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EGR: Escape Velocity
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Christopher Locke
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Dec 18, 2001 07:51 PST
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Gonzo Marketing: Winning through Worst Practices
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738204080/entropygradientr
http://www.gonzomarkets.com
http://www.rageboy.com/blogger.html
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"it's down to me
the way she talks when she's spoken to
down to me, the change has come,
she's under my thumb."
stones
Valued Readers:
Life, she said. A new life, right here. And I was caught in the
headlights then, indecisive, paralyzed, looking for the exit, which I
found in a heartbeat. How about death, I said, a fool pronouncing
sentence on himself. Later, when the pain became unbearable in the
muted screaming silence of that endless waiting room and there was no
one left to ask, I spoke to the darkness I imagined you to be, saying
baby, how could you do this to me?
Nowadays, Jagger sings about a goddess in the doorway. About, not to.
Over, under, sideways, down: around. Who puts these words in my mouth,
I wonder. And I hear your words behind the beat: after the pedestal,
the gallows.
This morning's New York Times includes a section called Outlook: A
Special Issue of Business Day. The first headline says A Bruised
Economy Leaves Everyone Guessing. I don't care about that. I don't
care. I don't care about trying to get back on top. The world is
broken. The world is not speaking to me anymore. Under my thumb, it
says to me, mocking. Rock and roll never forgets, it says. And fuck
you.
It's not just a bruised economy that's left me guessing. Last night,
lying next to you, I awoke with a start: the first plane had just
struck the tower. And I woke to a muted screaming silence, the horror
of it snapping my eyes open in the dark. The world is broken. It
cannot be fixed. Split. I am split. Body/mind. Day/night. Man/woman. I
am no longer sure who I am. I am flying the plane. I am watching the
plane approach. Indecisive, paralyzed, looking for the exit. Which I
find in a heartbeat. Venus in blue jeans, baby -- count the headlights
on the highway. And after the pedestal, Kali.
Because your pages were tattered and frayed, the book falling to
pieces in your hands, under your caress, I went looking and found
another one for you. Turned to the place where the man who sang of
kisses and spring and chimneys, turns the tables, asks "how do you
like your blueeyed boy, Mister Death?" And it is not a dream and I
cannot wake up.
On Saturday morning I wrote: "a cultivated hesitancy," not knowing
where the words came from, then built a corral to keep them in: "Rage
comes from the encounter with a cultivated hesitancy, a refusal so
deep it has no location, no handle; a cancelation of the ground and
possibility of relationship."
I read it to my sister, Liz. "Yeah," she said, "erasure." Liz is tuned
in to a bigger radio. Last week, she showed me a film about Haitian
Vodou, footage shot in the '40s maybe. A long time ago. Papa Doc v.
Papa Legba. It ended with a celebration of rage. Up here in the too-
high world of bruised economies and battered egos, we have forgotten
more about these things than was ever known. "Tomorrow will be beyond
imagining," wrote Susan Cooper in a tale for children on the cusp of
adolescence. On the cusp of a world we can no longer wake up from.
From the Welsh Mabinogion, stories we used to be able to say were
"only stories." The snow is melting outside my window, the sun bright
on what's left of it. But tomorrow will be beyond imagining -- for the
dark is rising.
Still, last night the moon was a thin white slice of perfect heaven
floating above the trees, above the mountains here. Real too. Not a
dream. Not a picture postcard, even though, yeah, it's Boulder, not
Tehran, not Washington DC. And the moon was whispering to me: I don't
care about that. I don't care. The world is whole and undivided. You
are trying to wake from the wrong sleep. Even though, yeah, I know
it's a bad sign when things talk to you like that. Or so I've heard.
But too late now. Born under a bad sign, baby, and I been loving you
too long...
Can't stop now. To explain. To categorize and put it all in context.
But however it happened -- switch gears, sharp bend ahead -- I just
discovered Helene Cixous. An actual person in the same world (as what,
precisely, we'll let hang), which seems some kind of miracle almost.
And of course it always is, to find you're not alone. I'd been getting
intimations we were about to meet. Searching for "voice," she would
appear out of nowhere. Oh no, I thought. Not another French literary
critic. Or whatever they're calling themselves these days. Please not,
dear God, another fucking feminist! I'm guilty enough as it is.
Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been about 50 years that
I've been swinging this big white dick. And to tell the Truth, I'm
rather fond of it. I have no plan to quit.
That's all right, My Son. I understand. The burdens the Lord places
on us are profound in these Latter Days. Say 13 Hail Marys and go
in peace.
Jesus Christ, Fadda! Is zat all dere is to it?
You bet, My Son. And by the way, I bet your Mama was a tent show
queen...
Mary, Mary, quite contrary. Virgin goddess. Don't get me started. (You
shoulda heard me just around midnight!)
As you can easily imagine, this ongoing fugue leaves me ill prepared
to hear anything different. Once you've converted from Catholicism to
ZZ Top, your options can begin to appear a bit constricted. Lord, take
me downtown, I'm just lookin' for some... theory???
Yeah, I know it's bad for me, but I just can't keep away from the
stuff. It started out so innocent: a little lexical semantics on the
weekends, maybe a couple tokes of etymology. And before I knew it, I
was parsing. Predicate logic syllogisms, augmented transition
networks. I woke up one day to discover I had a 300-dollar-a-day
habit. I was mainlining OED lemmas, free-basing pages from A
Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. It was AI did it to me.
Artificial intelligence, natural language processing. The models so
thin and brittle they'd unravel in your hands. The cat sat on the mat.
So fucking what? And the corporate stuff was even worse. "Our aim is
to become preemptive in our category," someone would say. And I'd say,
uh... maybe you mean "preeminent" there, Phil. But they didn't know
what that meant either, so fuck it, I thought, what's the diff?
You can see the attraction, can't you? I mean, of things like
semiotics and intertextuality. You can understand why I cracked. Why I
started haunting the lit-crit section at Borders back around 1989. Why
I began to pick up books by Derrida and Foucault and -- looking around
furtively to see if anyone was looking -- read the dust jackets.
That's all I ever did, I swear. I never read the chapters inside. I
never inhaled. But it was enough. I was so naive! I'd been wondering
for years where all the freaks had gone. In the U.S., most were
shooting smack or working the circuits on Wall Street. In France, they
were doing, that's right: theory.
When I first stumbled onto that stuff, it was like hearing Hendrix for
the first time. Have you ever been experienced? I didn't even know
what The Enlightenment *was*, but I knew what it looks like when logic
and proportion have fallen sloppy dead. Sure, feed your head. But
Amerika had reverted to Wonder Bread en masse twenty years before and
I was starving. So I poked a little further, brought home all these
books I'd just look at and marvel, imagining what they must contain.
Eco and Sebeok, Kristva. Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, De Man.
Geoffrey Hartman! Geoffrey Hartman! It was like some twisted
Continental soap opera on the Import Channel.
Later, I found out I'd come in just as the final credits were rolling.
(As usual. When I discovered I'd barely missed the Beats -- after
reading all of Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes and Ginsberg and Corso
and Ferlinghetti; listening to every bop album I could lay hands on --
I was inconsolable. It took 300 acid trips to calm me down.) And by
now, people like Allan Bloom were freaking out about Plato and Truth
and The Losing of the Amerikan Mynde. And people like William Least-
Heat Fuckhead Bennett were going on about Values and Decency and Mom's
Apple Pie in the Sky. In other words, in short: The Culture Wars. And
really, it was true: most of these Frenchies were fucking communists
anyway. Or, you know, "Marxists" -- which, being die-hard
materialists, I figured were no better than the AI pukes like Douglas
Dennett with his Consciousness Explained. Even I blanche at the gall!
Then, Christ help us, Rene Thom, catastrophe theory, chaos,
complexity, the Santa Fe Institute, all that. As the Cars once said:
it's all mixed up. I got a headache, honey, not tonight. Not ever
again, I swore. I swore off. I put those books in cardboard boxes last
time I moved. And most of them never took out again.
But still. It's like being sober for 17 years, which I have been, and
remembering the feel of that first double scotch kicking in. Mmmm,
yeah. Maybe a couple lines of coke. A noseful of meth. A few
mushrooms. Name your poison, pardner. Black hash and tequila? Coming
up. So last weekend when I was crawling this bookstore with Norlin --
you know, the guy over at http://www.tdcrc.com -- I got a whiff of...
ooooh that smell. Can't you smell that smell?
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393974294/entropygradientr
Weighing in at twenty-four hundred pages, it's got everybody in one
place. If you blew up this book, we'd be back to whitebread in a New
York minute. Among others: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Boccaccio,
Dante, Vico, Pope, Samuel Johnson, Shakespeare, Hume, Kant, Edmund
Burke, Paul de Man, Raymond Williams, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard,
Derrida, Foucault, Wolfgang Iser, E.D. Hirsch, Hayden White, Jean
Baudrillard, Harold Bloom, Habermas, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
Tzvetan Todorov, Stanley Fish, Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, Pierre
Bourdieu, Terry Eagleton, Stephen Greenblatt, Donna Haraway (or
possibly a cyborg clone), Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Dick Hebdige (who
wrote about punk), Julia Kristeva, bell hooks, and... Helene Cixous.
All the bad guys. Incredible. Like the Junior Woodchuck's Manual of
cult-crit. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy of Capital-T Theory. I
know what you're thinking. Yeah, I know. But see, just when I thought
that I was out, they p-u-l-l me back in...
So I buy the damned thing, of course (who could resist?), and the next
morning over coffee I'm looking up "voice" in the index. The first
entry (I'm pleased and amazed that there *is* an entry) reads:
voice: and Cixous on woman, 2045
OK, I'm thinking, that does it. I'm going to have to come to terms
with this babe. Only I'm not thinking babe. I'm thinking woman.
Really. I'm wondering though, you know? What is this going to cost me?
What indignities and humiliations will I have to endure to grasp some
little take on voice, something I can *use* over here. And why is it
always the chicks? Only I'm not thinking chicks. I'm thinking women.
Still...
What I find on page 2045 is a piece called "The Laugh of the Medusa."
I am not going to understand a word of it, I'm convinced. These people
are all crazy, I know. What more evidence do I need? But being a
professional and all, I grit my teeth to the task. I read:
I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman
must write her self: must write about women and bring women to
writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from
their bodies -- for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same
fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text -- as into the
world and into history -- by her own movement.
The future must no longer be determined by the past.
Why am I flashing on the saccharine sentimentality of Crosby, Stills
and Nash? "We have all been here before..." Yeah? Well boys, maybe
that's because you've been going in circles. Grab your dick. Love the
one you're with. (I'm not certain I've grasped her actual sense here,
though. I press on.)
Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the
history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support,
and one of the privileged alibis.
I am warming to this. I always did think that Socrates had the hemlock
coming. "Come, let us reason together..." Look, if you go around
talking that way, you're *asking* for it. You know?
It has been one with the phallocentric tradition. It is indeed that
same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory
phallocentrism.
So maybe my dick aside wasn't that inapposite after all. Making
certain allowances, you understand. I mean, my dick *aside*... But if
I keep reading this stuff, I fear I'll be psychologically castrated.
Maybe end up singing in a high thin soprano. What'd Tony know about
Lacan? But still, the guy nailed it: cunnilingus and psychiatry have
brought us to this!
Time and again I, too, have felt so full of luminous torrents that
I could burst -- burst with forms much more beautiful than those
which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. And I,
too, said nothing: I didn't open my mouth. I didn't repaint my
half of the world. I was ashamed. I was afraid, and I swallowed my
shame and my fear. I said to myself: You are mad! What's the
meaning of these waves, these floods, these outbursts?
Yes, this is what I was looking for. But more. Much more than I
expected to find. Not just voice, but silence. And the enforcement of
that silence. Shame segues so neatly into volunteer slavery. Rage
comes from the encounter with a cultivated hesitancy (come, let us
reason it out), a refusal so deep it has no location, no handle; a
cancelation of the ground and possibility of relationship. Erasure.
You are not mad. You are enraged. I can dig it.
And why don't you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for
you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written.
(And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven.) Because
writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for
the great -- that is for "great men"; and it's "silly."
Why is this "ecriture feminine," I'm wondering. We *have* all been
here before. All. You don't have to be a woman to stand before the
gates of power with your dick in your hand. Metaphorically speaking,
of course. But it gets better...
Besides, you've written a little, but in secret. And it wasn't
good, because it was in secret, and because you punished yourself
for writing, because you didn't go all the way; or because you
wrote, irresistibly, as when we would masturbate [there go those
corporate firewall decency filters -- PING!] in secret, not go
further, but to attenuate the tension a bit, just enough to take
the edge off. And then, as soon as we come, we go and make
ourselves feel guilty -- so as to be forgiven; or to forget, to
bury it until the next time.
Who was that Latin dude who said, "After zine'ing and blogging, every
animal is sad"? I turn to Google, and oh very strange, I find it was
Galen, who actually said: "Every animal is sad after coitus except the
human female and the rooster." Is this one of those Internet things?
An urban legend? But I'm wondering now about intertextuality and the
possible influence of Kristeva. I understand Cixous was pals with her.
Did they ever maybe hang with Willie Dixon, Howlin Wolf?
I have a little red rooster, too lazy to crow for day
Keep everything in the barnyard, upset in every way
Oh the dogs begin to bark, hounds begin to howl
Ooh watch out strange kind people,
cause little red rooster's on the prowl
Because, Cixous continues: Can't you hear me howlin? Callin on my
darlin...
Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not
the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are
the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an
economy that works against us and off our backs; and not *yourself*.
Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the
true texts of women -- female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.
Oh preach it, sister! Yeah! And what if they *are* "female-sexed
texts"? I don't care about that. I don't care about trying to get back
on top.
I write woman: woman must write woman. And man, man. ...it's up to
him to say where his masculinity and femininity are at: this will
concern us when men have opened their eyes and seen themselves
clearly.
If you're a man, be a man. Find out where the light comes from that
lights your lover's eyes. Break your *own* heart, motherfucker. Try a
little tenderness.
The world is broken. The world is not speaking to me anymore. Under my
thumb, it says to me, mocking. Fuck you. Try this:
http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/cixous/commentary.html
The origin of the gesture of writing is linked to the experience
of a disappearance, to the feeling of having lost the key to the
world, to have been thrown outside. To have acquired all of a
sudden the feeling of something precious, rare, mortal. To have to
find again, urgently, an entrance, breath, to keep the trace. We
have to make the apprenticeship of mortality.
And why, here, do I catch an echo of that shit-eating "review" of my
own writing in The Financial Times?
http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=011120001170
...the ideas struggle to get out from under the book's insufferable
style. Try this: "This world, this life so intricate, delicate,
complex. Precious beyond measure. I'm slamming my head against the
walls of empire, the habits of power, enraged." Or: "No corporation
has ever fallen in love. Reflect on that a moment." Right-thinking
people will find it quite offensive, so don't read it unless you
too tend to write like this.
Right-thinking people? I can't believe the bitch actually wrote that.
But I am confirmed in *this* belief: Write, let no one hold you back,
let nothing stop you.
I've been working on this send for two days now. How to end it? Why
not with this bit from Cixous's Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing:
What happens at the end of a text? Here again we have much to learn
from what dreams, our masters, do with us; the author is in the
book as we are in the dream's boat. We always have the belief and
the illusion that we are the ones writing, that we are the ones
dreaming. Clearly this isn't true. We are not having the dream, the
dream has us, carries us, and, at a given moment, it drops us, even
if the dream is in the author in the way the text is assumed to be.
What we call texts escape us as the dream escapes us on waking, or
the dream evades us in dreams. We follow it, things go at top
speed, and we are constantly -- what a giddy and delicious
sensation! -- surprised. In the dream as in the text, we go from
one amazement to another. I imagine many texts are written
completely differently, but I am only interested in the texts that
escape.
Then let me be your Dream Boat, baby. For a while. Confessin' these
blues on gently down whatever stream we're in.
The Management
for more...
'Coming to Writing' and Other Essays
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674144376/entropygradientr
Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0231076592/entropygradientr
Stigmata: Escaping Texts
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415179785/entropygradientr
The Newly Born Woman
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0816614660/entropygradientr
The Helene Cixous Reader
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/041504930X/entropygradientr
Helene Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/041515541X/entropygradientr
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