The City

The city is the mirror of the maze of the self.

… Marginal Potencies of the Absolute

The Number 1.

 The bubbles on beer.

Reflections.

The granularity of surfaces.

The rim of a glass.

The Glass Plate in the Mind of a Fish

An absolute is its perception.

For example, someone who argues that only the material world exists: that is an absolute.  The perceptual infinity is theirs.  This reflexive stance - their world made in this image.

Someone who argues that God exists: the same.  That God doesn’t exist: the same.  The perception is ‘without limit’.

How to Write a Poem in Seventeen Parts

 *

Fibreboard people

Talk while

They walk in

Folded lines

Suspended over a

Chasm

* 

Something unexpected has happened.  After many years of rigidly adhering to the principle - or the practice let’s call it - of not doodling I now find that I habitually doodle whenever I have a spare moment and pen or pencil and paper to hand.  Doodling and travelling by train inform the central questions of a life as ceaselessly mysterious to me as numbers.  Office space has reached a kind of high tide; it laps at my body real as opposed to imaginary introducing itself as the true element of thought in tangled and wavy lines that seem to hang in the air for unexpected periods of inactivity.  The thing is, I find them interesting.  Not so much because these scribbles suggest a key to the unconscious as much as because they are simply aesthetic.  Each doodle seems to represent a mental disengagement: a cessation of fatuity.  Something that I could never consciously plan but that all the same emerges indifferently, whenever I stop for anything.  Discontinuous.  That is the virtue of these lines.  The avoidance of linear thought.  Nothing is represented.  Just a bare tangle. 

A thorn bush. 

It is in the process that energy is concentrated, I find.  Here is another image.  A fireman’s hose, if I may.  If thinking is to be compared to digestion than its product is energy; and energy is only energy as directed: like the water out of a fireman’s hose obviously but in order to spray, to put out, the ether.

A rose head.

The knock - the knock came at the door - at the door it came sharply.  Three, like three fingers.  Followed by a long silence.  Steps on a tiled floor.   As of heeled shoes.  Were they angry?  What were their thoughts?  They sounded cold and heartless, those steps, like the cracks of a whip, but perhaps they weren’t; perhaps in that hollow sound one would find a warm heart, a smile?  The pause extended.  Three steps; but to another door.  Rat a tat tat!  Silence.  Out the back window nothing but the trees and rain and the sodden ground.

A compass eye.

A pond green with algae, sometimes it’s as thick as flock wallpaper: or the green of plastic; such as a mat one finds in a gymn.  One could almost walk on it.  Today, after much rain, the green has thinned.  Water is visible and clear, black under it, fresh and deep.  Two ducks, mallard and female, make their way across it in companionable silence.   The shoots of lillies mark their side of the pond like head-dresses.

The oiled feather.

*

Open shut

Horse

Trading lanes

Fibreboard people

Talk while

They walk

Rebel

Ask yourself.  Why exercise restraint - ?  Why not “go for it”?

“The writing is eating up my self” says Iggy of his divorce.  Thinking about what he should do he finishes up with: “I am not going to take any more shit; not from anybody.”

Why not just go for broke?  Cut loose?  Rebel?   Rebel absolutely?  Leave?  Free the rope?  Abscond?

Why should one not be absolute?  Be absolute!  Make that decision to rally one’s forces once and for all.  Be certain.

This is me: “I am going to stop explaining myself.”

Shopping for Ideas

Sometimes I catch myself thinking, “What am I talking about?  Where am I getting it all from?  Haven’t I just wandered off into some sort of zone of gibberish?”  For am I not saying things that, while they might derive from instances of sense in everyday life, have been re-expressed with such a degree of generality that the words out of which they are formed no longer have any connection with the real?  After all, what do I know about infinity?  I have only the haziest acquaintance with its mathematical expression.  What qualifies me to talk about it in the first place, and anyway why do I put such emphasis on it, what is so important about it?    Really I have no idea …

… Absent-mindedly I go out to buy eggs, dawdling, dreamy, I stare into a shop window attracted by the colours; the reflections that stretch and thin; so I go from one thing to another, buying this then that and I come home mystified.  What prompted me into it?  What have I to do with it?

True = False

“Infinity exists.”

“Infinity doesn’t exist.”

Both statements are equally true, equally false.

The Impossible

It either exists or it doesn’t.  There is no other possibility.

- But some things are only by being imagined.

This imagination forming the context of ‘what is’.

The Imaginary Truth

Even if it is real infinity is not a truth but an imagination.

Even if it is actual infinity doesn’t exist.

The Truth is Fictional

“Where we get into trouble is with the absolute.”

*

The “absolute”: one way or another it confronts us with infinity.  That is, with a decision that’s irrevocable: forever.   Say that we can say that the absolute is infinity’s illusion.  The Truth.  (If nothing is irrevocable except death.) … There are inadvertent consequences to supposing that something is what it is absolutely, without dilution - forever.  In these terms such an absolutism can only be interpreted as an intention; rather than an investigated fact it represents a decision about the way something is to be seen: a decision that is apparently unalterable but on the other hand may eventually change.  This kind literalisation of ‘the real’ therefore creates problems of reality.  If I say that God exists for example (or for that matter “God doesn’t exist”) then the statement takes on an appeal that contradicts its seeming sense for it inducts us into the world of the fantastic - : a world that hinges on this absolute so that it takes on an occult or life-bound resonance: literally it says that it is from this that life originates.

(Thus: either, Life originates from God or: Life does not originate from God.  One thing or the other; never neither.)

The absolutism promotes the idea that we can make the truth into whatever we like, to this degree: for it makes truth a matter of decision, which of course is the object, but inevitably given the mystical nature of this strategy it is possible only to encounter problems in this world, not the truth itself.

Much the same sort of inference is created by other absolutisms.  By its nature this is what each such ‘truth of reality’ accomplishes: a window onto the fantastic is opened that can close only slowly.  For what could be more appealing to the congenital fantasist?  To the Nazi, for example.  The main virtue is the absolutism.  The absolutism attracts us because it inducts us into a world of infinity because the world that is described can exist only mystically.  On the ground of a decision.  A fantastic world is therefore proposed - a world that exists without limits.  And where it is only in the context of the absolute that we can enter such a world  - and this world cannot exist normally.   Normally we are alive only in a world of limit.  That is, Nazism proposes: if limit is not limit.  So: the doctrine’s emotional authority; it is an authority born of a conflation.  Of a mystical decision based on the hidden righteous prejudices of nightmare dreaming alive. The absolute is a truth twisted, without any safe fictional pinch of salt to obviate its foolishness.   (Scientology.)