Today is Only Day
Synthetic Variance of David Baird
“I want,” one says... “I want – but my desire is not objectless, (or aobjective)... There is a definite ‘somesin’ I am after...” And by the time one gets it, one hopes one is “the same person” who wanted it in the first place, else one is giving a gift (or a curse) to a stranger... Obtainment or success or struggle is the desiring self controlling the acting self, having its way with it. But if we can get what we wish, does this help us if we can’t wish what we wish? (Do you want to want-properly?)
Are we after, I dare say, apparency – the being of what is apparent? Or what “being” apparently is? Apparently apparency is seductive, judging from the success of fictionality – movies and the like – in our world... This is understandable – the real can be oppressive... It consists of a struggle at the core, a showing forth of finitude, a matrix of structured relationalities, a story of a fabric of narrative threads, a universe knowing itself, a totalistic system of exceptions, generalized uniqueness, and all the other things your knowing got – the things that, with dread, some know not... The being of what is “real” is of course a being that is also, perhaps, “can’t-be”... Can’t be known, can’t be made, can’t really be in any plausible scenario... That is, no one can know ultimacy – ultimate reality – except “god,” who, it is often said, has left the scene to its own devices... And some findings indicate that whenever men have tried to know reality, they have only seen their own model of it in stead...
We can talk, though... Approach it. Reality is for us a written, or perhaps a spoken, thing. Scripted or crafted, to be glanced at or absorbed. Symbols or Images must have been the first things, and sensing them... A simultaneous arising, a need and its fulfillment. Compossibility of image and sense, their ineluctable nexus, is rationality. The Law following itself. A reasonable claim, to know how things began. The unending complexity, and sublime monstrosity, of the contemporary moment do not shield us from what must have been. With respect to consciousness, of course. A mere object is not our concern.
How to approach things? How to even approach approaching? I sought “philosophy” or a semblance of truth. I thought I was seeking impressionistic, unclear, psychotic-like text, to resonate with my experience of “mentality” – or life... Little did I know that aschizo thinkers have gone beyond the common as well. Have felt what it means to think. Have perhaps even heard their unconscious talking, if only in dreams.
Do multiple beings, schizo and aschizo alike, ever share a vision? Know. Or – nothing is public (that matters)... Or – there are many worlds. Your life could be called a world. World is a kind of fluctuating, traveling genetic/historic field, with a barrier horizon of other worlds showing-through. Life is a kind of result of everything, yet it knows nothing but what you know – a kind of universe that sees itself, yet can only see at the limits what it can never have – what the other worlds own as truth...
Apparency yields a private world for you no matter who you are – no event is totalistic, seen by all. Like – does the tv in your house really show the same things on channel two as the tv in my house? All media is exclusive, and system theorists wonder whether the media you see is the same as the media I see... (Even apart from the fact that we all see a different book when we read a book – else we would all agree on fictionality’s quality.) Or – how do you know your network isn’t being manipulated? Or – the engines can return whatever search results they want...!! Or – what would those with unlimited power really need?
I try not to, but most writers say life is “this,” or “that” – but why when they write is life always just all “that”...? They have totalization problems. Making everything something. A knot, a disturbance of time’s space, can indeed unravel in perhaps only one way – yet isn’t this always a thought experiment? And is there a basic “oneness” to thought? Is it all systems go, we’re on track, full force ahead? Or is it a permeating system of possibilities, a way of thinking thought that unfolds surfaces to reveal depths inside, a source of meaning everywhere you look, a collection of virtuoso performances by the evolution, a collection of alternate approaches to alternate approaches, an over-determined work “of art” that knows itself is only provisional, just for now, a gap to traverse – like what did you know at the beginning of this, and what will you know at the end?
Sure, be a physicist. But even if the amental exists, should mentality be wrapped up in it? An adventure of the expression of thought, done experimentally... The subject of the experiment? You? Or – telos, goal. Does the present refer to our goal, to the future? Or have our times already come? Always? Modern referentiality, talking about strings, sex, song, seeing, signs, time-slices – anything, really, with a “now” to it, says that “this is not enough – we want more”... But what do we need? An optical philosophy – a philosophy of vision, that sees things, and feels itself seeing, and wonders of vision itself, the composite of image and sense, unavoidably apparent to consciousness, that thing which has all the weight and extension of a substance, but which we know – know – can only be an ephemeral product of generative forces – not generative structures. A structure can calculate, but only a force can be “optical,” in the sense of uniting object and subject in a model of the world, a model as the mind, ephemeral and sublime, understandable if opened up to its own investigations and subjected to its own experimentation. And this part really, you can approach however you want. Thinking is finite. We can not share it between our heads. Yet what I choose to say here has resonant effects in your own symbolic system. It is arbitrary and melodic, fanciful and harmonic, yet as music has a reality, a presence which allows you to possibly say more, no matter how much I have said myself...
We need our say – those of us with voice... I say “life” is only life, but any thing is only a “thing” – and what the world calls you is “strife”... (It listens when you think?) Anything is a thing, except those “things” that aren’t – those things with super-real reality – not objectable, not objectivizable – the totality, god, you, me... To be not a thing. To have no thing turn you into an object. To affirm your subjectivity in the face of the void of time-which-shall-come, the void of we-who-will-see-you, the space opened up by performance, into which you can enter as a fleeting apparition, a momentary lapse of chaos, a provisional yes-finite glancing blow to history, an experimental probe into art, into the way-of-doing-things, the way-of-opening-your-mouth, which somehow never turns out to the observers the same way you know it to be...
You can be “like, whatever” and claim that physical things are objects – and why not even numbers too? But physicality? Isn’t this really more sublime than mentality, its self – the thing we truly know and are? What could the universe look like from the outside? They say time curves. Then why are evolution’s most graceful and subtle efforts, the curves of the nude human body, unwanted sights in public? Does it have to do with a “trance” of consensus – a given way of life, a “time-style” that everyone tries in synchronicity – a social fabric, with “threads” of language, “colors” of touch – which somehow “holds us back”...
Such as it goes, such as we flow. Because – “it” has been there... Every “where” there was to be... And it saw what happened... Every “thing” there was seeable... We did the acts... Acted “one,” acted “sun,” acted “fun,” acted “done”... That is, history is the only totality. Of the course, of the path... Your history is my history, some claim... Some would draw you out... Use coded emanations from deep unconscious, revealing meaning within the outside of being... Some must say what they want, knowing that others don’t know what they know, and will figure out, “figure out” in any way their world wants them to... In any way their soul wants them to – in ways that what you say extends as long as you want to say it into the deep times without which you are but a fleeting surface of referentiality, a tunnel of vision, an ultimate theory, a given fact... In short, you can and should and do and will write whatever you want.
Maybe – maybe let the pedagogues put you through their motions. I did. You could turn out like me – but I don’t know if it’s the happiest state to be in – if you take another path, and not let the systemic truth leave its footprints in you, you could know infinities of which I can no longer dream – you could do things with each other that would make my society seem mean – you could organize the plight of surgical repression – you could make beauty of incoherence and hallucinate truth in night’s the only night light...
I think. In any case, you could put interesting choices in your writing... Maybe when you get older, especially... And your confessional letters.. Maybe they’re ready for your truth in a different world – and this world’ll be ready for it in a different time... This world may react inappropriately to “crimes” like those you’ve wanted, you’ve committed, rules you’ve put to the test, conventions you’ve put to rest, excess control from above to be evaded or withstood... When you cross the line, what is on the other side? When you say what should not be said, what can then be said? When you write horror, what comes of unwritten real horror?
What is your night dream? Which one? One of the best ones... Time to use some specificity – tell us who’s behind her face, how long you’ve run her race, and with what terms you love her eccentricity. I am talking about your Other. This term is not abstract – it has all the meaning in the world... So does all of the meaning inhere in any meaning that means? Is it a binary logic – truth value one or zero? Maybe for concepts at least. A series of concepts, a sentence, may be able to be shaded in its certainty – but a word? Think of all a word implies. Infinite misery or infinite bliss. What you yourself have put you through – what you yourself have chosen to miss...
What is all of it about? Can a term serve here? A term or category or word or idea is a tool... We all know how some like to use tools... When you’re going to warp human nature into evil, you’ve got to use some conceptuality – some adverse textuality to wrap your mind around the aliteral sexual sphere of embodied writership – writing a world, writing time, the text as world... Text as crime... A crime against social normalcy, against the dominant view of time, against unjustified laws, against judgmental minds...
They say evil’s source is finally a category mistake... Can you really describe “the” “Jew”? Why you’d want to hurt one? Why your sun is not a Jewish sun? In a given problem area, there is usually a duality, and a transcendent. The adjective and noun, caught by a verb... Active versus passive, and the places like perception where they cannot be parted... You and your real self, and the back and forth process of synthesis, of healing – in which the pain the one has always felt is transferred and shared and made familiar to the other, and the control the other has had is given to the self...
They give lots of advice. A sentence suggests what to think, what to do with your mind... “Lead your self into alley ways... Lead your self on false forays...” Eventually you will “get” “there”... You will understand it – you will dig the vibe, you will come on, you will turn out, you will take off – and so, – “On!”
Although you can get anywhere from anywhere, and just because the one thing follows the other doesn’t mean there’s real continuity, the false dichotomy, as of feminine and masculine, has tricked many a thinker into arguing about what doesn’t matter. Not that anyone argues about what does matter... That sort of thing would seem to be beyond doubt? Only the inessential is variable? The truth is always the same? I know what about words – and I’ve seen the essence of life on what plane? (To “sense the flux” or to “be the flux”?) When it is all connected, words can cause you pain, they can lead you to pleasure, and the language itself can speak its cycles and certainties through you, and you can be in language, and say things you need to say, and see the same day six thousand different ways, six thousand different memorable days, six thousand people who have felt your play...
Love and the like are beyond all rational control, and the outbursts of meaning beneath every living line seem to point to a kind of other beyond – the next “whatever” that you know is there, but which only will come with time... Now that you know how to read anything... A thought almost too painful to complete. Love is beyond control – and that is just where we want it... We can control ourselves, and our worlds – but we don’t want to control everything.. Not only is this a foolish dream, it is a sick and wrong one... Total control would mean a possibly corrupt will instantiated without error or variation – it would mean a fine-grained connection between fantasy and perhaps overreaching act – it would mean consciousness would become one with its object in an uneasy marriage of self and nonself – the subject would be lost in its own arbitrary (if wanted) creation – the subject would be objective, and all objects would refer to one subject – yourself, your vision and Desire...
So maybe, tell us how you read yourself. They always seemed to want to know “how you read.” Little did you know you’d be reading your own inner realities much of the time... Quickly, patiently, deeply, shallow? How important are these perceptions, these lines in your head? Did you craft this life, this work, with the care that you’d accord to an angel or a world? How sublime is your tunnel into our minds, the tunnel of meaning that a linear text takes consciousness through, my consciousness into yours, yours into its own? Is this path of yours that we’re traversing going anywhere we want to go, or is it the analysis of dreams we already know we don’t want to know?
Pretend there is another “you” out there – maybe even six thousand... Pretend that they _knew_ you’d come here, and all preparation is to welcome you to time.. Pretend that life was drawn to see your smile, and all the other things are true that happened to you, and other stuff was happening all the while... (Can your girl write?) A true world... A world that was meant to be... A world full of dance light song and mystery... A world where you have to tell time who you are... You have to sell minds your kind of “far”... (If you’re a “writer”... If not – I feel for you...) Do you even control your words? Are you enslaved to structures of reaction-to-world that were instilled in you long ago by forces, parents perhaps, who pre-existed your take on things – who pre-existed your discovery of life – who were the actual matrix you developed in – who were somehow everything you stood against... You obviously didn’t agree with the world, with life... If you did, you wouldn’t have elevated strife to the highest symbolic point... Conflict – their goals against yours – resistance to the given flows – avoidance of the living informational structures – writing against the time, writing with time, in time, of time... (How insanely beautiful and trans-dependent can simple/spoken words be?)
It doesn’t take complex words to tell the truth – relationality between immanent images (the real “seen reality”) and virtual subjective worlds beyond (the wanted fantasy) is not the most difficult thing to ponder... The most difficult thing would be the question of why the milk sometimes turns black. But it’s not that hard, if you think about it really. An all-positive show or world would be like a hat without a hole to stick your head in, a cat without some stolen grace to float through space with... All-positive shows are for kids whose parents don’t want them to know the full truth.. Like yours didn’t want you to know it? They were saving your agency for adulthood, when you’d know the score? They were preparing you for this bad world – so you’d know what you are “for”? You know a lot now you didn’t know a year ago? Rather – your linguistic ability has been deconstructed by your broken illusions, and reconstructed by the writers you’ve discovered true... In short you are reading the best stuff ever written – you grew up on simple fantasy... But now you’re into the most sophisticated treatments of the universe... You’re into the writers who are writing the world – not the real world – we know which writers are in control of that – but the world that matters... Your dream of life... Your life.. The only thing that matters... The only thing you “mind”... Do you “mind” yourself? (Do you create yourself with your mind, or do you let fated externalities structure your days...? (Of course you need to know “out” before you can know “in”, and also the opposite...))
Once you make the breakthrough – and you know which one I mean.. Once you confront the scene, then what will happen? What _won’t_ happen? Once may be all it takes. Or yours could be a more repetitive curse.. Do this ten million times and do it till you’ve known the worst... I don’t know... It seems like I have more to say about any subject, then what’s been said already.. Okay, you yourself will fuck with you.. You’ve known that already... Lit and metaphorically.. But apparently, this is what you want.. Messages from afar, from versions of you in different systems... The god-version and so on.. The odd versions, the maybe even non-human versions... Why break the world up when it’s all up to you? Why not synthesize it into a new whole – an all-whole? Everything is one.. It all is in a mind.. You may be only an example.. A local conduit of time.. (This is my solution... What does _reading it_ consist of? How do you character, eyes, reading?)
Is this really what you want to do – write your life away? Couldn’t you be helping the world some other way? In sales perhaps? Distributing the goods to the peeps who are lost in the woods? Something or someone wants you to “work.” And it doesn’t care where you work, apparently.. You’ve worked in some shitty jobs... I guess it’s all for your mind... To understand itself and its world... To make its way through the given time, and confuse the bad with the good – virtue with crime...
Maybe this is my time to write a book, maybe this is the time to show the peeps what’s wild, what “time” it is, how hot is mild... I am like the devil I bring raw imagery.. I am like the god I give gifts for free.. I am like a sinner I have done wrong freely.. I am like a saint I have suffered injustice for others, I have felt the ill-fated’s taint...
Sometimes you have to intersperse a little new truth with the old. You have to have your say not only again but now intermixed with your previous say... Apparently you have a lot to say... To who? To yourself in all its phases and modalities?
Each vignette is like a model for a future expansionistic text.. Don’t think you’ve exhausted the reality potentiality of this poem just because you’ve moved to the next.. Come back and fuck with this shit.. Make it a million times better like it should be...
What have we gone through together, besides some stolen goods? What have we accomplished together, besides some journeys through the woods? I wanted to be able to understand all the books, I wanted to see about what those guys were talking.. I learnt how to do that.. Now I see that some of them are very good at walking...
I’m glad I’m standing – most of history has been knocked down.. We are the remainders, we are what’s left.. And the future will know us, by the heft of our texts. (Scary things on the temporal horizon – time to repay your debt, time to work for other people’s dreams and get your spoken-of feet wet..)
We only do good experiments – we’re experimental for life’s gain... Thought experiments are the best kind? The safest at least... Let’s think the internal to external jump.. What’s wrong with external? You’ve been internal for too long... The drugs may change your state, but can they cause the proliferation of complexities and deepening of subtleties in your projected world picture project? You know – that thing you have where you’re trying to figure out what this is? What’s a “universe”? In your head? And the constant cycle betwixt unbelief and belief... Your newest theory on who you really are...
If you can’t say it in three lines can you say it at all? What’s the upshot? What would you blast to the stars? Okay you don’t have to refer to pre-existent structure... You don’t have to “kill” us that fast... (You can tell which of us came closest, by the way the industry employs/exploits his or her cast...) The industry, the system, the set-up... You in it, somewhere... Though you’ve been in some pretty childish places – “Tell us what to do tell us what to say,” (school is not a prison, but they run it that way)... Life is so important.. And society’s project upon the earth? To become the best society ever, and show all the others how its done? School is really important, because the next new generation of workers and leaders must get extensive behavioral readjustment from the natural barbarous condition, must learn quite well how to “remain silent” and “follow instructions”... Yes we have information to impart, but it must be done in the most academic of ways... If we were to do it realistically, say where what you say matters, not whether or not you’re a pedagogue or a student – we would find anarchy and chaos, because kids haven’t been thoroughly educated about democratic values and the good operation of hierarchal governance systems...
But I’m not thinking alternatives, I’m just thinking this... I say “this is no good,” you say, “but what about the alternatives?” If we knew how they worked we wouldn’t be so bad... Why should we watch and never play the game and ask stupid questions and have you help us kill our pain? And do you wonder why they never have any good lines in previews for big movies? Could it have something to do with the movies – how they’re not “life”? They don’t like good lines, which reveal the underlying materiality they so wish to repress. “That is,” materiality or “mediality” or the quality of a process (cinema) being a media (data storage technique realized), is attempted to be hidden – not outright, not blatantly, but subtly, perniciously hidden... The film or fictionality is reified while the filmstrip or object is ephemeralized and magicalized... “Look at the news... It’s _facts_... Either they’re true or not... I don’t think they’d let liars on network tv... The smartest writers end up in the movies... They might simplify things to make a better story, but they’d never use mind-control propaganda techniques... They have our best interests at heart, because ‘they’ are us! The same people who make the media have to consume it too!”
And yes your verbality will get ten times better, as you grow old – you’ll reach those stars you barely know now, and from there you’ll see a new hold... Tell us to the minutes, tell us of the steps – this is the mid-evil time – we are in it but not yet out... This is gothic horror stuff – forget about school – they’re not allowed to show you there – horrors beyond compare... They merely “tell” and often not even that... It’s going on now here everywhere then later again. To stop it we must <blank>... (Become the gov?) Go out on an anti-horror trip... Horror is not just a genre – it is an over-pervasive reality... Try, try, try... I’ve felt the coldness of winter – and I curse the doom they set upon us, and I have sought and found another me – someone whose text sees what I see... Maybe I made the me’s with my text – I showed my coexperiencers, my Others, how vexed is vexed – the contradictions in the organized unity of our own particular group self... The group self the alone self the social self the system self... (Can you can parallellize any expression? Can any truth statement with removable variables have analogous variables substituted? Wouldn’t this be the idea behind analogies?) Does everything have an analogy? And I’ve been told metaphors are a cop out... Real intensive descriptions vibrate with empiricality our sensuality to cause _themselves_ to become our reality – so why substitute a metaphorical saying for what you really mean?
We seek those catching up to the contemporary... With time, but against the age... How can you be against an age? Some quite whatever things are happening now... You think life is normal, and normal is good? Maybe, may be... I have another option – I’ll believe what I want... The university philosophers, the highest establishment arbiters of truth, even say so... The ultimate ground of belief is our subjectivity – and objectivity cannot be trained into you in school – objectivity is attainable only by objects – and while our bodies are such, our minds are more important, and though our minds may be “physical” (and if you know what that means you must be god), minds are “subjective” – why else would there be the word? Language is the ultimate site of desire, writers get higher than anyone else, you can tell all you know, then you’ll know more, you can write a book, then know the score, you can have broken relationships, then finally connect, you can work your way through hell, and find upon release the truest way to text...