Ethos
I view these experiments in self-undoing,
Not only as self-unbinding practices,
But also as practices that bring to the fore
All the fraught ways I am bound
By my time, ethos, and ethics.
I try to practice noticing and surrendering—
To cultivate a way of speaking
That steps away from the moral habit of telling others what to do.
Unbinding is suspension,
An experiment in limits and experience
That suspends the murmur of unreason,
Called Eros.
Multiple readings—queers with feminists.
That temporal paradox,
Edges of a time that borders my own
And is therefore, others to me.
The form of sexual identities I hold dear,
Even as I increasingly bristle against them—
The concrete and abstract,
Utterly real and unreal site of inventive normalization.
A murmuring collapse of speech and meaning,
A method that engages with unreason
In ways that suspend and transform everyday practices of living.
The poetic speech of an exteriority that erodes.
I have listened for the murmur within the grid
As an archival noise that constitutes the I—
Incremental differentiations of a gradational logic.
Beginning from a place of suspicion that views morality as catastrophic,
And challenging the queer habit of rejecting normativity
And celebrating the non-normative.
In what was once called a “good dog, bad dog” rhetoric of puppy obedience school,
That simply reverses and thereby perpetuates
The good vs. bad moralizing gestures
Queer theories have claimed to disrupt.
Not an exclamation point, but an ellipsis—
An erotic unraveling into something other than sex.
And with that unraveling,
The cultivation of an attitude,
A different abode,
An emptying people’s space—
Thinking as an ethical practice of freedom.
The murmur I heard began to gnaw
At the sexual moral frames by which I had been bound,
Embraced, and rejected.
This quiet erosion as an ethical release—
Not a full-throated leap,
But the un-knotting and loosening of a fabric.
.
Unwinged
Its anachronistic strangeness leaves it unwinged,
As Ann Carson puts it—
A noun, whose spirit remains trapped in the lungs, unspoken.
In itself, a silencing withdrawal of meaning,
Eros hollows out the subject-object doublet
That structures sexuality.
For those committed to speaking and thinking
Within such disciplinary and regulatory forms of confinement,
New resources are required—
For speaking and thinking.
There is no outside.
Method
I focus my attention on the abstract and unseen operating system.
The archive’s double meaning is difficult to grasp.
The two meanings do not cohere into the unity of understanding—
Rather, they undo the philosophical idea of coherence and unity.
There is something heterotopian about this double understanding of the archive,
As both concrete place and abstract operating system—
As both visible and invisible.
How might we track the movement in the archive?
Truth, history, and life itself—
All fundamental elements of biopower—
Are made, fashioned, invented.
That fictioning is poetic in its transformative sense.
As something fashioned, a fiction can be re-fictioned,
Refashioned.
In the border-suspending encounter,
The archive becomes an ethical invitation—
To philosophical investigation as an aesthetic practice.
The encounter between nowhere and known,
A practical art that transforms the poet
And those who hear her—
In terms that are ethical,
Making ethos, producing ethos,
Changing and transforming ethos.
Attention
In this recursive movement,
It offers poetic strategies for cultivating attention—
That extreme attentiveness that comes with waiting,
The attention of atente,
The acute awareness of what is radically new,
Repeatedly eroded by half-said truths,
The unsaid or the unsayable.
Sound disposed on a page,
Erotic rhythm, arrhythmia—
More staccato than glissando.
It lays bare the places where the mosaic is frozen,
Broken, its peace and pieces missing.
Disintegrative and rift-restorative,
Frayed fragments of an erotic art.
This is my attempt to address that perplexity.
The murmuring background of a movement
That scatters,
In the spirit of conversation,
And eagerness for the challenge
To explain that which resists explanation.
The Question
This ethics does not take its own beginning as a given—
It begins by questioning,
By putting its own beginning in question.
This self-questioning exposes ethics
To the radical contingency
Of its own violent formation.
The modern psyche, or soul,
Whose sting of consciousness disciplines
Subjects into governing themselves,
Into the self-repugnance called ressentiment,
Half imaginary, half real,
And yet to be lived.
Try to love the questions themselves—
Like locked rooms, like books
Written in a foreign tongue.
Do not just strive to uncover answers—
They cannot be given to you,
Because you have not been able to live them.
Live the questions for now,
And without noticing it, perhaps
You will gradually live your way into the answers.
Meditation
These experiments in living
Are not self-indulgent, hedonistic forays,
Nor drug- or sex-induced limit experiences—
They tend to be quiet, sober, and recursive.
As meditation, these quiet practices of ethical subjectification
Are less explosive than they are erosive—
Like gullies hollowed out over time.
This describes a self-undoing
That necessarily occurs in relation to others—
A self-hollowing,
Relational erosion of edges,
Within and outside,
Despite the self.
This is the result of self-othering,
A surrender to something larger than the self,
Like the gullied rainstorm,
Season after season.
Dismantling
A movement of self-release—
Dismantling of self,
Rather than its negation.
A subtractive, recursive,
Disintegrating submission to something
Larger than I am.
Eros springs in ecstasy,
Larger than the self.
The lover belongs not to,
But with the beloved—
Like the thought of the outside
Whose movement intrudes
On the subject’s interiority,
Drawing it out of itself.
Divine yearning places the lover
Outside of herself
In the loving care she has for everything,
So that she may come to abide
With all things.
But the lover achieves
This erotic union with all things
By virtue of her capacity
To remain within herself.
Going outside of oneself
Is done ultimately to find oneself—
To wrap and gather oneself
In the dazzling interiority
Of a thought that’s rightfully being
In speech.
In other words, discourse—
Even if it is the silence
Beyond all language,
The nothingness beyond all being.
A Capacity
A capacity to affect
A unity and alliance,
In our particular co-mingling
In the beautiful and the good.
It binds things of the same order
In a mutually regarded union—
An ordinary ethics of everyday life
In which Eros names a desire
Larger than the self.
Something larger than the “I,”
A capacity for sustained relationality
That she also calls freedom.
The ethical effect of attunement with nature,
In the rapport between dissonance
And disconnection.
The desire for an ideal
Repeatedly fractured
By the arithmetic violence of the real.
Eros opens towards refreshing plays,
Refreshing places,
Refreshing spaces of comedy and laughter.
Erosion
An ideal integrity disturbed
By a movement of disintegration,
Whose resulting parts—
Like puzzle pieces waiting to be put together—
Have somehow been extracted
From that originary whole.
This dissolves interiority,
Bringing out the paradoxical relation
Of centripetal and centrifugal forces.
A simultaneous binding and unbinding
That does not come to rest in completion.
This restlessness is the erosion
Of dialectical sublations,
Victory, or right to victory.
Repeated gestures in history
Leave in suspense
Anything that might take on
The appearance of an ending
Or a rest in truth.
Something Other
What was scattered gathers.
What was gathered blows apart—
A function of impermanence, time passing,
An inward movement.
The tension in conjoining
Pushes things apart.
This chaotic formulation:
Earth to seed,
Earth speaks and unspeaks
Across a binding, unbinding.
That “I” is not a substance, but a grammar—
A present to hold lightly.
To work gropingly is to linger over the ambiguity,
Meaning-making as the temporary result
Of a temporal sedimentation.
This erotic movement dramatizes
The tracking of meanings
That fade over time
Without disappearing altogether.
Eros emerges
Out of a series of strange grammatical shifts—
Moves and murmurs as a verb.
Something like capacities,
Conditions of possibility,
An unstable conditioning agency.
Something other than domination,
Something other than discipline,
Something other—
Practice is a freedom
That coheres and dissolves us.
We extract ourselves as truth
From a background that falls away,
Intruding on that self-speaking
Extraction of truth, and its occultation.
Not a crossing of a line,
But a suspension of the relation
That gives us the line,
Opening at the heart of the limit—
A non-positive affirmation.
Awakening
Distances, disperses of faces—
Loosens.
Awakening and releasing
My cravings, my aversions,
My disciplinary attachments,
My unquenchable wants.
What is flickers,
Stereoscopically with what could be—
Something undisciplined,
Awakening a formless murmur.
Something shifts in that unsettling,
The goal of allowing refusal, curiosity,
And innovation.
Ways of existing,
Styles of life—
Inventing a possibility of life,
A way of existing.
A transmutation of the real
Through a free play of attention,
If theoretical practice.
A not-at-all personal mode of invention
That opens other possibilities for existing.
How will we breathe inside the techno grid
That puts us under surveillance—
And in turn, each of us
Becoming evermore effective
In surveilling ourselves,
And so many others
As so many forms of life,
As memes, selfies, internet,
Ad-junkies, and pixels?
I watch,
Whereas GPS-driven motorists
Suck the grid.
Might Eros teach us
To veer off course,
To get lost—
To keep living
By holding living?
Vigil
Open as a question when that loosens us.
More questions, whipping me into shapes
That are not quite me—
Twists, like a whip, folding and unfolding
Or cracking to the rhythm of its utterances.
The French verb is veiller—
To keep watch.
From the Latin vigilare—
To provide for, to care,
By watching, keeping watch.
As veiller means staying awake,
In the night, remaining alert
During the time usually consecrated to sleep.
Veiller is thus the verb of palliative care,
A caring attentive to the fact of dying,
Without knowing when the dying will come.
Its etymological roots in the Latin vigilare
Also link it to the Latin vigil—
The eve of a religious festival.
These occasions of watching,
Bending down as in prayer,
Are also acts of devotion.
Fragments
The way that a poem breaks off
Leads into a thought that can’t ever be apprehended.
There is a space where I thought it would be,
But which you can’t get a hold of.
I love that space—
It’s the reason I like to deal with fragments.
A poetic, disintegrative approach to thinking and speaking:
The breaks, the gaps, the discontinuities.
The conception of history is whole, written, and incomplete.
A free space of imaginal adventure
And embodied aging,
Inhabitant of a wonderful and devastated planet.
That thought speed—
That thought space opens,
In movements of self-doubling and deviation.
Even the absence of structure is a structure.
Defective fragments.
How long must something be
To cease being a fragment?
The Archive
The lover, the beloved,
And that which comes between them—
Three points of transformation
On a circuit of possible relationship,
Electrified by desires,
So that they touch without touching, conjoined.
They are held apart.
The sphere has become a thing full of holes,
With the figure of the spiral.
Something disappears
And returns with a difference.
An unconditional return,
And an absolute plunge—
Its vertical dimension.
And the strange return
Allows us to hear the distant background noise
Of which reason’s time was extracted.
I feel it reverberate,
Like sounds in a room.
That room is our archive,
A complex volume of events and things
That we call our historical present.
Kismet Arts Tangent 
Leave a comment