(high ramble january 2024)
for context i used to do this sort of shockingly grandiose philosophical-stream-of-consciousness-journaling when i would take edibles in high school, this is a more recent attempt at a similar thing
1/18/2024
The expectation to write means the white space colonizes the entire interface.
At what point is one no longer a writer?
The high is beginning in a stage of thoughtless excitement at sounds and even though I am totally
against genealogy of any kind I have this instinct to track (or construct) all kinds of lineages
that led me to here and may or may not involve the death of my father as somehow correlated with
a shift in this totally unrecognizably frivolous or even counterproductive activity of “writing.”
Why make the thoughtless thought? Why create the whole? (Maybe for the benefit of singing—- the
spreading of experience in writing as germinal [NOT seminal] of new experience rather than just
colonial of other experience.) In those high school google docs (was there just one?) I remember
having some kind of assertion in mind that the page in front of me was actually something like a
1:1 re-presentation of my thought (this is what I’m thinking from memory instead of just opening
the document because that’s a whole other layer of chaos I don’t know how to get into, oh god
unless maybe I should, what if i annotated it from my current perspective? /
I’m just remembering one line in particular where at least for a moment i wrote something like
“if you were to look inside the contents of my brain it would look something like this google
doc”), and while maybe I would agree in the sense that whatever I experience as my “thoughts”
while writing are probably pretty syntactical and English-like (per Benveniste - “linguistic
form is the condition for the realization of thought,” or maybe per Lacan - the unconscious is
structured like a language? [though I can’t pretend to understand Lacan well enough to lock him
into some white space like this, another terror of the academic-citational form]), I’ve also
since then turned so much (oh god here it is the impreciseness of the words—- thought? light?
[god forbid a visual metaphor, almost as bad as a phallic one]) to writing itself, in something
like a hatred of it, or some series of purely intellectual thoughts that have spread in
practical networks to my sensing-behaving fingertips as a hatred of it, so that any conflation
between the contents of the self and the materiality of written signs makes me itchy (per maybe
Mallarmé: “poems are not written with ideas, they’re written with words).
Because I still don’t know what is killed by writing, I have turned my “studies” (that quanti-
zation of something like “passion,” if I’m being even more pretentious-romantic) toward the
writing instead of the thing killed by it, which is the actual thing that gives me supreme joy.
Of course: the positive space is more easily defined than the negative it creates, even as it is
also created by this negative.
I’ve retitled the document to today’s date (1/18/2024). This way it stays historicized. One of
the most primary horrors of literature (per maybe Proust) is that it must “escape history.”
This is because the formation of an object carries the frightful weight of objectivity: the per-
manence of the book or essay flees to escape its instant (its writing) like the permanence of the
sign (which is the dealing of books) subsumes and obscures the perceptual, momentary singularity
of what it names and thereby makes universal, makes generally understandable (per Ponge: language
is gross because it’s been in everybody’s mouth).
My poetry’s goal, I think, if this is not me trying to find some solace in my complete imposter
syndrome (am I the only writer who writes because I resent the existence of writing as a practice
and form? surely there are a few), is the proliferation of the “pre-linguistic sensorium” beyond
the bounds in which it is deemed primary (after the materiality of the sign swallows it into an
intellectual, trans-situational ‘objectivity’ [Nietzsche’s columbarium]), which is of course the
exact opposite of this writing (the diaristic here being automatically made into a flailing
parody the philosophical-universal-ahistorical since my [communicable] subjectivity is so
thoroughly constituted by signs, and recently, by academic-philosophical signs in particular),
but which (if I were currently carrying out this goal instead of pretending to describe it [all
description being pretension]) would put the sound or vision before its meaning and thereby posit-
ion the materiality as the center instead of the substrate (the refuse), transform the signifier
which names into the referent which naming erases, an asexual nongendered kind of reproduction in
which intellect turns back into pure sense.
My automatic enemy the signified.
[and how we wish to live in the sensual world.]
1/20/2024
Being high
(in this moment)
(i must be momentary)
gives me a materiality in the particular.
If I read a non-fiction text while high, I no longer know how to abstract it into a broad image
of what socially-defined “type of person” may have written it (their edges, in sober life
[‘productive life’], always being filled in with a soft killing by the general, the violence of
the macroscopic). Instead, I see its sentences in color and sense, connections made bright for a
moment and then retreating.
This is why I have an urgency to write in defense of the unwritable-
eff in defense of the ineffable- when I’m high:
A displacement of sense makes me believe that the ineffable is a thing.
The pre-linguistic “sensorium” has convinced me that it exists, is prior, edenic.
I want the particular; this is why I generalize (by writing).
Is the sensorium produced by capitalism?
Where is God?
This, maybe, a horrible thought that being high always gives me, is why getting high in freshman
year convinced me I should study philosophy and/or writing[1].
But these are all blendings:
this high becomes the same thing as every high; language becomes the same thing as social life;
whatever I felt in my head just then before typing “social life” becomes the same thing as
“social life” (the same goes for whatever was in my head before typing “language”); whatever
precedes the semicolon becomes the same thing as whatever follows it
(there’s terror in the paragraph, I’ll maybe stick to verse).
ahem
language becomes the same as social life.
What did I mean by that?
the metaphor that: the reading of the text is material but dissolves into social/cultural “types”
(at least when all is functioning soberly, but let’s leave that aside
[embarrassment? for whom?])
, in a blurring inherent to writing, is in the next moment equated to
the metaphor that: sensory inputs are not linguistic and dissolve into language with writing
(the sensory referent dissolves into the psychological signified
which is solidified in the material signifier)
, because both seem reducible, in a violent algebra, to
the metaphor that: the particular dissolves into the general at the moment of communication.
in that very sentence, the particular of
[whatever series of thoughts i was having while writing the earlier reflection
(“If I read a non-fiction text…”)
which itself was an attempted recreation of whatever series of thoughts i was having while reading
a theology senior project followed by Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace]
dissolved into a generalization
[those thoughts’ relation to our particularly social need for describing “types” of people using
language other than what they provide to us within their text]
that led to their reduction into the simple (horribly ambiguous) signifier “social life.”
The writing is the need for re-creation of thought. It is a real need.
All writing is an epitaph.
How far down should a microscope go?
When will the map cover the terrain?
Footnotes:
[1] This thought is horrible because it would mean that I’ve defined the bounds of my ‘productive
life’ based around the retreats into interior sensation (what is “interior sensation”?)
characteristic of my ‘non-productive life’ (these at least being the categorizations of past/
future experience I construct when I’m high) [I].
[I] That footnote was written about 30 minutes after the original line [A], and already in
that time my thoughts have clearly gone in a new direction involving things like the
job market. Does this relate to the base, pre-linguistic layer of the sensorium being
colonized by state ideology? I don’t know, I’m going to go eat a piece of cheese.
[A] in fact, maybe it should ideally be read after the reader has already read the next
page, but Christ what reader am I even talking about? must a text always have a
reader? I have an instinct to imagine writing as an interior and closed-off space,
Proust and such, or fucking Descartes, but really writing implies the social by
default because signification is ALWAYS for the benefit of some future other, even
journaling is. I should figure out how to make sub-footnotes and make them smaller
and smaller until they disappear, an ultimate metaphor for explanation, or maybe
just write a story about a writer who does that