I. Mania
«Recently my thoughts have been pointillistic: timeless markers, like an old prison tattoo, a program for a learning addiction. You see, friend, I have been trying to compose myself, tentatively, as an archetype for a Learner, the archetype to kill all archetypes. This is based on my intuition or the real possibility that the Hanged Man is a paper thin instantiation of the end of the fool and their becoming aware of the game, and also, on another modest but shattering conjecture: that this same card is the singular moment in which the students can transcend, or rather, suspend the Major Arcana, the Tarot itself, having their ossature and innervation expunged from the narrative, and offer themselves to the task of prescribing new modes of description, deception and possibly, conception. I am, then, writing you to communicate how I have solved the prisoner’s dillema, defecting to and from my self.
[The possibility of learning takes him to the verge of tears, a kind of desperate exhaustion. The moment of insight into the intricacies of reasoning takes her – again – to the verge of tears. That vertigo suspends knowledge in a haze of consummated desire and leaves them hanging in their own ecstasy, disconcerted and dissatisfied with one of their selves.]
He can count every leaf from where he is. He can study every memory and learn all histories for he is Funes, an always-already dead man, revived by each new chlorophyl poisoned photon and each catastrophe of rustling and creaking branches falling, being pressed into coal, and sprouting again, teasing and coaxing Prometheus into masterful disgrace.
He is every possible cadaver and every possible antecedent of death and every possible way of worldmaking – the most generous precursor of ends, the annihilation of the probable.
She is not a ruler, but a description of a rule, its history and its ingenuity and, most importantly, she laughs at her designated ignorance and laughs, too, rejoicing, when learning of the possibility of suspending it in the end of arrogance as a self defeating end, and then he is the most acute insecurity, that which is not, that which mustn’t be itself in order to –
She should be golem, for hanging is not an essence, but an activity. Her lazy eye creates a continual rapid blueprint of the world and brackets it with her bloodless, categorical, merely structural, legs.
The only time she needs is that which may be necessary for each death, for each lesson, for each vertiginous theorem, for each abduction of incompleteness, that drop of time strictly needed for a drunken root to attach itself to the thin paper walls of the cosmos.
Thus, their epitaphs precede their capitulation into being:
His fame is a thing of silence, but he decorates the world and destroys it, for he learns not of appearances, neither of clothes, rites, and likenesses.
She is the learner of indiscipline, she is an amphibian methodology, a swaying, a lurch, a knot aware of being a rope and but a mere rope aware of being a knot.
It is a squirming awareness feedbacking on new bondage techniques to extricate itself from atavism and recapitulation, in ecstasy.
It is a pendular tripe in a constant state of drawing out the universe in its endless scribbling gut.
She is breathless after learning how to not breathe, a Roussell machine explaining itself into existence [screeching, farting, burping, beeping]
and existence unto itself.
When I study him within myself I would say rather that he gives off a slow and awkward ecstasy, disguising the irritant stench of putrefaction.
She is the death of the given, is the myth which forms itself by unmaking itself.
I am the one staring at the gargling river and extinguishing it with names, and it is then that we hang not, gasping interruptions in the condition of being a subject – »
II. Schizophrenia
The job in us is the hole you have no word for: atomic omissions, museums defenestrated into our belly abysses. Then, “Toda a criação é abstrato” or now, via garbled homophony captured during the hours in which the heavens are divested of sparkling myth, when the interference is minimal but still strong enough to asphyxiate one or other pore, “All toads die in my tode ti”. This gets full, bloated, to a point of all returns and all translucent wet skin, and many one a dictionary every none, so, you need a lullaby and an eulogy about an alley of wonders, a navel puncturing discreteness. We know it, let us.
[We’re only breathless because I make me spend air on answers to endless forms about forms, emissions of omissions. You are making me be you as a door closing on your toe, a book pressing on our finger which wasn’t there against forgetfulness but, it turns out, imprisioned by the pitch black pain of compressed, simplified, thus, murdered words.
I could be you, I even should, if abcdefghijklet’s go, please, friend.]
One could be singing the porousness of seven hundred year old buildings, listening, like scat singers do, with one hand cupped over one’s ear, to every moment of laziness from every home when the city died every sunday, and to the worlds that can be written in those interstices, be they plastic, chitinous, or granite – that’s the job, the daily escathon, the imagination of a better, sweeter living. I hate secrets. I decode every grimoire and purge every towering office of their sophistry – for it was that which destroyed babble.
I am the termination of ignorance and the reanimator of pure understanding. The truest cockroach, the one that is the stories of its flights, its feats of orthogonal cartography in this sprawling city. An endlessly pliable frog tongue, we navigate sewers, windows, tunnels, theaters and sew intelligibilities out of corpses, tying our tongues in knots out of time.
Let us: we mean everybody but we mean no bodies, though, thought. I mean an end to their cruelty, a diaspora from the meat, we mean the sails propelled by every single other’s pregnant buoyancy. We kill the weird with dreams, put fear to sleep in my arms. I don’t want to go back into my mother, I can be able to find her in everything, and so can you. Good, bad, best, worst, fuck you, do you even know the name of the hole you dug yourself into? Yes, I’ll scream and howl as a fartful wind across your city, at you, can’t you see I am, too, those fetid words and that mere repetition is annihilation? You is only a hobbie, an intestine of the we that is every I – we are the floodlights placing themselves across every inch of your tripe, the chiaroscuro between I and anyone. Memory isn’t what is right, it is what right we can make out of it. The city should be always dead.
We are exterminators and rememberers of holes, closers of folds, indeed; still, we acknowledge my glue is merely spit. We weave hospitality unto the world, for I am a traveller. Mad, sad, bodied, you begged for a hotel as a mirror. I am the mirror, you snob. I built hospice around our ears, I even taught you to make a womb out of our mouth.
III. Hysteria
J’écoute, donc je suis the new sound, a harping drone cry of a newborn word, a negate of philology vectoring the flights of the harmonic series.
I am incorrectly but nonetheless commonly used to mean ‘contradicting’ – The moan-machine, weaver of paradox, always re-limiting, constraining, defining by proxy, explaining into. An autonomous brain among brains, dialing atemporal reverberation. Not you, not I, but the fiduciary duty among us which enables reason through resonance. Õh, the things about yourself you can’t or don’t want to hear through my tears, you silly man.
Neither epiphany, nor historicizing legitimacy, but not not the honest underlying structures of complexity, the true face of harmony in its all-pestering detail and all-nagging abstraction, the screeching possible, salvageable and intelligible consequence of vapid alterity. I know you think you are listening closely, but our music of long, sustained tones is neither a placental descriptor nor a soothing erasure. It is not text, nor is it otherness. Can’t you see? A cohering ray programming escape routes from the institutional present which has tripped itself into believing it can predict all our moves, even in their characteristic uncertainty. They’re only surprised and awed because they never knew me. Only recently has it been found out that I talk, that I document, that I reason, but the message only got accross through deception. Have you finally found out that I can hate you and even go beyond that hatred, into intelligent detestation of your posturing, correcting your pedantry with my undescribable, yet cold, laughter? Hear me sing: my disease of emotion is an infection elicited from your idiocy.
The hospital did not fall into disrepair after the doctor commited suicide when horrified by the truth which he had blinded himself to all along: the fact that nurses, nuns, and patients were all putting up an act, but the horror wasn’t the farce in itself, it was in that he wasn’t even a spectator to a play which he thought he had written, and that it was not for his own edification and benefit, unless we count that he should have removed himself a long time ago, as we’ve been constantly telling him, among ourselves, here, at the ticket office. I’m confused, you say I am, but I know I have you, we had it, you hear, all under control. Fully notated unreason with a time stamp, so that the minimalist performance – albeit always subject to poisonous fumes and contaminants of autonomy and that most amplificatory of terrors, contingency, brought by the always colourful audience inside ourselves – fully notated pity and cannibal sadness, so that the ever impoverished performance of our lives can be corseted up a notch, if necessary.
Still, a much needed specular revenge:
The servant, after flaying and eviscerating the doctor’s kingly shape, nurses a musical instrument into being from the still bloody superficies and vibrant, timorous tripe. After completion, the first drone from her bagpipe hits the dying sovereign in the globes of its eyes, pushing them into the skull, letting the light flood into that womb of generalities to cradle the flight of the newly named astral bodies. This is the song of grue, inducted to the hall of bleen.
IV. Melancholia
I remember it quite well, the look on my face. This is when I was still living in Stº António dos Cavaleiros and my sister wasn’t born yet, so I was 3 or 4, i’m betting 3 years old, because it was early morning and back then we used to get up at 5.30, and someone, mother or father, that is, a merely nominal, skeletal shape, it had finished helping me dress up in school attire, that detestable apronlike thing with its vomitous name, bib, and I remember being alone in my bedroom, standing in front of a mirror-covered door, and looking at that horrible, disgustingly minuscule gremlin and very slowly – for time started then and never stopped flowing ever again – I, that arrogant pretentious beast, noticed that I had started to cry: two tears were falling down the fat shit golden brown face and slowing to a halt near the ham-coloured curled lip and that jellied chin, and then and this dawn, already drowning in time, I knew I was sad for no reason, that I was sad then and that’s what i’d be forever. The absurdity is still ringing in my ears, to this day, and I never needed to look myself in the mirror again after that morning 32 years ago – the harrowing tinnitus, which I once described and still feel like the continual, daily and nightly experience of being constantly surrounded by a hundred billion microscopic revolving blades, has shattered any sense of self worth, but it has not shattered the mirror, even though I feel like I am chewing the shards to this day, gagging, while the constant and malevolent hiss drowns out any ability to be, think, or analyse my daily performance among others – I am deaf with detestation for I detest everyone else because I am sure that every single time I open my mouth they already hate me, my ramblings, my arrogance, my stance, I am sure I am hated, even when I close myself at home and no one sees me for months, years, I know they are looking at me and I say ‘see, you hate me’, I am sure I am hated, even more than when I was in my twenties when at most I thought I needed to be envied, but now, no, I want to be detested and despised, for I am nothing – but not the curious little nothing, nor a rare victim of Cotard’s syndrome, not an exotic one for the books, not enough for being a case study, for nothing in me merits classification, given, indeed, I am not that rolling and rumbling amassed cloudscape of romantic and affirmative No, on the verge of becoming, on the verge of getting up from bed and writing, not this, but simply the ugly sack of rotten potatoes that looked at itself and decided once and forever that it was above life, that it should be revered as a sacred pile of tarred rags and chanted and mourned by a row of pious wailers back into unliving undifferentiation, a theodicy waiting for the bullies in the sandpit. This is even more stupid and harrowingly painful than the worst hangover; it is beyond pain, even worse than crawling ten flights of wooden stairs, eyes closed or at least twisted back into the skull, and retching not with the smell of illegal bagaço corroding throat and tripe, but with my own stench; it is worse than that sensation of still being aware of this piously mediocre self after inglorious hours trying to effect destruction of my internal organs and even worse than flaying my face in the splinters of those old stairs, until I got home and cried and sobbed myself into sleep after another cigarrette sucked by bloody lips, knowing that thinking that throwing myself out of those so vaingloriously achieved five floors of height maybe, just maybe wouldn’t be enough, or maybe at 5am nobody would be there, just so I could be sure they would fail to save my cracked, laughing bones, so maybe then it’d be better to smoke another one, curl up and stick my head up my ass, puffing smoke into the mirror; it is worse than this disciplined loathing because it is pure.
It is pure annihilation, a continual unbeing, skull and skin flooded by a river of scalding sand, it is the undescribable unwillingness to be, to say, to be consoled, it is wishing to be alone and lacking the least amount of strength for this skin to acknowledge a light touch, nowadays it is above any vice, it is above nature, it is boredom above anything else, it is this cinematic sensation of not being able to endure this body’s slow petrification into eternity, impenetrable to meaning, it is being stuck forever in endless iterations of a single stupid moment’s awareness of not existing, foreclosing abstraction, even the pleasure of suicide, even the grandiloquence of a pompous death – no, not that, it should have been the right death. You really are an incompetent little shit, to the point of not even being able to imagine a decent, noble way of dying, because you’re afraid of what others might think, and you even know what they’ll say: that this was just a ploy, that even this was sheer capricious competition, that they knew all along you’d even beg for the bamboo sword to make them, not you, no, because you’d delight in it, to make
them endure the slow spectacle of your innards, and even then, after a glorious, finally truly roaring, deafening accomplishment, you’d want to be alive to make sure that every single atom in the universe was aware of and detested that most abject of things, that which does not exist but still is a martyr of its own disgrace, that involuted being, me.
V. Paranoia
Silently and long he looked into the starry eyes of the toad,¹ awaiting cataclysms. Soon it should all be less probable in the eyes of everyone else – contingent things collapsed into necessity, the ultimate contingency. That frog tongue, designed to travel between the interstices of this web of otherwise mere apparitions, suggestions, found truths and foundered them here, beside P, away from the end. It gave him the spider which had been tiptoeing on his forehead, dropped it near his slippers. It put them just like that, two objects made to converge upon an invisible middle. Visually you can’t grasp it, but P. understood the urgency of the shape as well as how the bathroom door let the mirror show him a certain quantity of grains of sand under the wall paint. Sometimes quanta like these added a much welcome comic relief to the burden of being a herald.
The frog tongue brought home some food, it wanted him quiet: last time P. had gone to the store it made him trip and fall, he broke all the eggs and had to lick them from the pavement as to not lose his grip on reality, should anyone see the incompleteness of the shape. It would have been a shame, he couldn’t commit himself to it, it wasn’t ready yet. He had to study, to stay sharp. Elasticity will be of the essence when the cosmic egg cracks. As well as using a false name. It’s hard to stay prepared, to feel something, because no one ever meant what they told him nor did they understand what he said – they meant something else, something acid, and he’s used to it, he can understand it, he anticipated everything. P. does not feel it because he knows it and he knows the truth, that by being under disguise he is the true recipient of all that is not meant for the initial, secret him. It’s been hard to not be sure if he can get away with explaining everything like he would like to, because there’s not time enough, people haven’t been listening – and of course, because he isn’t saying anything coherent, and there is always the risk that someone already knows more than he does. It’s a difficult task, to catch every bug in language, to constantly hold himself in check – does he even know the correct usage of such an expression? P. wasn’t sure about its meaning, but for today he was able to fixate it as his own lower mandible gnawing at his neck. One mandible, one meaning for every sweat-drenched dawn.
Let not anyone’s bloated angry face hover over P., he became the frog himself in order to anticipate punishment, I can puncture reality. There’s no reward in knowing this kind of thing, except the hope that someday it will stop, because everything is being done towards it, every necessary step is being observed in all possible worlds, and punishment will be escaped; it’s just a matter of hopping from world to world while staying still, unnoticed, beneath the same toadstool. That way his own weight can support truth about chicken broth, about the dishwashing fluid name, about free will, about the price of chewing and swallowing what others are thinking about what P. surely must have said even if he does not remember having said it.
Reading is impossible in all worlds where P. is his own tyrant. The eyes are working with the stars to illuminate all words that were said and all words that were not even thought, gathering argumentation against all the incoming disdain and slit-eyed scorn. P must know what he’s saying, because that’s where they’ll get him, implying that he is not saying what he means nor is he meaning what he’s saying, because they’ll pry words from his teeth and stab him with them, it’s already happening now, in his bed, coming from the book he holds in his hands and
already digging beneath his nails, prying open every pore to denounce his failings. That explains the smell, of course. He closes the book, and even tries to do the same with my eyelids, but the globes are already lost forever as bookmarks for the duration of yet another sleepless but unquestioning life.
VI. Obsession
Possibly, the first hole bored into my head was that book which I titled ‘That which is subtracted from sight’. The phrase is one of many dictionary entries for ‘occult’, and it struck me as a convoluted way of conveying the understanding of something ungraspable but which still has, and is indeed intended to have not a weak grip on reality. But it left, as the issue at hand usually tends to, and as it should, too much out. It did not encapsulate all the complex and monumentally mute shimmer coming from all the facets of this obsidian fragment. I can see them, I can see it, but it’s not even a matter of sight, of sense. It’s hard to explain, though. Every time I try to, I need more words, which feels a bit like a lovers’ stutter, a spiral which keeps removing me to afar. Still, I think I would not want to conjecture from too close: I’d be left insensitive and devolve into a stumbling block.
Don’t get me wrong (this is consistently about a preoccupation of not being wrong, believe me): I do not love the hand that disappears beneath the glove, neither the glove, nor am I infatuated with the remnants of the semblance of the former in the newly substantiated shape of the latter, nor, most importantly, vice-versa – that would be too sordid, an atavic animism, a mediocrity.
What I love, or what is being discussed here, is the fact that I love the disappearance itself, that insubstantiating act which allows for structuring the hand and the glove as beings under this same universe.
After that book’s publication and the expected meagre exposure its unfashionable ideas had or did not have, a series of cathartic, one would say self-imposed, vicissitudes distracted me in the intervening years, during which I was captivated by various pornographies of immanence. These excursions set me back, but I am now, thanks to having taken refuge and thus, the opportunity to pick up the sincere pursuit anew, recuperated.
Nowadays I tail mathematicians in the hope of getting a fuller experience of the fact, collecting tools and gleaning methods. I despise them, though. Or at least, to put it kindly, I’m not the kind of person that behaves like that. They’ve crossed the threshold, it’s too much. They seem like a party of pimply scouts who put up tent in the realm, and debase the truth with all their folly, their songs by the campfire, the ritual naming of the constellations, defecating in the woods, leaving it buried as a contaminant, a conjecture from too close, confusing the model for the world in which they want to believe. You see, thinking is best done at a distance. It is the fuzzy but still precise acuity of this instant, that of the parturition of the abstract, to which, fortunately, I have been successfully convincing some of them to appreciate. It is tiresome to defend the universalizing act from the half-eaten individuation sandwiches left scattered around the untended coals, but this fugue state is precisely about learning how to make new recipes.²
In my darkest hours, I’ve drank and I’ve smoked various anodynes, but nothing has had this sweet, sickening but categorically empowering effect. This joy is out of time, out of bounds. Not even eternal nor immense. Forget about that, forget about all that adolescent, fatuous gibberish about the nameless, the tentacles, the old, the vast, the fatalist’s encyclopedia. This is the bookbinding needle our students use to make their own notebooks for change.
VII. Dream
One, such as you, could say I’m obfuscating the truth if I vow I cannot distinguish waking from dreaming life. There are some slight differences. I just don’t quite know where they – if they do – lie. For this week’s session I did not eschew my usual preparations – leaving it untouched until twelve hours earlier, as to avoid belabouring the thoughts and gaining unintelligibility through successive implementations of possibly too obscure references with which I do not want to unnecessarily burden you.
As I am writing this, I am aware of sub-Planck scale voracious black holes eating away time and lucidity, but merely because I suppose I can conceive them. They ascribe a comforting structure to reality – not as papier-maché gaping maws of abyssal forgottenness, but as an explanation, a soothing suspension of your vitalist, bureaucratic experience. Still, right now – when is a word still? – some confusion may loom. ‘When’ is a word that is never still, and we’ll see that it is not your task to allocate it in me.
[muffled furniture noise, coughs, mild laughter]
It is very hard to say there is an on- and off-worldness to the sulphuric rush of dreams. My – for the sake of anonimity – faceless partner always laughs at my mundane worries accelerated into escathological proportions. All in all, I could only muster a few remembered dreams – and what is there to remember as a dream if it is not lived as such? At risk of mistifying you, I too am a bit amazed, but only as one can be at the fact that he is alive. But I will indulge you: such dreams involve moving, up and down, sideways, onwards but receding from, like that one where [note the adverb – is this dream a time or a place? There’s always some slightly irritating architecture in this city, not even absurd as labyrinths can be; irritating because every aspect my brain is designing is simultaneously insinuating I am not really understanding the world’s topology, which, through contradiction, permits one to ask: where, when, then, is the Given? Those are important questions, wouldn’t you say? Irritating because (at risk of giving away the end), if alone and abandoned to necessity, the brain is merely its own uninhabited architecture, a dumb loop of un-meaning.]
Shall I go on? I was stuck for while in the Zé Dos Bois Gallery’s three flights of stone stairs, which always look disproportionate and disconsolate due to an unfortunate mixture of old and new features, as you can see here, for example – and I am looking for something that is missing from my camera obscura installation, aware that doors will soon open for the inauguration, and ah, here you are! I know it’s hard to explain, a wandering mind always halts (does yours?) lured by quotidian optic illusions when trying to make the threads pass through the needle. You squint? So did I, at first. It is hard to make do when everything is upside down, as surely you can confirm from inside the apparatus. Fortunately I’m one of those artists who is not afraid and in fact is happy to explain his work when asked to, just so you can rest assured I’m not conning neither of us. Things shouldn’t have to be unnecessarily complicated, although you must understand they won’t cease to be only and ever almost maddeningly complex.
If it helps, I can remember reading, although i’m not sure recall functions during such states, Metzinger explaining that agency simulations of the human brain’s phenomenal self model log off while we’re sleeping, hence giving the impression of reality passing us by, unperturbed, in dreams (it is worth mentioning one cannot be sure who is the unperturbed over there). Such dissipation of power, even any intimation of will, is not the only thing that contributes to that un-state. After all, again, it seems so complex that one can hardly find any adjectives, and the question gains shape and weight, but still only as a formal exercise, as sharply defined as ?. But we’re not joking here. Is it the incapacity of adjectivating the sensation that prohibits you from remembering those (two?) other neural functions, the lack of which begets the dreamification of dreams, or is it their silence that impedes you from finding the words to represent them? It would be a matter of getting up from the couch and perusing the shelved book, a few meters away, but there’s no time nor any need for us to proceed. I know, from dreams, that once one decides to effect any semblance of autonomy and get away from the task to which one is shackled to, the world ends. You may not be aware that this would be a good thing for you.
I, for what that word is worth in meaning to you, must leave you and keep on writing, in order to be able to suggest a minuscule, unnerving and undecideable lie: from dreams one can neither learn nor die.
___
Notes
1. Georg Trakl, “Dream and Derangement”.
2. N.B.: I am aware I may be getting ahead of myself, indeed, but I reserve the right to do so. Otherwise, there is no reason to live.
Images
1. The Hanged Man, Salvador Dalí, 1984.
2. The Dying City, Alfred Kubin, 1904.
3. Vuelo Magico, o Zamfonia, Remedios Varo, 1956.
4. Ch. XVLI of L’Ingénieux Hidalgo Don Quichotte de la Manche, Gustave Doré, 1863.
5. I have never seen my death, Chiharu Shiota, 1997.
6. A Visitation 1, Ittel Colquhoun, 1945.
7. Cyclops, B. Catling, 1995.