The Portal of Lost Wanting

ALL I HAVE IS THE BODY TO GO ON WHAT is going on in me. There is movement, always more or less sped up or halted, of consciousness, the movement of consciousness is a vibration in constant flux. Separately to this movement, an aspect of poring over the immediate written past and being unable to divine the written future but trying to, as consciousness takes its new dawn, exactly the essence of its previous but never stopping twice in the same river. Sun hides behind an onslaught of cloud the colour of permanent self-doubt. The absence is one of blaring livefeed and screaming headline, but within that reach of sameness everything is just as it was, and my awareness of self is not separate to an awareness of others having awareness of selves, and suddenly the wash of drilling and mining, the wash of digging and excavating, the permanent wash of greed washing one way only, and I’m in a room alone in cool air in complete rural silence and everything is impossible insofar as everything is inevitable, I’ll stop there.

I’ll start again in wishes, the futility of the day that begins either in a wish fulfilled in having, quickening heart rate, unstopping bottle of will to live, or a wish fulfilled in being dashed, equally wished for, which will carry body back to bed, to lie defeated on its back amidst damp sheets—but either way, wish carries the day, and does it matter whether wishing was for having or not having, if it starts in wishing then wishing has created this fabulous, awful day, day which began long ago in structure of wishing, which risk confounds all other attempts at vibrancy, and in this confounding lies the tidal threat of breakdown, small and thrifty, dormant or wakening underneath the ordinary deaths and ordinary heartaches and the worst thing that could possibly happen happening regularly—and the only answer to any question of despair is breath, and the only answer to any question of how to proceed is breath, and through all the vibrant moments and darkening moments breath is the pinpoint spot where the thoughts can be persuaded to wander off.  An insect dies in the hot shower stream, wings scalded and tracheal system flooded, bodies are struggling in the persistent potential of pointless agony, and coming back always to this, it does not have anything to do with anything

2 notes  /  

Fighting or Camping?

As much as reading the phrase ‘Žižek was right’ makes me hurt, this is interesting (Ben Ehrenreich in the LA Review of Books):

If the cops are being polite and the politicians are eager to make the protesters comfortable, it’s not because they’re nice. It’s because they’re not feeling sufficiently threatened. When several hundred protesters left the City Hall campsite last week, marched to a Bank of America branch on Figueroa, and refused to leave until tellers cashed a giant, Ed McMahon-style check for $653 billion made out to the people of California, the chumminess of our brothers in blue evaporated. Eleven people were arrested. The lesson was clear: The protests would be permitted, encouraged even, so long as the protesters didn’t try to actually do anything. It’s not a fight, in other words, unless you’re fighting. Otherwise, as one particularly intense young fellow put it to me on the City Hall steps last night, “We’re just fucking camping.”

3 notes  /