Kapital and Katalepsy: an exercise in Kapitulation

This article is only of note for the sake of later discussion. It is written down in a hurried and unthought manner, that does not betoken any genuine thinking, in fact thinking itself is lost.

The point from the beginning has been to become lost, hopelessly entangled in the dense forests of thinking, much better this forest than the technological conception of eternal perfection, high fidelity completeness if such a thing exists.

I have suggested that the essence of Dasein resides in its capacity to render what is proper to itself: Mort, mortgage and finitude. The attempt to "own" any property leads to mort-gage, to debt that must be constantly repaid: it immediately acknowledges the juridical-political system of the state. A dead end. What is proper to Dasein is mortality... is death. Death however tends to upset the order of ontic exchange perpetuated by the state: there is no price that is put on the threshold where one feels the exchange between human life and death.

And yet the ontic is death, the very opposite of the ex-stasis of the living world, which exists without property, immortal and thereby "free."

Oppermann and I have pointed to the issue that ex-stasis is always a kind of cover, that is eternally proceeded by a shadow: capitalist appropriation: this would have to do with being another spiritual system that can be sold to you by another one of those "fucking" (sic) (Oppermann's language) sages.

Catalepsy, I posited on a lark, is dialectically (hah! "dialectically!" how non-heideggerian, Heidegger being the greatest non-dialectical thinker) opposed to ecstasy (ex-stasis). If ecstasy is commodified and marketed away, then catalepsy simply grabs you and pulls you down and holds your nose to the topic till you can't think or speak any longer. It may be somewhat of an embarrassment, and it may be signs of a mild form of epilleptic disorder (which a friend of mine called "being attacked by the devil;" this friend sometimes is quite brilliant, but Oppermann and I labeled a "phillistine" just to express our considerable misogyny, and Deborah agreed if only to be rid of her, so I apologize.).

I very much admire the act of giving in: it leaves room for all sorts of subversion after the fact. When it comes to Kapital there is always more to say because it capitalizes on this. There may in fact be a commercial value to all of this drivel, and if there is not then it is likely to be whisked away as the next wave of dross. Kapital however is death, money is death, it is the lowest form of matter, it is matter that has reached it's lowest form of potential and thereby is potential for everything: a universal currency, Mercury stands in every door... and yet how unfortunate that we live in an era of a cliche believing that most everything we can discursify can be bought or sold... we keep seeking for a discourse that relates to our truth, but then this puts us at the point of our own mortality, where finitude creeps in and lifts it's weary face. 'Death old friend, the death of my cock," Jim Morrison will say, speaking of his own "sore and crucified" phallos, as ribald and repulsive as any poet has dared to speak. "And death shall have no dominion," speaks Dylan Thomas, but that event shall only come at a profoundly later date, when after we have suffered the warring and warning of the word and language to suffer us at last: you don't know how badly we have faltered and fallen into the political world.

I traced the whole thing back to Mircea Eleade (Oppermann calls him, appropriately Mer-che-ah) "Myth and Reality" the distinction between Mythos and Logos is the dawn also of the political world: Eliade cites Xenophanes (565-470) as the author of that distinction. The dawn of the secular world. And what is secular, a seclorum (latin for a "age" or a grasped period of time), is a tie, or a debt (from the Hittite), a bond of trade. It may be that from this distinction we can see the eventual rise of capital, though the necromancy of money in the form of tithes records is at least as old as the Egyptian religions... some attribute the first coinage to the same time as Xenophanes: Croesius of Lydia, Ca. 560 BC.

This is just a preliminary sketch, more on this will necessarily be posted later. One piece I would like to emphasize would be the issue of Katalepsy as something that grabs one, rather than a voluntary act of "stepping" out that one sees in "ex-stasis." This distinction seems flat at the moment, and rather lifeless, the point is that ex-stasis gets easily re-capitulated... catalepsy throws one off the path, a mortification, pointing to the dual ontic and ontological sense of death.

The waking tree

I would like to ask if it is possible to have a waking tree: that is a tree of correspondence where one meets with one's infinite loneliness face to face: with this emptiness which is endless. Make it more sharp though.

I would like to meet somewhere in this darkness, this presence of the other as near as the web can at times indicate: a waking tree... at least an entity that is living... certainly the parents are evoked in this tree of light and the incestuous marriage/ heirosgamos is kept. But there is always something essentially split in this form of presence. We know this story only too well.

Let me laugh with the soul's laugh. Let me dream of the forests: not just the imagination of forests, nor their representation, but their very innermost stillness, yes let me be that. And let there be the opportunity for rest in that portion of the forest, knowing there are those who must wake in a state of extreme anxiety. May we be, mortals blessed, and we immortals blessed as well: for those of us who own property, and those of us who own simply our own love from out of the bloody heart.

The Philosophical Water: the Phases of Endless Transformations... and the Withdrawl of Emptiness

From Thales to Deleuze I have traced the element of water: its descent and depth, it's surface capacity to reflect the light.

The ashes of Derrida, calcined, pulverized fire on human bodies lost in an unspeakable slaughter I surmised, when set in this solution, settled to an unknown depth, and took on the character of depth itself, though only when added to this solution: surface reflections, and the darkness of depth: Deleuze's "Logic of Sense."

Only today when I read Jung did I begin to speculate on what it might be like if this water were set to a boil: until now the solution has not been this animated, nonetheless to add the element of soul to the waters, these dangerous waters... did I perceive they froth and boil, the boiling of images, like the vision of Zosimos, or this passage from the "Psychology of the Transference" concerning the conjunction:

"The psychology of this central symbol is not at all simple. On a superficial view it looks as if natural instinct has triumphed. But if we examine it more closely we note that the coitus is taking place in the water, the mare tenebrositatis, i.e., the unconscious. This idea is borne out by a variant of the picture. There again Sol and Luna are in the water, but both are winged. They thus represent spirit - they are areal beings, creatures of thought. The texts indicate that Sol and Luna are two vapores or fumi which gradually develop as the fire increases in heat, and which then rise as on wings from the decoctio and digestio of the prima materia. That is why the paired opposites are sometimes represented as two birds fighting, or winged and wingless dragons. The fact that the two areal creatures should mate on or beneath the water does not disturb the alchemist in the least, for he is so familiar with the changeable nature of his synonyms that for him water is not only fire but all sorts of astonishing things besides. If we interpret the water as steam we may be getting nearer the truth. It refers to the boiling solution in which the two substances unite." (paragraph 459)

I have come to wonder if this is true of my current discourse with Oppermann, with Deborah, and with my own analyst. In each case the container of the relationship must be built up over years. The resulting synthesis comes from a super-saturated solution, where the matter of the unconscious, the incest of Gabricus is dissolved into atoms and then permeates the body of Beya... and so on... but let me maintain a slightly different course on this matter for the time being.

It is clear that my favorite philosophers have particular elements that they have enjoyed and played with: Derrida has his ashes, the result of so much fire and burning, but the ashes hold soul: these ashes remain (to me at least) as the relatively untainted aspect of Hades, lord and ruler of Dust... not the aspect of Pluto, god of wealth, but the two change into each other: and Derrida has sold a great many books on his ashes.

The firey consumed earth may be placed in still water and become inert, a sediment seeking its own depth, or the solution may be fired, the ashes animated again, given that they have water, and once again we may begin the process of seeing if we can re-animate this dead solution, given the presence of water.

There is the right and the wrong time for this kind of application of heat and steam. The wrong time is irreverent toward the grief implied in the ashes of a burnt out, exhausted, and brutalized life, and this life cannot be made to turn back to more slippery and wet, steamy solutions until its dust be blown about the planet... possibly many times, and lost at the bottom of oceans for a very long while. Still there is time, and there is time in the soul, which takes as long, and only as long as the soul needs to take.

This is the beginning of an article on the Philosophical Water and other elements. I pray that I have psychologized less and shared more.

There are other philosophers who are worthy only to be committed to the flames of continual consumption in our society, who cannot re-manifest even in the electronic flames of the internet themselves, except as the charring logs of consumer capitalism: the so called academics of American "philosophy:" these philosophers are too green to burn very well, so we will have to stack them up on the shelves and ignore them for a while... perhaps in a thousand years a socio-cultural philosopher will find them of interest: but certainly for reasons far different than the "authors" originally intended: one that is sufficiently calcined and patina'd I might suggest.

The point here is that Derrida's ashes is not a final state, and nor is Deleuze's comparison of surface and depth in his Logic of sense, these are stages of a process that goes on and on: you can always remove the firey, transformative element from the Deleuzian meditation. You can remove the water from the Derridean frame: and then there is a certain stuck-ness that begins to happen. Derrida blows hot and dry, ceaselessly and endlessly writing, apparently (Oppermann unfairly calls this chewing gum, but like chewing gum this epithet concerning Derrida... sticks). It is possible for Deleuze that in some sense the solution he keeps diving into (and as a terrifying aside he died by diving off a balcony), and reflecting: still needs to be compacted and brought in in order to express soul.

Soul is related.

Soul may be said to drive the operations of the philosophers. Many will say that the likes of Deleuze and Derrida were white-hot expressions of intensity: but there is always another stage of soul to meet with: the damn thing keeps changing:

Calcinatio
Putrefactio
Solutio
Mortificatio
Nigredo
Albedo
Rubedo
Coniunctio

and so on and on and on.

Like the Tao Te Ching: even the ideogram for the stillest moment of stillness: can only present a flake of a moment among all the other moments of the soul in its endless transformations...
Hexagram 52
"Bound". Other variations include "keeping still, mountain" and "stilling". Both its inner and outer trigrams are (gèn) bound = mountain

But suddenly I worry that everything I have stated up until now is somehow profoundly wrong, incorrect, uncertain. Yes, I am certain of it that you must think no longer of what was written up until now, even as I leave it for you so that you may understand within it the turning point of this contradiction. The greater truth if there is a truth and it is an "awful" truth, is that the emptiness is endless. There is a shadow to this pleroma, an infinity is always endangered of becoming a bad infinity. Endless transformations, Ja, sure, but in the end the emptiness is endless as well, and it is cold as the first clay of the uninspired Adam. This endless pattern gives ground, rather than groundless spiritedness, sublimatio (which is yet another alchemical action) of seeing that the system expands seemingly endlessly... there is a contraction, congealment (coagulatio), revulsion and withdrawing from the scathing trouble of emptiness. Such forced coagulation, withdrawl before the emptiness of being: creates and preserves the troubled self in the shape of human Dasein. Or perhaps the withdrawl before this emptiness, the constant coagulation of time past itself will manifest not only as "human" (perhaps as Gadamer suggests this may have another thousand years to it at the most) but as "other" Dasein that may be invented in our age or beyond it.

In this sense it may be hoped that the "Withdrawl of Emptiness" is not merely the force of "developing civilization" that will somehow conquer the searing force of this vacuum itself... somehow before the emptiness of withdrawl there will be withdrawl of the Dasein that sought to conquer and subdue (and possibly "sub-dude") the advent of this useless and meaningless emptiness.

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge

Images of home and the Beloved

An Artist's Card: The Intimacy and Distance of Universal Symbols

This then is the beginning. This then, Inanna and the Buddha of all time and space. Oh, and lest we forget, the Devil, a saddened and wizened satyr who is held at bay with the red hair of Mary Magdelen.

Yes, well Inanna, her name spell'd in cuneform "in-anna" Anima is animation. In animation. In-Anima a perfect phrasing of the clear female voice, beautiful and terrible.

May there be love among all of us, Inanna and Deborah and me. May the bright and terrible goddess who can wipe me onto the shores of blinding white sands and blue sky of infinite loneliness, may she have pity on me and leave me grace to love my gentle Deborah.

Deborah who rejects the role of being the gentle wife, nevertheless, while wild and free like some chill wind of psyche, has done me no harm. It is a religious question: do we choose to do this? Well, like if we simply lived in the void of convenience would we dream of any more impossible delectation.

The mandala is an image of beginning: some doorway is opened in the solar eclipse: an examination at the womb entrance: before we step in....

To a field of Buddha sunflowers
To a ghetto or a slum
To a dance with a beautiful woman
To the paths of poetry or power

The fox stands for the wizard merlin, a balance to the satyr on the right: the noble and innocent animal crossing the path of the present moment: the fox is wild and therefore innocence crowns and graces his posture, no matter what he has not yet been tamed by a man. The other side of the fox is his shape-shifting, his ability to blend in.

Brief acknowledgments should go to the tarot card of the priestess, she who says "all magic is woman," after all it is all she can say, dedicated to her art: and yet she too is yet another moment who steps into the universal dance.

Finally there is Saturn who strikes twelve, he falls to the right: Saturn bears the wheels within wheels, the metal technology of clockwork, but alas --- IN TIME --- all metal springs wear out, metal being finite.

Above this is the infinite spiritual wave beyond the wheel, Mount Fuji is always in the distance, this is highest spiritual knowledge conveyed in visual art: and the wheels of saturn melt before the churn of waves, corrode and become full of the water, the corrosive salt oxidizes the metal, freezing the gears, time itself is out of joint, beyond the centuries of Christendom.

Trust in the great wave! Believe in the great sound! No statement could be more affirmative of this manifestation of existence, as completely heartbreaking and confusing as it is.

...then there is my cat, and while some poets claim that cats are immoral, we had no problem loving each other. I loved my cat, and he loved me and now he is fully consumed in a blinding bright light.