<eyebeam><blast> Ecosophic Object /Fire/Escape/

[Clifford Duffy <cwduff@alcor.concordia.ca>]

        Activism has as many shapes as there are personalities,
movements, and committments. One has a committment as an artist, a 
writer, a poet. One has committments as a man or woman who is a poet, a
painter or perhaps even a dancer. What does the dancer do when she is
not dancing? What sort of dancer is a member say of an ecological
movement, or were there many dancers say who were members of the Maoist
wing of French leftist politics in France in the 1960's? I don't know.
But I reckon that dancers, at least the more classical kind, rarely
ventured outside of the domain of their art. I say this knowing there
were no doubt exceptions. I would say Nijinsky was an exception. Not
because of his politics as a practice, but because Nijinksy reveals to
us in his journals his desire to change the world. To change it in the
simplest sense, because he is outraged and hurt by the injustice. The
simple injustice of suffering. 
Once upon a time I was a community organizer, a food-bank worker, a
part-time refugee worker, a mental health worker defending the rights of
the 'mentally ill.' I wish I had been around when Artaud needed
defending. Alas. Not having been born then.


        O suffering
        O Joy O Happiness

        The sight of some infinitely suffering thing.
        
        Physical suffering is so degrading.

These are not Nijinsky's words, but T.S. Eliot's. A
man whose politics are distasteful to me. A strange man. A poet no less
for
that. A fine poet. Not as interesting say as Derek Walcott is in Omeros.
Which attempts to voice suffering in a broader more historical sense. 
But
that is another story.
        There are so many paths any woman\man\teenager\child can take -
BEcome them all - To alter the world in front of them. Words can change
things. 
Words by a poet
read in isolation 
        can be taken as the rallying call for a generation.
Words of a song can call out to thousands to stand fast against
something
that oppresses. 'No passeron' that famous great
slogan
of the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War.
Good that he did for lots of reasons. He can tell us one part of what
happened. Witness, the writer is a witness, because words are not
action.
Words act perhaps in some other domain, the imagination.  I maintain a
very critical stance about the web for instance, but I have read
thousands
of words that are fine and useful and have provided me with great
learning. It has  opened up some doors and closed others. The lines of
flight can be found anywhere. If we are looking. I am looking. I am lost
and looking for the key. The key is the word, and it is in me. And I am
lost. I go around the circular word only to find the page I began at.
The
reactionary politics of a great poet like Eliot for instance still does
not prevent his work from disclosing to us lines of flight. His last
poems (the 4 Quartets) display a mystical dynamic not unlike that of his
more
leftist contemporaries. I realise all of this must be subjected to close
scrutiny and it will be no doubt. For those who are interested. But what
of Rilke say? What if Rilke had not written his Sonnets to Orpheus and
had
chosen instead to act. Must one be silent to act? I dont believe this is
the case. Tzara, Genet and others have shown another way to write and
live
and act. But each author [to paraphrase Tzara] creates from a true
necessity. Joyce, who I continually think of as the greatest author (and
this does not have to con-tra-dict what Foucault says about the death of
authorship) 20th. century literature, never as far as I know, took
action other than to
write.  Those he aided, he aided by writing. By the pen. Oh yes, he did
type a little between the 27 eye operations. Oh yes, a man of words. 
        Joyce's work esp. the Wake is perhaps the model for the
multitudinous possibilities of meaning, levels and plateaux that the web
can be for those who see and choose to explore it that way. WHich is No
Way but the Many Way. Rhizomatic Finnegans Wake.

        There is nothing to write - yet everything to write. The
seamless
web of language is the tissue of action. Our actions are words. The verb
is the accompanying hero of action. Genet repeatedly states in Prisoner
of
Love, how the writer is needed so the men and women of action, will be
remembered. The nameless thousands who are remembered in the texts. As
in
Homer, he compares himself to Homer. Gilles Deleuze compared Genet's
last
book to the Bible. Heroic, epic, chronicle like. Repeats and remembers
and
unravels. Tzara never stopped writing poetry while the Gestapo sought
him.
They hated him especially because of his poetry. Many Jewish poets who
were victims of the Shoah have left is the only records we have of the
hell through which they lived. They could take little action but that of
writing. And then there is T.E. Lawrence another sort of example of a
man
of action, and a literary genius struggling in one bodymind. There are
plenty of examples of men and women who have acted and written. They do
not in my view exclude one another. 

        There is no one way to speak. To write. To put out fires.

        'To forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of
my
race.'
        No, there is no way to say, this is 'The[e] Way'

        As William Burroughs was fond of saying:
        'There is no More "the" one the answer'
        The word 'the' is dead"

        unless it is a spell that gets ya across the street
        

        Finnegans Wake which contains the names of hundreds of rivers as
they swirl back into the primal mythical Irish sea reveals to us the
plurality of consciousness through and with language. The signifier and
signified are one whole movement of transient flux with denotative and
connotative multiple meanings. So it is with action. 

        Each one must choose. There is no path.
        Somebody's house was burning.

        Joyce helped a number of writers get out of Nazi Germany.

        That was action of one kind. There are others.
        
        'I tell you again it dont apply
        Death or life or life or death
        Death is life and life is death
        I gotta use words when I talk to you
        But if you understand or if you dont
        That's nothing to me and nothing to you
        We all gotta do what we gotta do
        We're gona sit here and drink this booze
        We're gona sit and have a tune
        We're gona stay and we're gona go
        And somebody's gotta pay the rent
        - I know who
        But that's nothing to me and nothing to you '
                *** The Possum's.
        
        The honeyed twilight cupped in long shadowed squares,
        the dripping dungeons, the idiot dukes, were all
        redeemed by the creamy strokes of Velazquez,

        like the scraping cellos in concentration camps,
        with art next door to the ovens, the fluting veil
        of smoke soaring with Schubert? The cracked glass of Duchamp's

        The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors; did Dada
        foresee the future of Celan and Max Jacob
        as part of the cosmic midden? What my father 

        spiritedly spoke of was that other Europe
        of mausoleum museums...'
        Omeros - D. Walcott.

        What Walcott does not mention is Goya.

        And his nasty mad portraits that did not creamily reflect the
aristocrats the portraits they wished to see. So Goya paid a price for
that. So Goya. So you or me. Or them or us.

        What he forgets is Dada was born in Switzerland, - where 
Hugo Ball, Emmy Hennings,Tzara, Arp, Richter, Huelsenbeck, and others
had
sought refuge as a protest against the horrors of World War 1. A place
to
make art which no longer had a capital A. And an art which allowed each
individal to be and do what they thought best. As was to be the case for
each one of these artists.
        Maybe he did not forget. He had other things on his mind.

        The midden heap.

        Cause or effect/ or Both/And

                        Carlos writes:
. I think that the> internet could provide the means to develop this
kind of systems and I
> also think that is one of the most interesting political aspects of the
> medium. ***   Yes,, yes, yes....
        ****
And there tools to make this work. Politics, as Deleuze and
Guattari
state it in Milles Plateaux, is born at the same moment as Being. How do
we politic?
        I suggest we need tools which allow us multiple perspectives, 
and
that takes into account differences which span a range of what is almost
impossible to reckon up or dream of unifying any longer.

        Perhaps Felix Guattari can help us.

        "In order to counteract reductionist approaches to subjectivity,
we have proposed an analysis of complexity starting with an Ecosophic
object with four dimensions:
        --material, energetic and semiotic Fluxes;
        -- concrete and abstract machinic Phylums;
        -- virtual Universes of value;
        -- finite Existential Territories;
The ecosystem approach of Fluxes still represents an indispensable
awareness of the cyvbernetic interaction and feedback involved with
living
organisms and social structures. But it is as much a matter of
establishing a transversalist bridge between the ensemble of ontological
strata, which each in their own way, are characterized by specific
figures
of chaosmosis." [Chaosmosis. Felix Guattari p 124 Indiana Univ. Press
trans. Paul Bains ... 1995]
        
        History is the nightmare from which I am trying to escape.
        Joyce/Again


        And Both and Both and Both And Both And Both....
        
        'Good people say that we must not flee, that to escape is not
good, that it isn't effective, and that one must work for reforms. But
the
revolutionary knows that escape is revolutionary -- withdrawal, freaks--
provided one sweeps away the social cover on leaving, or Causes a Piece
of
the System[s] to get lost in the shuffle. What matters is to break
through
the wall, even if one has to become black like John Brown. George
Jackson.
"I may take flight, but all the while I am fleeing, I will be doubtless
looking for a weapon..... (L'Antioedipe 72/Deleuze/Guattari)

        the schizo lines of flight can take many shapes....

        as many as there are fires to be put out or lit


        as many words as require the poem to blaze


        Create rhizomes to make put out the fires

        I saw a fire in the sky

        I saw a word burning in head


        My true love had died

        While I lay dying

        While I was riding West toward the Eastern shore


        Alors, all aboard all aboard!

        Step right up, Get your tickets Now!

        The Greatest show in the world

        Year 2000 Coming Up sooooon Toooo Soooon


        Desire machine ringing and ringing


        Rig your desire to the fires

        The fires everywhere

        Best are all

        All are equal


        Desire and Fire

        *************************************
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