Against Unity

by Travis Jeppesen on April 20, 2016

The world had its own ideas once, and now it has run out of them. This is why we love it so: it’s alive. An animal, to be sure, and lodged in the free-floating that is an apparatus we might grasp on to even while it is eating us raw.

 

Our virtues had been forgiven and forgotten, a place on the strand offered to us, whence we might withdraw, unblemished by the limits of our placedness. A stance from which we might shout. Hardened generation of time’s siftliness.

 

He saw himself as a river, and that is how it got introjected. Introjection is projection backwards, internal. Spines with strings attached, suspended from clouds. The sun gets injected into the brain.

 

It takes an entire lifetime to learn how to dream properly; in the meantime, we have the violent act of translation to carry us. The inadequacies. There is a corollary to lust here which remains perennially unexplored. Were we to traverse the possibilities, crossing them out one by one as we trespass our way through them – suddenly yr foot is stuck in the sand, so deeply there is no choice but to detach it from yr body – the process completes itself just as the shore empties of its human occupiers. Yr time, you learn eventually, belongs to the machinery of someone else’s longing; the “other” is all those who endeavor to convey yr meaning.

 

You immerse yrself in the task of definitionality: the splatter-spatialization of all languages, human and other. The symbols with their intentions, bleeding all over the climate. Two figures: Hermes Hermaphroditus. (Splatter-Sprache.)

 

We are confronted with a map of the present and it frightens us into being, a cartography too real, because within its coordinates a photographic likeness of all our mistakes has been implanted and the green of the poisoned skies hums its radiated forecasts at us – the sort of dream that won’t allow you to sleep. The body without unity. Shattered glances that become a pool for the spectators to swim in – the spectatorial pool… And now, the grayness has returned to the sky, marking out a familiarity – a rat-object known by all the rest for the shrill of its squeals. Pretty soon it will swallow what’s left of us. (Ode to a poet who was recently swallowed by death.)

 

And then time was little more than the matter the substance that we would have forgotten had we not all been there counting wasting away the idle hours that knew no heroes only the losers among us could ever succeed at fathering up to speed the low-level countenance that was, at best, a present to the heart… but too many people had had their excitement driven out of them by outside forces whose voices resounded a basso profundo an allegiance to the absolute bottom, yeah that was the thing we thought we knew when it mattered to be a collectivity, the thing to be asserted – and me, I was lost before I even got a chance to find myself, a ceramic object submerged in the sand – found by someone else, the stranger, the bomb, the loss, what was left of the feeling of love…

 

There are two artists in the mindeye of the socius’s inner rot and only two, but projection and introjection infrequently collide, and then the work that bursts out of it is an animal, and the sand I am walking upon is more alive than the foot I gave birth to in the urethral splat of godliness that is lacking a proper name.

 

“This is truly the life-force,” she said, but she was looking at someone else. He had a vagina that looked just like hers, and someone took a bath in it, there were marble ruins all around, a police officer arrived mid-submersion to inscribe an anti-signature into his labial folds in a language that cannot be spoken.

 

The lexicon consisting wholly of ambivalences. In the village whose entire architecture was constructed from word-formations, its inhabitants pathologically illiterate.

 

Which language are you currently speaking. As I stare out at the world, the language floats away. A self-broadcasting that floats. That floods. Here, on the other side of the void. In the land made of orifices. The ground swallows you as you are walking. The ground is made of god. Absent father who put you here without celebrating. Pre-selection, to be drawn upon: worldvoid. To die without thinking what’s coming next. Without thinking.

 

Why can’t life perspire in the same way I do – because there’s no true freedom, that’s why – this neo-romantic cult of the lost macho adolescent, sexless and private in his guise – arid sounds that can’t be unhatched because the shell is shattered. Fear that you might one day run out of things to die for.

 

What is death but a person to go inside, another species.

 

There is an animal inside that speaks to me in the rot’s language. When I stand in the sand and hear the sirens shrieking, I will take off all my clothes and become an inanimate object for you.

 

Life has meaning insofar as it eats our fears for us while we’re standing in the sand dreaming. Were we to translate the sky into a language you might recognize, would you actually take the time to read it?

 

For some, research entails staring at a blank white wall until it collapses.

 

Represent one kind of freedom and it is there there before you you are dying a large stone a rock having replaced yr foot and the desire to escape the knowledge that you can no longer be a part of this and everyone out there, they all want a thing from you a thing you are tired of giving, and so why go on living you ask yrself but no, perhaps that’s not it either and there you are lost once more and there are children everywhere, the dispersal, mixed variables scattered about –

 

At the end of the sun, the rain, stars raining down upon all yr fears, an ideological snowstorm of fuckography, this is not me I am not the entirety that spells out that forms a riverscape for me to collect my weepery, yeah a giant genital forecast me on top of the world and no more lies, no more victors, who is there now to represent our fears.

 

Faciality is a graveyard you can swim in. The corpses all boats of joy.

 

Inanimacy as the liberating factor. In the days before gender.

 

The hermaphrodite came over to map me. But it ended up getting mapped instead. The void was made of paper. The better to make ashes with. Erasure happens on so many levels, one has to do little more than breathe before awareness kicks in.

 

There’s my name in another language. The ache of definitionality. I want to own this day so bad. So tell me why I am speaking – to deliver a message?

 

Me in countless versions, the language of the multiple – my selves and their inherent otherness – I as an army of ghosts, I as a flood. I framed while simultaneously leaving the container: anti-signature.

 

The river bled into a sea. Actually, the sea feeds the river. The key to all this being the way in which we fall. The bottom-up direction, the reverse spill. Staring at the world is great; it makes nothing happen so lightly. Without force, speculation becomes a constancy; it never ends. Never wanted a body – just a presence. A heart so fuckless as to be pure.

 

Wake up in the haze of days, yearning to be an escaper. Dog with three heads won’t let you. He’s all quantity, no qualities. Outwit hermetic dog-god, be humanity’s savior. It’s not just a fantasy. We aren’t the products of the sunless world, the endlessness of time, the triumph of the unknowing, the light that knows no time. All the seeming that goes into each effort. Erased by a cloud of ink while three heads bark in simultaneity. Whinnying lightness: a horse that floats. Air is like water – each time you breathe, you drown…

 

Wash the blood off yr meaning.

 

My god is a dead fucker whose face has wheels on it. You need something from me? I’m gonna teach you how to be the universe’s whore. I don’t want something; I own it. No and not really; both at once. When I was a serpent, the gods were after me constantly. Yeah, I had an entire army of unknowing backing me up. Performing raids on the superfluity of the quasi-real, which is clogging all the drains. Quit fucking owning me, I will give you a prize. No one really knows for sure how deep to go; the stature of the situation we now find ourselves in. Wrench apart yr claws, the legs of you, to reveal the entrapment of the ideal. Every sex act a mapping of the impending era that has arrived in order to be destroyed.

 

From Michael Müller: Who’s Speaking? Forthcoming from Hatje Cantz, June 2016.

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