THE MAD EROSOPHICAL SAGE: Moods and Madnesses of My Meandering Mind (Copy)
Introduction
I have been away from my computer for several months, while whirled away into a maelstrom of life confusion. The lack of a computer has not kept me from writing, I much prefer writing by putting pen to paper or clicking out cacophonous polyrhythms on a manual typewriter. But the maelstrom of confusion that has grasped my life has gotten in the way of lengthier, more coherent writings … that – and the fact that almost all of the notebooks I’d been traveling with were stolen from me at the beginning of August – means that for now this proudly undisciplined, utterly unlinear and untimely layabout lollard and mad erosophical sage will be sharing with you fragments and ragged bits, the moods and madnesses of my meandering mind that I have managed to gather in the notebook I picked up after the theft. Some of these are titled, some are not, but I will leave little marks to distinguish the fragments from each other. And note that all “bad” grammar is absolutely intentional, at least on the subconscious level … Let language be play, or not at all.
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Do I need to write every day? This is a story told to writers constantly. And perhaps it is true for those who wish to be professional writers, writers required to follow schedules, meet deadlines, have things ready by a certain time … chained to the calendar and the clock. But when you write as a way of releasing a torrent of words, a cascade of conceptions and images, there is a sense of relief when that need for release is satisfied, eased and disappears in a beautiful wordlessness, the marvelous muteness of mystery. Today I write briefly, laying down a few words on this sheet. Tomorrow, who knows? Tomorrow does not exist. It never comes. It is the carrot on the stick to keep us running. I don’t run; I don’t even walk. I dance. And dancing has no direction, no destination, I dance only for the joy of dancing. And this is also how I write.
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Empires Die
The southern empire collapsed under the weight of its gravity. The northern empire floated away dissolving into clouds of laughter. Levity had brought about its joyful demise, and its floating streets were filled with revelry.
The southern empire would be forgotten except for its books, massive tomes, marvelous for smashing windows or using as bricks for building towers from which to kiss the lightning or leap onto the moon on cloudless nights.
The northern empire would not be remembered for itself, but for the songs, the poems, the stories, the dreams, the laughter, the revelry, the dancing it gave forth in its dissolution.
Ruins and clouds, rulerless realms in which to play and dance. I will never mourn the end of any empire.
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If cosmos can be said to exist, then you are it! As for me, I prefer not to use the word cosmos, because I carries within it the implicit concept of a static, crystallized oneness. I prefer to tell the story of a dance of pluriverses. In a dance, nothing is static, nothing is crystallized. The unity of a dance lies in relational activity and so finds its be(com)ing only in the infinite multiplicity of unique ones, of unique moments. And these numberless unique moments (of which I am one), find their be(com)ing in relating with each other, in dancing with each other, in that ever-moving, ever-changing dance of pluriverses that always slips beyond what would crystallize it, petrify it, freeze it forever in a static form. If this wild, unchoreographed dance is cosmos, then cosmos is chaos. And you are it.
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No, you are not “here to serve the cosmos”! What a stupid thought! As if cosmos could have any need of servants! As if you and I are somehow separate from cosmos!
No! You are the cosmos! I am the cosmos! The small you is for you the center of your cosmos from which it observes and plays with itself, just as the small I is for me the center of my cosmos through which it dances and revels with the multiplicity that is itself, is myself …
No gods, no masters, no slaves. Instead arist-acratic god-beast pirates ever dancing beyond, dying and being born in each moment, as each moment, timeless, eternal transformation. Cosmos is Chaos; unchoreographed Dionysian dance that is you and you and you and you and you and I revelling in the wondrous whirl of Creative No-thing.
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Poetry is dangerous.
It offers no safe spaces.
It whirls within a dance
of wild tornadoes.
It rips the roofs off churches,
twists skyscrapers into knots,
shatters the foundations
on which societies rise.
Poetry is dangerous.
Its gifts are claw and fang.
Hear it howling through
the lycanthropic night!
It is a predator
who rips out the throats of kings,
who tears through the flesh of priests
and judges with a smile.
And the sheep who follow them
will fare no better.
They whimper are their blood drips
from lupine poetic lips.
Poetry is dangerous.
Do not enter its whirleds
until you are prepared
to devour and be devoured
where Chaos and Eros dance.
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Dada adventure dancing through the parks everywhere, overturning the boredom of normality, conformity, robot-humanity. Where does the Chaos of your dance meet the Eros of your dreams (and vice versa) ? Vice Versa, poetry of beautiful sin, free jazz played wild by the Virtuosos of Vice.
Virtuous in delightful pleasures, godless beauty dancing through absurdity, in love with the meaningless flow of the pluriverses, none set, no thing, ever flux. And through it all the Dada goblins do somersaults laughing. They are the cohorts of Tsuji Jun, Dada tengu, ragged anarchic bird-man, flying from the roof in drunken reveries. Delight in your own deliriums, drift into dangerous daydreams. Dying is but the dream of life that always ends in oblivion.
To be forgotten is a most beautiful gift. Embrace it.
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I am proudly an idler, well-versed in the art of indiscipline. This is not only one of the finest arts of living, but perhaps the greatest foe of productivity and the work ethic, and so the greatest friend of the Earth and of Life. Indolence, indiscipline, and individuality undermine industry in favor of indulgence, and so give birth to the creative beauty of impermanence, imperfection, and improvisation, the three imps who play the music of the dance of wild life. The good-for-nothing will always be the best for the Earth, because the nothing that rises from indiscipline and indolence is the Creative Nothing from which each wild life creates itself.
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The devils you create for yourself, but do not own up to, will make your life the hell you clearly want. If every moment of your life (or even most of them) are filled with misery, anxiety, dread and outrage, this is your doing. Don’t get me wrong. You may well have been tormented, terrorized, tortured, and the tormentors, terrorizers, and torturers are responsible for that. But if you choose to define your life in terms of these horrors, that is your doing, and in time your whining will cease to rouse sympathy, instead rousing only boredom. The adventure of life lived to the full demands moving through sadness, fear, anger, pain, … , and dancing beyond, weaving the lessons into the dance to draw out courage and joy.
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Dearest arist-acratic kindred spirates,
You all know well this basic bardic wisdom: For poetry to blossom, all politics must die. You will learn to relate to your whirleds poetically when you’ve killed the politics in your heart, in your mind. Then poetry becomes the force undermining the political, exposing how small the matters of the polis are. The poet never votes – as a poet. As a poet she’s more likely to riot, or better, to pirate or disappear into the forest. And a voter never poetizes; such autonomy with words most surely frightens those who fear autonomy in life enough to choose between masters to serve. Poets are of the Earth and of the flesh. Politics are deformed Heavens built by deluded reforming angels. The genuine poet is always a devil, and the devil is always an anarch. Let god fall and all Heavens collapse.
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Tomorrow
Tomorrow is perhaps the greatest lie to poison the human mind (do you mind). Its pollution of today is deadly in such an immediate way that slavish zombies eating their own brains wander the cities everywhere. The living, for whom here and now is all, are a rarity, their flesh and their minds, flowing, living water, refusing to be dammed. They embrace the beautiful madness of a raging river in the midst of a storm. For such a beautiful churning there is no tomorrow. Only the ocean here and now as its endless end. Every river is ocean, is storm here and now. Every zombie is a river self-dammed by the lie of tomorrow, self-channeled so it never comes to kiss the ocean. Purified of the present filthy beauty of life and love, the zombie-slave is crucified forever on the future where nothing lives.
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To accept with grace when it’s time for one to go is an essential part of a beautiful life. It is also a tricky thing. Since I am not an atom in empty space, my going is relational. It affects all the be(com)ings that surround me, and my desire is that my going, my dying, creates beauty for all those I have loved in my living. But beauty includes pain, sorrow, grief, rage, all the wild, convulsive feelings that the concept of death draws out of the living when they lose a friend, a beloved, a kindred spirit, … Knowing that death includes life and life includes death, that there is no living without dying, no dying without living, will not eradicate these feelings, but it may allow one to let them flow through and so to blossom in beauty. I still have preparations to make, but I know it is my time to leave this world and return into the Earth with beauty …
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Eternal Recurrence (a poetic joke)
I go back
to come back
to go back
to come back
to go back
to come back
to go back
to come back
to go back
to come back
again and again!
I dance in a circle
and whirling,
I whirl!
A most dizzy ecstasy
ever beyond any stasis!
I go back
to come back
to go back
to come back
to go back
to come back!
Oblivious cosmos!
Amnesiac god!
I dance in a circle,
unique here and now!
