The body is such a fickle, monstrous creature. I say fickle because its desires wash over me, food-desire, water-desire, coffee-desire, sleep-desire. Is it more liberating to deny or affirm these desires? I ask because I know tiredness, hunger, caffeine-sickness. Without that which our bodies crave they empty, they no longer work. The strongest smell, sharpest pain, the look of desire, all of it washes over incomprehensible. As Jack tells us, "With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything is far away. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy." Bataille's economic theory of excess is a dream during a sleep I was not able to take. The sun bothers me, my big toe gets in my way. I'd rather crawl to freedom in order to better smell the earth.
To get drunk or to allow intensity to flow over one's body is one and the same. We accept the shortcomings of drinking and drunkenness: bad judgment, clouded senses, the hangover, the guilt. We learn to not drink to excess, to moderate the passions. The body revolts, reorganizes, becomes homeostatic.
Is not Poe's Eureka a beautiful lie? For Nietzsche the value of ideas comes not from their implicit truth but their ability to sustain and empower life. Why not get drunk, if it sustain you? The lifelong alcoholic stops drinking and grows ten years older in two weeks; Werther finds himself unloved and grows despondent and suicidal; Rimbaud gives up the pen and dies a long death. Addiction is but a possibility realized and integrated into the body. My addictions are my organs. Would I rather have coffee or my left arm?
It is a fine feeling, being desired. It fills that emptiness we all have, does it not? The itch that perpetually needs scratched. Mother won't you hold me? To be perpetually held, to feel one's flows and intensities provoked. Excess: a beautiful positive feedback loop, a candle burning at both ends. Deleuze & Guattari sleep, live their waking lives, fight - fight and are fought - seek their place, experience untold happiness and brilliant defeats; they penetrate and are penetrated; they love.
Bodies inevitably reform their organs, restratify; to fight is to perceive the other, to fight is to cut the other... the other what? further; to seek and to penetrate the other is to seek and penetrate ourselves; what we gain we immediately lose; flow as illustrated by capital; flow as energy that waxes and wanes in excess and lack. The body of intensities never understands itself as part of a whole, a continuum of motion.
"They will not let you experiment in peace."
I have been getting drunk all my life. Rural life is either deadly or cancerous. My experiences don't mean a damn thing when all is impersonal sweep-swept flows. When I critique familiar symbols that codify my flows into temporary right order I can better understand my singularity, my being as an event in the cosmos of becoming. Each of our books will be a book of symbols, of particular code that maps out this flow of life.
Books should be excess and not lack. Books should provoke and prescribe in the manner of a physician. I think of Miller, Artaud, Cendrars, Celine, Kerouac, Lao Tzu, Borges, Dostoyevsky, Huysmann, Heller, Nietzsche, Proust. Series upon series of botched books, imperfect paens to unrestricted flows on the plane of immanence.
Deleuze loves a good paradox. A divine contradiction. Contradictions are an interesting phenomenon, and they have a strange way of multiplying when encountered. Take decadent art, for example, the way that it combines the content of the lowly, degenerate, and ill with the form of the beautiful and the sublime. Insofar as we embody contradictions in our desires, drives, and instincts, and insofar as we are saints and sinners, angels and demons, lazy bastards and busy geniuses, we can recognize and understand this contradictory art form much better than art which is directed in form and content to beauty alone.
It may be true that we only perceive that which shares attributes with us, and we perceive clearer those which share more attributes with us. And what could possibly share more attributes with us than another human being? There is the body, the voice, the words expressed, even the pheromones that we perceive unconsciously. Compared to the most exquisite book or painting the human being is a colossus. And to share any or many of these hundredfold attributes is a powerful thing, one that multiplies... Yet that is not enough.
No, there must also be a desire for that which is other than us. That desiring-other, a reaching out for attributes that correspond to that feeling of attraction. So to perceive, we must share attributes, yet to desire, there must be an other that we perceive and desire most strongly that which contains multitudes alike and different.
Love: read about it, breathe it, whisper it, live it, die for it, confirm or deny it, maybe feel it and definitely miss it when its gone. An indirect argument is the most seductive one. Love is always a transgression, not only because it combines sexuality and friendship. Love is a powerful narcotic. To say the words, "I love you" for the first time is among the most powerful narcotics.
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Fantastic progression low. Lulling thoughts quietly during a sunny npr morning with my own coffee sickness postponed. The idea of excess and attraction of its wanting. Can desires ever truly be satisfied, or even appreciated before a sense of more is alive again? Playing a game of leap frog with ourselves-ultimately we will top out; possibly be in denial and spend the rest of our lives playing catch up with our youth. Time takes us into fear of wanting what is out of our physical, emotional, and mental focus.
ReplyDeleteThere is a story of a happy dog gnawing on a bone playing down by the brook. Splashing along he comes to an eddy and sees a dog below him-with a bone in its mouth, a better bone. He drops his possession quickly and jumps down biting into the water in search for that bone. No reward to be found-all the while his one prize floats down the brook. ...Bed time stories were a bit different in my house, but to further the commune with, there is always a better 'over there' when 'here'. And so on continually, the game of excess is already playing catch up even in our youth.
The voyage of love as a narcotic... Baudrillard speaks "In reality, this voyage (drugs) only thrives on its own alterations. There are no others, only a series of extreme and vital internal alterations or interior alterities that keep the subject from breaking out of his or her own life. There is an involution to that life and subjection to one's own psychodrama." Love is the ultimate attraction, but it seems to be strictly reciprocal understanding. We love in order to be loved. The wanting within all is a search for solidarity outside oneself; the self has been abandoned long ago, or at least nothing deeper then a sense of attraction. To love the unlovable could possibly be the only true love. "For your love for the sake of loving alone" (Dr. Sid Williams)
The virus continues. We are anchored in excess, the America's "ism" exploits it. And the world is happening to us, and rarely through us.