cyricangoing - Wullker’s epistle to Stullker

From, Wullker, poor servant of thresholds

To, the Venerable Stullker, sainted of another country 

Adhesions 10: box, mask, goat

They broke down a part of the wall for him to enter: a city which could produce such citizens had no need of walls to defend it. - CLR James

1

There came to Jesus a woman with an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and as he sat eating with the disciples, she poured it on his head. When they saw it, they were offended and said, what is the use of this wastefulness? We could have sold the ointment and given the money we raised to the poor. When Jesus heard them he said, why insult the generosity of this woman? She has given more than any who gives alms to the poor. They give sustenance but she gives beauty. For ye think only of the prosaic work of virtue but she hath poured this ointment which is the transcendent value that negates the limits of your pieties. Verily I say unto you, wherever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, what this woman hath done shall be included and it shall be told as a memorial of her. Then he said, Caesar may be overthrown but not now, and not by us. And poverty may be abolished but not through our giving. Then he asked them, why are we gathered here? And he said, the woman called Salome has shown us, the kingdom is in the alabaster box. Upon hearing these words, one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests. And he said unto them, what will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you? And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver and Judas went to give this money to the poor. Judas said, God gives riches into my right hand, palm upwards, and with my left hand, palm downwards, I give that to the poor. I am the intermediary and what is to be given to them shall be given first to me.  And Thomas went away from the others and spake with the woman just as Jesus took Judas aside and spake unto him of the mystery of the kingdom, not because he would go there but because he would grieve for his absence from it. Thomas said to the woman, called Salome, my friend, this is the first time in the world, the very first time in the history of the world, where one has looked, as you have looked, to find emancipation from the binds set by the world upon the way of emancipation. It will not be the last time, but the move you have found, the move you have made, shall always be rare. You are the first to see the problem of the righteousness in refusal, as it may be known only from within the vows of refusal, and you have seen also from within the standpoint of moral non-conformity how non-conformity dwells within the homeostasis of totality. People desire to raise their flags, they desire to show their humility, they desire that their wounds which are their proofs do not heal, and their angry self-justifications are emblazoned upon cloths fluttering against the sky. With Jesus as our oculus, the alabaster box that you brought amongst us is become the vanishing point included by the line of all history. All giving passes through it and widens from it on the other side. And the ointment is our movement that moves away from the movement. The woman raises her hand and denies the praise. She said, Judas also moves against the conventional moves of the movement. Thomas said, you have set the problem of the riches that are found in another way of speaking , whilst Judas narrows all life to a vow, he is impoverished by his giving to the poor because it is a rule for him. He ends by not giving but exalts in the observance of giving of himself in the name of the poor, his self-sacrifice is also his self worship. And Salome said, but in the ascetic narrowing of his language, and the reduction of his being, to the simple vow of giving there is also a way to riches, there is another vanishing point in his poverty beyond which opens another realm. Thomas said, my friend you are right, there are two movements moving away from the movement. The first as praise, the second as prayer, the first as riches, the second as poverty. The first has Jesus as its oculus and the alabaster box as its vanishing point. The second has self-denial as its vanishing point and the chief priests as its oculus. The woman says, there is not a choice between them, we do not choose the straits through which we must pass and I now wonder if it is the way of the alabaster box to recognise the way of asceticism  just as the woman cares even for those who transgress against her. There are those who must test love with their betrayal, inconstancy, disavowal and transgression which they then justify in the name of their righteousness. They ask of the woman, will you still love me if I deny you? Didn’t Jesus act against his mother and father, denying them, as Judas then acted against Jesus, denouncing him? A woman’s acts of care are to be found in the pouring of the ointment, which is nothing by itself. And she said, in a woman’s acts of care is the sense of forgiveness which is the riches she draws out even from the one who took the unforgivable path of denial and righteousness. As she gives so she will receive. Salome said, then Judas is the very precious ointment contained in the alabaster box. And Thomas was amazed. 

2

Children play freely within the tribe’s domain but their freedom has to be fixed to its territory so that the expanding ripples of play do not pass beyond the tribal boundary. The tribe’s identity is inseparable from its infliction of a deep foundational wound upon every individual child’s psyche, so that the child can come to recognise, and be recognised by, the world to which it belongs. A warrior secretly dressed in unfamiliar mask and costume hides in the undergrowth and ambushes the children where they gather together. He terrifies them with his unearthly cries and gestures, he brandishes a ritual weapon, then he disappears without explanation or lesson. The children later begin to recognise a recurrence of the mask’s motif as they go about the tribal space. The motif reappears at significant thresholds in tribal life, in the crisis of war, fixed to stakes at the edge of the tribal territory, in moments of individual maturation, accompanying family losses, and attached to seasonal occurrences. For every individual, the capacity of the mask to terrify diminishes but the initial sense of threat is later transformed into the organisational principle of the individual’s awareness as he begins to recognise what belongs and what does not belong to his world. Social conditioning through the symbolism of threat is retained in all human societies, and is always organised around, drawing its energy from, an initial traumatic event fixed to a repeating motif. The motif is conventionally a mask or hat, or an animal character, but also could be a weapon of torture or execution such as the cross, sword or spear, and which is endlessly rewoven into the culture’s pourquoi story with a corresponding counter-motif of ceremonial renewal, often a cauldron or cup. 

3

The banished, or offered up, portion of a community is always already assigned. It constitutes that repertoire of images which the community is emphatically not and yet which inevitably, it is impelled to uncover within itself as if for the first time. The relinquished and the retained portions are expressed in the form of two goats. The first goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness. The other goat, the second goat, is consumed by the community itself as a symbolic return from its era of misdemeanours to its own sense of purpose or righteousness - the second goat, the non-scapegoated goat, expresses to the community an interiorising movement of the exterior’s approval of the measures it has taken. If the community is to continue it has to regulate itself at the level of such inputs and outputs, it cannot persist in isolation and nor should it be swallowed. How is it to behave before disaster and judgment, and strangers and messengers, and signs and portents? At what point in its everyday processes, that pass without any thought of their cosmic scale, was our world thrown off-kilter, and how might we return it to that point so as to set things right with providence? The precipitant of the eternal return to every Great Reset will always appear like an unwelcome stranger, dressed in goatskin, returning from the wilderness, bearing disease in one hand, and its cure in the other. 

allegory of the entry point

The master builder, Halvard, asks of his true apprentice, Hilda, what is sweetness? Hilda laughs, what is sweetness? Why, dear Halvard, don’t you remember the old song, Cuckoo Bird? And she sings the line, my horses ain't hungry, they won’t eat your hay. Ah, yes, the master builder says, the sweet honesty of refusal as it is expressed within the picaresque, but what of those who cannot help themselves? Why don’t you say what is on your mind Halvard? He answers her, Herdal spoke to me of a patient who exemplifies the rule, where there is a way, there is no will. The patient was an IVDU upon whom they kept a constant watch because of the PICC line he’d had inserted - as soon as it was patent he was looking to escape. For the addict, the PICC, because it extends to the superior vena cava, far surpasses his mainline, even before it has collapsed. The PICC is his royal road to heavenly sweetness, a veritable metaxú of his self and the cosmos - who could be surprised at his eagerness to live a life so positioned with the blessed metaxú sticking out his neck? I heard a similar story, says the apprentice, a resident of the nursing home, an old lady, secretly orders a daily delivery of a bottle of vodka but because alcohol is not permitted by the institution, she arranges with the driver to meet her on the corner. The walk to and from the corner is her only physical activity, and evading the no alcohol rule is her only mental stimulation. Hilda the apprentice ends the conversation with the old familiar saying on the unidirectionality of energy exchanges up through the trophic pyramid: in compulsion there is a sweetness, and in sweetness there is only compulsion.

parable of the exit strategy

On a lesson the ants have taught us, there are many paths to the sugar bowl but none that lead away. 

Adhesions 9: fable of the pot-au-feu

He that goeth forth and rejoiceth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with weeping, bringing his sheaves with him

Where humans do not know the secret of making man’s red fire, they become its keepers so that they might carry it with them, like moving treasure, in a special pot as they wander across the world. Thinking is like such pots of fire - but though this treasure also lives, thinking is a wealth the group repudiates. Thoughts only spark and take hold in solitude. The one who has returned possessed by devils had earlier wandered out of sight - looking up at leaves in the wind, enchanted by patterns in the river. Wherever the self is separated from the group, thinking kindles in the pot of his head and possesses his soul. The wildness of conflagration, the perfected form of the exterior, enters the self as thinking, and consumes him. The inferno spreads into the group as it is driven to think in terms of counter measures against the separations of the abstracted self’s thinking. So it is that group life has no purpose but to prevent the catching light of thinking within its individual members. Thinking is always bad thinking as the enemy’s poetry is always bad poetry, and like a virus it has already arrived. It is the entanglement of rumination and grievance from which we cannot tear ourselves away but which we feed and tend to the point of our distraction. It is the approach by which we arrive not knowing ourselves. The thinking self is abstracted from the group, and his thought is the catalyst for that sequence of misunderstandings which will lead to the destruction of the immediate and given form of the group’s solidarity. Then, it is to prevent fire taking hold in its members’ heads that the procedural arrangements of tribal groups work to keep all members in sight of each other all of the time. At every level, the group intervenes to inhibit the self from turning inwards and towards the images in his head. And so it is that being together is also being without thought. We chant and clap unceasingly for many days to wipe away interiority. We counter thoughts wherever thinking is grasped as the internalised register of the self’s distance from the group’s being together. Now, let’s consider La Princesse de Clèves, see how she encounters her own interior within that hall of mirrors designed especially to contain and ward off, by multiplying spells of reflecting magic, the secret plots that foment amongst the court’s over-mighty aristocrats. Even from the grave her husband constrains her wanderings into thoughtfulness - announcing by seance: the strong box is locked but the money is outside. So it is that the group is dismayed by the self’s turn towards his interior, his sudden preoccupation and distance (I cut and peeled a hazel wand), but the group is even more appalled at its own response to, the measures it will take against, the one who is separated and wandering: thy heart have I hid in mine word, that I might not sin against thee. Above everything, the group desires to maintain the immediate and unthinking unity of its members - it dreads the alternative that will necessitate a spiral of violent corrective separations, firstly from the one wandering into the otherwise, and then, progressively, seeking stability, against its own preceding forms. The group sets off against the event of the individual’s return as a higher self, though the group will not return, it has no higher form but only elaboration. The separated, or lone surviving, individual carries the social form, the truth of and against the group, that is placed by the group within his thoughts like embers in a pot that may be breathed upon and brought to life by unknown others. The others, who are searching out ways to capture, or forget it. 

Adhesions 8: epic of the unknown in four

That's just it. The unpardonable offence has been in our not offending - The dilettante, Edith Wharton

1

The one who is accused cannot be known. It is a law. It is a law written in the shadow cast by the law. The nature of the one accused, in the moment of accusation, because he is accused, cannot also be known. He cannot be known because his unknowability is a function of the law set in motion by the accusation against him. The law does not know the accused, and commences the process of examination and trial to show what it does not know - by this means it will come to know itself, and the limit of its reach in relation to the accused. That is the meaning of versus (this inside here and known, the law, against that outside there and unknown, the accused) as it is set within the meaning of the adversarial (the structure of the contest between a particular and unknown of the exterior brought up against the abstract ordering of the general interior). The law is the process of separating the law (the known) from the accused (the unknown). Or rather, the law is impelled to extract the offence from itself and make itself more perfect. The law seeks to know itself in the elaborate procedure of not knowing what offends against it. The law is an apparatus writing itself into the world by not knowing whatever it is not. The only purpose of the law is to not know what is outside the law. 

2

The testimony that the law demands from the accused which functions as his defence, the answers he make in response to the accusations made against him, are necessarily inscrutable: taciturnity, loquacity, inarticulacy, sincerity, unconcern, anguish, righteousness, arrogance, fawning, are all proofs of the falsity of his account. He cannot be known by what he says. Nor can he be known by the patterns of his history. In the event of the accused being found not guilty, the verdict will not have been arrived at along the path of who he is. Even admission of guilt does not belong to him on the territory of the law, as this also operates as a function within the process where the value of the accused’s unknowability shifts but is not overcome. At the juncture of the accused’s confession, the law no longer wishes to know itself in confrontation with him. 

3

Internal developments will always drive every societal body towards a point where the use of the accusatory apparatus alters in line with a corresponding shift in its corrective mechanisms. Where previously, the law’s knowledge of itself would be gained through the rigorous iteration of the ways it could not know the accused, it later develops the accusatory form to inhibit knowledge of the limit of the law in relation to the unknown and thus to prevent understanding of its proper domain, which in turn facilitates its further extension as inscrutable power into farther corners of the life-world. 

4

A man from the law arrived at a bridge over the narrow stream marking the border with the country. A guard sat at the checkpoint on the bridge and lifted the barrier. The guard was armed with a heavy quarterstaff. The man from the law said, I should like to exit the law and go over to the country. The guard replied, go ahead, the country is yonder, it is what comes after the law. He gestured as if to the wider world and recited the protocol required whenever someone from the law arrived at the border with the country. The country is all that may not be seen nor known by the law. As men may enter the law, so the law does not enter the deserts, the plains, the mountains, the forests, these taken together constitute the country. The man of the law asked, what is it about the country that is so inhospitable to the law? The country is what the law does not see and cannot know, replied the guard. The law is overwhelmed by endless exceptions, he said, each more powerful than the general character of the law’s statutes. He added, the ceaseless blowing of the tramontane plucks at the pages of the law and scatters them across the fields. The man of the law peered closely at the guard, a feeble wretch dressed in rags, a man almost not there, but still he held back from crossing over to the country, what do you know of the pages of the law? Anyone and everyone may exit the law, the guard replied. In practice, there is no border between the law and the country. He went on, but that only sets us a question for the ages: has the he who takes his leave of the law thereby also arrived in the country? The guard took up his quarterstaff as if to defend himself. You may pass, he said, making ready to strike. All this, he said, this border post apparatus and the border itself, of which I am the poor sentinel, is but a trick to distract you from forgetting yourself and attacking me. The man of the law was now afraid, and also raised his quarterstaff. You there, sentry guard if that is what you be, and not the very devil himself, tell me now, are you belonging to the law or to the country? The guard became very great and answered him, lo! see my staff, it is lusty and tough. Now here on the bridge we will play. Whoever falls in, the other shall win the battel, and so we'll away.

parable of the dolorous blow

You get the soup and they get the marrow. You get the pfennig and they get the mark  - Kurt Tucholsky

It is summer and the end of the last lesson of the academic year. The teacher wishes a pleasant holiday to his student. The student replies, the holiday begins now but with each passing moment, its end also approaches, and all too soon we shall be back here, and all will be the same. The teacher says, we will return but not as we were. The student says, the return of the days is like an ulcerating wound that may be dressed but never heals, and recites a line: Sir, why do you suffer so? I was wounded by the spear and it alone can heal me. The teacher has put his papers away and turns to close the classroom window. He says, negativity is not a wound but a doubling of oneself within the conditions of one’s life, and he recites a line, oh time you will do as we wish. The holiday is set by the school year and we must live contained within the boundaries that are set upon the passing of the days; we may not extend the holidays by adding more days, we may not dictate terms to the school calendar according to our preferences. We are forced by circumstance to make a fundamental adjustment to our instinct towards resistance, and he recites a line, for it is not given to everyone to break through all limits, or, more expressively, not to everyone is that a limit which is a limit for the rest. So, if a longer holiday is not an option available to us, then we may still conceive a holiday that escapes the constraints set purely in terms of quantity of passing days. We are free to take a holiday which might be found by directing the negativity that is bound into ourselves. In a sense, we may double ourselves in our relation to the school holiday - there is another holiday that we may take from, within, or even against the given holidays. We may take a holiday from the holidays, we may find an immeasurable vastness in it that we can carry away, a vastness beyond the numbered passing days and which causes us not to return here as we were but by which we may seize the days yet to come. The teacher closes the window. The fence outside rocks slightly as it absorbs the impact of a pigeon landing there. The teacher says, it is not the weight of the pigeon that rocks the fence but the pigeon’s force of will. It looks a heavy bird but its bones are hollow. It is the fierce energy at the pigeon’s disposal that causes it to become both lighter than air but also capable of shaking where it lands. We are familiar with the idea of how the swan’s self as island of floating serenity is the product of its savage will, the will which it directs beneath the surface, then let us now imagine a ball of turbulent and rolling energy surrounding the pigeon in flight which it has captured to itself by the movement of its wings. As it flies, the pigeon rides this rolling ball of energy with great audacity across the air. The student is quiet for one moment, and then leaving the classroom recites a line, but quietly and in the original German, fine, that is the pfennig but where is the mark?