A Comment on Critique and Pedagogy and Stuff.

I cannot remember the quote, if it is a quote at all, but a digestion of a series of quotes, and that's funny, or odd, the word 'series', appearing right here in the beginning, before I've even set up the 'ministry', so to speak. In American culture, I am almost ashamed to even bring up Deleuze and Guattari anymore, but there is something positively uncanny about the way they often catch resonances between light and psyche, or mind and optics, or perhaps, put better, to make available the possibility of a physics of elucidation, and one which isn't simply the piled up charms of the literary person's elucubrationary dissimulation.

The ministry.

Let me just say plainly, that I think it's a fairly good idea to stay firmly rooted in the material world, and if that sounds ridiculous, as it does to me, let me say, that knowledge of the material world does not always account for "eventu-alities that arise in the index", or rather, "virtualities that coalesce due to memory and arrangements within the fabric of factors which comprise the contents of thought at any given moment." Those quotes are my own, and they reflect not exactly a close reading of literature, per se, but a close reading of experience itself as comprised of "objects" in a software sense. D&G, and I've sold all their books, in one of the books give a short discussion, or maybe a long discussion of "Series", and this leads into things like deterritorializations, and hybridities, but what it makes me think of is, thought figured like photonic trigonometry, a space where objects, more or less autonomous, however that works, or perhaps the 'objects' can be called threads or processes, bump into each other and are both affected and changed. And that sort of general bottom level process being like a single tile in a more overall under-standing we might call a hologram. But these are positive and reasoned aspects of the process. How do we account for the more traditional and irrational mechanism of this process. One word for it is PARANOIA. I wrote it in scare capitals because that is the way it happens often, the eyebrows go up, the thing in your head that wasn't happening until the thing in the landscape happened, and both are now happening in a way that doesn't seem quite possible. Or is there something metaphysical at work? This too, makes me recall a quote, perhaps from a letter or work I never read, and this quote is supposedly something Benjamin said to Scholem, or vice versa, and just the other day, and this is exactly how I work, because I allow for the landscape to speak, landscape as in, say, a room, I pick up a book at random, and open it, and let my eyes fall down on some word, and just the other day, I let it fall on the word

monopsychism.



Sure, nothing new, but when I was a teenager, the idea of a single conscious hologram that was the universe was all the rave in my mind, and I searched constantly for ways to prove it. It wasn't that I was religious, I was mystical. I felt I knew I was right about things, and often I was, and could usually prove it, and they way I thought back then is still the way I think today, something I call

labored obliquity

I pick out some unordained element in the landscape of human thought, and I 'highlight' it, and then remember the fragments that come through the sieve that happen to get marked with that tag. Take for instance what I just did: I went and plucked 3 volumes off my shelves at random not really thinking about them or what they might contain when opened randomly. I read John Latta's blog entry this morning and was thinking about it when I plucked _The Golem_ by Gustav Meyrink off the shelf and began to read the biopic of GM, which I will return to. I plucked _A Theory of Natural Philosophy_ by Roger Joseph Boscovich which is something I barely remembered I had, and it turns out to be the Venetian edition of 1763. I've been reading about 18th century Venice for almost a year now, off and on. And I also plucked _Dionysus, Myth and Cult_ by Walter F. Otto, which when I opened it up was mandibulating upon the Dionysian animal par excellence, the panther, which also figured prominently in the poem I wrote first thing out of bed this morning, even before coffee! That isn't usual for me.

To return to Gustav Meyrink and John Latta's discussion this morning of the Grand Piano project, I was struck by the odd crypto-resonance between Meyrink's biography and the thematics involved in something like Latta's post, which in the end, tend to lead me to a rather familiar subject, "the materiality of immateriality", but also to series (hint:Ceres), and their interruption or deflection, as in light.

Let me cut to the chase as this is seeming rather dull and square:

In E.F. Bleiler's short biography of the different people who were Meyer (Meyerink) he recounts an experience in the young writer's life, where just as he was about to pull the trigger on a gun pointed to his own head, a book slid under the door of his flat, and strangely, it was a book on the Occult. Now what's odd, is that Meyrink did become a participant in the Occult and knew some father famous folk, but he was also a debunker, and would do things like snip off a piece of ectoplasm and take it to a chemist. Meyerink was also a banker, until he was blamed for some bit of misdeed and sent off to prison. He was, in a Grand Piano sense, in business as a banker with the nephew of Christian Morgenstern. Meyerink was also a wild-hearted playboy:

"There was also, Gustav Meyer, the aggressive playboy and bohemian, who delighted in using his sharp, sarcastic tongue to annoy the stodgy German patricians of Prague, and wasted no chance to shock them. He was athletic, and won many prizes as a sculler, including the championship of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a skilled fencer, a riotous liver (see previous poem for "liver") who rode about in

balloon decorated carriages with troops of chorus girls

and he affronted the horses by driving the first automobile in Prague. Like his counterparts in England he lived in eccentric surroundings, in a tower in a older part of the city, where his strangely decorated room contained a confessional booth, a terrarium filled with exotic African mice, a large picture of Madame Blavatsky, and a sculpture of a ghost disappearing into a wall."

And now, I am just so enamored by the weirdness of the world, that whatever feeble criticism I once had or migh have had, is just gone. Let us all be victims in the finality of the poem. I have nothing to say, except perhaps, do you have that

poem by Euphorion,
that poem of Dionysus on Samos
who received his shrine there because
of the gratitude of a lion.

A god
still needs the blessings
of the local animals.

"The limit points of cohesion are
strong or weak according to the form
of the curve near the point of intersection."
p. 74 RJB's A THEORY~

"raging jelly bean"



In later years, Meyerink was said to be an old fool
who couldn't remember where he'd [laid] his shirt [down],
and had lost his ass in banking, and more pointedly, in general...