Friday, August 22, 2008

Coffin in the Sky With Diamonds

If we, like Zizek, are allowed to induce precepts from several observations of a given set of cultures, may we not also hypothesize a cultural observation from a standard ceremony of that culture? Ascention should mean we suspend the dead in the sky or propell them outward past the reaches of our atmosphere. Perhaps the Roman tradition of cremation more accurately demonstrates the Christian concept of ascention, even though this practice was bannished by the church, declaring the soul of that burned body condemned to hell. Or is the heavenly conjecture wrong altogether, and the subteranian tradition (once practical, now obsolete and liably uneconomic) more an accurate metaphor to our beliefs concerning death?



Zizek proposes some contextual questions for our yet hetergeneous western culture.

Why should an author be restricted to a single genre, or a work itself be restricted to a single genre? Anne Carson plays with this question and short circuits the function of lyric and rhet?ric. We have always played critic. Unlike and like Rilke, poetry is the product of criticism: and by criticism I mean cognitively critical.



The you to which the I answers shifts face, is polytheist. A subject remains social, or cultural, as observations provide material for criticism; the social as text. The narcissism of creation explores the differentiation between the social and the subject, the universal and the particular, as demarcated by culture or tradition.



I seek an island, not a coffin. Seek the sublime subject disenthralled from the necessity of alienation. There's also the Wordsworth quote on my mother's tackboard: With the conflict of others we make war, with the conflict with ourselves, poetry. That's paraphrased. Poems are psychologicaly invested, subjectively imprisoned, confined to awaiting the oportunity of the prepared reader, the randomly matching context. We return to a poem and are shocked to be unmoved, or find a poem written years ago and cannot imagine ourselves as author. I've tried to organize them through subject or form or method of inquiry; none of which have satisfied. I believe this dissatisfaction rests in the restrictions of inquiry through a rigidly private belief system universally imposed, albeit tacitly; subtly. It seems that in order to free myself to work, I must remove the imposistion of origin, of orientation. To allow the cartesian square to disolve and allow the observations induce a random intersection of inductive angles, to not impose or lean them into eachother, and through this betrayal of causality, allow a voice to speak.

Bats or (anything with a heart and wings should fly straight)

I spy a hearse driver with a key map
a mobile blood bank towed down the freeway.
Are you trying to tell me something?
The loudest sounds on earth are inaudible to us.