Sailors, ships and smell of tar
When my ship puts out to sea
When my ship puts out to sea
I can't sail it very far
Because I must come home for tea
Very Christopher Robin of him don't you think? Well, Gysin is entertaining, but it seems odd that he's also a bit of a prevaricationiste, but I think its a 'cultural thing'. It's also a 'mark-making thing', a kind of deeply embedded form of the horror vacui, and who could deny the immediacy of something like the story he gives after the first line of the above poem where he says a zeppelin came down on Streatham common across the street from his grandfather's house. Then he goes on to describe the sailors who came out to repair the damage to his grandfather's house, and yes, there is that everpresent homosexual lilt to the description (They smell good.), but what I come away with is something more like Henri Rousseau (Flags and anchors.. Hearts and flowers.. A whole peacock fanning its tail all over his back). In one sense, Gysin was a failed painter and a failed writer. I've read everything they've published by him, and even have several of the later retrospective texts, including this the earliest, Planet 101.. And something I always enjoyed were these background mentions of 'small narrative'.. especially in the context of something like Burroughs looking at Gysin's work later on, the calligraphy, and there is this small sub-literature within the Burroughs/Gysin oeuvre where Burroughs will give some offhand descriptions of 'what he sees' inside a Gysin painting. What this tells me is, is these were people who were actively seeing, and actively participating in the act of seeing and more importantly, actively involved in the act of experiencing.
I imagine Burroughs minutely 'reading' one of Gysin's paintings (in the Chinese sense), and then like a literary DJ, or rather LJ (for lit-jockey) I reach for Maurice Roche's _Compact_ and just open it at random and see if anything connects:
I imagine her lying on the bed, next to me... and yet the minute exploration of her skin by my hands had removed all traces of her presence. (reading, one step removed)
Interesting.. If you continue in the Roche text, you begin to get the odd frisson that somehow you're getting the image of Gysin's dreamachine. It's uncanny:
And as I myself read this, my mind duly inserted a little (t), thusly:
One stands back a bit. One abandons the pain(t) for an instant-and moves away.
But where the comparison gets even more weird is on the next page:
So then write before our eyes, we see the text lurch into contact with none other than Raymond Roussel! Attempt to gather up the details Roche' gives and to model or construct the sense that he is laying out diagrammatically. I'm not a voracious reader, but this odd disjointed mechanisme seems to me to be a direct descendant of a version of Roussel's procédé. I've looked at the thing, and I suppose that if you could first plot a code, you decipher this image's message, but I have not. Instead, I note that this very page is what must've inspired a piece of my own for one of my zines in the mid-nineties (she was used for experiments with avant-garde prostheses):
Machine-Fetish-Narrative
by Great Skull Zero
The Chinese nurse seemed to be preparing a hypodermic, her royal blue silk uniform iridescent in the candle-light. On the wall a huge blue neon "86" flickered and buzzed gently. On the 'Cinema table' a young girl lay touching herself, dreaming once again of the beautiful jade dragon penis pipe she had smoked opium from earlier that day, then subsequently used for other purposes. The nurse was smiling as the drops dribbled out from the syringe one by one, but stood very still being only a fibreglass mannequin, a leaking monument. The candles sputtered and black roosters went about the chrome floor pecking at the squirming beans (words), and all was movie-like, irreal in its arrangement, tableau-like, a diorama for the female Rama, savior of a faux-feminist cinema revolution, a clittoral film-noir where a lubricated nubbed film loop soon plays between the spread legs, appropriating the vaginal opening as light source, projecting the minidespotic bondage-as-machine-fetish-narrative of the world as paradoxical sexual Wunderkammern, miniature and inescapable womb-cenotaph of an aperversive somniloquy of moving parts, of perfect and unavoidable interactivity of optic and organological element. The 'Cinema table' is a variation on the operating table or any such table treating an ergonomic flow, a bodily fitting. Yet this is a table designed for the female body, for the vaginal cinema. There is a slanted rise at one end used like a gently sloping chair back, so that the participant can watch her vaginal projections on the screen provided or any appropriate suface. A filmic loop runs perpindicular to the plane of the table bisecting its surface through a slot. The film running vertically is diverted over a roller a couple of feet up, (by means of a stainless steel bracket adjustable to vaginal height) then travels diagonally to the next roller set farther toward the end of the table and to the side of the beam thus allowing it to pass back underneathe to the other rollers and lubricating reservoir. The nubbed film slides smoothly over the vaginal surface stimulating the external vectors including the clittoral ganglionic complex. The translucent film shows ideomorphic text of an alexical nature (ie no particular language but reminiscent of many characters, exploding and morphing etc.), literally cumming apart. This autodeconstructive metatextual narrative is meant to parallel the autoerotic interface with the nubbed film. The sound track is then generated by the participant herself: with a microphone to her mouth to catch her utterances; electrodes placed on the nipples which could read the flux in curlean energy data or thermographic data to create an audio analog similar to the idea of a Theramin. The vaginal light source would then be a vibrating dildonic apparat independent of the rest of the arrangement beaming light in a focused beam from its exposed and illuminating terminus........
"I had to stuff my show full of ads"
Multiplicity-generators?
There's a wonderful line in Emilio Mario Dolfi's poem _Swift Plastic Crossroad of Women_
'here there in front in back I offer hot perfumes'
Now as this poem is really a cool example of multiple narrative, I can help but multiply it further. It really creates a sort of scene of the poet at a table, maybe drunk or high, and playing with his food and making a scene and describingan aesthesis. He creates a cross-roads with cars and pedestrians out of the acoutrements of his dinner table, but what this particular line makes me think of is Lynn Margulis conception of protoctistan omnisexuality and its relationship to 'drawing' and 'line'.. The il y a of the representational domain = the omnisexuality of the protoctistans. And that's all fine and good, but look into the burgeoning minor literature that combines Sagan and Margulis' theories of Protoctistan Omnisexuality, and the Metametazoa to Romanticism of all things.
But here is where the tidiness of the acadecian breaks down completely. I won't say that nobody has finished connecting up the dots, but it seems there is a sort of Joseph Cornellism or compartmentalist fever afoot.
For ten years or more I have been trying to unite these fields into a general concept of knowledge, and oddly enough, Burroughs performs admirably as the Arthur C. Clark of the Biological Information Age.
When Burrough says language is a virus, he's so spot on the mark, not only in terms of culture and ideology, but right to the point on how the evolution of the cell itself proceded.
Look at the material on Viral Nucleogenesis. No. That won't find you anything on wikipedia, or google except my silly ass. Try Viral Eukaryogenesis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_Eukaryogenesis
Now, viruses are just like a literature, and by that I mean that they are like a free-roving archive that when it come into contact with a proper host can execute instructions. How long can we deny that our own computationality comes out of this? Viruses in the ancient seas were like book-drugs, a weird object that a biome might pick up, but then, obviously couldn't put down. Oh shit. What's happening tooooo meeeee.
Exactly.
So where do we get from all that today? Well, Metaphysics becomes memic flux and conceptus instantiation,
and the global noosphere becomes one of symptographis..
Meaning is searcheable, translatable, and transformative, and most of all, spatial.
Meaning is part of the spatial domain, and even time is collapsed into that, because of the speed and compression of things.
It starts to make me think of that sad farmer played by Steven King who finds the meteorite and turns into a plant monster in the bathtub, but is it all that new?
Arcimboldo seems to have known, or at least intuited, and there are weirdo bronzes going way back of chimeras, hands whose fingers are different animal heads.
Our bodies are THE CLASSICAL CIVILISATION OF THE MICROBIAL DOMAINS
we are the golden age of the amoebas.
and as long as any bipedal monkey beast with language and tools walks
and really as long as any animal form at all moves around
that golden age continues.
Our reproductivity itself is what unites our 'culture' to the concept of knowledge entailed in Blanchot's Il y a.
and that gives us phrases of an almost Futurist nature
Yes, It's unfortunate what happened, LET'S BAKE UP 50,000,000 more and try again.
HALLELEUCHA..
for every string in the catastrophe of human understanding there are generated a 1000 other strings
that will the vector forward, at ever increasing speed.
The memic flux is crystallizing.
Art will be the global legislator by 2100. The nation state will be a stage hand to a global entertainment / social charity movement the likes of which we can only imagine. The rise of the Zaibatsus will continue and will not only be benevolent, but utterly illuminating, by 2200, there will be new species walking the earth
and many of them will be terraforming prosthesis designed to reclaim the earth from our mismanagement.
This whole long period of Decadence will be understood as memic excess under duress
or
MEUD (mood)
as in bad mood, like bad poetry, or bad painting.
Like a Turner painting:
APMV was discovered serendipitously in 1992 within the amoeba Acanthamoeba polyphaga, after which it is named, during research into Legionellosis. The virus was observed in a gram stain and mistakenly thought to be a gram-positive bacterium. As a consequence it was named "Bradfordcoccus", after the district the amoeba was sourced from in Bradford, England. In 2003, researchers at the Université de la Méditerranée in Marseille, France published a paper in Science identifying the micro-organism as a virus.
Mr. Bradford? Mr. Martin. Me-Me. Meme.
Not quite.
The mimi here comes from Microbe Mimicking Virus.
Right. Finnegans Awake!
now it resumes fragmenting interpenetrating and copulating in the shop windows filled with mannequins
multiple perspective mobile in the mirrors and windows swift creation of motornoisy complexes via continual variable superimpositions in the eyes of every pedestrian
(are we sure Burroughs wasn't reading just a little Dolfi?)
What is intuition? Is it an Unconscious Temporal Stochastics based on unknown frequency harmonics stored in the calculation being referenced during the quotidian rumination?
