Ab-Use (I would rather not think about) and Waking Up

Utility marks this epoch, utility as opposed to ornament.

In such an epoch, marked by utility above all ornament, we have been confronted by abuse.

Abuse is the abuse of innocence: no where is it more plain than in dealing with the problem of the concentration camps. Abuse gives itself over to the pleasure associated with the will to power solely. This personal will to power manifests itself as the humiliation: the overcoming of all sense (sense: deferring to exteriority) by an internal will to satisfaction.

Sense is deferring to exteriority.

(The purpose of this writing will be to convey a sense that is somehow between any of the concepts that I will explain.)

The word "use" is of recent, almost indefinite origin: that is to say that it does not have a six-thousand year sense of use. Perhaps it might be said that use did not exist linguistico-ontologically prior to 1240 AD (see
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?search=use&searchmode=none
) . There was "Uti," the Latin root. But this takes us back to the origins of current Latin juridical dominant will to power: that is the epoch that has lasted since the days of the laws of the Republic (508-27 BC) ("checks and balances!").

There are "textual abuses" but the text is always a willing harlot: she is always willing to go there insofar as she is a completely blank space to work upon. But in point of fact the textuality (unless it is a suffocating textile, which is a possibility) cancels the abuse. The question between our capacity to do evil, even to ourselves, depends on our ability to be a willing recipient of the abuse we are promulgating. (This is insufficiently Walserian. And now if I spoke as a cheeky Walserian, I would say something to undermine the sincere, reporting-like quality of the last comment.) Can one murder a truly, genuinely willing victim? (This last statement qualified as "Walserian.") (Notice the placement of notices of verification, a double verification: "truly," and "genuinely," as if this truth must be verified according to the highest juridical standards to be true.) But in point of fact we could point to the will of a person to be a fundamental split: the will of the suicide is the will to be alive, and to literalize the will to annihilate oneself. [This then extends to the responsibility one has to oneself as Other (This last statement was an attempt to catch up with the scholarly conclusions, that in all likelihood Oppermann will have already made; he is about the only reader who will understand all this; it sounds like a scholarly "report" to the academy)]. When Alphonso Lingis, for example, speaks of "abuses" in the line of bodily scarification: he would be advocating the fetishistic, probably perverted, old man line of existence that sees all this sort of thing as just fine, but he unduly scares all the ladies away. Lingis would make a distinction between the profound genocidal tendencies of Spanish and European colonization of the Americas. A large-scale form of abuse for Lingis seems unpalatable, but the ritual scarification of the body: an attempt to transform the flesh into an ornament of the spirit: this can be tolerated.

Nobody is killed in most fetish derived forms of self laceration. A saving point of scarification is that as ornamentation and experience it remains in the realm of mystery and metaphor.

On the other hand, there are pornographic "snuff films" that we can make "scandalous" cinema about ("8mm" being a notable attempt on this ultimately banal topic, banal with the banality of murder and of evil). At this point there comes about an ethical dilemma: that is to say that we have to ask a question of censorship: are there texts that are too vile to be censored? Before I move into an area that even the kindest readers must shut their eyes and shake their heads at, I will move on, somewhat saddened that we live in a world where this thing could even exist. I seem to remember a science fiction novel, other than LeGuinn's "Things" in "The Wind's Twelve Quarters" that depicts an otherwise beneficent civilization that has resolved as a matter of conviction, perhaps one of aesthetic beauty, that the end had finally come and that it was time for human life to extinguish itself. There was at least one other instance of auto-genocide that I can remember. set in the distant future, where each level of society had decided to destroy itself

This would also constitute a form of abuse. We are not at that point of evolution, thank goodness. We still project our ultimate despair on other civilizations and think of ways to annihilate them, I mean what savages we are! I think that I would prefer not to think too much about that.

What wakes me up is that abuse must stop. When I live in a dream for so long: and I see that the dream has become a matter of abuse, then I am forced to wake up. I cannot live with this form of abuse any longer, so, given sufficient pain, we wake up. To wake up means stating that the abuse must stop. This means leaving off: it is an act of gelassenheit that lets or leaves off of a specific text: a text or a snuff film that has become too abusive: the willing whore becomes murdered in Musil's Moosebruger interludes in "The Man Without Qualities."

Abuse happens when one is unable to wake up and leave off: with an outraged cry, with a whimper and a moan: "The abuse must stop." I see the point here that one must only go so far before one leaves off. And that point is easily at the place where the volition of the other fights my own desire to the point that my desire (not my mere survival) is weighed above the life of another. Call me "milktoast" if you will. When surveying the depth of these waters one tends to grow easily terrified, I know I do. And shuddering I tend to just bow my head and to breathe, and then to straighten again. I would recommend, once again, a limit to my own entertainment of such psychopathic material: this is a point of Vipassana: adequate entertainment of a thought back to it's causes and origins. Entertainment does not mean morbid pre-occupation (from there it is an easy step toward abuse). It is a matter of recognizing that there are in fact pieces of the larger personality that can only be integrated slowly.

Waking up is a matter of opening one's heart utterly to the pleroma of yet another new, possibly ontologically different context.

Since I have no time

"Yes, these machines. These machines! They are our friends, they remember lines for us and play them back when you ask: beautiful and incomparable lines, like Gulda himself playing Beethoven. But the machines wind down, they ask for more energy, they test demand of us every last resource. And we feed, and we feed them, lest we find ourselves alone, annihilated, nobody, trembling naked savages in the dark!"
-Juan Apolodoros ("Applications," Book xxiii, Chapter 9, "The Incomplete Aeneid")


Since I have no time, no time to connect, no time to reflect, I will offer you this unthought missive, raw and unhygenic. I will not say "raw, like sewage," because I do not want to spill excrement (after all who would read it?). Yes, after all who would read it? Definitely not Robert Walser, who wonders ahead at things like, "how many words have I yet written of my 500 word essay?" (1000 is too long for him, let me tell you, though often his words go on and on and on and never seem to stop, like some slippery river treading over slime-covered stones, make no mistake about it.)

Since I have no time I will not make comment on any other human genius, so far as the matter can at all be seen by me, I will comment only on myself and my selfishness: what have I done after all, wasted another afternoon? What have I done? I mean I haven't done anything but take stock of the situation.

Bestandsaufnahme: "Taking stock of the situation."

We take inventory of things so they can be stood up on a pyre of usage, usage by our friends the machines: used and burned, in fact burnt out. Used and burnt, yes, or held back in a vault somewhere, glowing, but trembling awaiting use, still in a state of potential, of un-thought, and of dis-use.

Elsewhere I have stated that the process of going into the heart, or stepping out into the world is a process of turning abuse into love.

I can take stock of this, or I can simply live it each waking moment. Ultimately we run into an antinomy: the text is a supplement: it is a form of replacement compulsion, where we write to sublimate the fulfillment of desire: or something else, the text itself is something else, it is an art form we work on and re-visit, from time to time. To write, to practice one's art, in the infernal bibliotech (and I am intending the cold hells of the darkened museum, it's haunted-exhibits in the evening, when no one possibly is there). To write in Hades' repositories of invention, in these "web-logs" or in some other contraption, is a matter of what it means to polish a turn of phrase, or pick a metaphoric leap that is sufficiently bold and unheard of in order to create a dynamism, a quickening of the text.

One thing is certain: I cannot base my action on the text, there is no praxis, except to love again and to forebear from too literal interpretation, it is really the best we can do, and it will once again be another long week full of untold fortune and misfortune. We cannot tell it all, there are not enough libraries in the universe to deal with transforming the victim of abuse into a gentle spirit. How difficult it is indeed for the victims of abuse we see inciting lust! To transform into relationship, where we can actually take a breath and say, you are beautiful as you are, you are beautiful as you are. The abuse stops here. It is enough to say that, it is enough to wake up.

Like the sea shore you are beautiful from a distance: like looking at the unfounded and unfathomable cities of man... from a distance!

Those we choose to unite with: the going will be difficult. All that is left then is presence, breath, and prayer.