Hello, My Name Is Almost Bird & Forest

A book I am now 20 pages into, and still owe its author for (not fogotten! not - quite - forgotten!). For years I have shyed away from consciously developing a conventionally narrative prose, to explore what I tend to think of as "the outer reaches". But this affection for Sun Ra, cosmic ambience, and absolutely stunning disjunctions eventually circles back into the prose rhythms of... well "conventional narrative". I mean to imply a dialectic friction - a text may push against the limits (using Lacan) of big S signifiying with its firm grounding of place / noun / speaker / subject / object etc. but can not exactly escape it - into what? the line drawn between the big S and little s is not to be crossed in language. There is no identity of one's words, and one's desires, no more than between an anatomy book and a living body. We never break through to the other side, but we can tool about at the very edges where signification (its constant mapping) becomes so obscured, or troubled, or fragmentary, or bewildered, or overloaded and cluttered, that it loses its train and derails, and this derail hints strongly / evokes / can point towards little s states. But we still have there (as our hinting /evidence ) the derailed signification. If the hint is taken is not in the texts hands.

I have written extensively in this (demanding) vein, towards noise/bliss/silence, but, as with ecriture feminine, such work always carries something of a paradoxical question about it, something unsettled. To write against language in language, to resist the ordering of perceptions through the mediation of words in words, is this some quixotic prank?

Not today (meaning "yes") . It is a phase, a choice to explore a certain realm of possibility in language, one our culture overlooks, significantly overlooks, and it is a journey, a phase, a choice, one possibility among many. Why head off to the barrens and the wilds where the beasties lurk (for if you think they aren't hiding in your own incomprehensions, then where exactly under your bed are they) except for the classic heroic tale - so that, in doing, in going to the underworld, you can again pop your head out into the bright and perhaps sunny day, at home, and live your life with renewed vim and vigor. Its somehow neccesary work and it helps me put things right (and not put a lot of other things right - i.e. intrude/go anal/bonkers - i have (exhausting) interludes of (trying to) making a well-ordered world, instead of just writing and witnessing a well-tempered word). Instead, I have a go at exploring chaos.

If I was a more caring soul I would go back over this and edit it for you, or me, or the hell of it. As is, here's one more walk in the woods. I want to add that I don't seperate the emotional/spiritual/intellectual realms of this "underworld" or outer galactic reach. They intertwine. It is the work of examing a shadow, of the earth under my feet, the compress of the rubber of my shoes, it is work of armpits, latrines, old girlfriends and things said/seen when i couldn't even speak. Its a place that utterly compells the rereading of the most hideous and depraved old notebooks (and not in any titillating sort of way) to bear my signature scrawl.

I do hate the stickiness of writing from this place. Even writing on these old fells sweeps me into them again. Reground. Use the delete where neccessary. Bring the figure (half) out of the stone.

So there is an element of flirtation in writing around the unwritable. It also bears a touch of s/m, as the distinction betwen pleasure and pain, power and vulnerability is also troubled, dissolving into moments (perhaps of "pure being" or "the box thing" depending on which character in Huckabees you prefer). That so much confession/conversion narrative in so many traditions does not honor these ruptures is a shame, and points to how many "breakthroughs" are largelly big S affairs, concerning ideologies far more than bodied praxes. I live this shit - how many times do you tell yourself "that was a life-changing experience"? Versus how many times your life actually radically changes. Wording the experienc ein that way is a first neccessary step to murdering it, an act I - deluded to this - participate in willingly. We drag the shock and opening of an emergence of little s into the analytic lab-fridge of big S, murmuring how exciting it is, unable to conceal our murderous glee to anesthetize, roll-over and slit open the fucker.

All this relates, as a sort of pre-amble to the introductory note, to Brent Cunningham's Bird & Forest, a delightfully different tangling with language.