quote of the week
“i wanna kiss my cat one more time. i wanna tilt at league one more time. i wanna thank my dad one more time…”
-porter robinson
musings
tw: annoying
In the Topeka School, a young hah eaths his peer’s respect by freestyling. Another learns to dress in the words of society despite his learning disability. A woman explains how she misuses a friend. A man sees his father’s infidelity in the mirror. In their own way, all four are allowed by author Ben Lerner to describe themselves in their own perfectly placed words. The first young man (rich, white) goes to an Ivy and the second (poor, white) goes to Trump. The woman loses her friend and the man cheats.
Language does nothing. When the prosaic monologues end, the Topela School slots its characters into the same trajectories they began in. Any suspense - and it is rare- arises from curiosity as to the hues of the character's becomings and not the becomings themselves. These hues are enjoyable (that language does nothing does not mean it is nothing, solely a becoming-nothing), even delectable, but they are momentary. An informatic of the instant, endlessly pleasurable, but detertorating in - itself.
Protest: “but the devil’s in the details! What of multiplicity! What of pluralism!” No, dear, the "devil" is the details, those diversionary things. The fury of life is infinitely signifying — it is the sound of speech that signifies the presignified, signifying nothing. Just us Lacan erred in presupposing the Oedipal and Kant erred in having reason critique reason, language has become but an immanent recursion valuable only in its pleasure of denotation. The linguistic turn of the last one hundred years is but an institutionalized hedonic treadmill.
Even to grant linguistic philosophers their lacks and performance; the center will not hold! “we thought it we had language for our feelings, we might transcend them," Lerner's narrator says, Oh, to transcend the performed - signified with signification! This is the ascetic ideal, the life against life. This ressentiment does not change the paths of becoming traced by the preconditions of society. Even if you are a fatalist determinist, surely even you can admit that joy comes from doing, becoming, becoming -doing. The prophet of language, Jacques Lacan himself, even identities his jouissaince in the strive (failure or success irrelevant!)against the normative. Language satisfices, survives. Does it move? Because, still we move, still we move.
We move through space (be that idealistically, materially, rhizomatically...) and this is only denied by language. It says "We are nowhere and it is now" — only interior sense accompanied by an egotistical overdefinition. This nke is not liberating, no, it is fixed, static, destroying of becoming. And there is no escape! As Kant notes, time cannot move without space, the sume space that language disinhabits in its full-throated immanence.
"That sounds like the worst to me. Not being able to talk bwck." Why? When the self is necessitated upon a linguistic performance that becomes -nothing (similar as to how Gilles Deleuze suys humans become-ressentiment), the self has no space, no plane. No lines of flight drawn. No praxis. No revolutionary disorientation, There is simply Azuma's animalistic linguistic consumer.
My friends, there is no shame to toasting and cavorting. But we would scoff at any which drinks wine in order to swing a hammer at the nail.
ps: so i was talking to my friend j in this weird suburban forest hills area before the porter robinson show and then i went to porter robinson and told her my favorite song was called language, to which she said “ironic,” and i said “it barely has any words.”
what i’m listening to
it was my turn to make a special playlist alhumdillah
“1-800 hot n fun” - le sserafim
music for 18 musicians (erik hall minimalist version) - steven reich
blue angel sparkling silver - quiet light
“lento (unplugged)” - julieta venegas
what i’m reading
the topeka school - ben lerner
genealogy of morals - frederick nietszche
nietszche and philosophy - gilles deleuze
the wrong end of the telescope - rabih alammedine
what i liked this week
rotting
the porter robinson show was truly a transformative experience like i’ve seen him live before i mostly knew what to expect but it felt like shows used to where i feel entirely incapable of rejoining the real world after! like it’s a cathartic experience i would probably liken to what i imagine church feels like for a believer. i am really lucky to live it, to dance it, to scream it. if you are thinking about going to a concert, do it.
being told when i am wrong
i emailed quiet light about her upcoming shows and she is coming ten minutes from me!! and she answered!! who wanna come to the show on september 28th with me!!
buying a nice steak for my lover in cash by candlelight. and rolling rs.
the beauty of a polycule wedding and my upcoming gainful employment as the resident pool boy
writing my polemical musings (above) on a sheet of binder paper at molasses
spirit air flights booking website
good news from grippy socks friends
knocking out the horrors of texting in a feverish twelve minute wait for the M train
a poem by me
eat pleas
it's like you've shook God's vast constellation of hands and introduced yourself as an atheist it's tasty, i know, better than bread or cake and i've tried this gloomy fountain but eat eat please your heaving chest must be armed in its fight against inertia and the primordial soup is so hearty it's scary, i know better than i've fessed to you and my sheer collapses too so eat please eat i would wear your every flab and bulge if i could and i would even line them in gold it's arousing, i know to tempt winning against nature and the hurricane dies in a slow seawall embargo but eat eat please because the storm only ends when the sky is drained and the bay is drained too a hospital bed doesn't, i know, fit you like a flower field and don't let it mold your shape so eat eat please eat, for it is the body and eat, for you are not your body but eat, for you are in your body and eat, because i love you and not as an idea but as a body that will eat for the striving and grasping and eat for the laughter and eat for the crypt without limits we will waste our lives looking for them instead of building our sand castles {----opt. addendum----} eat please we bleed enough from the shards of broken windows on the street and i too have tried to make my wounds only my own because i am scared of all the scars that appear overnight but i eat eat with a plea that habit can crease me until i am saved from myself eat please not because it will feel good but but but eat because there are better hurts there are failures waiting for us failures that will not forfeit our lives eat please eat please eat please it will make a guardian it will make a garden it will
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