ICONOCLAST, n. A breaker of idols, the worshipers whereof are imperfectly gratified by the performance, and most strenuously protest that he unbuildeth but doth not reedify, that he pulleth down but pileth not up. For the poor things would have other idols in place of those he thwacketh upon the mazzard and dispelleth. But the iconoclast saith: "Ye shall have none at all, for ye need them not; and if the rebuilder fooleth round hereabout, behold I will depress the head of him and sit thereon till he squawk it."
-- Ambrose Bierce

Sunday, June 30, 2013

The Rule Of Thumbs: Of Seventy-two Trivia,
Seven terms are amoural and two are confused

With no blood and no guts it's linguistic diversion.
Not a lemonade ocean, the Utopean vision lies in
the hyphen twixt Uto-aztecan and west european.
  1. Virgin: a sensual being come into a world which makes no sense 'less it's chaos, that is, in potentia, something to taste, otherwise it all seems downright dangerous. Raised as a princess or atop a pedestal, the world comes to you without question, or you take it away – no feeling's mutual. Raised under your boot gives the self-same result – either way "the world is shitty". The point's they're both prisoners riding conveyors for assembly and boxed up and sorted away. Unbeknownst to the moderns, no body ever was born a resource like clay, a product to finish or naughty, despite all the shit that they lay.

  2. Culture: is just common sense, or repeated attempts to provide it, originally by mothers and childhood friends, by whatever means can be pulled from the kit, there giving courage or for the germane, a germanic mut, it's all the same. Without a doubt even doggies will do it. When the girls get together and mimic procedures, one could say, were they catholics, they're just wearing their habits, but mostly they're stories that travel the land, just like when a cowboy becomes an old hand. Like taste, experience is naught without trying.

  3. Mores: an olden-time word for customs, not just trivial, in fashion, but iterations of vibrations worn like folds in a performing fabric. A bit of trivia (meaning by way of three or a trinary crossroad) from the middle of tera, the collective of three mothers was known as the Moirai, in Persia was Peri, in english the context, the peripheral area that is your surroundings – brings forth or it cuts off your fate. Maybe invective, it's what carries and gives you the "v" in subjective. A moral's a theme or the gist of a story and that is expansive. Begetting big its, the righteous give shrinkage: binary morality will imprecate all that is body, that is to say 'specially below-the-head senses, all excremenses and let's not forget good old amoure.

    What could be next? The reverse most would think: "amoral" lives past the begotten context or tastes something new that's inviting – peripherally it just means innovative. What most mean to be saying's "immoral" – Immorality's everything outside the city or any rigidity, and that's why it usually rhymes with mortality. It implicates death, an abuse of conserving, like "if it's all not our story then it's no story at all – whatever's to learn will be given, so don't give me no more of your snivelling!"

  4. Short term memory: the inertia of sensing. Everything else is either drilled in (a habit) or art reconstructed if not a big shock stuck on looping (inducted). Then there's denied, ignored or excluded "phantasia", almost any excuse is good for amnesia. Memory is always a creative urge, so recall must be colored by the dream or ideal. Writing it down don't make it real. If they're looking for truths, no one can track 'less you start out with answers and then give the proofs (but only if time will allow). Should you give them the moral, the story's no use 'cause the point is for poking and bloody abuse. Just follow the orders or make an excuse. Otherwise, distinguishing morals from stories may be the extensivest ruse. Besides that, it's just plain, old fashion rude.

  5. Ideal: sensations invite repetition like a bobbling buoy or booby, a lighthouse or road-sign that's pointing to all points of interest, at least those that are inviting. Or t'other way around where-in danger abounds – lines in the sand are just writing. Sometimes obsessive, it's never compulsive, like a harmless addiction to patterns of sounds. In the present it's everything given or shared – the thing's less important than ever the giving. In other words, taste, less concern with the past ('less it's cooler) than con-joining (a juggle) a future worth living. When they can't see the humours or don't get the joke, they repay you with facts that are "real". In old Norway you're sent to the yoke for a spell (Oh wait, they still do that in Jersey!). Like, what's so funny about blood and fluids and gaseous emissions you're tempted to toke or put off an off-puting smell or you're broke? The mysterious "they"? They're offending folk, like the angels and genis who nuked our Bikinis. No matter the duct tape they stick to yer teeth, the narrative insects implanted in ears or beneath the puss-oozing wall-screens infecting yer dreams, except paranoia they make for their meals, they can't put a dent in how everyone feels. Ain't more what is meant by that word, "ideal", it's no joke, it's a blast where such gods are ass-ended, that is them and thar's go all up in smoke?
    With balls to announce just who is insane, "Bring it on" spake the bush 'fore it burst into flame.

    Quoth the ball-rag with a match and the kerosene dripping, with a bit of a twist, "take care of your wishing, yer likely to get it" so sayeth Sutr.

    It's not just for Gypsies, it's a Utopean curse, when it's sung with some feeling, mettle from gutters like in Phoenix a'flutter from the ashes of the excluded, the middle-third verse.
    Madame Blatsky
  6. Creation: Literally, it means making meat. In fact it's a meeting of muscles and sinews in vats that are seathing. Whether wuthering weather is just decomposing or grounds for the moving with seasons, you might think it's nice, but old Epicurus would say "I think it needs spice". Grandmother World (or the earth if you'd rather), with the help of her sisters, the rainy and windy (or maybe urainus from flatulent aether) and some fire and lightning, after making a meal of orange sunshining, a mana from heavens, maybe her forbearers, digests with a rumble, or some say a tumble and shat out some mud, that original excrement sprouting a bud. Since during that epoch, hell meant a mound or whatever's inland and Helen was princess of tall vegetation, to this day some think that earth mother is cruel, the domain of satan, a confusion of "shat on" with ga-elic saturn and arab shaitan[1] or what is to come from a lengthy gestation, one way or t'other erupted some fashion, a nation, the mistaken translation of all divination – what's muddy is hell under irrigation. Now all ways are coursed with precision, some clarity as well as distinction, but few, you will find, can tell shit from shinola or spam.

    Before that (or later) the trickster, her son (or was it a daughter instead? well them days for things immaterial so much didn't matter, or so old granny had said), fashioned the beings by shaping the mud. The proof of the trickster, even today is every time you notice small creatures at play. What was missing was fire cause all they could eat was the plants and each other with much indigestion and should the sun settle, they'd go and expire and turn back to clay from a cirrhotic liver. Now a grown-up is someone who can play with fire.
    Come on baby light my fi-ah.
    Send me to my heart's desi-ah.
    Try to set the night on Fi-ah!
    – Jim Morrison
    Incendiary eating and sex, so hard to distinguish since one goes to such lengths to envelop another, was a fortunate mistake or unlikely abstraction since everyone knows the trickster gets bored (there's limits to any attention) so does nothing at all in a timely fashion. Unless put into tales, it's just babies who make one immortal. But that one's the story of birds and the bees – you can see for yourself if you peek through a portal and be very careful should you up and sneeze – should they catch on to your sneaking they're all apt to leave us, like o'r-sated leeches, such is of old Merlin and what Heisenberg teaches.

  7. Tale: something you follow or what follows you – for the ear, proper spelling is never a clue except that at one time folks weren't so hell-bent on making distinctions and other dissections for making you grovel – however you smell it, a spade's just a shovel – at the top of the food chain are worms and some beetles who'll eat you up just to raise some more hell.

  8. Shrewd: In Sanskrit, sruti, which is literally the word of a mouth, so I've heard, is considered divined out of chaos or beneath the subconscious, in more psychoanalytical terms. Feelings, archetypes, intuitions, vague memories of vaguer old stories. Stand-offish science objects "It is written!" and they're right in a sense but they follow it's tradition as long as it's spoken objectively and the younger must always proceed from its elders like all things genetical. One identifies true offspring only by attending to the inheritance of property. Surely not shiites, they all went to SUNY! Now who is ambiguous when "objective" is simultaneously a material particle, it's detached observer and somebody else's bullshit detector? Before there was pencils and microphones, there was never a word jump-starting the world, unless god was created in the image of men. It may be all jive, but everyone knows that the whirling began with the likes of Khadijah in the year five hundred and fifty-five!

    But where your gut leads you ain't always to truth – that's whatever's swallowed without puking. Where there is a question, divination precides over a reconstruction, the order of words or the calculation, unless of course, it's all just a matter subjective for further experimentation – "In the beginning was invented two lips. It may suck, but the tongue was discovered for tasting!" First principle of poetic interpretation is not babble – it's dada – and only encourages get-up and go. More toothy than dental, less incisive than insightful, it's rarely exclusive, except when it's sent off to school, where the measure of ecological relationships is the same as the steps between eight-ball and pool.

  9. Smarts (Smriti 're-collected tradition'): a sometimes-useful fiction like book learning, being both incisive and exclusive (ignoring the context looks's more like a purging), so it sometimes hurts as it is the primer for laws and for rules for every behavior (and all look at somebody else for to blame). The juxtaposition of shrewdness and so-called smarts creates Octavia, the way of eighths (it's multiply divisible within certain circles but there's no room for jazz in a major scale), so ever confusing "authority" with "guesswork" and else-wise and when-ways "to fabricate". But isn't the blues from excessive beating?

    There's a third position that's often excluded for reasons we suspect are defense mechanism, as if to suggest there's much agency in a cybernetically arranged information that's an inverted heat sync called Sir Gray Matter Brainy with inputs and outputs and feedbacking fibers processing data like rigged pinball machines, but we've lost our ball bearings or spring in the wallop. Whatever is said of reality, our world's just an aftershock of generalized bumbling, which is to say chaos is mother. Culture is just a collection of stories. Rivals for cultural authority, "Show me the data" they're likely to say. Without rules of enclosure, there's no information – data's whatever you happen to use for an over-expedient explanation. By accident, force or tricks and deception, the "data" will fit into any system. A system is fine, as long as it's open. To plug up the scheme, you've just made religion. Try to inflate it or make it much neater and comes Ouroborus, the world eater, and finite and infinite aren't just outside-in, from some points of view they're just more o' the same.

[1]: Shaitan, if you're Hindi, a name for a boy, who carries a torch for Lucinda or Venus or following Saturn, in a sense Dyonesian but it means an affectionate and giving demon with a rambunctious urge for some free expression. Sometimes it's too much but ya can't shut him up. In Islam, a genius who doesn't bow down to the patriarch, Adam, the author of particles proceeding to sink and then drown all the waves in the proverbial drink. Like Helen's father had slaughtered her daughter to settle the weather and stirring the seas for proceeding to conquer, all for heeding her taste rather than complete the transaction, to the highest bidder and the king's satisfaction. The story was likely constructed beforehand, a ruse to excuse what was already planned. Like the void was invented to abolish the egg, excluding all mothering. Man, what a scheme! 'cause nobody prior paid tribute to nothing. Ever since then the war-cry of profits, creatio ex nihilo or "Somethin' fer nothin!" was heard through the land – most folks understand it was only a scam. Boys will be boys only when they're believers (that is, when they're or there're polices). What became sacred duty was once just a feast, is now over-paid to one or more gods, begetting both sacrifice and beating the odds, and everyone else is still starving. And still they insist "t'was girls caused the problem!" With thumb up the ass and head in the phylum, it's a living assylum. If any's to blame, I'd say it's not eve, it's the void and that little, cantankerous, wanker named atom and all of them cards which fell from his sleeve.

Friday, June 21, 2013

The witch's promise was coming

Like Ulyses, Poe's tyrant Tamerlane discovered way too late that the future's not what you've bought and paid for, not by any means of currency or blood. It's bad enough expecting much from our commodities, one must also be careful what you wish for. Like product quality, and given the morality of efficiency, repulsive dystopias are just easier to design, construct and defend. Without a destination in mind which may require more than cognitive maps, utopia is just a direction, anything but here is out. Like in grade school I watched the clock to hurry up and get to three. It's just a turning point and not a compass.

Like major depression, mediatic education can only claim a victory as bloody as Odysseus' slaughter if one comes to see outside the pit of eternal stench, the air is even fouler. Maybe let's not throw out utopia just yet – as long as we remember it's the way and not the product (line or destination) even when the most shocking idea has always been productive termination. Need we be reminded again that taking the journey is everyone's fate and destiny? This is not an invitation to stand still (in line or in formation) to purchase an ounce of immortality. Sustained development is the fuel for a commodity without a shelf-life. That's a utopic destiny called heaven for gods alone – and aging democrats who expect at every whim the world will come to them. And need we be reminded that a haven's just a resting spot or free hotel and not the end? They say that hell is only as hot as you can make it. They also say that should be enough for anyone! As to Tamerlane, who set out to conquer and suppress the world as a gift to his high school sweetheart:

Lend me your ear while I call you a fool.
You were kissed by a witch one night in the wood,
and later insisted your feelings were true.
The witch's promise was coming,
believing he listened while laughing you flew.

Leaves falling red, yellow, brown, all the same,
and the love you have found lay outside in the rain.
Washed clean by the water but nursing its pain.
The witch's promise was coming, and you're looking
elsewhere for your own selfish gain.

Keep looking, keep looking for somewhere to be,
well, you're wasting your time,
they're not stupid like he.
Meanwhile leaves are still falling,
you're too blind to see.

You won't find it easy now, it's only fair.
He was willing to give to you, you didn't care.
You're waiting for more but you've already had your share.
The witch's promise is turning, so don't you wait up
for him, he's going to be late.
Jethro Tull, The Witch's Promise

"The incredible thunderbolt of a propelling idea suddenly surges up from the grey monotony of everyday life. A desire to be beyond the abyss, well beyond it.

...the real movement is rediscovering the explosive potential of utopia. It is acting in such a way that its radical critique of the process of recuperation cannot be recuperated. It is not by chance that this position has appeared at the same time as economic claims are diminishing in importance. There equality was seen as the result of the repartition of produced value beyond the endemic division between capitalists and proletarians. But we are sure that any society that were to pass more or less violently from capitalism to post-revolutionary socialism through the narrow door of syndicalism would necessarily be a grey parody of a free society. The heavy trade union self-regulating mechanism with its ideal of the good worker and the bad skiver would be transferred to society as a whole. The students have faced the problem of the impossibility of any outlet in the labour market. But their analysis strengthens (or should strengthen) the conviction that only with a radically utopian way of seeing the social problem will it be possible to break through the boundaries of a destiny that those in power seem to hold in their hands...

Why, one might ask, are we so sure of the revolutionary content of an idea that, after all, has moved with varying fortunes in the world revolutionary sphere for at least two hundred years? The answer is simple. The propulsive value of a concept cannot be understood in social terms if one limits oneself to examining existing conditions. in fact there is no causal relationship between social conditions and a utopian concept. The latter moves within the real movement and is in deep contrast to the structural limits that condition but do not cause it. In the fictitious movement on the contrary the same concept can move around comfortably. Here in the rarefied atmosphere of the castle of spooks the utopian concept, having lost all its significance, becomes no more than a product of ideology like so many others. Research into the causes of utopia or rather utopian desire could certainly be interesting but would give poor results if one were to limit oneself to the study of the field of the social and historical conditions in which the concept suddenly appears.

For this reason we cannot outline the limits of a presumed operativity of a utopian concept starting from these conditions. It could go well beyond the latter, in other words could itself become an element of social change...

The strength of the utopian concept multiplies to infinity at precisely the moment in which it is proposed, so long as it emerges within the real movement and is not an ideological plaything within the fictitious one."

Propulsive Utopia (Alfredo M. Bonanno)

Battaile called the "real movement" the "intimate order" and is not confined to the fiction department at the local library. Order is isolation and exclusion, which are simply two views on the same process – one from the inside and one from the out. But this only applies to a mechanical universe. A common mistake is to shout the name of chaos at everything unlinear, like apples in eyes and pies in the skies. Intimacy outside the confines of mere proximity points our ears toward affinity, and that must entertain a notion of aesthetics or it's just hear-say or a game of follow the leader or connect the dots, not to put too fine a line on the matter. In artful things, only an aristotle or rockefeller would want to set a standard for everyone else's taste. That really only makes the profit margins more predictable and big.

What is the difference between finite chaos and infinite complexity? In linear terms, it's always where you draw the line. Finite chaos is in the order of a bomb going off or the death of an individual or, in more galactic terms, an epic or a pox-ecliptic, or even epoch-elliptic revelation like a supernova, or big bang as a creative urge, even if always in need of further evidence for any sound determinism. Even capitalists understand a sound investment relies or lies again on some insider information – otherwise it's just a gamble. It wasn't a call for deeper cuts or further articulation when they use to say "seeing is believing", it's just that if you can't trust your senses, why bother with another's?

A mirage is no lie by evil senses, the mistake is just their misinterpretation, sometimes a distortion. If taken as auspicious message of a by-passing phantom, it's still food for thought if not a later-than-expected materially metabolic satisfaction. The line between a taste bud and a spud is always wiggly. The phantom only bids you try it. How else could you know to change direction or keep moving without the curiosity (once called bravery) to engage with what may be only an illusion, wishful thinking or a hearty meal?

Everything's provisional. It's why without the security of a bird in the hand, a free gift must arouse the trust detector. If there's any sense in reductionism, the mammary gland is a give-away for all mammalian babies. Before religious orders, god and darwin, there were no orphans. What's inherited genes or property got to do with anything when every child knows a mother's not only one who satisfies your belly but makes you giggle. A smarmy ass-licker is only interested in excrement or caca. He's a phony. If only to preserve a sense of integrity, even an untrained monkey will call bullshit and hurl, or freely give him what he wishes – sometimes there's room to take the metaphoric quite literally so might refrain from criticising bricks hurling through bank windows. It's not immoral violence like playing with your food or barfing on your shoulder, just some freedom of expression. If malicious, what the devil? it's conditions made them do it! Any way, who's complaining, the glass or the banker?

Data, of course, must refer to sense data or an echo from another receptor which we refer to as literature and tall tails. Or it's a harmony between a sight and what one smells. Beneath the data is ground, making archaeologists and potato farmers and all variety of critics the most suitable scientific fodder by virtue of digging up the dirt. For the dead, it's no great concern but for soon-to-be live beings, it's a premature extraction by an all-to greedy or impatient or conformist (in other words, a sleeping) obstetrician.

Once upon a time phenomenology was the word which said to only trust your senses 'cause the further from that phenomenon called "data", you'll need some stronger lenses. With polytics and other seizures, metaphysics and religion are for the ownership of reality when they ask what underlies the data. That, of course means more theory or systematised ideas and it's the more arrogant among them who proclaim reality is nothing BUT a set of grand ideas, the numbers or go on to invent an absolving god-creator, a tool to absorb them their mundane responsibilities (only meaning here, the ability to dance, that is, respond) and then to take the blame for their cooking the books instead of cattle and thence and then again with much destruction, created poverty.

The christians added heaven as an unearthly reward for intentional starvation and toil in the here and now. Or so said Mark Twain. To this day, even atheists consider reward as just the temporary withholding of punishment and call that humane treatment. Humanity always justifies the ghettos with more humanity. Truant workers call it leave which is the only opportunity to live, as if by someone else's permission, learned early on with the proprietary grammatical distinction between may and can. Life itself has become affixed to utopian idealism when all that's left is a virtual simulation. Fortunately, our ancestors were skeptics when they coined the word "lies" to apply what lives beneath the gods' ideas – beneath the ground the only sounds are heard from corpses. D. H. Lawrence only said reality is only found the other side of Benjamin Franklin's barbed wire fences. In other words, "beauty's coming out of the box" is all was meant by all apocalypses. Shelley said Pandora was a godess for all-giving. The problem wasn't what came out, according to Promethius, but what was missing, and for that he lost his liver and Atlas dropped the ceiling.

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

The thing about receivers and emitters is when they resonate or dance together and then you can't tell one from the other, and you shouldn't lest they fall away. An harmonic can ring truer (which in auditory language means beautiful) than either end and everyone with taste or ear for it prefers a good harmony over a monotone or loud cacaphony. So for immersion or participant observers, the real data lies not beneath but amongst or in between them. What makes sense for Goethe is a portrayal of the context, not a systematic explanation or in architectural terms like syntax, an arrangement of its constituents. Olmec Masons understood that leaders are the ones who cut the corners. From the stone's point of view, it's all just falsification of data to fit someone else's scheme to build enclosures. Any good story either resonates with your experience or peaks your curiosity for exploration. That's all. The social agreement is for commisurating retirees always complaining about the youngsters.

“A ‘cause’ (or gene) is something without which some ‘effect’ (or character) which you expect fails to occur, while something else occurs instead. To turn the sum of such negative statements around and fashion from them a positive doctrine of plenipotency (of causes or genes) seems to me a reprehensible somersault of logic.”
paul weiss, 1973

Could it be that the ego is NOT that which is defended, but merely the set of all defenses? To the pure, all things may be pure, but Nietzsche reminds us that to the swine, all things are piggish and Reich adds that underneath the layers of body armor or the masquerade is a bloody mess – nothing pure about it. And by the way, as to those puritans at the nsa, we're laughing – they've learned to do a google search so now have the entire web at their fingertips. Ah the beauty of seduction. A real spider spins a web from its ass – it's the fly which experiences sticky fingers!

Monday, June 17, 2013

The other Ethnography: Studies in Literature

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed; and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.

So ends one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world, closing up its mystery and its tortured symbolism. It is an epic of the sea such as no man has equalled; and it is a book of esoteric symbolism of profound significance, and of considerable tiresomeness.

But it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest book of the sea ever written. It moves awe in the soul.

The terrible fatality.

Fatality.

Doom.

Doom! Doom! Doom! Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America. Doom!

Doom of what?

Doom of our white day. We are doomed, doomed. And the doom is in America. The doom of our white day.

Ah, well, if my day is doomed, and I am doomed with my day, it is something greater than I which dooms me, so I accept my doom as a sign of the greatness which is more than I am.

Melville knew. He knew his race was doomed. His white soul, doomed. His great white epoch doomed. Himself, doomed. The idealist, doomed: The spirit, doomed.

The reversion. 'Not so much bound to any haven ahead, as rushing from all havens astern.'

That great horror of ours! It is our civilization rushing from all havens astern.

The last ghastly hunt. The White Whale.

What then is Moby Dick? He is the deepest blood-being of the white race; he is our deepest blood-nature.

And he is hunted, hunted, hunted by the maniacal fanaticism of our white mental consciousness. We want to hunt him down. To subject him to our will. And in this maniacal conscious hunt of ourselves we get dark races and pale to help us, red, yellow, and black, east and west, Quaker and fireworshipper, we get them all to help us in this ghastly maniacal hunt which is our doom and our suicide.

The last phallic being of the white man. Hunted into the death of upper consciousness and the ideal will. Our blood-self subjected to our will. Our blood-consciousness sapped by a parasitic mental or ideal consciousness.

Hot blooded sea-born Moby Dick. Hunted maniacs of the idea.

Oh God, oh God, what next, when the Pequod has sunk?

She sank in the war, and we are all flotsam.

Now what next?

Who knows ? Quien sabe? Quien sabe, senor?

Neither Spanish nor Saxon America has any answer.

The Pequod went down. And the Pequod was the ship of the white American soul. She sank, taking with her negro and Indian and Polynesian, Asiatic and Quaker and good, business-like Yankees and Ishmael: she sank all the lot of them.

Boom! as Vachel Lindsay would say.

To use the words of Jesus, IT IS FINISHED.

Consummatum est!  But Moby Dick was first published in 1851. If the Great White Whale sank the ship of the Great White Soul in 1851, what's been happening ever since?

Post-mortem effects, presumably.

Because, in the first centuries, Jesus was Cetus, the Whale. And the Christians were the little fishes. Jesus, the Redeemer, was Cetus, Leviathan. And all the Christians all his little fishes.

POST-MORTEM effects?

But what of Walt Whitman?

The 'good grey poet'.

Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?

The good grey poet.

Post-mortem effects. Ghosts.

A certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage of human parts. A certain stridency and portentousness. A luridness about his beatitudes.

DEMOCRACY! THESE STATES! EIDOLONS! LOVERS, ENDLESS LOVERS!

ONE IDENTITY!

ONE IDENTITY!

I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.

Do you believe me, when I say post-mortem effects ?

When the Pequod went down, she left many a rank and dirty steamboat still fussing in the seas. The Pequod sinks with all her souls, but their bodies rise again to man innumerable tramp steamers, and ocean-crossing liners. Corpses.

What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going.

So that you see, the sinking of the Pequod was only a metaphysical tragedy after all. The world goes on just the same. The ship of the soul is sunk. But the machine-manipulating body works just the same: digests, chews gum, admires Botticelli and aches with amorous love.

I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.

What do you make of that? I AM HE THAT ACHES. First generalization. First uncomfortable universalization. WITH AMOROUS LOVE! Oh, God! Better a bellyache. A bellyache is at least specific. But the ACHE OF AMOROUS LOVE!

Think of having that under your skin. All that!

I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.

Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And your ache doesn't include all Amorous Love, by any means. If you ache you only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there's so much more stays outside the cover of your ache, that you might be a bit milder about it.

I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.

CHUFF! CHUFF! CHUFF!

CHU-CHU-CHU-CHU-CHUFF!

Reminds one of a steam-engine. A locomotive. They're the only things that seem to me to ache with amorous love. All that steam inside them. Forty million foot-pounds pressure. The ache of AMOROUS LOVE. Steam-pressure. CHUFF!

An ordinary man aches with love for Belinda, or his Native Land, or the Ocean, or the Stars, or the Oversoul: if he feels that an ache is in the fashion.

It takes a steam-engine to ache with AMOROUS LOVE. All of it.

Walt was really too superhuman. The danger of the superman is that he is mechanical.

They talk of his 'splendid animality'. Well, he'd got it on the brain, if that's the place for animality.

     I am he that aches with amorous love:
     Does the earth gravitate, does not all matter, aching, attract all matter?
     So the body of me to all I meet or know.

What can be more mechanical? The difference between life and matter is that life, living things, living creatures, have the instinct of turning right away from some matter, and of bliss- fully ignoring the bulk of most matter, and of turning towards only some certain bits of specially selected matter. As for living creatures all helplessly hurtling together into one great snowball, why, most very living creatures spend the greater part of their time getting out of the sight, smell or sound of the rest of living creatures. Even bees only cluster on their own queen. And that is sickening enough. Fancy all white humanity clustering on one another like a lump of bees.

No, Walt, you give yourself away. Matter does gravitate helplessly. But men are tricky-tricksy, and they shy all sorts of ways.

Matter gravitates because it is helpless and mechanical.

And if you gravitate the same, if the body of you gravitates to all you meet or know, why, something must have gone . seriously wrong with you. You must have broken your main- spring.

You must have fallen also into mechanization.

Your Moby Dick must be really dead. That lonely phallic monster of the individual you. Dead mentalized.

I only know that my body doesn't by any means gravitate to all I meet or know, I find I can shake hands with a few people. But most I wouldn't touch with a long prop.

Your mainspring is broken, Walt Whitman. The mainspring of your own individuality. And so you run down with a great whirr, merging with everything.

You have killed your isolate Moby Dick. You have mentalized your deep sensual body, and that's the death of it.

I am everything and everything is me and so we're all One in One Identity, like the Mundane Egg, which has been addled quite a while.

     'Whoever you are, to endless announcements-'
     'And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.'

Do you? Well then, it just shows you haven't got any self. It's a mush, not a woven thing. A hotch-potch, not a tissue. Your self.

Oh, Walter, Walter, what have you done with it? What have you done with yourself? With your own individual self? For it sounds as if it had all leaked out of you, leaked into the universe.

Post-mortem effects. The individuality had leaked out of him.

No, no, don't lay this down to poetry. These are post-mortem effects. And Walt's great poems are really huge fat tomb-plants, great rank graveyard growths.

All that false exuberance. All those lists of things boiled in one pudding-cloth! No, no!

I don't want all those things inside me, thank you.

'I reject nothing,' says Walt.

If that is so, one might be a pipe open at both ends, so everything runs through.

Post-mortem effects.

'I embrace ALL,' says Whitman. 'I weave all things into myself.'

Do you really! There can't be much left of you when you've done. When you've cooked the awful pudding of One Identity.

'And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral dressed in his own shroud.'

Take off your hat then, my funeral procession of one is passing.

This awful Whitman. This post-mortem poet. This poet with the private soul leaking out of him all the time. All his privacy leaking out in a sort of dribble, oozing into the universe.

Walt becomes in his own person the whole world, the whole universe, the whole eternity of time, as far as his rather sketchy knowledge of history will carry him, that is. Because to be a thing he had to know it. In order to assume the identity of a thing he had to know that thing. He was not able to assume one identity with Charlie Chaplin, for example, because Walt didn't know Charlie. What a pity! He'd have done poems, paces and what not, Chants, Songs of Cinematernity.

     'Oh, Charlie, my Charlie, another film is done-

As soon as Walt knew a thing, he assumed a One Identity with it. If he knew that an Eskimo sat in a kyak, immediately there was Walt being little and yellow and greasy, sitting in a kyak.

Now will you tell me exactly what a kyak is?

Who is he that demands petty definition? Let him behold me sitting in a kyak.

I behold no such thing. I behold a rather fat old man full of a rather senile, self-conscious sensuosity.

DEMOCRACY. EN MASSE. ONE IDENTITY.

The universe is short, adds up to ONE.

ONE.

I.

Which is Walt.

Hispoems Democracy, En Masse, One Identity, they are long sums in additions and multiplication, of which the answer is invariably MYSELF.

He reaches the state of ALLNESS.

And what then? It's all empty. Just an empty Allness. An addled egg.

Walt wasn't an Eskimo. A little, yellow, sly, cunning, greasy little Eskimo. And when Walt blandly assumed Allness, including Eskimoness, unto himself, he was just sucking the wind out of a blown egg-shell, no more. Eskimos are not minor little Walts. They are something that I am not, I know that. Outside the egg of my Allness chuckles the greasy little Eskimo. Outside the egg of Whitman's Allness too.

But Walt wouldn't have it. He was everything and everything was in him. He drove an automobile with a very fierce headlight, along the track of a fixed idea, through the darkness of this world. And he saw everything that way. Just as a motorist does in the night.

I, who happen to be asleep under the bushes in the dark, hoping a snake won't crawl into my neck; I, seeing Walt go by in his great fierce poetic machine, think to myself: What a funny world that fellow sees!

ONE DIRECTION! toots Walt in the car, whizzing along it.

Whereas there are myriads of ways in the dark, not to mention trackless wildernesses, as anyone will know who cares to come off the road - even the Open Road.

ONE DIRECTION! whoops America, and sets off also in an automobile.

ALLNESS! shrieks Walt at a cross-road, going whizz over an unwary Red Indian.

ONE IDENTITY! chants democratic En Masse, pelting behind in motor-cars, oblivious of the corpses under the wheels.

God save me, I feel like creeping down a rabbit-hole, to get away from all these automobiles rushing down the ONE IDENTITY track to the goal of ALLNESS.

     A woman waits for me-

He might as well have said: 'The femaleness waits for my maleness.' Oh, beautiful generalization and abstraction! Oh, biological function.

'Athletic mothers of these States -' Muscles and wombs. They needn't have had faces at all.

     As I see myself reflected in Nature,
     As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness, sanity, beauty,
     See the bent head, and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see.

Everything was female to him: even himself. Nature just one great function.

     This is the nucleus - after the child is born of woman, man is born of woman,
     This is the bath of birth, the merge of small and large, and the outlet again -
     'The Female I see -'

If I'd been one of his women, I'd have given him Female, with a flea in his ear.

Always wanting to merge himself into the womb of something or other.

     'The Female I see -'

Anything, so long as he could merge himself.

Just a horror. A sort of white flux.

Post-mortem effects.

He found, as all men find, that you can't really merge in a woman, though you may go a long way. You can't manage the last bit. So you have to give it up, and try elsewhere if you insist on merging.

In Calamus he changes his tune. He doesn't shout and thump and exult any more. He begins to hesitate, reluctant, wistful.

The strange calamus has its pink-tinged root by the pond, and it sends up its leaves of comradeship, comrades from one root, without the intervention of woman, the female.

So he sings of the mystery of manly love, the love of comrades. Over and over he says the same thing: the new world will be built on the love of comrades, the new great dynamic of life will be manly love. Out of this manly love will come the inspiration for the future.

Will it though? Will it?

Comradeship ! Comrades ! This is to be the new Democracy of Comrades. This is the new cohering principle in the world: Comradeship.

Is it? Are you sure?

It is the cohering principle of true soldiery, we are told in Drum-Taps. It is the cohering principle in the new unison for creative activity. And it is extreme and alone, touching the confines of death. Something terrible to bear, terrible to be responsible for. Even Walt Whitman felt it. The soul's last and most poignant responsibility, the responsibility of comradeship, of manly love.

     Yet you are beautiful to me, you faint-tinged roots, you make me think of death.
     Death is beautiful from you (what indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?)
     I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers, I think it must be for death,
     For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the atmosphere of lovers,
     Death or life, I am then indifferent, my soul declines to prefer
     (I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death most)
     Indeed, O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the same as you mean—

This is strange, from the exultant Walt.

Death!

Death is now his chant! Death!

Merging! And Death! Which is the final merge.

The great merge into the womb. Woman.

And after that, the merge of comrades: man-for-man love.

And almost immediately with this, death, the final merge of death.

There you have the progression of merging. For the great mergers, woman at last becomes inadequate. For those who love to extremes. Woman is inadequate for the last merging. So the next step is the merging of man-for-man love. And this is on the brink of death. It slides over into death.

David and Jonathan. And the death of Jonathan.

It always slides into death.

The love of comrades.

Merging.

So that if the new Democracy is to be based on the love of comrades, it will be based on death too. It will slip so soon into death.

The last merging. The last Democracy. The last love. The love of comrades.

Fatality. And fatality.

Whitman would not have been the great poet he is if he had not taken the last steps and looked over into death. Death, the last merging, that was the goal of his manhood.

To the mergers, there remains the brief love of comrades, and then Death.

     Whereto answering, the sea
     Delaying not, hurrying not
     Whispered me through the night, very plainly before daybreak,
     Lisp'd to me the low and delicious word death.
     And again death, death, death, death.
     Hissing melodions, neither like the bird nor like my arous'd child's heart,
     But edging neat as privately for me rustling at my feet,
     Creeping thence steadily up to my ears and laving me softly all over,
     Death, death, death, death, death—

Whitman is a very great poet, of the end of life. A very great post-mortem poet, of the transitions of the soul as it loses its integrity. The poet of the soul's last shout and shriek, on the confines of death. Apres moi le deluge.

But we have all got to die, and disintegrate.

We have got to die in life, too, and disintegrate while we live.

But even then the goal is not death.

Something else will come.

     Out of the cradle endlessly rocking.

We've got to die first, anyhow. And disintegrate while we still live.

Only we know this much: Death is not the goal. And Love, and merging, are now only part of the death process. Comrade- ship - part of the death-process. Democracy - part of the death-process. The new Democracy - the brink of death One Identity - death itself.

We have died, and we are still disintegrating.

But IT IS FINISHED.

Consummatum est.