Kismet (2024)
Inkjet and Watercolor on Hanji Paper.
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“He who writes, writes down himself first of all, for all to read.” - Cixous

I've been searching, faraway around the eyes, missing the feeling of being lost in a gazelle of windswept voices amongst all the broken benin bronzes. Mackey said "public" and "private" were disjunctive, now convergent masks for the featureless cave or the evaporative curve of an elapsed interiority, a nonexistent self, maybe that provides enough grounding, in Times Square there were so many different speakers playing Empire State of Mind and one speaker playing Rio Da Yung OG and so many people making images, I walked all the way down from 72nd street, where I sat in a diner drinking coffee eating marbled pound cake after a cigarette after watching Werckmeister Harmonies, another end of the world, staring at the rotting whale thinking that nature was bigger than man, that man was within nature, I was nodding off before, I like when that happens, then the sense of normal time is totally disrupted and the cinema flows into dream time, into everywhen I don't think I believe in an end of The World, but I believe in the ending of Worlds, i remember the ending of Worlds, like I remember forgetting your cosmologies and I remember forgetting that perfect sentence in order to escape its ending and the

it wasn't my party but we threw a party yeah we threw a party bitches came over yeah we threw a party echoes and echoes, i went, i saw people, we talked, we took pictures, we smoked, we pissed, then decided the night was over and rode him in a car talking and talking and talking, at that point with J, E and R were in the car drunksleep but noddingupon, the car was driving the wrong was but R fixed it, I had a nice talk with R on the roof before, about how people dress and their cosmetics, but also about life and past lives and future lives, just before we were at M's, i saw paintings and pig troughs, and me and M and J talked about art and publishing and films and systems and ate garlic bread and pasta and drank kombucha, J and I were talking about important things in the car, but they've faded, what's fresh is Food in SoHo in the 70s, now SoHo is different, everything is different and will never be the same

example: when jim jones jacked the beat to electric feel. now i listen to nr boor rap about mixing fetty with dog and hitting it with tranquil, N emailed me saying i was sensitive to a nihilistic plane of reality, but this is the first time in the opium wars that people made art about making drugs that eat flesh, the outro samples a newsclip about how narcan doesn't work, Flusser wrote in Our Inebriation that "man is not only a being that produces instruments, but also a being that produces instruments in order to escape from the tension produced by his instruments." and then he talks about art, "a medium to propitiate immediate experience"; "Art turns utterable the ineffable and audible the inaudible... The artist is the inebriate who emigrates from culture in order to reinvade it"; "To publish the private is the only type of engagement in the republic that effectively implies the transformation of the republic because it is the only one that informs it."; NR Boor says "we been out here doing all this wrong, I hope this money save us" and i think again everything is different and will never be the same but also everything is the same and will never be different, there are so many worlds always ending, Sauce Walka said "it's Armageddon on my block nigga!" over the pussy money weed beat, Cixous said "Death-in-life is more frightening than life... nothing is lost, because all is lost to begin with" and in Ouvrir, Marker went to Chateaubriand seeing the Battle of Waterloo, knowing he was watching the end of a world, then asking the viewer "what are you watching?" , and as i walked through time square and all the cameras and the noise and the heat i thought "what am i watching?" and on one hand Ulysses was so long ago, but on the other it just happened, time's string lost around the midnight suns

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, Time is a trap from which I am trying to escape, I is a self I'm trying to lose, the first time I spent months walking back and forth on the Sandymount Strand, trying to grasp for something because the ineluctable modalities were meaningless, after asking "whoever anywhere will read these written words?", he thinks "signs on a white field". returning again to language & writing as a means to transform reality, transforming reality as a means to change the world, create a world, end a world, and the idea that writing is a continous project, that one can become Almost Infinite, which is an Infinity separated from Infinity. in my mind I diagnosed the problem as people now trying to rewrite Joyce, but focusing on Stanislaus's diaries and the letters, but who are People, is this projection, what have I assembled here so far, and what will I continue to assemble, already the idea of sculpting these texts into a book is forming, and Cixous gets into the Joyce-Nora relationship as an experimentation space for literature, the fart letters are as much canon as Portrait and Wake, and are probably read more than anything else today, they circulate in far greater volume and frequency, and that speaks to both the work and the problem of work today, as volume and frequency is not a signal of value, but we are so inundated with everything, i inundate this page with words that could go on forever but will only go on for as long as i write it to.

"Joyce also tries to replace the imagery common to Western thought, with its implication of a beginning and an end, a here and a there, a past and a present, a self and an other, by a world without history, a continous world of osmosis. Space is then no longer defined by personal landmarks and one's surroundings are not a line separating the known and visible from a beyond which is different and strange. The outlines of reality become blurred, the horizon clouds over, and people and things can appear to us without being subjected to our minds' usual process of examination and recognition; races, knowledge, cultures, personal histories, childhood memories, desires, all mingle, with no concern for the normal boundaries of mine and thine, hic and ille, tunc and nunc. This is not chaos, but the polycentricity that has replcaed egocentricity or theocentricity."

I suppose what's obvious now is that this isn't the place for that nor can it be, as there's already the linearity inscibed into these numbers, the verticality of the scroll, there would need to be a whole different form, and Form was what first got me lost in Joyce, the imperceptible shifts between reality and hallucination to realize reality-as-hallucination, that there is no stable ground which Flusser fed into later, and I keep trying to understand what it is my task is, of course there is no Task, but there is a Holy Task, a Purpose, a Destiny, a Delusion, I used to think of this compulsion as a Delusion and he did too, and then it became Real, it enveloped me, but remembering the Delusion seems key, in order to reshape it, expand it, so that once it evelopes me again, I can inflate it, make it bigger, bigger, until it evelopes Time, History, -Self, all that I am trying to escape, awake, dissolve, Delusion as a Pharmako, the same words in different places, all these words to escape the near-Death and near-Suicide that has been so Real and Near lately, because of these public and private masks, my mind goes to those African masks, Black Skin, White Masks, Brown Skin, White Masks, how do you say dead sounds, dead words, dead signs, how do you make Dead Times alive again

in another sense, everything I do falls into this sort of diary type practice. not over-thinking, just Thinking