Fireflyjournal.com

No. 2
March 2005
Firefly Journal
Because the End Times Never End and Everything is Still Possible
 
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because power was never the same thing

by k


and i speak, and i speak, and i speak through a truncated flavour of pinkish rebellion, i have no time for this, it makes far too much sense to me. it is the stated world of understanding, it is the motion of sense making, the act of meaning things for other people, but nevertheless the accidental evolution of who knows but we’ll see came upon us, set us apart, adaptation as gamble, and i wish to gather thought into instinct, but then i would be alone finding no common measure slowly separating its blood solitary into dissolution, i gather thought into instinct but then i have no capacity for description, things become simply as they are, no possibilities, what is. i can no longer define myself against things for each exists as part of the gentle demands of the skin.

i want this world and i do not hope for something better

and who came up with the oversimplifications anyway? who dropped the bomb? that is, shat on the table? the stench right here so that we can all suffer the consequences, in any case we are here to do precisely this, each implicated. otherwise what is the fun? have we still found ourselves believing in that flogged hide of salvation? the empty carcass of hope, of happiness without pain, the extrication of suffering, abolition of war, that cold and precious stone at the center of a universal potential, the decadent squandering of an excess that builds to dangerous proportion, capital, capital, gain. such a pity that we have so quickly forgotten how to wage war, how to feel the brutality of, well, whatever it is. no, all concerned at the twilight of an era towards the motion of accumulation perpetually turning towards the taming of chance, heaven, science, insurance, each moment of the future castrated, predictions born from a fixation with the past that might secure a known; cowards, dignity has no regard for itself, it just is.

and here we are in this land. you are me i am you, this country’s claws firmly ensconced in my flesh, like never before the sickness is my own, so much do i crave my own demise, holding onto the beauty of the tragedy exquisite and absurd riding into dissolution, the end of slumber, the smell of ashes, decay is your lot, as mine, i am certain of this necessity, of this unambiguous fidelity, body to sleephood as all one ever wants is to bear witness to such a spectacle, not only act but also to watch, i will make no other home, to love, to rape, to nurture, to suffocate, from this place i have not learnt, but am always already, no time for the dream, just the equilibrated disaster of a pistol in my hand, shoot you mother fucker, shoot; the tangible culture of blind-sided decline, power hardly known, not as to extent, but as to the kind of thing it is, we still do not know so many things, the nature of our own expression for instance, a fire burning in the viscera with a gun held like a pen, delicate, deliberate, tender and meaningless, yes meaningless but still true, true as can be. i want this world and i do not hope for something better, i want complicity and self-abandonment becomes another word for freedom as an act severed from the petty attachments of subjectivity, meaning open to chance, time as a multiplicity of things, not as in science, but as in life. and so what is sought is something that does not start with thought, writing because it is the sole unit of measure, it is everything this story is and all else happens only to its end, follows its exigencies, that is to say life, that is to say intent, that is to say need, but i wanted something prior, some foreign song with unknown subtleties of time and countenance, spoken as noise, skips, phonetic discontinuities, harmony and detailed punctuation, speed and curvature, the taste of its rudeness, its dislike, its tenderness, its flirtation. that one should remain a philosopher, that life should become such a problem, that the experience of thought would be our final battle, and still we do not know how to fight, every day i attempt to fight this very fight and yet it does not approach me, i stand in the late moments of this time, power means electricity, it means control, it means politics, it means information, but it has yet to mean power, i am certain of this. the possibilities do not end and yet i can see none of them, attached as i still am to the idea of humanity. the complacency of the imagination as it settles all the slow uneasiness of a need to shed the human skin and always to the end of settling life back into its place, its petty little place that stinks of self concern, of accumulation, of work, of society. everything you can think of is true and yet you can’t think past all the meaning that holds you together, that allows function, that makes sense, that renders happiness, that builds our life as we know it, but life is not for the living it is for the making, hence art. but art only became more important than life in order to expand the proportions of that latter word, in order to expand it into things that did not look nor feel nor sound nor act like one’s self. discovery is not an evil child, but often that is the way one responds to it, each time round the wheel closing one’s eyes so as not to see the movement, each time the same words: for here there is no place that does not see you…

i want to begin in the clutches of magnificence as i care not for the ending, it does not hold any allure, it is always badly thought because it cannot be thought, there is no such thing as resolution and death also is no end.

and then art is still only an excuse for something else, but i keep looking for it, i keep wondering what it is i am after, i would be much happier at war, art is not war, even as it could be; but war no longer exists in the forms of my desire, the word power no longer an interesting one until it is stolen back, how does one walk all alone with no ally?

knowledge is conquest indeed, but when does the extension of knowledge and consciousness transform as conquest? where does one break the embrace of the word power with that of the word control? we have not understood the extent of the slavery under which we have put ourselves, and even the form which is the question already betrays our desire for freedom, and i have many questions, even when answers are not sought. how to forge an intimacy of power tender to the touch? a feeling of what it is that slavery is, that category of broad and ever expanding proportion, freedom is a tiny little thing that is so difficult to desire with ones heart and mind, our vocabulary would seem altogether outdated, indeed we still believe in grammar, we cannot escape our own proportions, the future does not arrive, none of the radical late-20th Century philosophy has found its was as operation, and it promised so much, it was so fundamentally intelligent, it offered to carry us so far and then it couldn’t, or it wouldn’t. if I had had a choice I would have chosen to wage war, but a war doesn’t exist for me, there is no war that has only disregard for its cause and direction, indeed whose cause and direction are simply a bi-product of an attempt to continue without the baggage of predetermination, of responsibility of one’s-self.

and so once again this is a rehearsal for something altogether different than itself, it must be, because i cannot imagine that this might be this even as it happens there is no fathoming, there is no approach to such a thing, we are both still awaiting some slippage or another, you want to place yourself right in the middle of your lightest and your darkest shades so as to grab hold of as much as possible on either side, necessity does not oppose contingency in the manner that it seems to.