unmöglich Boden

Let me propose something: oblivion awaits, yet we are inclosed in the Being of the now. This now is not stationary, in spacial terms, we move through the now. A constant displacement, or displacement as a constant, distorts what is here, again spacial terms. Being is coiled in nothingness like a worm. Within this immense field that of finitude, resides the effort of the Being. Coiled as it is, it is. Whilst infinite nothingness supersedes it, this reality which is a swirl, a series of eddies that etch and sketch out various modes of Being: being-dog, being-amoeba, being-tree, being-time, being-human, being-you, etc: the worm immerses itself within itself: as an Impossible Ground. Impossibility, the Impossible, is what resides at the core function of finitude, reality and that which recapitulates it: swirls within the infinite. An unmöglich Boden gives itself to us. In this sense I am here, with you, apart from myself, for you displace me: we swirl around each other: is this gravity? Are things ‘out of place’? Is one thing ‘wrongly’ there? Do people get off the subway where they shouldn’t: not as an act of mistake, but as an act that is Impossible, filthily out of ‘place’? Simply, to disjoint philosophy here I am disjointing your-Self: that which presupposes itself, whether intentional or even knowingly ‘after the fact’ mistaken, as that which is actually ‘not right’? Do you feel that: the submerging of the ‘out of place’? And if time is to be in some sense, thought in spacial conceptual sensuality, then where does that leave the openness of the incision that is scripted onto you? 

Untitled I 1967 Cy Twombly 1928-2011 Purchased 1995 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/P77733

As flesh is spread open, say in cunnilingus, whereby the mouth presses onto the vulva, exciting the clitoris to action, aren’t we here aware of the deepest unmöglich Boden? At least in its contemplation, the speculation, the imagination of the act, aren’t we looking into the impossible ground? Where does the tongue lead to? What is the movement of the nose? How do fingers react? Where is the placement of the floor: is it slanted, does it creek? How are we to ‘know’ – or as Eric Gardner recently exacted – understand? Must we ‘over’ stand: float above the scene? According to Octavio Paz in his (1969) Conjunctions and Disjunctions; trans. Helen R. Lane. London: Wildwood House; p. 97 “in Chinese Taoism, cunnilingus is revered as a spiritually-fulfilling practice that is believed to enhance longevity.” The tongue pressing, in a sense, wei wu wei, both are united: the genital stage is united with the oral stage. These ‘stages’ are both times (spaces?) and drives: movements of theatrical abundance. Theatralischen Überfluss the outside of the stage that is not ‘staged’ but a series of stages: an explosion of divinity. Diving into the cunnus we are, as spectators or actors (or both?), drinking from the furry cup. [cite: 1] How delicious: even for the mere ‘speculating philosopher’ I cannot ‘see’ or ‘understand’ how unmöglich Boden – that which is the being coiled in nothingness like a worm – cannot begin with drunken cunnilingus. Simply, all philosophy must take this as its starting point. In the original Taoist texts, wu wei is often associated with water and its yielding nature. Although water is soft and weak, it has the capacity to erode solid stone and move mountains. Water is without will (that is, the will for a shape), though it may be understood to be opposing wood, stone, or any solid aggregated material that can be broken into pieces. Due to its nature and propensity, water may potentially fill any container, assume any shape; given the Water cycle water may potentially go “anywhere”, even into the minutest holes, both metaphorical and actual. Droplets of water, when falling as rain, gather in watersheds, flowing into and forming rivers of water, joining the proverbial sea: this is the nature of water. [cite: 2]

Moving down the perineum, we are pressed into the anal sphincter: here we shall see the extrema excreta. The maxima and minima of anality: the explosive and the retentive. Script yourself with me: take the chest, open it up with a scalpel near the scapulae and move the incision to the navel. Follow the cut, a small cut into the epidermis, something incisive, something glorious: watch the it move. The ideation of castration anxiety will come over you: you may not notice or feel it, but it’s there: unmöglich Boden. Bumsen the unmöglich Boden: pardon my grammar, but here German is a necessary interruption into the lack of English. We are moving far too far into ourselves, the worm is coiling. Narcissism is boiling over. The worm may be ready to explode: a brilliant light shines out of the Negative concave of existence. The beginning of life/lie if not the idea/ideal forms of Plato himself arrive in this nadir: or rather they are this nadir that continues to bob about in the lacuna, a place full/fool of placenta, but also embryos, arms, stem-cells, detached penises, Aristophanes separated lovers, fellatio – but fellatio is for another topic, and is not the beginning of philosophy – the Feminine has been defined as the chthonic, that which is unmöglich Boden almost par excellence. Follow me now: down the rabbit’s hole, into the field’s of plenty that arrive toward the end of the story: or that which is presupposed as its end. What do we really posess? We do not ‘have’ a body, a body ‘has’ us: we are open to liability as soon as we ‘step on the scene’. As soon as we ‘engage’ with the impossible ground, as soon as we exist. The after-birth is that which is crawling into the worm of being: the warmth of being: the shelter of the body, disfigured, even if some of its variations are worshipped, demonised, problematic, etc. The body itself is that which cries, tears scream out for a type of disfigurement poses a question to us: the mirror of Narcissus: that which reflects but isn’t us: that which demonstrates. A mirror doesn’t only optically reflect: or rather optics shouldn’t be privileged here: it is the ‘touch’ the vibration of the back: the neck: the hyoid: the glandular abscess. Cancerous tumours grow outward from the colon, but where do they go? The root is suffering, yes, but madness is prevalent. When Schumacher damaged his brain, the brain damaged ‘fans’ waved themselves about with Ferrari flags in support of this man, although their support was meaningless in the physical sense, it can be derived that they, at the centre of the fungus that is being, Being-as-It-Is now but not then or when under-stand that humanity has a brain haemorrhage: almost an inherent haemorrhaging to the Other, in Sartrean terms. 

“This is Happening Right Now,” Vladimir Santos Drawing, Courtesy Exploding Buffalo

How does one end such non-sense > sense? A place where non-sense is greater than sense? To think otherwise than this specious sentence that precedes is how! For what I am talking about is sense par excellence. Cunnilingus is sensual, sensuous, sexual – what is better than a common sense philosophy based on the body of the homo sapien? Perhaps instead of ‘flash-mobs’ we might have ‘flesh mobs’ – globs of apolitical-potical goop dripping juicy sauces into the base concave of the Negative? Delighting like faeries dancing on a pound of infinite light? As Jean-François Lyotard might lick his philosophyfrom his (1974) Libidinal Economy [cite: 3]

Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, nails, hard transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelids, set with lashes – but open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit ofthe rectum, then the colon, then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit; as though your dress­ maker’s scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the small intestines’ alleged interior, thejejunum, the ileum, the duodenum, or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats’ wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins. Work as the sun does when you’re sunbathing or taking grass. And this is not all, far from it: connected onto these lips, a second mouth is necessary, a third, a great number of other mouths, vulvas, nipples. And adjoining the skin of the fingertips, scraped by the nails, perhaps there should be huge silken beaches of skin, taken from the inside of the thighs, the base of the neck, or from the strings ofa guitar. And against the palm, all latticed with nerves, and creased like a yellowed leaC set potter’s clays, or even hard wooden handles encrusted with jewels, or a steering wheel, or a drifter’s sail arc perhaps required. Don’t forget to add to the tongue and all the pieces of the vocal apparatus, all the sounds of which they arc capable, and moreover, the whole selective network of sounds, that is, the phonological system, for this too belongs to the libidinal ‘body ‘ , like colours that must b e added to retinas, like certain particles to the epidermis, like some particularly favoured smells to the nasal cavities, like preferred words and syntaxes to the mouths which utter them and to the hands which write them. It is not enough, you sec, to say, like Bellmer, that the fold in the armpit of the child, dreamily intent, her elbow on the table and chin in her hand, could ((llmt as [!laloir pour) the folds ofher groin, or even as the juncture of the lips of her sex. The question of ‘counting as’, don’t urge us to ask it, far less to resolve it. It is not a part ofthe body, of what body? – the organic body, organized with survival as its goal against what excites it to death, assured against riot and agitation – not a part which comes to be substituted for another part, like, for example, in the case of this little girl, the fleshiness of the arm for that of the thighs and its faint fold for the vaginal slit; it is not this displacement of parts, recognizable in the organic body of political economy (itself initially assembled from differentiated and appro­priated parts , the latter never being without the former) , that we first need to consider. Such displacement  whose function is representation, substitution, presupposes a bodily unity, upon which it is inscribed through transgression. There is no need to begin with transgression, we must go immediately to the very limits of cruelty, perform the dissection of polymorphous perversion, spread out the immense membrane of the libidinal ‘body’ which is quite different to a frame. It is made from the most heterogeneous textures, bone, epithelium, sheets to write on, charged atmospheres, swords, glass cases, peoples, grasses, canvases to paint. All these zones are joined end to end in a band which has no back to it, a Moebius band which interests us not because it is closed, but because it is one-sided, a Moebian skin which, rather than being smooth, is on the contrary (is this topologically possible?) 

Let me let Lyotard finish his licking, (he keeps in ticking: click-clock, click-cock, no that is too far for now let’s stay with the chthonic vulva?) Is ‘it’ chthonic?: 

There is no need to begin with transgression, we must go immediately to the very limits of cruelty, perform the dissection of polymorphous perversion, spread out the immense membrane of the libidinal ‘body’ which is quite different to a frame. It is made from the most heterogeneous textures, bone, epithelium, sheets to write on, charged atmospheres, swords, glass cases, peoples, grasses, canvases to paint. All these zones are joined end to end in a band which has no back to it, a Moebius band which interests us not because it is closed, but because it is one-sided, a Moebian skin which, rather than being smooth, is on the contrary (is this topologically possible?) covered with roughness, corners, creases, cavities which when it passes on the ‘first’ turn will be cavities, but perhaps on the ‘second’, lumps. But as for what turn the band is on, no-one knows nor wiII know, in the eternal turn. The interminable band with variable geometry (for nothing requires that an excavation remain concave, besides, it is inevitably convex on the ‘second’ turn, provided it lasts) has not got two sides, but only one, and therefore neither exterior nor interior.

It is certainly not a libidinal theatre then, no density, intensities running here and there, setting up, escaping, without ever being imprisoned in the volume of the stage/auditorium. Theatricality and representation, far from having to be taken as libidinal givens, a fortiori metaphysical, result from a certain labour on the labyrinthine and Moebian band, a labour which prints these particular folds and twists, the effect of which is a box closed upon itself, filtering impulses and allowing only those to appear on the stage which come from what will come to be known as the exterior, satisfying the conditions of interiority. The representative chamber is an energetic dispositif. To describe it and to follow its functioning, that’s what needs to be done. No need to do a critique of metaphysics (or of political economy, which is the same thing), since critique presup­poses and ceaselessly creates this very theatricality; rather … forget it, that’s the position of the death drive, describe these foldings and gluings, these energetic vections that establish the theatrical cube with its six homogenous faces on the unique and heterogeneous surface. To go from the pulsion to representation, but without allowing oneself, in order to describe this implantation, this sedentarization of the influxes, without allowing oneself the suspect facility of lack, the trick facility of an empty Alterity, of a Zero whose silence is about to be shattered by the demand which disturbs it (demand, already speech then? and addressed already, and to something? yes, to this Other; and by something, which is therefore already able to speak? yes, whether in gestures, tears, fury, the infatuated suckling’s torpor, interjections, as they say), so that with this trick of the demand and the Zero’s silence, well, it remains only to inaugurate the theatre and power, and set them to work, the theatre of power where satisfactions will dupe the desire originating from this alleged lack itself. Quite the contrary, it is necessary, we will come to this later, to describe the business ofthe cube starting with the opened and exposed band of the libidinal body, according to the unique face without verso, the face which hides nothing.

We should not continue to confuse the closure of representation, that sarcastic discovery, that sham dropping of the scales from our eyes, by those thinkers who come and tell us: what is outside is really inside, there is no outside, the exteriority of the theatre is just as much its interiority – don’t mix up this sad piece of news, this cacangelism which is only the other side of evangelism, this wretched news that the artefact-bearers running along their little wall behind the backs of slaves who are bound and seated at the bottom of their cave, do not even exist, or what amounts to the same: that they themselves are only shadows in the cave of the sunlit world, reduplication of sadness – don’t go confilsing this crestfallen message and this representation of an entirely closed theatre with our Moebian-Iabyrinthine skin, single-sided patchwork of all the organs (inorganic and disorganized) which the libido can traverse: for however well it is closed upon itself, it too, like a good Moebius band, is not at all closed in the sense of a volume, it is infinite, and contrary to the representative cube, intensities run in it without meeting a terminus, without ever crashing into the wall of an absence, into a limit which would be the mark of a lack, there is nothing the libido lacks in reality, nor does it lack regions to invest, the slender and very dark finger of her left hand which, in a conversation, the young woman, anxious because she is afraid of what she believes to be your erudition, passes over her eyebrow, while in the other hand she pulls at a cigarette – here is a real region to invest, one can die for it, one can give all one’s organicity, one’s ordered body, one’s functional arrangement of organs, one’s memory oforgans, one’s socio-professional status, one’s supposed past and one’s supposed future, one’s agenda and one’s mtimate theatre, one can feci like paying very dearly, exorbitantly, for this finger which is like an engraver’s stylus and the whole orbital space, cranial, vaginal, that it engenders around the eye. And it is not because it is prohibited that it is invested, not because it is represented, beyond a stage-set and because one hasn’t the right to climb onto the stage – but because one desires to climb up there and seize it! The libido never fails to invest regions, and it doesn’t invest under the rubric of lack and appropriation. It invests without condition. Condition is rule and knowledge.”

The (b)end.

Édouard-Henri Avril’s depiction of cunnilingus in the spread-eagle position.
Courtesy of:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunnilingus

Boundless Psychopathy; Magical Hegal!

The Negative is central to my philosophy. There is magic in these parts. Mark C. Taylor in Alterity states,

Hegel insists: ‘the life of the spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in the absolute dismemberment … it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having finished with it, turn away and pass onto something else; on the contrary, spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and lingering with it. This lingering with the negative is a magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical which what we earlier called the subject, which by giving determinateness a concrete existence in its own element, sublates abstract immediately, i.e., the immediacy is only generally, and there is true substance: that being or immediacy who mediation is not of it but that is mediation itself’ … As magical power that transforms water into wine, stones to flesh, lines to circles, pyramids to spheres, letter to spirit, sign to concept, nonsense to sense … death to life, the absolute knowledge born of legitimate philosophical conception is salvific. Hegel believes – truly believes – that ‘thinking is the loosening of hardness; the meeting with oneself in the other. This is a release that is not a flight of abstract, but consists in what is actually having itself not as something else, but as its own being and place in the actuality which is bound together by the force of necessity.'”

Engaging with the negative, even lingering with it, is essential. Averring that finitude is reality, a set of objects that have uniqueness, which is a swirl or eddy coiled within the infinity of nothingness is the centre of my psychoanalysis of philosophy. My interrogation, or interruption, within philosophy is an extension of coiling, a return to the lamella of birth that is a priori to the fleshy awareness of being-for-itself. The tighter the coil, the sleepier the person, the subject. When we stay with the negative, the lacuna, the abyss, giving not to quick solutions or immediate fallings, a ‘magical power’ comes to the fore which ‘converts it into being.’ This it is us. Taking a surgical knife to the scapulae, cutting down through the armpits, opening up the flesh and tying it into a lattice, I begin my philosophy with a slow, soft and anaesthetised incision from the shoulders that hold the head to the heart. Secondary to this, cut upwards toward the throat, the oesophagus, the mouth with its precious supple interior, turn the laser on and begin creating a circular cut around the middle of the skull. Open the bone of the skull and leave the brain intact. Examine the functioning of the brain, touch it with fingers, tweezers, and drip holy water on it.

Fascination with the body isn’t new. Anatomy of the being, the creature, the homo sapien requires these biopsies, autopsies and brutalities. A topography of the psyche is similarly found via a surgical process. Fire artilleries and canons into the space where thought-objects arise into- and fall- from consciousness. Snap the neck at the back, and open the brainstem, analyse it for a moment, and then brand it, lacerate it. Locate the hippocampus and lick it. Eat the cerebral cortex. Find new abstracted matrices of soma. Inject the subject with finitude. Inject yourself with death. Hegel notes, “the life of the spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in the absolute dismemberment.” Within the various psychic basements, store-houses, barns and sheds are various apparatuses, memories, tools, cutting machines, telephones, cars, text messages, people and so on; a certain shadow on the wall casts itself as we stand. Our imprint is (contra) luminal. Luminal activity, that of opening the flesh to the air, is the spirit that is fully authentic be-cause of its dismemberment. The phenomenological experience recapitulates the ontological foundations. A summary paper is produced, a knowledge of the body; lay out the intestinal tract, inspect the bile from the gland, cut open the appendix, find the cellulose, examine the muscle tissue; if there are tumours, lick them, touch them, inspect them, cannibalise them.

People find within my topography a nihilism. The nihilism of the infinity of nothingness. Whilst the nihilism, located in its various reductions, some noted above, is a nodal point, the navel from which I cut upwards toward the liver, then downwards, castrating the gonads, the testes of the familiar Father Time, the man who negates all negation and weights down upon us squirting out tears of joy or ecstasy on various foundations; wherever we find ourselves situated: from the foetal positioned melancholic on the cold floor of poverty, and impoverishment, to the drunken flailing arms, animated by martinis, beer and pizza, on floor of the discotech. Where have all the disc jockeys gone? Have they too been sucked into the blue ribbon primacy of indigestion? These are the spaces and places, both temporal and psychic, both arising and falling into the infinity of nothingness, that I am concerned with.

Unashamedly, I am a nihilist. But one cannot be a nihilist. One must operate as such, and this (surgical) operation is always tentative, always hesitant, always exhausted of possibilities. The desecration of art is the beginning of awareness. Art transgresses the boundaries of the human body, yet it holds together, mirrors and allows a simulacra to formulate. The Taliban destroyed the giant Buddhas in Afghanistan, what could be a more beautiful expression of authentic churning against the reflection of self? What could be more in line with Buddha’s dharma than the understanding that cultural relics are transitory? Insubstantial? What could be more of a lesson to the so-called West about our attachments and aversions to the Other, which we modify through polity? Of course, the anal-rententive West must now re-furbish, re-model and attempt to re-create ‘its’ lost Object! When it is not an Object of Itself, but one otherwise than Itself! The hollowed out rock, with the broken Buddha bits, is a beautiful testimony to the de-anthropomorphising psychoanalysis of the Taliban. A consciousness of the unconscious. A fear of the unknown that lashes out without apology. Without exterior justification of human rights and liberty. We all know that liberty and human rights are tyrannical, and the Taliban’s offering isn’t the paradise its dis-members violently procreate. But lest we fall into lazy reductionism, let us follow the cravers of authenticity. Brutal authenticity. What is fascist is operative at the moment we depart from the infinity of nothingness! Indeed, what I aver is that the finitude of ‘man’ situated within a ‘space of his own’ is a typology of constriction: it is here where banal meaning enters into the body, animating it towards the phantasmagoria of ubermensch. Ubermensch is nothing more than a finite subject, a man, who seeks authenticity without being open to the cavities, his recesses, to the rectal examination of infinity and nothingness. Nazi-ideology – one of tying-together ad strapping itself to – meaning, is an in-ability, an inhibition against dissolving into the gooey soup that predicates itself betwixt the finite and infinite.

Wilhlem Reich, staunch anti-NAZI psychoanalyst, states in Listen, Listen Little Man

“You differ from a great man in only one respect: the great man was once a very little man, but he developed one important quality: he recognized the smallness and narrowness of his thoughts and actions. Under the pressure of some task that meant a great deal to him, he learned to see how his smallness, his pettiness endangered his happiness. In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else’s strength and greatness. He’s proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had. The less he understands something, the more firmly he believes in it. And the better he understands an idea, the less he believes in it … I want you to stop being subhuman and become ‘yourself’. ‘Yourself,’ I say. Not the newspaper you read, not your vicious neighbor’s opinion, but ‘yourself.’ I know, and you don’t, what you really are deep down. Deep down, you are what a deer, your God, your poet, or your philosopher is. But you think you’re a member of the VFW, your bowling club, or the Ku Klux Klan, and because you think so, you behave as you do. This too was told you long ago, by Heinrich Mann in Germany, by Upton Sinclair and John Dos Passos in the United States. But you recognized neither Mann nor Sinclair. You recognize only the heavyweight champion and Al Capone. If given your choice between a library and a fight, you’ll undoubtedly go to the fight!”

Counter-facism: Meaninglessness, or more properly infinity and no–thingness qua authenticity. An authenticity of brutal genuineness, a messy amalgamation of intransigence. The hobo, the destitute, the prostitute, the sex worker, the semen collector, the notable anarchist who bombs the police station, these are meaningless apertures; apertures where lasers dissimulate, and in their dissimulation mark the authentic not-knowing! The proper process of impropriety. The legalising of the illegal, and the movement of the thighs into the mouth of the great white shark. To be devoured by such a beautiful beast, if only in fantasy, is, for me, ecstasy? Yes. In continuously exposing ourselves to annihilation we find what is not. We find what is left. We find, perhaps this is too romantic, our lamella. We find our tears, our eyes, the heaviness of the corpse we carry around, the rotting stomach ulcers created from binge drinking, the stench of faeces and faces inured in normative practices. We find ourselves circling outside of the healthy, humanitarian economy of relations and into the practise of impoverishment and improvisations. 

Andy Warhol, 1969 (After Being Shot by Valerie Solanas) 

Martin Heidegger in Being and Time here hints at the received, its constipation and denial (my personal phraseology)

“When tradition thus becomes master, it does so in such a way that what it transmits is made so inaccessible, proximally and for the most part, that it rather becomes concealed. Tradition takes what has come down to us and delivers it over to self-evidence; it blocks our access to those primordial “sources” from which the categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part quite genuinely drawn. Indeed it makes us forget that they have had such an origin, and makes us suppose that the necessity of going back to these sources is something which we need not even understand.”

The questive function of return, the returning to the opening of the gapping hole, the rectal anal-ysis, is what gets us beyond these received conditions and toward the more primordial sources “from which these categories and concepts handed down to us have been in part genuinely drawn.” So, yes, the cutting, the surgery, the crying, the joyful ecstasy experience in castrations, lacerations, clitoral stimulations, pornographic simulations, and fellatio. Cunnilingus, that cunning craft of vulva excitation, so beautifully demonstrated in the film Blue is the Warmest Colour, encapsulates the broad opening of the mouth with the opening from the Verb to a Noun. A person who performs cunnilingus may be referred to as a cunnilinguist. [1] Certainly any psychoanalytical philosophy, or philosophy in general, must begin with cunnilingus. 

Édouard-Henri Avril’s depiction of cunnilingus in the spread-eagle position.
Courtesy of:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cunnilingus

Heidegger continues

“But “nowhere” does not mean nothing; rather, region in general lies therein, and disclosedness of the world in general for essentially spatial being-in. Therefore, what is threatening cannot come closer from a definite direction within nearness, it is already “there” – and yet nowhere. It is so near that it is oppressive and takes one’s breath – and yet it is nowhere.”

What is threatening, what Spectre haunts us, is that which is “there – yet nowhere.” Infinity and no-thingness drivelling escape into the swirls of finitude. Laughing madness, absurdly bursting forth from the gates of Eden! Perhaps the laceration, the cuts, the bruise, the joy, the here which is nowhere is the palace of endings, the ultimate place wherefore we can operate in a sense running after finites, after ourselves, to-ward the walls of Reality that are Negative in their construction but convex toward the Positive reflections that allow for such operations? Adorning itself with otherwise than being, the Positive is the limitations of the concave, and this is the presentation of Self in Everyday life, the on-tic non presence in routine. 

Classic Alex Quotes

‘On Time’

You need time to think for you need to be time to think for thinking takes-time taking time from being to thinking for in thinking I become in time thinking not being for thinking does not come to being when being is out of time but only when being has the time to be in time to be time to think mind but this only happens from time-to-time and through the patient waiting of the time to come to being to become mind without being in itself becoming time in itself as our being mind for the form and foam of the mind is time-materialized for the materialized-time is the being-mind and being-mind is time-thinking thus the phenomenology of mind is the being of time and the matter of being-mind is the matter of being-time and only the time matters the mind.

‘The Phone’

The mobile cellphone was a radical deconstruction come destruction of communication for the mobilephone is there ot the one on it or the one on the other end of it for no one is there but the phone itself which is why no one can communicate on their cell-phones which is why you know noo ne is listening and no one is talking but miming and aping communication for the mobilephone was invented in order to negate communication for since when has anyone really communicated on their mobilephones that are not theirs but the networks that have netted the they and the them into it orbit vortex of non-communication for to use a mobilephone is to not communicate but masturbate: you see the they and them playing with their cuntphones and cockphones and anusphones for the mobilephone is the new dildo the new cunt the new cock tthe new sex toy that must be played with and fiddled with and wanked with and molested with and we all see the they and the them trying to make their mobilephones come-off and shoot semen juices and vaginal juices but the they cannot come-off but tthe hem cannot come and so the play with their mobilesphones but no one is their to make them cum…

– Alexander Verney-Elliott, London-based Anal-Theorist 

Fingers and Flesh: Male Homosexual Desire

Cy Tomwbly, Untitled, 1968

What does it mean to have male homosexual desire? Obviously the quest for a clear definition of desire continues, so male homosexual desire becomes even more difficult to locate. Fingers and flesh, the bony or stubby fingers move toward their desired flesh. A reaching out and an extension of the body, sex is one of the most universally worshipped and divine objects. Perhaps precisely because of its divinity it is torn asunder by theocratic invocations and fears, religion both celebrates and berates sex.  In Jewish, Christian and Islamic practices, which make up the bulk of Western notions about sexuality, heterosexuality within marriage is worshipped as the pinnacle of copulation, for it serves to reproduce children, which is of extreme biological and sociological importance for humanity and religion.

I am from Oregon, in the United States, and I live in Europe; I come out of this Jewish-Christian (and to a lesser extent, Islamic) tradition, what is commonly called ‘the people of the book.’ Being raised in a strict Jehovah Witness family where sexuality outside of heterosexual marriage leads to disgrace and even permanent abandonment informs my relationship to sexuality. I aver, that when we write about sexuality we must (at least somewhat) demonstrate our own thread in the tapestry of taboos and titillations.

Beginning with the ‘people of the book’ and their secular successors in Europe, the United States and many parts of the Americas and Asia, how can we proceed with a tentative analysis of male homosexual desire? A methodical analysis of this specific desire, which is in fact a multiplicity of desires, love and fear, is almost entirely impossible. Desire eludes almost every inspection. Yet, certain scratches on the wall of history leave us with bits of information, and maybe something for the present.

A representation of male homosexual desire is to be found throughout thousands of years of human scribing and artistic representation. From the sensuous poems of Rumi to the steamy bedchambers of Oscar Wilde and Peter Tchaikovsky, enjoyment between men certainly generates all types of suffering and pleasure. Whilst heterosexual dyadic copulation for progeny is worshipped overtly, male homosexual desire is the hidden, covertly worshipped spunk.  The ancient Greeks and Romans all enjoyed various formations of male homosexuality, and certain societies outside of the European sphere have even venerated the male homosexual as some foremost spiritual guide.

In Ken Russell’s brilliant 1969 film Women in Love, an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence’s novel by the same name, Larry Kramer adapts the book to screen perfectly. With Russell’s unusual and distinct direction and Kramer’s adroit prestidigitation Women in Love deftly moves the audience through male homosexual desire in 1920s England, a perfect place and time to analyze  what it means to be a gay man in the 20^th Century and beyond. The two main male characters, Rupert Birkin (played by Alan Bates) and Gerald Crich (played by Olivier Reed) wrestle completely naked after Gerald’s beloved sister Laura dies. Gerald needs to get something out, so Rupert suggests they wrestle. Notably Russell made film history; this was the first time two men touched each other completely naked in cinema.

Women in Love also demonstrates the aforementioned obsession with marriage. All the main characters, which includes the fabulous Glenda Jackson as Gudrun and Jennie Linden as Ursula are under the spell of love and marriage. Rupert is keen to see the chain betwixt the two broken, and wants the same ‘eternal love’ from a man and a woman in equal portions. His is a search for what Ursula, his fiancée, calls the ‘impossible … perversity.’  Precisely at the end of the film is where we can begin to understand the beginning of male homosexual desire. It is an impossible perversity. And because of its recklessness it is all the more satisfying and destructive. Here is a desire that shall not speak its name.

In Roger Grossman’s 2007 film What We Do Is Secret the inner workings of the mad band the Germs is intimately exposed. Infamous Darby Crash (played by Shane West) and his totally closeted relationship with Rob Henley (played by Ashton Holmes) bring together an altogether different landscape of male homosexual desire. The Germs were a late 1970s punk band in Los Angeles; entirely destructive, they often destroyed the venues where they played. As Darby and Rob continue their chthonic relationship they become increasingly involved with heroin.  The theme of latent, covert and underworld homosexual desire and drugs will be explored in later fragments, for now suffice it to say that this ‘tradition’ – especially one born of the late 19^th Century – continues, presenting all types of complexities and complexes. Desire here ends in suicide; notably, Women in Love ends in desiring pushed to confusion and suicide.

Drugs, desire and suicide are all bemoaned as too often reoccurring in cinema presenting gay and bisexual male affection and sexuality. However, we must first ask, why are these themes so ubiquitously connected? The question refers us back to the underworld that is male homosexual desire and the reverence for heterosexual marriage. Ang Lee’s 2005 film Brokeback Mountain deals directly with men who must retreat to the forest to sexually maintain what becomes a life-long commitment stronger than their actual marriages. We also must note that bisexuality, as desired by Rupert in Women in Love, falls within the spheres of homosexuality for it (bisexuality) obviously includes men desiring men as sexual objects.

Lastly, my own first sexual relationship (as opposed to encounter) with a man is a kind of contemporary memory inspiring my work. Patrick Coughlin of Grants Pass, Oregon came to me during Halloween of 2004. I was a first year college student, and he was in his third year. During a street party where we danced in a pre-sexual rhythm that I could never reproduce a particularly special demand was made on both of us. I did not respond to this demand, but Patrick did. He identified (and I am told still does) as straight. But a few weeks after Halloween’s haunting he came to me in the evening at the Dutch Brother’s café where I’d later burn the US flag leading to the ultimate demise of both our lover and friendship statuses.  During that second meeting he confessed the unconscious made conscious. Pre-verbal to verbal we entered the strange realm of what became my first actual relationship. I invited him to my house, which I shared at the time with my grandparents (meaning it was their house). Whilst they were away he preformed the best fellatio in the history of such an act: I came in his mouth without leaving one drop for the outside world. At the time I was a bohemian middle-class college student with aspirations for a vocation as a social worker. This is of course before the familial-religious ex-communication and financial abandonment all-too-often concurrent with ‘coming out.’ He came over several times, he taught me how to have an orgasm and we spread bliss from my room to the shower. My grandmother met him once, almost pre-consciously immediately knowing who and why he was present in her house. Throughout those thorny days of sexual education I became more than myself, an accumulation began anew. Male homosexual desire, from the fiction to factual: Rumi, Oscar Wilde, Rupert Birkin and Darby Crash often invokes the highest spiritual discovery along with the nadir of impossible perversity. For me, I am marked with this impossible perversity; sometimes I am happy (or shall we say, gay) with this Hegelian master-slave inside of me, but mostly I am tormented; and it is here, torment, that relentless churning of semen to anus to mouth, that noticing of a glance to the waking naked with a body built similarly to yours, like a mirror or house of mirrors, that desire might be found.