond the body, and that means beyond the retro, repro bonds between the sexes. Humans are still the genitals of the machine that is evolving for us. The higher machines, which 'will owe their existence to a large number of parents and not to two only' (Butler, 212), will be reproduced in the group metabolization or psychology of tensions between replication sex and the production of one or three by two at a time."

"As genealogy of media, mediations, and means of human being, evolution comes on strong with constitutive interruptions, gaps, so-called missing links. This throws a precision fit with every way the breakdown of mourning always admits, via the narcissistic and psychotic conditions of conditionings of a melancholic attention span, the frontal shot of direct connection with our technologization."

"The link with the missing--the haunted relation--is what keeps selection (not unlike substitution) going, going, goner. The link Benjamin misses in his reading of our current techno-evoution can go by the name 'aura,' the ghost inside techno-selection, inside the either-aura. After Benjamin, Andy Warhol and Shirley MacLaine fine-tuned 'aura' for the selection stardom of channels. But Benjamin might as well have borrowed his aura, the notion of a retrenchment of the missed link with presence that flickers even in certain media-technological products over time, from the trenches of World War I. Down there aura designated the zoning-out phase of acceptance of whatever psychosomatic convulsions and techno-metabolizations of trauma were coming soon."
Laurence Rickels, Nazi Psychoanaysis, V.3: Psy Fi

Juxtaposition IV

After Ferdinand de Saussure's death, a number of boxes and folios of notes were found dealing with anagrams and their connection with Indo-European linguistics and Latin poetics. Written around 1906 but not generally published until 1964, the discovery became somewhat foundational to certain aspects of modern French poststructuralist theory (esp. Kristeva and Derrida). By all reports, Saussure became somewhat obsessed with finding another layer of meaning in certain Latin texts (specifically, but not consistently, I believe it was the names of gods found in the first words/lines of texts). It's not particularly important what the subject of th anagrams were for my purposes but the fact that another system of meaning lurked 'beneath the surface' meaning of the work and unknownst and unwilled presumably by the author of the surface work.

That phenomena, i.e. a secondary level of msaning which is forever threatening to overtake and dethrone the ostensible primary meaning, has become a staple of popular culture and new age culture (remember 'Paul is dead' supposedly encrypted into an early Beatles song?). Reverse speech has now become enshrined among some as a possible route to truth, as well as the bible code and a host of other phenomena such as stegonography encrypting messages in pictures. They all have in common the idea of a second level which, from the point of view of the intended surface level are subservient to it but which threaten it. One could even say that this shadow/substance relationship is part of the fabric of modernity officially since Freud, Marx and Nietzsche and that the materiality of language seems to configure ITSELF, fractal-like, in the same way that atoms orient and connect themselves in very complex ways, ways which are still coming to light (speaking of which there is some evidence that DNA molecules emit and absorb light for seemingly communicational purposes: is this true or another example of this paradigm playing itself out?)

Perhaps, somewhat as Greg Bear (and maybe not only Bear, but some aspects of physics would make a good story) fancifully speculates in THE CITY AT THE END OF TIME, books themselves are entities which communicate somehow. Certainly it seems that way as I find these combinations. It's easy to see how one could become a kabbalistic word mystic. Herewith another combination leading to Moire communication retrieval.

(and while I'm thinking of it: might also be the/a source of the countermovement to modernism generally...I'm reading Daniel Tiffinay's wonderful book INFIDEL POETICS where he links a certain strand of counter-enlightment thinking to Leibniz's monadological speculations viz:
"Leibniz's theorization of 'perceptions we do not apperceive.' an idea anchoring the first systematic mode of subliminal or unconscious experience." That is, a second order of experience largely undetected.)
---
How To do Things With Words, J. L Austin

"So far, well and good. The action may be performed in ways other than by a performative utterance, and in any case the circumstances, including other actions, must be appropriate. But we may, in objecting, have something totally different, and at this time quite mistaken, in mind, especially when we think of some of the more awe-inspiring performatives such as 'I promise to . . .'. Surely the words must be spoken 'seriously' and so as to be taken 'seriously'? This is, though vague, true enough in general -- it is an important commonplace in discussing the purport of any utterance whatsoever. I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem. But we are apt to have a feeling that their being serious consists in their being uttered as (merely) the outward and visible sign, for convenience or other record or for information, of an inward and spiritual act: from which it is but a short step to go onto believe or to assume without realizing that for many purposes the outward utterance is description, true or false, of the occurrence of the inward performance."

Russian Criminal Tattoo: Encyclopedia v. II

"The tattoos drive and guide a thief's career, they 'appoint' him to new positions. They 'make' him take certain decisions, perform precisely regulated actions, carry out an entire complex of 'ritual' activities. The tattoos 'shape' the daily life of the thief, they subordinate his entire life to themselves. The reality of the tattoo is the symbolic basis of the world of thieves. The thief lives through his tattoos, he is mentally immersed in this reality, that is, he dissolves into the symbolic world of his own body. Like the Herman Hesse character who gets into the last carriage of a train and rides away -- a train that he himself drew on the wall of his cell."

[....] a thieves desires are the desires of his tattoos. A thief's basic desire is to match his tattoos perfectly, that is, to carry out the law of thieves, to be acknowledged by his own tattoos, i.e. by the Other, who spares the thief death and humiliation. But if it is the Other who speaks and acts through the tattoos, in a certain sense the tattoos are pictures of the thief's unconsciousness. That is, the world of criminal tattoos is to a certain extent a realm of the externalisation or, perhaps, visualization of the unconscious."
Anne Applebaum

The Old Straight Track, Alfred Watkins

[....] imagine a fairy chain stretched from mountain to mountain peak, as far as teh eye could reach, and paid out until it touched the 'high places' of theearth at a number of reidges, banks, and knowls. Then visualize a mound, circular earthwork, or clump of trees, planted on these high points and in low points in the valley other mounds ringed reoud with water to be seen from a distance. Then great standing stones brought to mark the way at intervals, and on a bank leading up to a mountain ridge or down to a ford the track cut deep so as to form a guiding notch on the skyline as you come up. In a bwlch or mountain pass the roacd cut deeply at the highest place striaght thorugh the ridge to show as a notch afar off. Here and there and at two ends fothe way, a beacon fired used to lay out the trak. With ponds dug on the line, or streams banked up into 'flashes' to form reflecting points on the beacon track so that it might e checked when at least once a year the beacon was fired onthe traditional day. Al these world exactly on the sighting line. The wayfarer's instructions are still deeply rooted inthe peasant mind today, when he tells you -- quite wrongly now -- 'You just keepstraight on."

Out from the soil we wrench a new knowledge, of old, old human skill and effort, that came tothe making of this England of ours.

For as in Puck, Rudyard Kipling's tale siings:
She is not any common Earth
Water or wood or air,
But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,
Where you and I will fare."

Juxtaposition III

A re-cap for all you late arrivistes (of course this being the web, the last are the first): finding my library in disarray one lugubrious night spent staring at spiderwebs in the corners, I found that the disarray of the books did indeed seem to have a shimmering order, if not aura, to them in the chance clinamen that had happenstanced them. Herewith selections from some of the juxtapositions -- without, however, lingering on possible overtures which the collisions may generate. But first another fortuitous selection from a new Greg Bear novel, The City At the End of Time, I was reading last night. I trust you will see the resonance.

"His texts, hundreds of thousands of them, were acting as a kind of lens, focusing the improbable and retrieving from not so far away, perhaps, those things that would only become likely across a greater fullness of time. A fullness now deeriorating coming apart in sections -- jamming and mixing histories in alarming ways. If nothing more were done, the future would drip-drop into their present like milk from a cracked bottle."
Greg Bear

From Proust, Samuel Beckett:

"The point of departure of the Proustian exposition is not the crystalline agglomeration but its kernal -- the crystallized. The most trivial experience -- he says in effect is encrusted with elements that logically are not related to it and have consequently been rejected by our intelligence: it is imprisoned in a vase filled with a certain perfume and a certain coor and raised to a cerain temperature. These vases are suspended along the height of our years, and, not being accessible to our intelligent memory, are in a sense immune, the purity of their climatic content is guaranteed by forgetfulness, each one is kept at its distance at its date. So that when the inprisioned microcosm is besieged in the manner described, we are flooded by a new air and a new perfume (new precisely because already experienced), and we breath the true air of paradise, of the only paradise that is not the dream of a madman, the Paradise that has been lost."

from Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, Dan Auiler:

Sequoia sempervivens is the classic redwood that gives this forest its beauty, and its ancient slendor would of course have attracted Hitchcock. The stand of trees through which Novak and Stewart wander is more than a thousand years old. The Latin name and definition is prominent in all the literature connected with the Big Basin; the film's explicit reference suggest the same was true in 1957.

No on at the park has any recolletion of the Vertigo filming nor does ajy park record remain lof the two-day visit. The crew's shooting days were shorter than usual -- under five hours.

"On October fourteenth, most of the time was spent on the conversation just prior to the redwood cross-section scene. Judging from where the Jaguar is parked and where the redwood lcut is positioned, the scenes were filmed on a trail known today as the Redwood Trail. The two and a half page sequence was completed in a number of setups, the most difficult one requiring seven takes; in the final cut of the film, only a page of the material remains. Though Big Basin has (and still has today) a cross section like the one in the film, all of the dialogue surrounding the cross section itself was shot later on a soundstage and then integrated seamlessly with the location footage."

from In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, Douglas Curran:

Madeleine Rodeffer became interested in flying saucers through reading a 1954 classic, Cederic Allingham's Flying Saucers From Mars. The book mentioned George Adamski's similar encounter with a blond Venusian named Orthon. A search of her local library turned up three titles by Adamski: Flying Saucers have Landed (1953), Inside the Space Ships (1955), and Flying Saucers Farewell (1961). Deeply moved by Adamski's writings, Madeleine paced a call to his home near Mount Palomar, California. 'I became so convinced that Mr. Adamski was telliing the truth that the first time I called him on the phone, I offered, 'I would like to know what I can do to help you spread the word.' Adamki's reply was simple and direct: 'Read and learn all you can. Be open-minded and do what you feel is right.'"

Juxtapositions II

The second one of these, these...bibliomancies for lack of another word, until I get tired of these diffraction grates...but of course a book person ... or perhaps rather some kind of feral scholete who, rather than truth, enjoys the sparks ..but then, what is truth without the sparks and grating mists?

Again, the books were found lying together after a year of debauchery; the first bookmark or placeholder was followed. The sometimes Orphic nature of the concatenations comes from chance placement. There are times when the whole library becomes a visceral writhing of energies, sedimentations, cautious circumspections and ebullient demands, patent nonsense mied with the darkest but profound obscurities --and me stymied in differentiating the two, that it seems as if a Lovecraftian door will --or perhaps already has done so -- open any second and draw them all in with a deep eldritch inhalation combined with the sound of snapping shut.
rc
--

Awaiting Oblivion, Maurice Blanchot

• You will never find the limits of forgetting, no matter how far you may be able to forget.

• "But if I remembered eerything and told you everything, there would be nothing more for us than a single memory." -- "A common memory? No," he said solenly, " we shall never belong in common to memory." -- "To forgetting, then." -- "Perhaps to forgetting." -- "Yes, when I forget, I already feel closer to you." -- "In a proximity, however, without approach." -- "That is correct," she eched fervently, "without approach." Also without truth, without secrecy." -- "Without truth, without secrecy." -- As if disappearance were the last pace of any meeting. Forgetting will separate us slowly, patiently, though an identically unknown movement, from whatever still remains in common between us." [....]

• Being is yet another word for forgetting.


Mesopotamian Myths, Henrietta McCall

Radiant with terro, Marduk sets out on the road to Tiamat, but at the sight of her his will crumbles and he cannot decide what to do. Although this sees somewhat unrealistic, it is a common mythical device (used also in the epic of Gilgamesh) to heighten tension, by putting the inevitable victory temporarily in the balance. Tamat sneers, and Marduk's courage returns. He challenges Tiamat to single combat.. His the climax, the geat battle scene towards which everything has been leading:

Face to face they came, Tiamat and Marduk, sage of the gods.
They engaged in combat, they closed for battle.
The lord spread his net and made it encircle her,
To her face he dispatched the imhullu -wind, which had been behind:
Tiamat opened her moth to swallow it,
And he forcced in the imhulla -wind so that she could not close her lips.
Fierce winds distended her belly:
Her insides were constipated and she stretched her mouth wide.
He shot and arrow which pierced her belly,
Split her down the middle and slit her heart,
Vanquished her and extinguished life.
He thresw down her corpse and stood on top of her.

The gods who had formed part of Tiamat's terrifying army then panic and turn tail, but they are caught by Marduk and bundled into the net where they cower


Saint Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre

We expect the harvest of cut grain to be fine and rich; but these grains are breaths, nothing, not even a bit of air that one exhales: one will make sheaves of nothingness. The strange being who haunted the woods, whether woodland god or criminal, was defined only by his functions: having beocme a harvester of nothing, he vanquishes with his breaths, everything is canceled; the rocky, compact density of this of this sound unit and the shimmering of the light around the t=stone concealed a cold, dark emptiness. A signification beyond ;the syncretic interpenetration of the meanings was suggested to us; and this signification is the destruction of all signification, the challenging of all prose; Genet put the whole country side into this verse, but only to annihilate it. The capturing of the world, an act guided by resentment, ends in catastrophe.

Juxtapositions I

Yesterday I was staring with no particular purpose at the bookcase in front of me. The books have been moved around repeatedly and so are mostly in no order, many of them lying on tops of shelved books by the threes and fours.

I was reminded of some quip about the connections and patterns that a library can make, even under fairly well-ordered circumstances so herewith a series of volumes that were truly found together, usually stacked on top of each other, set adrift into meaning by the clinamen, by making a nice trinity.

I have, more or less, randomly selected a a quote from each book, in the cse of two of these, by a pencil or other bookmark stuck and left in place.

Looking For Orthon: The Story of George Adamski the first flying saucer contactee and how he changed the world, Colin Bennett

"Western thinking in general has great difficulty with these intermediate forms and partial states of being. Such an order of matter is excluded (rather than unkow) from science, banished to those far regions (either microscopic or interstellar) where rationalists alwasy locate thier mysteries, if only to daunt inquistive heathens, the uninitiated, and, of course the great partly-washed."

Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan), Ann Carson

'The riddle (griphos) was a popular form of after-dinner entertainment and Athenaios tells us that Simonides was an expert riddler. He preserves two examles of Simonidean riddles (both incomprehensible to me) and appends a list of popularly conjectured solutions. 'Some people explain the riddle thus...but ohters say...and others again...' The point is, good riddles do not say what they mean. It is an innately stingy form of discourse, disguising its data and begrudging its truth. 'You know the riddle advertises all the techniques that the joke conceals,' said Freud. The ridde advertises everything except its own punchline.'"

The New Spinoza, Warren Montag and Ted Stolze.

"The Lurian conception of evil, the qelippah, which is for the Kabbalah the obverse of the En-Sof, was to play in this event, we have said, the role of a crystiller of the new doctrine. The rein of husks and shells (the literal meaning of qelipah) traditionally used by the abbaloists to designate the universe of 'evil and the demonic powers' had drifted, since Isaac de Luria, toward an interiorization of the demonic prinicple at the very root of the En-Sof (the hidden god who is indefinite and foreign to every creation, which Jacob Boehme will Grund, the foundation of God the Creator) so that the word in its complexity can reach existence:

'Know therefore that the supernal space is like a field, and ten points [that is, sefroth] are sown in it. And even as the grains [of seed] grow each according to its virtue, so also these points grow according to its virtue; and as the grains do not attain to growth and perfection if they remain in their original manner of being -- for only in their decomposition is thier growth -- so it is also with these points .... Only by their breaking could the divine configurations [parsufim] be perfected.'

As elliptical as the text is this is the rule of Kabbalah), one thing, in any event, appears indisputable: the idea of the necessity of a wrenching that, setting out from the essential negativity of the divine, provokes the scattering whose splinters are the world. This world of disorder and multiplicity -- sometimes cmpared with that of the various colors issed from the compostion of white light -- 'had to fall from the high summit to the depth of the pot soa s to be smashed and dished to pievces, like the wheat which is separated into flour and bran by grinding. Moreover by their fall the unclean forces are separated from holiness.'

Dromos: Life After Ever: Our Glorious Future in the New Quantum

"For we live surrounded, in the invisible air, by wandering avengers who never forget the 'ancient contaminations'." Roberto Calasso

The race course has been pitched to a new level---but levels go up AND down, right? (bad case of enantiadromia: every state of development at its zenith pitches over into its opposite). But...even so... those levelings can be crossed, obliquely (there you go, loxodromic), perhaps requiring abandoned gods fitting the descriptions of Gustave Moreau as it ITSELF becomes crossed with the clonal crossings of the Island of Dr. Moreau:

"Huge, pale figures, tremendous, lonely, dark and desolate, fatal, mysterious lovers condemned to titanic infamies. What will become of you? What will your destiny be? Where can you hide your fearful passions?"

(But we have a plan, we, us humans, to deal with such, and this is always where we seem to wind up folks; as that great metaphysician Bela Lugosi put it in Bride of the Monster "Home? I have no Home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal; the jungle is my home. But I shall show the world that I can be it's master. I shall perfect my own race of people. A race of atomic supermen that will conquer the world." )

Suffering from gadget disorders, the fundamentals of fetishism, we will no doubt find it hard to pass from the Thing to its outlet, to its let out-ness or even better, to the acting-out (escape even) of that Thing in itself, that bit of plastic, silicon, copper, whatever, scooting away from us (always 'scooting away' but never quite making it, the nature of the act-trying-to-get-out, can't get no traction in the rain), tending to its chores in the solar system.

It's the hardest cross-over act in the world, hanging on the edges of frayed rotting matter, looking over to the next clump zipping ahead of us, maybe into the future we think -- always brighter and shinier, yes? Atomic supermen on the march!

It's the fearful en-trance of Einstein's spukhafte fernwirkungen accusation against Niels Bohr's new quantum club, beginning to beat god about the head: 'Spooky action at a distance'‹-too much like some hoo doo infection, some non-locus hocus pocus (etymologically speaking, some transsubstantiation going on there, from the latin meaning: "here is the body"‹-now of course it means: "WHERE the heck is the body!?", just about the only thing we can get out of Freud's fort/da swollen foot dance now, the Oedipus Waltz, holding our collective family drama breaths [in waltzology, atem pauze] in between phase-state changes.

And then, too, this, ex post facto, is what the old folks pass back and forth:

"...he is surrounded by night; suddenly a bloody head juts forth here, there another white figure, and just as suddenly they disappear. One glimpses this night when one looks into the eyes of another human -- into a night which becomes frightening; here each of us is suspended confronting the night of the world." G.W.F. Hegel