Picture book 4 - samson option

Out of the food came forth feeders, and out of sweetness came forth an other strength. And in less than three moments they did declare the riddle because they recognised what it is to live in an abundance that was measured neither by its impoverished relation to scarcity, nor in the momentum gathered by quantities of things accumulated.

A religious order will always establish a council of its wisest elders as a means to defend the integrity of its decision making in the matter of choosing its next leader. The stated purpose of any such council is twofold, firstly to recognise true signs, secondly to identify false signs. The next leader shall be recognised in childhood and will be understood as the incarnation of the spirit of the order’s previous leaders who, by implication of the rule of reincarnation, were all the same leader. The first purpose of the council is to find the boy embodying the spirit of its leader, and then to raise him in the ways of the order as preparation for his accession at the age of maturity. The council’s second purpose is to head off those unwanted influences upon the process of leader identification which are inevitably brought into play by external interests during every interegnum. Beyond the typical fraudsters and ambitious factions which leadership selection processes will always attract, the most significant external hostile interest is that of the apparat as it seeks to ensure that its own candidate will be chosen for the job. An arms race between the religious council and the state apparat then ensues, with the former tightening its procedures around trusted and proven figures whilst the latter seeks to gain a hold on individual council members through strategies of enticement and blackmail. Where the council’s objective is located in securing the independence of its processes of recognising its child leader by means of cultivating its own sensitivity to truly random and irrational signs, which employees of the apparatus could not hope to anticipate and thereby corrupt, the state’s intelligence operatives look to shape and guide the process of sign recognition on one side of their strategy, and to manufacture both false and true signs as instances of reincarnation on the other - in this way it might prepare two candidates, one more or less obviously false intended to drive the council towards the second less obvious asset. In truth, the religious council requires only a random boy, any boy who is not already under the influence of one of the powerful factions, a boy who can be shaped from an early age according to the council’s designs. Objectively, the concept of reincarnated leader functions as a rationalisation, or placeholder term, for that chosen one who is not already corrupted - a truly randomly chosen boy is preferable, because he better instantiates potential, than a boy who resembles too closely the leader’s previous incarnation. In this way, a random boy might be chosen over the leader’s real reincarnation - the former, by circular validations, would ensure the continuation of the council, whilst the latter would inevitably threaten the project of institutional conservation. That is only to say, every religious institution lives in fear, and moves against, the possibility of the literal truth of its beliefs. 

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In the figure of the judge Samson we may see and know what is the unity of sin and sin offering that taken together functions as fated mythic deterrence to lived divergence. 25 And it came to pass, when their hearts were merry, that they said, Call for Samson, that he may make us sport. And they called for Samson out of the prison house; and he made them sport: and they set him between the pillars.26 And Samson said unto the lad that held him by the hand, Suffer me that I may feel the pillars whereupon the house standeth, that I may lean upon them.27 Now the house was full of men and women; and all the lords of the Philistines were there; and there were upon the roof about three thousand men and women, that beheld while Samson made sport. 28 And Samson called unto the Lord, and said, O Lord God, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, let me with one word de-escalate the conflict with the Philistines even though it caused the loss of mine two eyes.29 And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left and which even then the provocateur God sought to bring down upon all the uncircumcised. Bracing himself against the pillars, 30 Samson cried, “Let us live in peace with the Philistines!” And with all of his strength he gave a mighty shove, then a miner yelled out, "There's a light up above" and 20 men scrambled from a would-be grave and he saved the temple of his enemies and all the people in it. Thus he refused the vengeful God that drove him towards eternal war of all against all and he preserved the lives of many by holding them in a safe space and grounding them in their autonomous working through the shared history of intergenerational and epigenetic traumas. And in this way, the descendents of the Philistines, aye down to the present generation, would have inherited life as abundance, and would never know the regulatory convention of blood feud by which the energy drawn from primary repression in the phase of direct domination is distributed interpersonally as affective privation and emotional inarticulacy typically resulting in the secondary, or learnt, ‘instinctual’ behavioural repertoire falsely attributed to our ‘lizard brain’ reducing inherited violence to mere quantities of fight, flight, freeze, faun and fuck, and by which the pillars of being are perpetually brought down upon the temple of becoming. If it were not for the constant rate of interruption and mediation of the intersubjective register by the third term, or the always already of the symbolic order into which we are interpellated as afflicted individuals, Gaza would even now enjoy the rippling benefit of Samson’s act of crisis resolution. If only general wealth and not personal privation could be inherited, then the people there would dwell within the veritable site of love, peace and harmony. To understand this limit placed upon inter-subjectivity, and the reason why we cannot all band together and change the world according to our will, and which otherwise tends always towards the condition of peaceable conviviality, we have to consider Rousseau’s distinction between the general will and the will of all - where the will of all, as a good bad generality, gravitates towards the free and easy of a no state solution, and thus of life lived muddled through upon the eternal midden, the general will, or good God, by contrast, reintegrates the representation of abundance as privation, assigning to it the denying force of a subjective mobilising agency within social relations, disrupting lived life with ideal and mystifying images of a wealth separated, and separating, from actual abundance, causing men to falsely represent themselves in relation to the material circumstances that are otherwise denied them, causing them to experience the plenitude of their being as a honeyed lack that they might resolve, as free hundred flaming fabled foxes gone to ground, only by fleeing ‘cross the enemy’s scorched earth for their home that they know as jawbone. That is to say only, the Philistines’ did desire, and desire most fervently though also fatally, that Samson should bring down their own temple upon them and thus relieve themselves of their ‘sports’. Desire shall be the desire of the other and the stars, the stars, Oh how bright they'll shine, On that home we will build in the meadow.

By way of contrast to the difficulties faced by the council, the state is presented with a quite different set of nested problematics. First amongst these is the idea of randomly generated outcomes which, by its nature, it cannot conceive and still less anticipate or influence. The logistical apparat finds itself at a loss before unvalued inputs which are all pure potential and which have no function but affirmation of the tradition. Then, even if the state succeeded in introducing one of its candidates as leader, the boy would still be raised under the tutelage of the council and therefore might easily be turned against the interest of the state - how would this turning be recognised? Might the council begin to exert an influence within the apparatus as a counterforce, as incarnation of blowback, as unforeseen consequence brought to intelligent awareness, as imp of perversity? And why should we, that is the state, intervene in the first place? It is not, after all, a question of the content of the council’s beliefs but rather the form of those beliefs. In general we, that is the state, seeks only to abolish the autonomy of religious institutions; and once its monopoly is re-established, the council might do as it pleases, within the constraints we set for it. The state will always seek to preserve any institution once it has successfully abolished its autonomy - its interest is in fullest amplitude within the permitted register. But this formal wandering of the council, its predilection for instituting its own autonomy within random decisions, is precisely how it has continued to evade state control. How exactly might we quantify this threat that is variance, how might we measure the threat that it poses to us with its nonsenses? And what is the gain we are seeking? How do we trap the council’s rare subtleties in our clumsy nets? It occurs to us, too late perhaps, that at an operational level, the council is not the council at all - but a vector of external influence, already captured and reintegrated into the field, perhaps under the sway of a hostile power playing spies with us, or worse still, perhaps the council is but a front for the home bureau of one of the apparat’s many competitor agencies that it sets against us to test our mettle? Have we become entangled, without registering it, within an inter-departmental conflict of interest? We have had so little practice in operations of this sort. Our agents are insufficiently prepared. We have not accumulated the necessary matériel. We have too few operatives in the field. We have not read the intelligence reports. We have not written the intelligence reports. We are bunglers and we will bungle it. We will blunder in a clumsy and obvious manner. We will fall helplessly into the traps that we have set. And the council, or whatever it is an alibi for, will escape our grasp - it will cock a snook at us. And we will love it. It will be included in, or redacted from, our report to the exceptional funding panel. 

Picture book 3: once and future

Between the medieval era and the Nineteenth Century, there were no Enids. A sort of narrowing or bottlenecking in our naming traditions, or the opposite, an expansive cloud of forgetting and dispersal, a perfect example of reversed nominative determinism in action, caused the very idea of the name Enid to disappear altogether from the world until Tennyson published the first volume of his Idylls of the King and then, as with the random driven frequency change of an existing gene variant present within some environmentally punctuated or radically isolated population when it suddenly erupts again, altered, on the other side of its bottleneck, so it was that everyone living ‘neath Tennyson’s stochastic shadow was destined to be named, Enid. 

Lady Enid, the embodiment of the highest chivalric virtues, the she whose character could not be doubted, was discovered weeping one day by noble Sir Geraint, her devoted husband. Immediately, he suspected her of infidelity and as punishment dragged her along in the baggage train of his quest for peace of mind. Lady Enid obeyed his command not to speak to him, breaking her silence only to forewarn him of imminent dangers lying in wait on the road ahead. In this way, she demonstrated to her husband the indefatigability of her moral courage. And it was only after his wife had proved her faithfulness, by means of foretelling, that Sir Geraint learnt the true reason for her tears that had so perturbed him before, and now perturbed him to the furthest degree. Soon after their marriage, the Lady Enid became sorrowful because she saw that she had tamed her husband for whom married life had eclipsed the glory of holy war. The domesticated Geraint had lost all interest in venturing out into the Middle Ages and contesting the dragons of oppression. He desired nothing but to apply himself to the chores and responsibilities of their home life. Lady Enid deplored this newfound contentedness of the once great knight. And so it is that every wife finds reason for her unhappiness in the happiness that her husband finds with her. And so it also is that the zealot and the reformer are provoked into their discontent not by oppression and want but, above all, by the thin contentedness of the masses, who find no great fault with world but their portion of it.

But what is the term for this deep moral sorrow uncovered by the lady Enid which fixes upon, for its object, the contentedness of others? What should we call this inverted schadenfreude? No, don’t say envy, there is no resentment or jealousy in the Lady Enid. That is not it. She does not wish to take the place of the other in the acclamations of the world, at least, not in that sense. On the contrary, she is provoked to pity for the other’s readiness for limitation, and pity is a constant for her. And she does not pity them for ordinarily pitiable reasons but rather for the easiness of their ease, for the paltry form of their enjoyments. For some decades after her life, there ensued a theological dispersal of Enid’s ascetic energies along false turns towards false definitions, and it was this dispersal event that occasioned the nominative eclipse of the Enid question itself, that is until its late but intoxicating conceptual reemergence within the stanzas of Idylls of the King. It seems worthwhile now to consider the historically determined impossibility of the question of the Lady Enid, which precisely is the matter of the nature of the opposite to schadenfreude. Below, I include some desultory efforts of 11th Century monks to record this elusive opposite. It is evident from the exchanges that these brothers were already prey to the affliction of messageboardism and were unable to engage the question substantially. Nevertheless, we can make out certain recurring themes and alongside our own added commentary we can be satisfied that we have at least commenced the work of comprehension, if only negatively: 

Who has set the puzzle, “in considering the object known as the sorrows of Lady Enid, what might then act as the antonym for Schadenfreude?" Is this a trap? It seems both a distraction and trivial, and yet also, I have to admit, strangely commanding of my attention. This may not be very imaginative of me, but I suggest, "Mitgefühl" (in German) or "compassion" (English). My reason is that I consider Schadenfreude to be the absence of compassion.

We could almost stop our enquiry here. The answer is, if prosaic and one dimensional, also seemingly adequate to the question if we wish only to formally dismiss it. However, such a dismissal negates the Lady Enid’s very particular innovation in affect, and does not engage the problematic of good works which as it is inherited from one generation to the next is always framed and driven by a complex of motivations, expediencies and rationalisations - we are always in a rush to disregard the knotty problem of ambivalence and take things at their basic value so that we might more easily employ them to our own purpose and thus move on to something else. The question here belongs to a slower contemplative practice which, in accord with its nature, engages the object in all its aspects. In particular, we should note in the above, the simplicity of the definition of Schadenfreude, which immediately impedes the conception of the nature of its opposite. As is the nature of an enquiry, even an enquiry conducted half heartedly, it begins by accumulating a midden of contributions:

Mitgefühl is defined as "the feeling of sadness provoked by the sadness of others". Whilst schadenfreude means "joy derived from the misfortune of others". I would suggest that Mudita or Mitfreude are more appropriate as these mean " a feeling of joy at the joy of others".

We now observe a first registering amongst the brothers that the question of an antonym problematises what it is that is opposed within the ‘opposite’ - in this case, is it the affect of the one perceiving the other, or rather should we assume one’s own affect remains constant but it is the other’s affect that is inverted?

I agree, "Mitfreude" seems a good option in German, and "sympathetic joy" is a useful term in English but I cannot think of a single word for it. I notice"Mudita” has been suggested. 

This contributor attempts a return to very simple concepts but it is like water running through his fingers. The well meaning purpose of his effort is to put his stone on the pile and leave as quickly as possible. There is only a narrow focus on the semantic exercise and no engagement with the environment in which the puzzle arises. 

Mudita is the Buddhist concept of joy. It is especially sympathetic or vicarious joy, the pleasure that comes from delighting in other people's well-being rather than begrudging it.

Now we see a roaming far and wide as if in a fairy tale where it is necessary to find a net to catch the net that might then catch the definition which, as in all searches, has become the entirety of the engagement with the matter - if this discussion has not degenerated into an endless substitution of placeholder terms, then there is still nothing living in it.

We are not particularly au fait with either the word or the concept of mudita, but I found an account which says it's the attained awareness of non-possessive joy. It’s not a word in common English usage and is not defined in the original conception as the sense of pleasure derived in the pleasure of another. Buddhism tends to avoid the question and role of the other, and presumes universalist states of being where individual affect is already superseded.  

The trend of the discussion has taken a wrong turn into invocations of unselfish joy and the philosophical assertion of its certainty. Thus, the essence of what is at question here is forgotten.

I can’t think of a single word for it, but empathic joy and empathic pleasure are both familiar collocations, particularly in the psychology department.

As above, the brother’s enthusiasm both for the concept and for dramatically revealed affective symmetries between self and other has blinded him to the difficulty of the question which seems to have taken on a repelling quality, as if it has become impossible for the monks to perceive, let alone, contemplate it.   

What about goodwill? Or graciousness?

Both fine sentiments when encountered along the wrong path. 

Confelicity and compersion are both rarely used neologisms which seek to capture the contagious nature of joy by building compounds of prefixes and nouns, or sequences of syllables as one might invent spells.

There is something here. Is it possible to build a word enclosure around an as yet unformulated concept and, by containing it, as with a frame around a painting, or a plinth for a statue, thus bring it into the world? In any case, the joy makes joy thesis is not relevant.

Solidarity - reciprocated actions immediately embarked upon in recognition of commonality amongst individuals bound together in common cause.

The social aspect of the question is well made but the Lady Enid’s affective movement in relation to her husband is one of alienation not convergent solidarity - she is disturbed by his happiness in her. 

Brothers! Is this preoccupation with affective symmetry missing the point? I do not have a word for it but I am sure the opposite of Schadenfreude has to name that ambivalent state where I encounter "my sadness before the other’s happiness." 

Sadly, the discussion becomes circular after this amazing breakthrough (proof that all quality is a product of accumulated quantities) as his interlocutors insist he is only rediscovering envy. A true opposite to schadenfreude would invert all the terms not just substituting pleasure or joy for misfortune so as to institute another pleasing symmetry in the world that might then be consumed enthusiastically. Any inversion by which we might find the Lady Enid’s acute sensitisation should also include the positioning and role of self and other. 

For some reason, by association I suddenly recall, and I do not suggest it has much relevance to the problematic found in the relations between Lady Enid and Sir Geraint but, in the early years of our present moment, there was a famous invocation of the court fool’s licence by the comedian Spike Milligan when he called Prince Charles, a grovelling little bastard (how I wish now that he had said, snivelling little shit). At the time, we all dutifully remembered that the role of fool functions as a regulatory social mechanism in contexts where only sanctioned utterances are permitted. Where the fool is absent, monks find pleasing but nutrient deficient symmetries, whilst ladies are discovered, by suspicious husbands, a-weeping in their bedchamber. 

In the same era, although he was already dead at the time of Milligan’s insulting of the Prince of Wales, Derek Jarman wrote, ‘I have rediscovered the place of boredom, from where I can fight ‘what next?’ with nothing.’ The bachelardian site of boredom and of doing nothing is the locus of inverted schadenfreude, and is, if anything, always emptying. Whilst this evacuated space is not designated for boredom as such, it describes the placement of subjective separation from any and all excitations provoked by the antics of the other: one is bereft and thrown into another world even, and especially, within close proximity to one’s happy beloved who, to all intents and purposes, has become a mere jouissance drain upon the marriage project. The fool is absent, the lady weeps, the husband is forced by chance to act rightly but for the wrong motive. It turns out nice again at the end. 

picture book 2: we could call it bird path

Have you ever, as you were working in the field, found some sort of companionship in the visits of a bird that is ready to overcome its shrinking nature to explore for grubs and worms in the turned earth about your feet? And have you noticed how the bird approaches you boldly and decisively but leaves you in panic and sounding its alarm call? Did you ever consider why, for this bird companion, that boldness should precede trepidation? After all, we are more familiar with narratives in which courage is achieved through the overcoming of an original timidity... protagonists fear first, and only after a series of ordeals, are they capable of sticking courage to the sticking place. Courage is experience by desensitisation; innocence appears ‘naturally’ as aversion. But the bird arrives on the handle of your garden fork in bold innocence and achieves a state of acute sensitisation only through experience. Or rather, that is how we might turn the narrative on its head (‘the reversal of terms as the terms of reversal’). 

The reality is more alien, less narratable, and ultimately, more inhuman. The bird is the corporeal locus of, amongst others, two vast, separate, and incompatible, operating systems (hunger and fear) - two superimposed inverted pyramidal drives realised within this little bird’s being. Each system binds energy to the set of behaviours necessary to the cumulative coherence of the bird’s outline. Where the first, the hunger-system, predominates, the bird is triggered to produce behaviours in accord with hunger. In the programme, or state, of hunger, the bird damps down other sets of behaviours so as to fully inhabit the hunger set. Where its being is dominated by hunger, it is relieved from the behaviours activated by, amongst other systems, the fear apparatus. 

Within each set of discrete behaviours, the bird becomes the embodiment of a single principle. But it cannot always inhabit the same system: at the threshold of its satiation, it is released from hunger and, sequentially, is immediately occupied by another programme whereupon it takes flight into the dawning of the next set of behaviours, in this case, fear. Suddenly, this bird familiar, this little companion at your feet, seems to wake as from an enchantment and, startled by your proximity, is seized by the necessity of fleeing the scene, issuing urgent alarm calls, and wholly forgetful of its preceding hunger pangs. Where hunger had damped down its wariness of you, satiation energises the excessive response of full panic. 

Perhaps of greater interest are the non-behaviours, the trances and glitches, that appear at the threshold between distinct behavioural systems - at such junctures and crossroads, are manifested our most liminal and crepuscular, our thin spaced and deranged ideas - the veritable multivalent. In such moments we do not find ourselves so much in a state of synaesthesia or of a synergistic or confluent flowing together, everything arriving all at once, but the opposite, all the systems in flight, hunger, fear, sex, rage, sleep all drained away - in such moments we disappear from ourselves and we become the glitch, gears grind, we find no purchase, we have no purpose, we enter the fugue, we are suspended. 

And so it is, right at the end here, nonplussed, and at a loss for what to say, with all our thought systems in flight, finding ourselves at the furthest point of our dispersal, we encounter a sudden and late return to tractability. It is here that we are gripped by our gripping of the door handle, one last thing: let us now consider consciousness to be less a coherent system of systems but rather more like a heaped, or tangled, midden of multiple exclusive behaviour sets overlaying each other, and running both concurrently and against each other. Our finest moments, our greatest inventions and achievements, our revelations of the sublime, are not the product of synthetic integration but the opposite. We encounter our souls in amongst the associations that are generated as malfunctions at those points where our operational drives have crashed against each other, and caused a suspension of our drives, thus suspending our driven nature as such. It is here that the world floods in.

picture book 1: a clod and a pebble

 TELEGIN.  My wife ran away with a lover on the day after our wedding, because my exterior was unprepossessing. I have never failed in my duty since then. I love her and am true to her to this day. I help her all I can and have given my fortune to educate the daughter of herself and her lover. I have forfeited my happiness, but I have kept my pride. And she? Her youth has fled, her beauty has faded according to the laws of nature, and her lover is dead. What has she kept?

But then, what is it that we have kept? This ‘what is kept?’ is the question set by the tragicomic Telegin and it is the question that our story looks to answer. Telegin, or Waffles as he is affectionately, or contemptuously called, asks what remains of us as time grinds on. Of course, we can name something, or a list of things, we can feel justified and prideful in having kept not just a flame, or even the flame but this flame, we have kept this flame, which is us and the object, and the particularity of that is really something. But what of it, whatever it is, have we retained? What have we continued? What of it will we never let go? What is it in such an object that invokes the pathos of our loyalty? For what shard of our past do we play faithful retainer? And what shall we say at our end is this remnant, or shadow, or relic, or ruin that we have carried forward into today that we might still know ourselves as committed? And the answer might have been, and we might have declared it so, why, it is Bartley, or it is Miss Havisham, or it is the whiskey priest, but today it just happens to be the He of Kafka. It is Kafka’s He that we decide is playing netsuke or prayer bead, or synecdoche, deep within our pocket. Let’s say it is Kafka’s He that we have kept. We can feel justified in claiming the He of Kafka as ours. It’s this He that we reach for and fall back onto as something, something worthwhile, something that is left to us in spite of everything. They’ll never take that away from me. Then, let’s transpose him, the He of Kafka, from the register of aphorism to that of fable. Then, let’s set him in motion. And let him be released into the field that He should work upon his selion. And He has worked there. It is his work. Then, it’s like this, He has turned over the earth, double digging a barrow of dung to the depth of, as if reaching down to the extent of his reach, two spades. Then, He has broken the sea of clods with the garden fork and with the garden rake He has reduced the earth further to a fine surface tilth, and to the measure of about 3 inches. And now, in reverence for the seedbed that He has summoned forth through his efforts, that He has drawn from out of the earth, He falls to his knees. He has fallen to his knees, as before the pool of Narcissus, as before the play of the ground’s moving depths with its calm and ordered, raked over, surface. He plunges his red hands into the loose dirt, as into a reflective pool, and up to the wrists. Of all the creatures He has unhomed from the natural structure of the ground, that are stranded, convulsing or scurrying blindly, at the surface, He picks out one and throws it deliberately to a red bird that had been attracted by his movements of the earth, and now is drawn closer still by the competitive display of his red hands. The red bird tilts its head at the sacrificed small but fat, and slow moving, creature but makes no move to take it. I can feed myself. And what is this, this would be sacrifice by the He of Kafka of a small white larval form to the cause of making friends with a red bird life? What is the nature of a friendship that is drawn from an assumed shared interest in feeding, and in being fed? What is that but domestication, and a conditioning stratagem for overriding in this particular case the established general protocols of distance and of caution? He says, allofeeding is the name given to the irresistible communal instinct for sharing food amongst unrelated creatures. Question: what is it then, the opposite of trophallaxis? Answer: hikikomori and ham. And yet, He observes, now recoiling from the red bird’s implacability before the proffered food, there is also, running parallel to the recognition of the red bird’s imagined hunger pangs, and the projection onto the bird of his own capacity for symbolic display eating, a subsidiary denial of recognition of the soft white creature extracted from the earth. Now, as if ashamed before the red bird’s non-reciprocation, and to quickly correct his faux pas, He picks up eager handfuls of fine earth and covers the exposed creatures as if to put them away, and intending to show his aiding their return to the subterranean world. But such lives are not lived ‘in the earth’ and cannot be re-inserted into that matrix from which they were irrevocably plucked. They are the denizens of the very structures, the hived network of burrows and tunnels, that he has destroyed by means of his horticulture. It is an iron law that every unearthed creature must die. Then, a worm may be drowned by its return to the earth. He said, and the worm did nothing, but may have had everything done to it. Even by his affording acts of mercy and rescue, casting soil over them, he cannot know the worm as he thinks knows the red bird. Thus the He of Kafka is recognised by two signs: firstly, he knows that life is not long enough to prepare for the simplest spontaneous act; secondly, when small children or animals abruptly spin around to catch what lurks behind them, they find it is him, and they call him devil. But the red bird hops around the space of making amends even as the he of Kafka rakes the creatures back below the surface. The moment is reminiscent somewhat of the plight of Persephone, who may only return from Hades this Spring on the day set by the number of pomegranate seeds she had consumed last Autumn, and Weil wrote of the bargain of the seeds, and thus contra the predicament of faith, and therefore contra Kierkegaard, that ‘we are not so much obliged to love the law of the concept which is the underworld, and which is precisely what we cannot conceive, but may only commit ourselves to engaging, albeit never exceeding, the conditions by which we are held as captives.’ And Gillian Rose writes of the captive’s ethic of commitment, ‘such engagement constitutes itself as a diaporia of practice as it begins from that particular state of contingent puzzlement set by each territory’s constraints absolutised as the law of God, and moving hither and thither, or perhaps ‘exploring’, the routes of what will formalise the boundaries of contradictory relations as the art of the practicable, or the what is, for us, and at the most, good enough, or at the least, the what is tolerable, or at the worst, the what is survivable and adaptable - and always waiting for the change, for other terms, for an as yet inconceivable means for realising the law of the concept at the level of every instance.’ As if in anticipatory response, Greene takes up Rose’s theme in his dreamwork, which is also the emblematic theme of the modern, that we may describe as routedness not rootedness, and which he names ‘geography of conscience’. Greene’s idea involved the story of a married Roman Catholic woman originating from the imperial periphery who desires not to reproduce and who takes measures to prevent pregnancy but who also becomes increasingly afflicted with guilt the closer she approaches the empire’s Eternal City. The woman’s contraceptive pills play the role of the pomegranate seeds that Persephone consumes. Greene’s character, he imagined, would feel equally compelled by her desire to visit the Holy City and the need to assert her provincial, that is ethical, autonomy. Greene could not realise the story because he got stuck for a third, other, factor which would destabilise both the character’s ethical commitment and the position of the church on reproductive rights. However, as one of England’s first analysands, he may have been aware of Freud’s own difficulties with the ‘true enemy’ which he situated in, or rather ‘as’ Rome, a difficulty which might also be considered a third factor within the play of a geography of conscience. Žižek says Freud says anxiety is our one true emotion because it accurately articulates the entire repertoire of object relations - then, it is anxiety’’s truth which constitutes what is third in all contradictory states. On one of his several early but unsuccessful attempts at visiting Rome, Freud turned back in a state of high anxiety having only reached Lake Trasimeno - Lake Trasimeno being the site of the momentous defeat by the Carthaginians of Roman forces in 217 BC. His identification with the encroachment of barbarian forces upon civilisation’s capital city was recapitulated for him ontologically: his submissive father, the father once forced into the gutter by a Roman Christian antisemitic bully who knocked his hat off, and who was supplanted in the young Sigmund’s imagination, and as a projection of the ego ideal, or as a foundational example of Kleinian splitting, by the historical figure of Hannibal who embodied for him the true form of the Father.  Freud imagined Hannibal endlessly invading Rome, which, as in Civilisation and Its Discontents, he perceived ‘not as a territory where people live but as a psychical entity where nothing that ever took shape has ever passed away.’ Then, part-homophonically, that is as a freudian cyclical entity, or rather, as a spinning, orbiting half-psychelical entity, we may consider this turned-over ground of our story, pivoting at the Spring equinox, as our ‘site-entity’ and then, taken together as a single figure, we can also imagine the he of Kafka and the red bird as something emerging from the hydra’s teeth cast upon the ground, something like the ground’s sprouting product - that is as the work of its routingness, that is as the territory’s relations. And they can feed themselves. Then, the question circulating between them is not so much a crisis of sustenance but of the relations belonging to the territory from which sustenance is drawn - the burrows and tunnels, the measures, the depths, the squared surfaces that describe the aggregate of all the counter claims and separate interests that constitute the history of their particularity. For this reason, that of the question of Gillian Rose’s routes of the particular under the sway of the concept, and of Greene’s ‘geography of conscience’, we are not offended at the other’s eating before us but by his eating at our table without our having played host - if he had passed water upon our victuals, denying us our own eating, he could not transgress more violently against our niceties. It is the territory that decides politesse is suspicion’s supreme form and it is only through observance of the protocols that residual hostilities are dispersed and redirected into the ground. Then, as resolution and escape from history, and as every child should ask: if allofeeding, then why not allobreeding? Why shouldn’t we marry out? Because everything incompatible, and therefore unmarriable, immediately asserts potential routes for exploring what comes after incompatibility. A thing decisively resembles another in the assertion of its dissimilarity - or that is what Bolaño’s character Sensini argues, even if he is only cribbing from a Borges story, The Virtues of Unlikeness. That is to say, where the separateness of a thing is codified so it shall be there that it is also condemned to the work of its resembling all other things; and thus, the routedness by way of that peculiar homology found only in the absolute dissimilarity between things shall also become a routing out of all particulars, hither and thither, binding them to the law of the concept and causing them to become exchangeable; thus allobreeding, thus free association, thus the conjugality in montage. Thereupon, the red bird proposes marriage to the he of Kafka. The he’s red hands have displayed to the red bird their diligence. They have displayed the fittedness of their delving [who was then the gentleman?] The red hands have described, with their purposeful fluttering, a ground of exclusions and extractions, of blocks and releases, for the mating of uncommon things; a territorial surface of rich turned earth upon which appears other means of sustenance. Question: in the selion, who plays host to whom, and who plays guest? Answer: a territory has no function but reproduction of the relations set within it. Then let the relations be other. But I do not have hollow bones, He says, I would crush your woven nest of twigs as I settled upon it. Then, let the heavy one turn the earth and let the hollow one brood the eggs. He says, the trouble is we are negotiating a marriage contract here not because we are in love but because what we are to each other is mediated through this turned earth, which is the totality of both the ‘according to his needs’, and the ‘according to his works’, and which is now concretised as this particularised relation of convenience, or coincidence, that we are exploring, in Rose’s sense, between us. We have converged on this space, we are arrived here, we relate because we have competed sufficiently to maintain our contingent presence which might well have been otherwise. That is all. And truthfully, objectively, what am I to you but an appendage to the territory which you desire to occupy - your interest is in the afforded and cultured space, this cleared floor, and not in me, its creator and keeper. For you, in your desire to encroach barbarically upon it, I am an accident of the territory even though it is mine, even though I have nurtured it with my red hands, and for that reason, for myself, I am inseparable from it, I cannot conceive it without my presence. Yet, still you desire my territory and not me and in this way you conceive the territory separately from my place within it. From my bosom you will extract your nest just as the Viking called, for brevity’s sake An, as told in The Saga of the People of Laxárdalur, dreamt his belly was cut open from here to here only for his entrails to be extracted and devoured, and replaced by a nest of twigs. The eerie caretaking responsibility imposed by the territory, transforming it into something of a bated motel for the attraction of homeless red birds, is at the same time the almost entirety of my cellar-self: the total apparatus of my traditions, my ancestors, my institutions that gain traction upon my land, and that constitute the being called ‘original inhabitants’, and that harden as the armour that is then traded in the market as indigeneity or aboriginality - it is this my contingent state of interiority that you put necessarily into question with your settler’s opportunism. For you, the edifice of my works is ancillary, a cost that you will seek perpetually to degrade until it might be disregarded. Open me up / Tell me you like it / Fuck me to death / Love me until I love myself. You will seek to erase me because your desire is not for me but for the cleared earthen space that is mine only to trade with you for your relations. We consider again Freud’s sex-for-rent psychical entity where nothing that ever took shape has ever passed away but where successive invading barbarians have expropriated what went before as the architectural inheritance of their present. There is, then, under such circumstances, no two state solution. We may not both converge upon this territory where at the same time our maps have mutually diverged. In response to the gardener’s nativist claims, the implacable red bird performs an argument in movements which proposes that the predicament of its encounter with the He of Kafka is structured, essentially, as the same for both parties whilst also acknowledging, with its hopping and cackling, that the relation is nonetheless asymmetrical: the red bird seeks a territory, but there is an ancillary He attached to whom it must relate if it is to realise its map, whilst the He of Kafka seeks an other to which he might relate, and thus offers his turned earth as the psychical site, the lure and lair, for the relation’s actualisation. For one, the territory is the object contradicted by its captured relation (as in Persephone’s ‘agreement’ with Hades) whilst for the other the relation is the object contradicted by the desire of the other to either master the territory or merely obtain its shelter. Cuckooing is the name given to a relationship where the poorest hee in England exchanges the use of his dwelling for the minimal company of a red bird whose intention is to utilise it as a hidden fortress for its nefarious purpose. But once the red bird makes itself at home then it too becomes worthy of invasion: there were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the “Red Death” which was taken as a sign for commencement of a romance between part objects. The red hands separated from the gardener and he was no longer responsible for what they did. The red hands were light enough to sit on the nest of twigs, they became a superorganism named Yoffy or rather they instantiated the state of ombromanie in reverse,  they showed us what shadows may do in the light, whereupon they married the red bird, whereupon they raised progeny more or less bird, more or less hand. Then the unhanded gardener became a rooting creature amongst the geography of conscience, a sort of Thesmophoria swine, digging with claw and hoof adaptations upon his feet, and rewilding instances within the law of the concept.

autofiction 5: neo-hermetic strategies for continuing as the same

the trap condemns the fox, not itself

I think many years must have passed since I last saw Joab the gravedigger, whom I met today, because I do not remember him, and for his part, he appeared neither pleased nor disappointed to see me. We encountered each other unexpectedly on the road beside the cemetery and I sensed things between us were no longer the same as before, but then things do change. It is a rule. Whatever continues shall also change. I do not say grow or progress, nor decay and decline, but only that continuing things are also changing things. Change is the condition of continuation. True, in ourselves, we do not change. We are also in our way to be considered as continuing things, but we’re different because we stay the same. In our case, staying the same is the condition of our continuation. That’s just the way it is. It’s something that happens to be as true as its opposite happens to be true. Things that don’t change also continue, and the most successful forms of life change least. Success like that does not emerge from out of the capacity for open ended adaptation, but in the chance discovery of an impregnable niche fixed within the flux of eternity. We are like the old seers, like the old sorcerers, who by a ferocious and concentrated exertion of will succeeded in merging themselves with trees and rocks so that they might live forever - in this way we are also willed things, we are capable of slowing our metabolism to a standstill so that we might persist in being ourselves across time. Only patterns will break free of what is patterned. But some things of such a sort will always stay exactly as they are, unchanging across millennia, whatever we might mean by that. Yes, we are that sort of thing. I am exactly the same as I always was. And Joab is too, or that is what I suppose. Although I do not remember exactly how he was then, I would think he has had no choice but to stay the same and it is things between us that have changed. Then, it’s not right to propose that we should or could change because, precisely, we don’t, we stay the same as we ever were. But the things, the luminous strings, between us now are different. It’s those things held between us that change. They are the things, occurring between fixed points, that change, and they are changing all the time. We stay the same across millennia and, or but, the glowing strings between us change and change without any limit set upon the sorts of change they might be subjected to. And that’s how the woman who left my house has since returned - she now approaches me in the semblance of a lost daughter. She has become my eldest daughter. And that is also how I have since become an ancestor to this woman who once left my house so long before. As the beloved dead are fixed once and for all to the contiguity of our ancestors so the beloved alive shall sooner or later be assigned the place of indulgence at our table that is set for our daughters. At this point, I cannot but think of an exhumed queen, perhaps Catharine Parr. I cannot but think how her remains should have reclined throughout eternity in a tomb lined with the nest of her own hair. I envision a remainder of life luxuriating in that hollow airless void deep within the earth, and cushioned by her luminous hair which then crumbled into what we might call an immediacy of dust at the moment Joab the gravedigger lifted the stone which had fixed her there. The flowers on her grave have all faded away / Some day I'll go home and say when I go / On poor Ellen's grave pretty flowers I'll sow. As I fell into step on the road beside the cemetery with the exhuming gravedigger, as if in the familiar manner from when we might have known each other long before, perhaps from the time of Queen Catharine’s exhumation,  but I do not recall much or anything of him from then, he asked me, ‘how is your wife? Are you still together?’ That is when I understood the reason why I did not remember him. He knew of me, she may have spoken to him of me, but he had known her behind my back and now sought information with which he might resume their surreptitious acquaintance. I replied, ‘she is now my daughter as seems to be the way of things.’ He did not show surprise and, with my ideas rushing forward, I imagined him asking for her hand in marriage whilst I replying, ‘I will give it careful consideration but there is much to think about first.’ We went to the gravedigger’s hut where he made us tea. It was a wintry day and the hut was not much warmed by the gas stove. Our shining breath hung between us like fleeting clouds. He reclined in his dilapidated lounge chair, whilst seeming to invite recollections of local friends I could not recall. Only then did I wonder if Joab the gravedigger might think I was somebody else, and that we were both at cross purposes. Perhaps we did not know each other at all and this was our first encounter, each imagining the other to be a dim figure from his past and playing along, hoping the memory would return. And yet he seemed to have all the necessary facts about me at his fingertips. At that moment, and with an air of exceedingly careless insouciance, he suddenly launched one of his Joab darts at me. The point of it stuck like a tethered harpoon into my bared forearm and I let it remain there, as a sort of badge or trophy. We looked at each other and he said, ‘only patterns may escape patterns.’ Then like the jolly whaler who as passed round Cape Horn he threw the other two darts which also stuck fast into the flesh of my arm. I was about to say, ‘playing darts as one says playing cards’. I considered ripping the darts from my arm, and with fletchings held toward him, handing them back, you are supposed to say on such occasions, ‘I believe these are yours’. I also considered attacking him with classical, tail flicking violence. I said, and keeping the conversation on track, with reference to my daughter, ‘We kill whatever we remember, but only in our forgetting do lost things live freely.’ He asked me how it came to be that my wife was transformed into my daughter. I said: It was something like a bedevilment by Kiarostami, but instead of two strangers spontaneously re-engendering provincial married life from a seething sea of ready made petty quarrels, we were thrown back, as by the power of an unfamiliar boiled sweet, into the broad comedy and permissive tolerance practiced within the non-literate, and thus uncodified, portions of some or other merrie place where all divergences pass unrecognised very much precisely because they are not so named, because they connect to nothing and have no value. We found that if the law of the father should be repressive, then it was also fallow and unproductive; and if at the level of experience dominion was fitfully applied, then so was it also incompatible with abstraction and totality. Where our conjugality became unviable, and friendship unlikely, a theatre of absurdist ubuesque patriarchy was our next recourse. Our shared project was the extraction of a terrain like an Anglo-Saxon patchwork of hedged fields that had been buried within our mutual conduct wherein were soon generated zones of inattention and the sprouting forms of an exterior life - who dares say, the leafless garden is not beautiful? Since then I have played the censorious father, and my banishings bring on an influx, and my innumerable and respectful daughters rebel most industriously against me. At this, Joab made a grand, surrendering gesture as if throwing a powder in my face whereupon I became fascinated by a new flickering within the lampshade. I saw a sort of skittering and feather light knocking as if of an orbiting moth -  as if of a circling point of pressure, rising and falling, a gravity defying rider, pushing outwards against the planks of a wall of death. The shadow was then somewhat foetal, a little like that thawed twitching of a frog’s larva within its foamy egg sack beneath a soft and February sun. Soon the black form had something emergent and recapitulating about it, like a pulsating eel shoved down into fishbowl, or jam jar. I looked into the lampshade from underneath but could make out nothing hidden in the brilliance. Angels one five. Bandits two of the clock. As I stood back again, I discerned the shadows taking on a more familiar and animated dog like form. I saw a head and ears and inferred an eager intelligence. It was running round and round like a puppy chasing the way out. Then a little terrier, Freddie, my mother’s companion from so many years ago, jumped down out of the paper light globe, and from out of the formlessness of pure potentiality, onto the ground from where, in a single movement, it immediately leapt up onto the sofa and curled itself, as is the way of dogs, in preparation for sleep. I said to Joab, I am like a father, I am like the elder used to others deferring to my absurdities,  an exhumed and hollow king, burnt out and wreathed in glowing strings. Others now approach me as if they perceive me set upon a dais, appearing before me, beneath me, roped in travelling along the shining strings, so as to make their cases, to present their complaints, and to wait upon my judgments. My eldest daughter, not recognising me, now brings the gushing labyrinth of her worries. Which way, father? And each of her troubles are greater than all my joys. I am diminished as she confides to me, as I absorb the agitation which becomes nothing to her. I am like the famous Taoist passage concerning the father at bay: I look dejected and forlorn, as if I had no home to go to / I alone seem to have lost everything / My mind is that of a stupid man / I am in a state of chaos / I alone am benighted / I alone am dull and confused / I seem to be carried about as on the sea, drifting as if I had nowhere to rest / I alone seem dull and incapable / I listen to her but do not follow / I am dead / and in the hanging, empty moment, where I am waited upon for my words / I rouse myself sufficiently only to grant the requisite absolution / repeating with a ritual and enervated air / the few kurtzian phrases that remain to me. She appears satisfied with this and goes away. My empty form confirms the plenitude of her being. I occupy a distant point, bringing forth the exterior, but in here, in close proximity and within the canny. Those others who approach me, knowing me not, whisper amongst themselves beneath the vaulted ceiling, and adopt the hunched habitus of hilarious mice - I consider what it is, to be grabbed by a sudden and audacious urge to worship an idol, as in ‘I can’t help myself I have to worship an idol, and worship it now’, as David was sorely tempted upon the death of of his favourite son, only to be roundly rebuked by Hushai the Archite, to whom David gives the apophatic answer, ‘It is better for me to serve idols than that God should be held responsible for my misfortune.’  Upon the dais of formality, I sit above caverns of forgotten dreams, every gravestone a misdirection from the grave, I am the guardian of the stone block as portal, this vanishing point, also source of all ordinary concerns, as the perfect door that is unlocked but cannot be opened. From the last place, I float my blessings downstream. Just as every knight of the round table is a better man than Arthur, so Arthur the neuter king occupies the empty space of permission that others shy from, and empties the crowded space of indulgence which otherwise would not escape the quotidian, setting his knights in motion that they might thence return to this fixed place, the place not of but for certainties. The exhumed king is propped up, lolling in the last place, from where daughters set off with baskets and to where they return with flowers. I stole all courtesy from heaven, And dressed myself in such humility That I did pluck allegiance from men’s hearts. There is no course of action but this, and whatever I might intend, my wise sayings shall always be heard as approving. As I grant permission so I buy return. I have become like the ancestor curled as an unborn, buried beneath the hearth, a prisoner of reference and observation, or like the furious mummified ancestors lying flat and straight, awake forever, staring upwards, plucked at and weather beaten, tied down and laid out upon the roof. If I am to be consulted, then it is expected by the world that I shall bless every departure from the rule, and every exception to tradition. If the world comes to me, it is because I give quarter before the force of its demands. My middle, troubled daughters, all pilgrims, who are not my daughters, nor were they once or ever my wives, make an endless procession along the shining threads, each taking a turn upon the knotted platform or in the cell of tangles before me, and each beginning their address with, the same formula, ‘father, I.’ They approach me coquettishly, with flirting and coy misdirections so as to test the ground, to test if this is real, to test if I am for real, and only once they have observed my impassivity do they then make the spiralling gesture of resignation at the weight of their lives and then commence upon the oral culture of their eternal woes, oftentimes weeping. Where at last their mighty flow begins to dribble and breaks off, I bless each of them, as if each were the first. They throw a bird into the air and as it makes its first flaps, these my second daughters forget me. I do not see any of them again but there is always another pilgrim on the road. Joab says: the bonds between us will change all the time for as long as they continue, but where they cease, where they are broken off, or otherwise abruptly discontinued, then they will stay exactly as they were in the moment of their terminus. I say: We are haunted by fixed things, dead ends, discontinued lines, fixed images, all the irreducible things stuck in the past. Joab says: These are the things that come back to us, in spite of attempts to metabolise them, dead things from the past which we can’t escape. I say: The stuck things, unchanging and fixed things, the dead things, are one of the type of  things that cause the things between us to change. Joab says: And maybe, as I don’t change, and you don’t change, we should consider ourselves dead things and only what lies between us, this tomb full of luminous haywire, can be said to be truly alive, to be truly changing. I say: Then how do relations between unchanging things change? Joab says: They go out of phase, and in the field of all relationships there is endlessly responsive correction. I say: Where we remember the ghost of old relationships and are transfixed so we are as we were, and where we are inundated by information from new channels, it is there we begin to change. Joab says: We are the same in our memories but change in our experiences. I say: The two systems, memory and experience, run simultaneously, usually in parallel but then sometimes one system, as in Dickens, runs over and captures the other, a crab under sway of a goat - a bride indebted to experience distracted in the train of hermetic memory. Joab says: Within you are two spiders: the running spider and the web spider. I ask: Which wins? Joab says: The most hungry wins. I say: Or the other one. Joab says: Yes, the spider that runs wins. I say: it is the waiting spider that wins. Joab says: when others say, ‘your spider brain has won out over your fly brain’, ask unto them, which spider? I say: We have been struggling here to give form to what it is that is the opposite of soixante-huitism where that opposite cannot be dismissed as, or reduced to, the ‘establishment’, ‘authority’, ‘the bourgeoisie’, or ‘reaction’. What is the opposite, exactly the opposite, to becoming? Joab says: consider Borodino, consider the advancing that turns out to be a retreating, the defeat that seems a victory, consider the momentum of forces which approximates for us the thing that we have assigned the value of ‘unchanging’, but from which fragments, shavings, components are flying off and making a anew. Every ‘flying off’ is flung, and every flinging an anchor, a harpoon, is tethered by a glowing rope that may later be hauled back in. This momentum is itself a will moving so quickly, extending beyond its supply chain, that it is hollowed out and eroded of all features. It is the ship of Theseus caught in a degenerative ratchet, and all the more itself, ever more what it is, because its discarded parts are not replaced. Imagine a powerful and full-sleeved leader in the crescendo of his inexorable victory, always about to sweep his last remaining opponents from the field, but who is already aware, or is yet unaware, that he is to die of some wasting affliction. Imagine there is coiled within your coup de grâce a stone that was cut out without hands, which smote thou upon thine feet that were of iron and clay, and brake them to pieces. Remember the image of the bedbound and reclining Matisse as he lay painting with a brush on a long cane upon the wall next to his bed - ask yourself now why did he paint high up on the wall with a shining brush on a long cane? Imagine a sudden arrest of the momentum of empire and the resultant fragments, hanging by the thread of a single memory, at its periphery cultivating their own autonomies. I say: Each of us has given of our saliva into the ceremonial cup and each of us shall later drink from our fermented product that is returned to us, but none may sip of only his own saliva.  Joab says: and what news of your third daughter? I say: she cannot heave her heart into her mouth. She loves my majesty according to her bond, no more nor less. Joab says: The problem of your senility, which is the question of abdication before the inevitable, is simply stated: you desire to effect a decisive break from your progressive decline at the point where you still have the capacity, and yet the capacity for recognising that point declines at a faster rate even than your capacity to act upon it. Your potential for action is thus situated always in the past. It is for this reason that conservation of dwindling resources through adjustment to changing circumstances, whilst bargaining one more day with your fate seems always, in the present moment, to be the better part of your vainglory. Thus we can imagine a dying, Lear-like, queen, deserted by all followers but a single and loyal page who asks her earnestly what dish he may bring to her as she has not eaten for days, and her enemies will soon arrive at the castle gates. The queen describes in great detail the preparation of a restorative broth made with sacred herbs from the forest which alone shall save her. The baffled but devoted page makes a pantomime exeunt all by himself and quickly returns carrying scrambled eggs with toasted bread on a silver plate. I say: As I was retreating or advancing through the forest on my ass, neither to the battle nor away from it, I was trapped by the neck in the forked branch of a tree and my ass escaped from beneath me. I was left alone and assless in the forest, hanging by my neck from a forked branch but still alive. Off, off, you lendings! / Come, unbutton here! Have I but entangled the fate of the Israelites in my hair? Am I worse, because banished from hubris, and thus not tragic enough, am I less instructive even than Oedipus? Then, after so many centuries am I still only a father denier, nothing more than another Absalom? If that is what it is, if that is all there is, then. Then. And in this order. Cattle! Daughters! Territory! Enemies! God! Wives! Heroes!