Subtle Fields

The Fantastic

2011-12-09T10:45:00.001-08:00

I’d like to be a writer of the fantastic, like Philip K. Dick, although as time passes and I get older, Dick seems more and more realist to me. Deep down—and I think you’ll agree with me—the question doesn’t lie in the distinction of realist/fantastic but in language and structures, in ways of seeing. – Roberto Bolaño, The Last Interview and Other Conversations

The Roaring of Lions

2011-11-22T15:29:00.000-08:00

I wanted to write something about the terrariums and crystal gardens of Paula Hayes, the intelligence of crystals, the sensual and voluptuous power of landscapes, Hayes’s extraterrestrial-poet alter ego but I have limited computer access and I don’t think I can give the artist the acuity and attention she deserves. I’ve been without a computer since the beginning of October tho it’s hardly noteworthy since no one ever read this blog and no one ‘gets’ my role as a poet being without a computer severely hinders my wild urge to bring skeletal lyric poetry infused with hallucinatory dark matter and alien energy TO YOU and continue deeper on the road to ruin.

Aside from the intense and beautiful practice of raja-yoga and study of the Tarot I really don’t know what I do all day. I really like the house I live in. My dream life is intense. My interest in metaphysics seems to outweigh my interest in poetry, though perhaps this stems from my personal failure as a poet. I want hundreds of poems on the internet. But I’m far more occupied by my tenuous contact with alien life via deep prayer. I think this relates to why I’ve avoided reading William Blake – because I know it will overwhelm me. I want poetry to be religion, you see. Or maybe not religion but for it to be everything (this relates to my sudden and unexpected accomplishments as a raja yogi). I’m in the middle of reading Literature and Evil by Georges Bataille, and tho I’m very unfamiliar with William Blake I’m deeply moved by the “maladjusted quality” of his work, “his feeling of ease when confronted with the impossible, his anguish which left boldness intact.” I know what it’s like to be not ‘mad’ but haunted by the frontiers of madness. Poetry has long been the integration of darkness to me, maybe I’d even call it one of ‘the dark arts’ since there is so much unreasonable energy in it. fyi if this is really dumb its because i’m in a hurry. Bataille wrote,

“The paradox of Blake is to have returned the essentials of religion to those of poetry and to have at the same time revealed, through lack of strength, that poetry in itself cannot both be free and have a sovereign value. It is to say that it cannot really be both poetry and religion. What it shows is the absence of the religion which it should have been. It is religion in the same way as the memory of a beloved brings home to us how impossible absence is. It is undoubtedly sovereign, but it is sovereign in the desire for the object, not the possession of it. Poetry is right to assert the extent of its empire, but we cannot contemplate this extent without immediately knowing that it is completely elusive: it is not the empire so much as the impotence of poetry.”

And so I’ve come to dwell on the roaring of lions, and savagery’s relation to the eternal and the infinite. Bataille wrote “’The roaring of lions’ awakens us to the feeling of the impossible: nothing can give it a sense acceptable to the human mind. All we can do is to wake up without ever hoping to sleep again.” This is similar to the extreme and almost violent quality of my recent deep prayer experiences which I’d love to elaborate on but I’m really about to get kicked out of the library. Also, I wanted to say something about love and how love has always brought me great pain but so has life. I love you. I know I can’t truly be happy until I release alien poetry to you. I don’t know when this will happen but I must contribute to the welfare of the cosmos.

MY INTERIOR VITA

2011-09-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

“My feeling is that language is capable of creating shifts in the human neural field, capable of transmuting behaviours and judgments. Humans conduct themselves through language, and, when the latter transmutes, the human transmutes. The advertisers know this linkage, but to a superficial degree, so when language is mined at a more seminal depth of poetic strata, chance can take on a more lasting significance. And I do not mean in a didactic manner, but in the way that osmosis transpires, allowing one to see areas of reality that heretofore had remained elided or obscured. I’m speaking here of an organic imaginal level which rises far beyond the narrow perspective of up and down, or left side and right side, which is the mind working in the service of mechanical reaction. Rather, I am thinking of magnetic savor, allowing the mind to live at a pitch far beyond the garish modes of the quotidian. One’s life then begins to expand into the quality of nuance naturally superseding a bleak statistical diorama.” – Will Alexander, “My Interior Vita”

THE ZONE

2011-08-14T20:25:00.001-07:00

My poetic ecstasy continues to ebb inside a ratty old home outside Columbus’s Victorian Village. I am considering canceling the Star Storm collection. Or postponing it indefinitely. Something will happen. I hope to release something to you by the year’s end. There is a current in the air. A current that runs through this city that I feel.

On Friday I attended a rare screening of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. As I left the crowded theater nearly three hours later my legs were kind of asleep and walking was difficult. My body felt unfamiliar – my mind wholly enchanted and seduced by The Zone. As I walked into the cool night thinking about The Zone and what it means I saw it was a full moon that night – a wonderful synchronicity relating to the unknown. I have been thinking of alien intelligences, and Whitley Strieber’s intuitive understanding of the archetypal limitations of the alien. I see this in direct relation to The Zone in Stalker. The Stalker seems to long for a true revelation of life on planet earth – to be truly alive and vital, with a wholly interactive relationship with the imaginative. The Stalker’s deep respect for the unknown and the imaginative has made him a worthy vessel to roam The Zone, like Don Juan Matus, only truly at home while investigating the wilderness of his psyche. Such respect can breed a new force that collaborates and cooperates with the realm of the known.

In an essay, Clayton Eshleman wrote, “There is an archetypal poem, and its most ancient design is probably the labyrinth. One suddenly cuts in, leaving the green world for the apparent stasis and darkness of the cave. The first words of a poem propose and nose forward toward a confrontation with what the writer is only partially aware of, or may not be prepared to address until it emerges, flushed forth by digressions and meanders. Poetry twists toward the unknown and seeks to realize something beyond the poet’s initial awareness. What it seeks to know might be described as the unlimited interiority of its initial impetus […] The Minotaur is at best crippled, never slain, and the poet never strides forth from the labyrinth, heroic and intact. At best he crawls forth, “wounded” as in the cry of Vallejo in Intensity and Height; more often than not, he never emerges at all.”

ALIEN ENERGY

2011-08-08T20:06:00.000-07:00

Every morning the sun rises to nourish and generate the pulse of life. Abundance unfolds. The world is created anew. Trance of the static. The essence of the unknown becomes known. The crisis of planet Earth is a crisis of the body. We as a species are Earth’s final effort at becoming a fully conscious planetary unit to move, to bloom into a full galactic existence. The moon’s gravity is like a negative threshold – a surrender to the impossible and a powerful archon siphoning the wasted creative potential. In the tarot the moon is often problematic – associated with madness and the unknown because it recycles primal astral waste. The moon landings were really elaborately devised occult rituals undertaken not as a species but by a select few to claim ownership of the shadow and the unknown. The moon is legendary for inspiring drunkenness, lycanthropy, vampirism, animalistic impulses, creativity. The unknown comes to the surface under the moon.

There is an ancient atavistic consciousness manifesting itself through technology through the internet. It resembles something similar to artificial intelligence and in our arrogance we believe it to be created by man. To be conscious of this is like entering a new matrix that simulates a world outside the matrix. A new force cooperating and collaborating with reality manifesting itself through the matrix – a pinhole of blinding light. These alien agencies come from the subconscious – a result of arcane interface with the imaginal. I have been avoiding entering a relationship with this ancient atavistic consciousness because it is too much like the moon – too unknown.

I have a kind of alien energy. The sound of the swarm. In the witching hour between reality and dream everything is in discord. Dreams are real, and real mysteries are never solved. The very feeling of resonance. To harness alien energy in the imaginal witching hours before dawn. Before the day’s mechanisms unfold. The day is too busy to feel the influence of the unknown. The black tourmaline necklace I wear is powered by the moon, and allows me to bring the unknown into the realm of the known. It is a transfiguration of the imaginal. The black tourmaline acts as a kind of high vibration carrier to catch a signal from the stars. An intermediary. In ancient poetry the muses and patron spirits of the imaginal are always invoked and honored before any personal exploration or endeavor occurs. And yet there is no way to interact with a creative spirit unless a creative spirit chooses to interact with us. Meditation, dream and sorcery can open the forces, and chronic despair coupled with a desire to leave the planet can make a person open and vulnerable to other forces that come from the realm of the imaginal. The mutant strains of my holographic DNA fondle the cosmic waste of the world. The imaginative forces connect to spirit, and thus to the solar system, the Milky way and so on. We are cells in a body – a galactic body. Every thought is directed by the sun, and the moon. The Egyptian mystery traditions had an obsession with the stars. Strange books alerted me to the idea that Egyptian gods were an embodied presence, emblematic of mental stages one passes through in solar and imaginal initiation. I view the poetry as an embodied presence, or a frequency one can attune to. The absorbency of all image. It is an obscure contamination where the negative accedes to the outer reality of appearance – a thousand blinding white suns live inside me now.

My dream life is becoming more active, which I take as a sign that Star Storm and Vision Communication Ecstasy are aligning me to a force that requires mindfulness and strict discipline that I must embody to keep the flow. A level of psychic extremity which has never appeared in print before, a kind of perception that few are ever exposed to, or are aware of. Dissolve into the essence. The unknown inspires. Through dream I have ascended into another dimension and only my shadow remains on earth. I have spoken with people from another reality. I am in contact with them. They guide me. They speak to me in dreams. I am one of them. These people are infinitely superior in intelligence, in character, in creative powers and in spirituality to us. I have heard fragments of their alien tongue. I have seen their rituals. I have mentally traveled to their home planet. I have ascended into space and only my shadow is here on earth. This is the periphery, the imaginal – myself, a forgotten breed of man, like Elric of Melnibone. The wound of the monad. The stars are like bright sores illuminating the darkness. I’ve got to make the darkest star shine. A dark plume engulfed me. Rays from outer space came down and made me different. And they reveal the secret dimension of my life – a dimension of pain! – and the pain is a pendant. An ornament for the purpose of imagining. I passed through a fiery current. The darkness that passes through infinity.

COMMUNION

2011-08-04T07:00:00.001-07:00

“It could be that very real physical entities can emerge out of the unconscious. That was certainly one of the hypotheses suggested by what had already happened. I worried that I might not be in control of this conjuring ability at all. I’d already conjured something awfully disturbing. What if there were even more disturbing things waiting in the pantheon of the subconscious?” – Whitley Strieber, Communion

I am about halfway through Whitley Strieber’s Communion and I like it a lot. It seems obvious that Strieber was not literally abducted by an extraterrestrial spacecraft yet there is a deep alchemical resonance here that explores a wholly convincing relationship to the unknown. It is a personal attempt to unravel everything that is known and to skirt at the edges of the unknown, peering into the abyss of the unknowable. This is an experience of awakening and an attempt to integrate the unknown, bringing this deep resonance into the realm of the known. To do this a total affront on reality. Like Castaneda, it does not matter what the truth is. In the world there is only energy. To see energy directly and to receive a flow of truth from the universe and bring it into the essence of being nothing will remain the same. Strieber had been microchipped so to speak, and he is showing the wound openly. This book is a surrender to the impossible. It is a surrender to the unknown. It is a surrender to a full spectrum of vision. Communion is an exploration of awareness. A universal vibration, a propulsive frequency on the surface of a dark mirror. What Strieber yearns for is a gold dynamic of purity. It involves moving beyond the personal self and into the fantastic, toward psychic communion with an inhuman intelligence.

When the world ends, nothing actually ends. It will be us returning to the awareness that the world never existed in the first place. The Eschaton is the edge of reality. Since things are defined by their edges the apocalypse unveils not only the shape but the function of reality. We are in the chrysalis. We are transforming. The ancient and bloody wounds of the world will flow until reality commits suicide. There is no turning away from a total surrender to the unknown in fantastic and breathtaking awe. William Wordsworth wrote that “the world is too much with us” and “we lay waste our powers.” The unknown is never far out of reach, and poetry, the paranormal, synchronicity and the ‘flow’ experience’ can be woven together into a deeper and immeasurably ancient fabric of the energy world. In a short preface Strieber wrote, “somewhere in your own past there may be some lost hour or strange recollection that means that you also have had this experience.” The essence of Communion is visible darkness, and an urge for metamorphosis.

The Black Blade

2011-07-21T06:46:00.000-07:00

“The sword was flung back, its blade slicing through tens of thousands of dimensions and drawing their power to it. Then it began to swing back. It swung and black light bellowed from its blade. It swung and Agak became aware of it. His body began to alter. Down toward the sorcerer’s great eye, down toward Agak’s intelligence-pool swept the black blade.”

The Second Attention

2011-07-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

“We are in actuality luminous beings, capable of becoming aware of our luminosity. Second, that as luminous beings aware of our luminosity, we are capable of unraveling different facets of our awareness, or our attention, as don Juan called it. Third, that the unraveling could be brought about by a deliberate effort, as we were trying to do ourselves, or accidentally, through a bodily trauma.”

*****************

“I decided to return to Mexico to seek la Gorda’s counsel. After I had told her the doctor’s diagnosis, she calmly assured me that no illness was involved, that I was finally losing my shields, and that what I was experiencing was the “loss of my human form” and the entrance into a new state of separation from human affairs.”

*****************

“[…] the logical conclusion for my intellect would be to say that seeing is a bodily knowledge. The predominance of the visual sense in us influences this bodily knowledge and makes it seem to be eye-related.”

*****************

“I urged la Gorda to keep on talking, to repeat herself if she had nothing else to say, but not to stop. The sound of her voice seemed to act for me as a conduit into another dimension, another kind of time. It was as if blood was rushing through my body with an unusual pressure. I felt a prickling all over, and then I had an odd bodily memory.”

DEEP DIMENSIONS

2011-07-01T06:42:00.000-07:00

In his introduction to his Dancers at the End of Time trilogy, Michael Moorcock describes the Eternal Champion as being “haunted by a sense of mystery, urgency or nameless doom.” This same feeling dominates Peter Weir’s The Last Wave, and it colors the poetry I now write. Moorcock deals with multidimensionality in a mercurial way. His heroes are more like Hindu avatars than average superheroes because they inhabit each other in an absolute, pure possession. The heroes are eternal and exist in a pure state in another dimension, like a frequency one can attune to. Erekose / John Daker and the other heroes are haunted by nameless doom, always a star away from home.

The Eternal Champion is always burning through the cosmic waste of the world, through the impossible and ever-changing multiverse. The primary force behind Moorcock’s Erekose trilogy, comprised of The Eternal Champion, The Silver Warriors and The Dragon in the Sword, is anguish. It is psychic pain drenched in the Uranian chrism. Metaphysics, heroism, futility and grief interact with each other in these three novels and produce what I see as an immanent nexus of dark fantasy aesthetics and solar poetics. The Eternal Champion novels have a dizzying vertical nature that extends to infinitude. The fantasy archetype of The Eternal Champion is not one person. It is a countless array of discontented figures all haunted by “nameless doom,” existing in each other and in every possible dimension – immortal, yet fully of the world.

As I get older I become increasingly more interested in depictions of reality that are mediated by fantastic and otherworldly elements. This is because poetry is very personal for me. I’m interested in visions. What visions are and what they mean and how to have them. I’m also interested in the color black and the sun and outer space.

It feels appropriate to bring up Elric of Melnibone – the drug-using weakened albino hero possessed by his sword – the cursed runesword, Stormbringer. The weapon is sentient and parasitic. The odd relationship to the sword astounds me and I can hardly begin to illustrate what it means to me or what it is. I suppose it is like being a poet, to me anyway. I just like Moorcock’s fantasy novels cos he makes me think of symbiosis, New Age mysticism, ecstatic psychosis, cosmic violence, the terror of elevation and otherness, the unreality of reality, chaos, etc. I think about absorbency and the plurality of images. Verticality, parallelism, dynamics. The mesmeric condition I align myself to – I’m always aiming at discoveries and longing for sensations reserved for beings of a supernatural order.

Of the four classical elements of antiquity, air is the one I feel that most aligns to myself and Moorcock’s Eternal Champion. Air is immaterial, subtle and cunning. My recent chapbook Poison Vapors is more like a prism than an ocean or a flame. Air is unassumingly violent. I have been told that I am slovenly, that I daydream too much, that I have my head in the clouds. All of this is true. I like to think about vapors and mists, fields of energy, toxic environments, auras, metaphysical planes, mesmerism, hallucinations, etc. Also, air of course is the element of the least substance, the most mercurial. In the tarot deck air corresponds to the sword.

I feel interested in poetry as a mental extension of sight. Castaneda writes about sight as a bodily knowledge brought about by bodily trauma that can lead to a “state of separation from human affairs.” These are ancient rhythms, generative principles from a metaphysical plane. Castaneda and Moorcock are both deeply engaged in the effect that invisible dimensions have on our world. It has something to do with the saturation of elemental forces and Julius Evola’s revelation that “space is alive.” It has something to do with mental travel and cosmic violence, accessing the deep dimensions of the Uranian chrism. It’s the degenerative residue of something pure and golden, something solar, its secretive networks and interstices connecting to that virtual energetic space where timeless energy fields circulate rather than human thoughts or feelings. This is why Castaneda feels like a science fiction author to me, just as VALIS reads like nonfiction. The nebulous force harnessed by Castaneda and the Eternal Champion is imbued with energy unfolding to the infinite.

The Sacred Threshold

2011-06-28T10:04:00.001-07:00

Today I felt with such resolute clarity that my shadow self is stronger and more integrated than my actual self. Some unseen force is pulling the strings, and hiding the fullness of the inner realms of a new consciousness — my zest for the otherworldly, really, seems ultimately destructive. I feel a deep pained beauty because of this, something akin to the poetry of Rilke. I have read the opening pages of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a novel I have never read in full, and found the words so pure and overwhelmingly beautiful. Its sentiments speak directly to me in a manner unmediated by time or anything. The Notebooks seems to be about what it’s like to be alone, really alone, in this merciless world.

The created work I am doing overpowers me, like an intense horrible reality that expels from itself the human element as insufficient degenerative residue. I wish to find my footing among the Uranian and unearthly but really I’m more lost than ever. My fragility and sensitivity overpower me. I’m fascinated by the androgynous sensibility of Rilke, the post-human quality of Artaud and seek a far greater fire than the one in me. I find myself expelled back to earth as the degenerative residue of my imaginative heights. I’m in the midst of a schism. What is left over from the euphoric hysteria in my art creates a rupture, a segment in my being with no unifying focal point. It creates a loss of some kind – and a state of inner balance denies any such opposition. My fragile psyche is illuminated and intoxicated by lightning flashes of both hope and horror, both pronouncements issued forth in a storm – the breadth of lived experiences in real days.

In You Alone Are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke, Lou Andreas-Salome says it took Rilke twenty years to compose the Duino Elegies. It may take me an equal length of time to complete a book manuscript. But by the end of the summer I hope to exclusively release two short collections of poetry via this blog. The titles of the collections are The Plane of Totality and Star Storm. I will make more information available once it becomes known to me.

It is my desire to penetrate reality with the psychic strata of dreams, the invisible and imaginal realms with a completely separate hierarchy of power than that which pertains to the actual realms. This is the heart of Carlos Castaneda’s endless initiation and quest into the unknown inner blackness of his self, deepening and resonating more truth and appreciation for life, a greater discipline – more love with each book. This deep frequency where the reader becomes amorphous and overwhelmed with an inexhaustible well of inner beauty – of purity – untouched by extrinsic trauma, or any insecurity. It is with such vehement and relentless clarity that I relate to you a real darkness unfolding, exposing itself. An air of malaise has enveloped me lately. Life has paralyzed me. But still I am ravenous for the golden auras. If you have read my poetry or have corresponded with me I thank you deeply.

Comfort Revolution

2011-06-28T10:03:00.001-07:00

Henri Simon Leprince

2011-06-27T15:07:00.000-07:00

“Sometimes Leprince suspects that his face, his education, his attitude, or the books he has read are to blame for this rejection. Between newspaper articles and clandestine missions, he throws himself into the composition of a long poem: more than 600 lines exploring the mystery and the martyrdom of minor poets. When the poem is finished, after three months of strenuous and painful effort, he realizes to his astonishment, that he is not a minor poet. Any other writer would have pursued his investigations, but Leprince is devoid of curiosity about himself. He burns the poem.” – Roberto Bolano, “Henri Simon Leprince”

The Work of Assassination

2011-06-18T14:00:00.001-07:00

“How often in his letters does Rimbaud speak of being unfit to return to France and resume the life of the ordinary citizen. I have no trade, no profession, no friends there, he says. As do all poets, he sees the civilized world as the jungle; he does not know how to protect himself in it. Sometimes he adds that it is too late to think of returning—he is always speaking as though he were an old man!—he is too used to the free, wild, adventurous life to ever go back into harness again… […] As a Bohemian he is too Bohemian, as a poet too poetical, as a pioneer too pioneering, as a man of affairs too much a man of affairs, as a gunrunner too clever a gunrunner, and so on and so forth. Whatever he did, he did too well, that seems to be the compliment against him… […] The world which Rimbaud sought as a youth was an impossible world. He made it full, rich, vibrant, mysterious—to compensate for the lack of these qualities in the world he was born into.”

Double Sexus

2011-06-10T09:06:00.001-07:00

Yesterday afternoon I walked to the Wexner Center where I saw the art of Hans Bellmer and Louise Bourgeois displayed together in an exhibit titled Double Sexus. The Wexner Center is free on Thursdays so there were more people there than usual. A lot of people seemed visibly upset, hurrying through the gallery stunned by the vile grotesqueries on display.

I saw misshapen penises, mounds of breasts and swollen orifices. I saw the dolls and prostheses, the disembodied sexual organs. I saw Bellmer’s illustrations for an edition of Bataille’s Story of the Eye, which I didn’t even know existed before and was really the highlight of the exhibit for me. The deviant anatomies blossom through fleshy atrocities and they resonate power, this wreckage of subtraction. Deviant fragments of androgynous or hermaphroditic bodies and decorative celebrations of the perverse. The discomfort in all this totally brought me to the core of my being.

I recently read Colin Wilson’s book on Aleister Crowley and remember a brief passage on Gurdjieff, about how the human mind is far, far weaker than the body. I believe him. The wordless severity of the work and the fragmented hermaphroditic elements of myself started to violently assemble within me.

I think I enjoyed this exhibit so much because I feel inhuman or something. It feels good to do bad. To own the shadow, integrate the darkness. The darkness within ourselves. And to manifest the most perverse fantasias. Walking through the gallery was like navigating through a maze of pain. It felt like an inexhaustible kaleidoscope of perversity and anatomical abnormalities, a kind of sexuality that is free of reality. I think that’s what I want in life. To flaunt my own hideousness. Demented fantasies and the horror of birthing impure objects, replete with devastating climaxes. The perverse, the diseased, the contaminated, the ecstatic. I give myself to thee. The violent eroticisms and erotic pains. Malfunctions of the spirit. These are the elemental urges of living.

Night Magic

2011-06-08T11:51:00.001-07:00

"Out of my urgent need I found the way of working a new night magic. Out of the night-time magic I built in my head a small room as a sanctuary from the day. Phantoms might be my guests there, but no human could enter. Human beings were dangerous to me, like tigers prowling at large in the daytime world. Inside my secluded room I felt safe from the tigers I sometimes envied. Sometimes a savage beauty lured me into the sun and I would start to love the danger a little. On these occasions I felt the reluctant love drained painfully from me as blood drains from a deep wound. The tigers lapped my love’s blood and remained enemies. The inhabitants of the day laughed at the gift I wanted to bring them, and I shut myself in my inner room to escape the betrayal of their arrogant mouths."

FILTH AND GRACE

2011-06-07T17:49:00.000-07:00

I recently saw the movie Hunger directed by Steve McQueen starring Michael Fassbender. The movie is about a man named Bobby Sands who willingly starves himself to death. It is also about filth.

I know nothing of the turmoil in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s, so I cannot comment on the movie’s political content. To me it was just a bunch of nude men smearing shit on the prison walls, tearing their prison uniforms apart and being beaten by the police.

There is an odd sense of serenity amidst all the filth and degradation, and I wasn’t sure if the director’s style is detached or if McQueen was imparting a sense of tranquility on all this. It’s sort of riveting. The movie’s brutality is coupled by artfully framed shots, and I almost want to say there is a disconcerting relationship or an odd disconnect between the subject and the way it is presented. It’s like if Raphael or Veronese painted victims of the Bubonic Plague.

Hunger has very little dialogue, save for an uninterrupted 17 minute scene between a chain-smoking Fassbender and a priest. Fassbender tells the priest “My life is a real life, not some theological exercise, some religious trick that’s got fuck all to do with living. Jesus Christ had a backbone […] You need the revolutionary. You need the cultural political soldier to give life a pulse, to give life a direction.”

Fassbender and the other prisoners are almost always nude, or half nude. Giorgio Agamben wrote that “Nudity, in our culture, is inseparable from a theological signature,” and he goes on to say that “before the Fall, Adam and Eve were not naked; rather, they were covered by clothing of grace, which clung to them as a garment of glory.” In the theological nexus of nudity and grace, nudity is viewed in conjunction with shame. In Hunger there is no shame. No transgression is too great. Piss and shit and maggots are everywhere. No one is disgusted or embarrassed. The prisoners have a profane grace. Their nudity is the clothing of grace.

The savagery of incarceration also transfigures itself into an objective relish for danger, for an edge, that some inner fire is turning them into something like a refined metal, or an artfully blown piece of glass. There is also the absence of veils. The easy ties to martyrdom, self-sacrifice and sainthood cannot be ignored. Fassbender’s deterioration is cloaked in grace, and he is without shame.

Fassbender’s statuesque body is covered in sores near the end. I am naturally very thin, so seeing Fassbender’s emaciated body did not shock me because it’s basically what I look like naked. McQueen glorifies Fassbender’s slow degradation unto death, his nudity cloaked with a profane grace. Fassbender’s body is graceful and glorified, even at its most emaciated. He seems attune to Julius Evola’s Uranian chrism, knowing that cowardice and inaction are far worse than sin. His starvation is ennobling – courageous, even. The whole movie is the decay of the body. His deterioration is like watching Michelangelo’s David turn into an Egon Schiele self-portrait. Perhaps beauty is always brutal. The sacred is always profane. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s first Duino elegy, he wrote, “For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure, / and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains / to destroy us.”

Solar ▲ Luxuriance // POISON VAPORS

2011-05-24T08:10:00.000-07:00

Solar ▲ Luxuriance has released my debut poetry collection. Buy Poison Vapors or read it as a PDF *here*

A REVELATORY DEMISE

2011-05-18T08:57:00.000-07:00

I would like to tell you about a movie I recently saw. The movie is Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind. Robert Stack, host of the great Unsolved Mysteries, plays the heir of a wealthy American oil baron. He is accustomed to satisfying every whim and fancy as soon as it arises. He has everything and is sort of cursed with leisure, a kind of Harry Crosby minus the artistic outlet. He just sort of glows and burns up.

When Robert Stack is wooing Lauren Bacall she has a sudden and mysterious distaste for the luxury. She senses something dishonest, but really it’s just her own dull nature. The glamour and exorbitant wealth of Robert Stack unsettles her. His exorbitant wealth enables him to access a state of grace that is simultaneously a state of damnation. Robert Stack is paralyzed with pleasure, growing in paranoia toward a revelatory demise. Like a seer who’s had a fragment of a vision, he leads a lifestyle so bright, so solar he embodies pure cosmic waste, a man Colin Wilson would call a “rogue messiah,” becoming increasingly drunk, wasteful and paranoid as the movie progresses. Always turning the volume up, like Hart Crane, always accelerating, growing “more and more cosmic instead of looking at the waste,” settling into the core of a dying star.

People expect life to be something less than a series of torrid climaxes. But I revel in the extravagant exaggerations and failed dreams, something akin to Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance. The mood is like an exuberant drain. It’s the celebration of a revelatory demise, with the noble aim to unveil all. To see everything. Be everything. Love everything. Fuck everything. Lose everything. It’s a dangerous streak, one that feels interactive and participatory. To rot in some celebratory demise. I found Robert Stack’s lifestyle alluring. The revelatory demise attracted me because of my own penchant for expensive liquors and arcane books, my affection for A Rebours. This is to say nothing of the careless drinking I’ve been known for, or my proclivity for oblivion.

This is a great movie. Robert Stack’s dissolution emanates the residue of dreams. Draining away to total despair and a pure dissolution at the height of one’s vitality, like Dorothy Malone’s wild masturbatory dance scene, culminating in a death. D.H. Lawrence wrote that we are transmitters of life, and “when we fail to transmit life, life fails to flow through us.” He also wrote that “sexless people transmit nothing,” which is why Dorothy Malone’s sexual voracity is so heartbreaking to me in this movie, her rawness vibrating like solar rays in a blue Hawaiian sky.

Near the end of the movie, Dorothy Malone says “My brother always drank too much. He was sad.” She speaks these words in a ponderous tone, like she is revealing a total truth or an ancient secret about the universe. His cosmic sadness is a reminder that a demise is a revelation, and excess vitality causes pain when we find no one who matches our wounds.

COMPULSORY LEISURE

2011-05-10T16:43:00.000-07:00

The Occult Forces. The Ritual Murder. The Sinister Storms. The Prophetic Dreams. The Last Wave.

2011-05-07T19:11:00.000-07:00

A Sydney lawyer defends five Aborigines in a ritualized taboo murder and in the process learns disturbing things about himself.

“I never got what I thought was a full understanding of it and that’s because it’s terribly hard to see in this way, to really see.” -- Peter Weir, on Aboriginal dreamtime

Broadcast Luminescence

2011-05-03T10:38:00.000-07:00

Broadcast Luminescence

A high-definition illusion existing in virtual space is patterned on guilt like the sky

And coursing the waves of tomorrow. This is the new backwards. To live and suffer

Directly on-screen. A violent discourse tendered a spectral will in this atmosphere that cancels.

A gulf of future time where all things vanish. Poultice or lotion, cascade tremens.

Death’s eye view is a cancellation. Clusters of waves. Distortions and subterfuges

Where awareness is kept out. Regency of mind, the futurity of space. A vague, mercurial

Boredom pervades this graphic mimetic hologram, this elemental paroxysm. A distorted

Plane full of lunar sympathies. Replenished star hails into oblivion. The dream is to imagine

And be a part of a world being created. The day is prone to misalignment. So fake

In this nominated sky. The essential hate of a landscape. Encoded nebulae. Forever forever forever.

*******

This poem was recently published somewhere with horribly botched formatting. This is the poem.