WHAT MAKES THE SELF

WHAT FORMS THE PAST

I've known the name of it ever since I can remember, though the pronunciation has evaded me from time to time, and with sounds being so succinctly tied to the weave of the past these days I may not ever have spoken the moniker at all, aloud, to the extent that the speaking is the naming itself and also the remembering, so for that matter who can say how far back the memory can be said to extend, if it can at all be spoken, or known. What can be said for sure is that I've always been unsure, unsettled in the definitive qualities of secured foundation, blurred in scope by any perspectival instrument, somewhat deafened to the inner tones zoning through the very bones which sustain me, or at least some aspect of a self which has risen more or less vertically along a horizontal axis of self-seeing-ness, which is all of my selves and none other, at least so far as I may make such an assertion in-definitely though without precise definition. Who is this voice which is asking incessantly, simmering up from the boiling toil of the banal canals of everyday breathing schemes, every so often rising above the hissing whisper of subliminal murmur to clang a clear cold chord through mind and over body to calm the chatter of pragmatic consciousness and focus the senses upon a point of excruciating clarity - a pain due in part to its sur-reality in relation to the callous cauldrons of the resting states - yes a point with all the precision of an edge and the aerobatics of starlight and just as much distance, infinitesimal in physics and poetics alike in allegory, from every being throated or thwarted? This voice must be my own, arising from a within which is not wholly mine, rather a mining hole of switches, twitches, tricks and traps tapping in rapture the senses of my feelings feeling themselves as self, kneeling before an altar of a holed self, a holy shelf of lenses and other potential clarities, rumbling resonators of recoiling accentuations of a location somehow completely here and consuming how's of practice and completion and hearing, absorbed and ventilated.

My self is a breath, ventilating, a process of laying out and unloading the accumulating gleanings of a life of inhalations exhumed in relation to a softly laid air. Putting it down upon the page in neatly carved lines, scrimshaw of the fingers own prints making marks upon a body of pressed porous pulp, filling with ponderous flowing nibs inky guffaws and quivering tines, as a page of a book with no middle and perpetual prologue pummeling towards grand release with no end, or at least no credits. To write is to ventilate, to breath, to carry on a rigorous physical exercise with no mind and scarcely a body, to make vulnerable a voice which cares not to be spoken but must finds words through a material language even as it evades direct stares, distilling the tactile colors of the otherwise luminous scrim of reality down to a charcoal contrast of cheap dry communicative compote which only sweetens the tragedy of the eternal drama. Oh-so-human, oh-so-dramatic, why speak of any other, and how could we not? Text is the mirror guide which shimmers hints of the unspeakable names gurgling over the watery vocaled chords, falling over the quartz of the self as radiant beams of densely felted fractures, shattered from the ancient icebergs by Viennese mountain herders and left out to dry, flipping eternal folds of acrobatic reverie without glee in a midnight ocean of metonyms, metaphors, meteorites, Roman mollusks hiding purples in their genitals, rich running amethysts, ameliorated adamantium, and other archetypal archipelagos of awareness. This mind stretches out over the page to soak up the rays of the solar plexus, warming in dark sponges and lighter velvets, humming a gentle characteristic coo across the watery abyss like syrup over fresh pinecones. But still - in this stillness - of this moment outside of time and far within the compartments of space - how am I to know my own name?

Friendships are made spontaneously, an improvisation of mortal musics with solos streaming out of the greater symphonies in curiously crafted crescendos of delightful absurdity, when they are right, which is to say tuned in harmony not dissonance, though sometimes even the mal-tuned chords create an enchanting comedic chorus. Friends are made to be lost, again and again in eternal return, back to the beginning always already starting up in a finale, small morsels of joy and insanity dripping upon the tonsils and filling the voids of our lives or at least one life, for awhile, until they fade through silence or distance, by attention or abandonment, to the mausoleum of memory whose chilled marble contents gather dusty decorations and decayed enamels, frozen in the tanks of amnesiatic corpses and auspicious urns, rotting under layers of the flooding present ravenously consuming attention without heed to the vaporous emissions of excrement. We live many lives. Some relationships are abandoned for idealism and others murdered for pocket change, some we sew to the torso so as to never become unattached while others slip and curl instantly over the grasp before we have the chance to savor the flavors of the would-be reorientation, some filling our souls with previously unimaginable satiation and others amounting mountains of starvation. Loneliness is a bittersweet digestif best served cold after a long hot meal of sweaty sex, soiled secrets, and soulful soliloquy with saints or snakes.

Objects also come and pass, go through and on top of, providing programs and burdens and portals and barriers, but somehow always seem to become more than their material properties as we live along with them, as though the physical resonation of the thing plays a role as performer or conductor in our singing systems, or perhaps our song elates some supra-sensual shimmer in the properties, so that perhaps the mind and the matter may be said to be mustered of particles that can be differentiated but are not altogether different. I am myself to my own mind but also in body, solving and self-ing through making manifest my mental perturbations in mental meat, cerebral corpus, and there is no difference I would say, at least so far as I can speak of difference in things from their being not of my being but only becomings in relation to that which my self is said to be, namely a becoming in and of itself always and already in relation to that which defines it: the other. All these things piling up around me are not me but are also, they are me and me also, me +, greater than just, they are not my body but give it feeling by being felt and making my touch tactile, giving to me or some sense of me as much as I give unto them my attention or sense them as something in their own, so how can I say so assuredly that this sense is decidedly mine and not a shared reciprocal oscillation of sensation passing between what is me or mine and what is other or just another me or perhaps a me also? If that which is outside cannot be without a projection from my own within then I must declare that all my declarations are demarcating no delineations between any imagined or imprinted peripheries of ins or outs, that these others are also myself and are active in my own becoming as much as I am activating their ontological unfolding: we are making each other through being other, we are activating ourselves through a process of selving, we are processing difference as a process of dance, a primary movement of sensation and expression alike. So here are these objects waiting to be used and here is the me waiting to be objectified, some matter of memories and mind and a memory of materials and other matters, so let us take them up mindfully.

All these plants all around us, are they me or mine or matter or memory then? Sentient beings anticipating our moves before attention can intend the rudiments of mobility, sensing through qualities unquantifiable by our own rational mechanisms or machinated organs that which is and will be, with roots tasting down through gravity, seeing with mineral optics the rotations of the terrestrial capillaries, stretching up a tireless yoga of solar nourishment upon rich chocolaty firmament, forming without nerves an awareness to wind and water and even more obscure waves coasting our terrestrial beaches and corporeal breaches, these gentle bodies without organs, reeds and pipes and drums of every variety, harboring secrets of dark orchestrations and luminous consternations that make our feeble human mythologies seem like cheap gossip or cramped constipation. These chloroform nymphs offer a crystalline clarification that has yet to be incorporated into our choirs, a concentration upon being not compartmentalized in mortality but performed through the perpetual motions of the prairie, at the jugular of the jungle, active in the making of landscape-as-body, essential to the ecology rather than attempting mastery over some thing outside, a display of potent exteriorization of interiority that may offer us a refreshing vocabulary for an understanding in situ perpetuum mobile. Such an understanding is only found through acceptance, via compassion, vis-a-vis love attained not through purity but putrefaction, by turning dirt into earth, rejecting debilitating descriptions of what is in favor of revitalized incantations of what the sensuous and sensible could be, to reorient towards activating attention upon the myriad minutiae, and of course upon love itself.

AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH an exclamation an exultation an exoneration an evocation, of the amorous! AAAAAHHHHH a scream of torn tendons, of tenuous clouds, vapors of transcendence and tragedy. Love is not experienced through possession, in maintenance of a perpetual moment as it is always fleeting, always leaving, already gone, a requiem release of what is known or knowable: it is not itself concretely understood but only ever indirectly fondled through reflected and/or refracted and/or's, non-verbal streams which inject turbulence in sentimental sediments, only alluded to in form, color, shape, and simmer through poetry, philosophy, and other pedantic panhandling. It is through loss that we come to feel the swells of the hearts seize, by way of lack that we understand that which we once held to be so potent, by observing the effects of amorous magics that we may glimpse the residues of attachment itself. Love is tragic, defined by tragedy, known through a hallucination no less real than every other, is the other, the many lines that linger at the end of the poem, the dim pitch that encroaches and consumes after the lights have been blown out, and so it is through the circumstances of the separation that we should locate it. To know it is to have lost it, to feel it is to have it drop out of reach, to taste it is to feel ones own tongue tasting, a self selving its own through differentiation without difference. Screaming out into the vacuum formed after unclenching from the loving embrace is the clearest, most amplified declaration of the self-as-relation, as the locus of relations, even when oriented towards a nil languishing in pure liquid lack: the universe is a black love.