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.