SIGHT / SIGN / SET / SCENE / COFFIN

by Timothy Lavenz

We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little information upon certain points of Himself... But it is this Being of the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary and you would have Him on the street. —Melville, in a letter to Hawthorne, ca. Feb 1851 If God had looked into our minds, he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of. —Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Psychology, §284

I (1) The "how" of an expressions' enactment, the "way" it is said, is as important, if not much more, than the "what" of its content, the "about" of its object. (2) For the "about" to be proper to itself, it must employ a strategy of conceptual negations, tricks in language; certainty, as I hope to shown, always involves an uncertain and undefined observer, or at least the dwindling of a certain overconfidence as to what being an observer is "about." (3) The reference point of any observer is questioned and brought (in)to its proper relations, where a formal language of ironic observation is engaged. We seek a meaningful efficiency of language to these ends. Wittgenstein's main proposition is that we must remain attentive to the application of words, not merely the words themselves; we must dig deeper than what the words "say" and into the "mode of saying," the usage. His gesture emphasizes the importance of the relational over the referential, that the relational and differential aspects of our usage matter most, the meaningful aspects, rather than the supposed truths words were trying to reference. A style of thinking is its invention in usage, in thought and language, where, when reading, the role of imaginability can never be understated or overlooked. We say we find ourselves an age where reference has failed: advertising and consumption mask unfreedom in freedom; deceptions about financial and political matters flood the media scene; and quantum physics reassures us that the sight has everything to do with the seen, the scene. Our knowledge of the link between word and object has become more difficult, illustrated by the conflicting references to the name of God (the name of the observer?). Holderlin's "the gods have fled" or Nietzsche's "God is dead" point directly to this failure to successfully reference God. Yet we must never forget the

creativity and new breath these observations and texts picture; the passion that expresses the failure to commune is equal, yet different, to the passion of myth-creation itself; and therefore close to language's corpse, where myth would have tried to give it a metaphysical substance. The substance, rather, lies in us, in meaning-it. Similarly, Wittgenstein's vision yearns to go beyond the boundaries of significant language; his ethics cannot be a science, but is equal to aesthetics. The document it tends is on unshakeable grounds; its nonsensicality refers us beyond the constrictures of the world (the observer?), the sense come from convention like a phoenix. Likewise, our own death is a living counterpart we must attend to and care for, lest we lose sight of our meaning. Death is how we carry our consciousness: it coincides with the end of my truth, the myth of myself, of my outwardly directed raison d'être, which ends for your sake. It is a gift one cannot give or receive, for it is the gift of the self, shared partes extra partes. It is time, infinite love, an expression of care for words and for the observers they stage. The sense of wonder at the world, the intuitions over which we fall silent, foster language games that foster the ethical. This implicit and emergent necessity cannot and could never stay within the bounds of religious tradition, we might even say of "language itself." But let’s be clear: this is not to say there is something that we can’t say, only that we speak what can’t be said at the limit of speak. It’s how we say things with our mouth and hands that we had not thought we would say. But we no longer know who or what this "we" stands for. Yet this was never the issue: these "words" are concepts in relation that do correspond and mirror substantive conditions; but to the extent that we "know what these words mean," we block the conduit between the meaning of our being (what our being-here or being-with indicates) and its phenomenal expression,

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which makes its reality more accessible by producing a virtual picture of it. We don’t need the picture, reality is already there for us to see that we can’t see it; and yet to see the picture is to see what the picture can’t access or round-out like a blueprint or working diagram. The pictures, the discourses, compose a relational network finds expression in a language of concepts, consciousness, and thinking, where each expression is singular, subject to its own formal laws. The logic of the work is then tautological, much like the error of representation is not itself representable; but the work requires an outside to be this way. Its standard is mere falsity, a settling unwinding of difficulties, whose cause exists only in its effects. It therefore requires we lend equal weight to sense and nonsense, consciousness and unconsciousness, thought and unthought, the human and inhuman, the different and the indifferent, life and death. Insofar as we surrender this weighing, we surrender ourselves. And yet it must be said that the weight is apparent; the "failure of referentiality," as it were, is merely the sign of a larger change: that culture itself is the escape from the all-too-human, that we are only insofar as we are offered as the locus of the other. The self is the relation relating between, and to write it out, whatever its formulation, is to offer a thoughtful handshake. This handshake happens in language, in thought, in consciousness, body-to-body, but it involves a meaningfulness quite other to these phenomena. To be sure, it requires this meaningfulness, Wittgenstein's truthfulness, and in this way remains forever en route. To return to (1). The philosopher, whoever it is, is a speaker in a social world; whether he or she is discussing mathematics, metaphysics, or simply ordering baguettes from the local bakery, he or she quite naturally enters conventional modes of representation. The question of whether or not words actually corresponds to things "outside" language is rendered null once

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the baguette is in our hands and it is time to eat lunch— and, the concern then seems plainly absurd. And yet: I use the word "baguette" quite differently at the bakery than I might in a poem. We cannot generalize the essence of how words relate to things, because there is no standard. Words are revenant: at each use, they return from a long absence to assume a current function. This new function is equally: new origin, new word. Insofar as we can never know the whole context of a word's use (as Wittgenstein tells us, the explanation of a context itself requires an explanation), we can hardly even begin to separate the word from its manifest, current function. We do not escape the web of linguistic existence, which does not mean that our existence is simply linguistic, but that our existence is properly shared. In short, the question of "what a baguette is" or "who I am" is not something we answer in the abstract, removed from contexts, or further, removed from their transformation. Just as a mother eats bread not only for herself, but suffers for the child growing inside her, the question of "who I am" is not a clear-cut question of reference, but rather a question of social relation, for the mother is not herself, and I can never consider my loneliness to be my own. (2) Regarding the confidences and uncertainties we have per this social relation, we can follow no line back from the words I say, or the name I've been given, or even my facial or bodily expressions and find "someone" behind them. "I" am never encapsulated, summarized, or collected by these attributes; and yet I am nothing but these attributes you might see in/as me or hear from me. (Why is it that God could not seeing me, why is it that he sees nothing?) Existence is a matter of acknowledging self-otherness. I cannot be a reference point for myself: I can only be a reference point for you. In other words, to you: I can only be to/for you. "I am" is a method of projection that stands in relation to your method of projection. "I am" is a method that requires justification elsewhere—perhaps in that place in

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you where an auditory or visual impression can be made or find a place. Finding our place in the world means making space for others. Whatever my "method" is, to the extent that it involves an “inner process,” requires an outward criteria. This outward criteria is you, in whom there is no other, or can only be otherness. The reason for my being here is to see you to your reason also, to make room for those alienated from the reasonable spaces of the world. Finally, (is it true?) the "about" escapes us; in the end, we must attest and acknowledge that we, that they, are there. The "why" is beyond our grasp, we catch it only in glimpses, winks, lightning strikes, as Holderlin said, of a coming community and coming justice. And rightly so: the "why" of my being has its "because" only in you. (3) "It is almost as if 'seeing the sign in this context' were an echo of a thought. 'The echo of a thought in sight'— one would like to say."

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II Rubric rigged with stars, how gentle are your gridlines, R's! (I intended emotions, remoteness, severance. I went to bed with your questions; my begging them was our urn.) You who have come to me with eyes frustrated, an inaugural act casts demons to their true purpose. You're eyes, they're dead!, but for the rest (of us), instead, you I.

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O to think through what's been said of absolute dread, Maybe we'd come back with gardens in our heads Our feet the scalp of grass. My teeth The only band: Your bone Upholding everything.

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The diorama I drew in average conducts the average language does it reconstruct my clavicle? Burden like antelope at lioness night, Hunt for the child in the brunt of the seen, tucked in the black ground frames of these my hollow dreams at-who-aimed, braking unblamed.

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Fulfilling no economy, world- broken, the wonder I experience at its limits comes open in lungs in language. The tales and ails spin upright to potentiate an Eagle perching, no Bird to seek—the Law: space of the heart's eye seeing the reason for the mind, language burning up in the struck flame of its late desire: to be heard unburdened, articulated to return.

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Curtain always

falling

We are always

full

(I want for an unknown destiny (unsought) to rise and reside inside us to leave a residue.) ( I want to see you who you'll be with when you're due.) (Who will share with you your funereal home.) ( Who will play the futile hymn.) (Who will deem the days well sung.)

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*** What seemed inconceivable, to fill the gap between us, opened itself wide at the impetus of your reflexive gaze. From the aftermath of the self-fragmentation you witnessed, was it the unity of the body or the odd relation you pertained to it that you disavowed? My unity asserts itself in this fragmented image of yours: I assume my position in the gap you yourself have established as decisively operative in your self-conception. There was little else to take account of; the removal of mis-(self-)conceptions is all I could mean. The languages, the activities we construed for our domain, bled into theirs and theirs into ours, until we saw the whole of this world as shared— an I inner outer, freed. That the temporal always required more vocabularies, each fragment more fragments, symbolized our shed skin— the "yours" of "mine" that magnifies itself exuberantly and without measure in the scope of my attention. What felt free in this circle was the paradox of public motive and criterion mixed with my sweet feeling of desperate melancholy; and so I share in the writing out of your body, exscribed by it as it were, heterogeneous and irreducible in the dawn of your specific time, that voluntary motion that acknowledges the secular condition and impossibility: I am nothing but consciousness, and there is nothing but consciousness: there is no other of "Me"; but I can have no consciousness of who I truly am, because my possibility is grounded on this possibility: God is and I am within. Thus is exposed this body of yours Who prevails through all time. I am there, genuflect at the physic you presence, the psyche you bury. But you cannot peer into me, only I into you. Impossible as it is to deduce your essence from mine, I must finally say that I have none and am you. Or it is your having, preconditioned by the impossibility of this "is yours" signifying

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possession; unless of course you, like me, are me— mine, that is, dirtied object of black space and white words, memories of drained human soldiers. I am not the negativity the theologian finds absurd, even if for good discursive reason. I am a slab of pain, I am the piano being tuned, inaugurated in this offering as I enter the circulation of public signs and activity for the sake of the continued instrumentality of the instruments, for the relevant conception of the player's death, for the last row of vine tomatoes— which is conceived here, not refuted. What we deny is the player's position: he or she is the self-playing tone of the universally acoustic metaphor, the drink dinner offers to the evening. Never fully developed, meaning is all that develops; and there is no set meaning that need be developed. There are only settings where meaning develops: this involves sight, sites, signs, time and attention. Development: when our meaning is increasingly met with our attentive (looking and listening) (in-)different care. Thus, we dance in metonymic differences. The blackbird of our praise and thanks was not an empty charade, even if the message finally communicated was one of the essential emptiness of essence, sexual or otherwise. Emptiness signs the vast web of interrelatedness implicit with human activity, beyond any presumed "entities-in-relation," even if entities presume to manifest themselves in and from out of the nothing that this real (social) space is. We dwells there. The "decision" to be omnipotent was symbolic, such that all our actions enact it, even as there can be no (perfect) cognition of the scope of our influence, which we simply exhibit by being-there. (What we cannot cognize, think, or know, but only attend to, listen for, or peer near, is God: our process propped up in us, a log in thermal clothing.)

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***

Sticking to my designated task, I read. Thus, I entered the context again and again. Nothing can be deemed wrong here, because all truth is lacking. Only my obscure reference can exist, and I have already addressed myself as the deferral of your immortal attachments (which, you are quick to notice, both do and do not look like what's seen in the mirror of your self-reflection)). I, tautology shining with term-darkness, talk to my imaginary double, an amalgam of influences who inevitably emerges from any wrong idea or purpose for inner experience. I emerge as this outwardly directed inwardness precisely because I saw the emergency their wrong-headed notions engendered. Anxiety was but the negative repercussion of a presupposed substantiality; but subjectivity itself resolved to be this particular substance just at this moment that finds itself aware of this impossibility. I realized I was a tulip; these tulips. The form of the insight allowed others to discover the untruths integral to their own constitutive project in consciousness. The sole dimmer switch (dimerous, that is), I switched on the light to reveal the darkness cast by appearances. Yet time is still my segment: I've no choice but to be passed over in the wake of you forgetting your own past. This forgetting I foster, I encourage, I self-enact. A womb in my cavernous perception, I wonder: how you could ever fail? unless failure is codetermined by the end of conscious direction. Something— alas, your most cherished nothing— allows for this enjoyment of meaning, regardless; but this allowance is not of my own. It is of God, the incompossible logic; it is of you listens. I seek that place where an auditory impression might be made, but in my vocalizations I therefore find no place to rest, and the oncoming coffin (a possibility engaged daily) has already won control over my presentation. It is because we share (this)

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(same) coffin(s)— or it is that consciousness, matter itself, is a coffin, yet nothing more threatening than a bug in the throat.

The sheer autonomy of vision breathes with its hair. It bubbles up in order to be lost; but nothing is hidden. One's inhabited environment, whatever it appears to be, is mouth, is time's rhythm. The inhabited environment shares the truth of the text insofar as each lie and lack themselves and require the supplement context. Your inhabited environment is mine too. Bridging the apparent gap between locations, times, and identities remained impossible: but it is this virtual and conceptual work that mattered most, because reality on its terms was partial and as yet unfinished— even if, beyond this self-construal, the "real that escapes reality" was long ago "completed" ("redeemed"?)— a way art-naming— the way each moment of a process is both the whole process and the whole process at an effective stand-still. Sounded. Almost, like a prayer. Breaking open the causal connection was the only connection to the organ of passion. Energy, expanded, had no way out but in.

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Even the confluence of

affects over-generalizes me. I have so many doubts, so many debts to pay; my subjectivity is lost in an archive to find; I find it; I lose everyone along my way. So this is for the hidden one, the one that points and blinks and appears

To be blinded by the insight— this night, our time, the romanticism Where there is something un-incite-able, something inflected, inflicted, quiet, lost maybe even About the cost of spending time, at the ledge where some— none— thing takes over, this intoxication To a certain ex-tint I mimic the conditions of sudden friendship in

is constant gratitude

whipping like a white flag in the wind.

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Whichever One who left his tongue dangling on the tepid balcony bridged levers: the all I meant to bark handling over.

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Wherever Creation run its course there is ambush: a sermon of adjectives standing losing their place.

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*** I advocate the spontaneous proliferation of philosophical concepts into phenomenal planispheres and textures: an overflowing spontaneity mastering salving tradition and its immediate failure the tragedy. Let us climb to the ledge of existence and never look back. Deny the line of projection that might lead to who I am— I am here trying only to change again our style of thinking. How could I predict how I would respond to your existence, the call of sight and hearing you harbor as though it were your dimension to surreptitiously command, when really you simply expanded and contracted like a larynx naying.

(Please, eye, modify: The field of the word decides).

My roundabout connection to it, this feeling of control, is difficult to decide if legitimate. If "I do" makes sense for us without any experiential content, if "remembering" has no experiential content, then I am simultaneously that "I do" and that "I remember" for which I can, by introspection, find no content, no "who" where a line of projection might reach— except, of course, to that place which only reaches. I indicate a failure in the real, the forcing-upon of a concept, the introduction of the virtual such that its artifice might effect a change; but not causal, conceptual. I indicate a lack that is, there, in the way that I am; a trace, beyond what appears and exactly whatever appears to be. I erupt from out of placid unconscious perfection into a conscious emergency not only to acknowledge this perfection but to acknowledge that it requires my emergency, my imperfection, a stain like me, to be what it is. Yet, conversely, I am aware of myself as a perfect

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imperfection: a clear substance as distinct as you and your phenomenal capacities.

(The dynamic and the mathematic are irreducible to one another and yet E merged in this (world language). Their functions exhibit a conceptual heterogeny, but the M other they exhibit is in many ways U northodox. She is khora; he performs his J ustice without specific force. The form of the I nteraction— who, by the way, appears more negative?— mimics the S pace of the E ncounter, where all that is is, and has, and will, A rise.)

This primarily is a philosophy of water, waking up to its flowed self. It presents its concept insofar as it coheres— or "compears"— co-appears. It's only insight must cohere with the depth of sleep and death, of which our access reveals their dependency on waking life, just as consciousness only arises as a function of the unconscious criterion, hidden in you like my opal.

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My kinship with your loose directives manifests most readily in the moment of readiness, that is, my loneliness. What accumulates in this middle, and what we behaviorally express as response to it, participate in an ecstasy we can hardly comprehend. Precisely, anguish flares in me as the negative moment of the other's unrealized yet urgent enjoyment; so urgent, here you are in me. Perhaps melancholy is really a kind of surplus (love) above and over all common modes of enjoyment, yet intimately interwoven with enjoyment's (un)common (un)folding. Not surprisingly, this surplus of us in us leads us right to the threshold of our conscious origin (space now, time zero), and reflects the unconsciousness to which we owe our presence and cognition. That other who is there in us, exceeding us, can properly be no one other than oneself. In the dynamic one of apperception, the mathematic two+ of the perceived world finds its synthetic purpose; in terms of this purpose (mathematical?) (accurate?) (accidental?) (natural?) the dynamic one can experience itself as one and the other. This procession of eventual essences is futural, yet futile to capture you: here we can merely address; and written words do little to help this happen. The "room" you are in, the space itself, addresses you with your most urgent call— a confluence of material consciousnesses on a concourse of themselves. That this text enters it, possessionless, is thus both an excess and of course. The game it names is decidedly not irrelevant.

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I am no noun, Not a word, not a solid. I am is a method of projection Love projected. I am Adjective, Ad- Verb, purr, I am Protection. And yet it is hard To recount With certainty the television glaring back at me

It says that we hurt, It says we are seriously in trouble, We're to go to the hospital, Or bury the live body In the yard.

but No complications in this coffin / logic, You just walk thru.

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When the ample bounds Of freedom eclipse The memory of our Shapes of words,

How then did we find out what had happened? We alerted one another That it happened.

Our forms in space, The modeling glue, Were meant to yelp trust In contentless room Into view, "viewer-less":

A uterine you, Neutered, two rendered, entered, centered anew.

By and by the multiplicity of formulations grew like the days from sirens.

Naught was thus coughed up and covered,

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A plethora of rhythms (who will

find it to fill it?) echoes

The hidden message hid the hidden beloved (How negation?) Such that I'm seen in everything, you.

Verb, noun, whichever, I am Severed, irrevocably I Hover back off down The heaven's hood.

But these teeth teach the curls of Never.

The central sounds assent, leveler.

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TWOMB In me, there is two, there is you. I love to count the ways… In- numerable, the details we bought each other, the sentences we robbed. I, me, vexed rawhide, have a clover: not a letter, not a reader, not a sender,

not an ever. I'm the sever you breathe in each second twiceentailed. Marks of how you embarked, trailing out,

arching

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Your two shoulders of paradise, clung: how you came to

encompass the passion of the disintegrated community—

(epoch of first times erupting out of the crust of eyes dawning).

Caught in the coffin Caught coughing this logic I prevail the way you shine through your veil to me.

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temptress tombstone where… are… you…? you rule everything, echo like a syllable in my babbling eye come through.

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I don't have to agree (with you) (to talk) with who you are; in fact, agreement stands (in the way). The point is to read your metaphysics while you eat your baguette and chat spontaneously with the others on the spray. Then, you indicate something— and, granted at least one of them is attentive to your sign, maybe something will even be expressed. (But these concerns aside, could your exposure ever be prevented? The point is to eat your metaphysics and each being-there that there to you is given.)

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I, lunar tic in her air waves am bespeckled by the sun spots I can only reflect back upon myself. I am full, A son is razed.

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I've tried to surrender everything, but failed. Tried to say your name, failed. Thought I could cast a rippling wave across the stone, a negative of water levitating earthy reveries. But the period we seemed to come to at a stop reflected back our brightness, and surely, the light above us was our light.

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Death, Herr Vistletime, I think, was the concept that forced itself on. Despite what we said about communication, we both find that there are things and concepts, perhaps, it is difficult to say. That is why the fingers wrote and could not, or needn't, think; that is why you so often used scissors. Did you know when you wrote that their fragments were yours? That is why you told us to look; that is the way you suggested to us: "Don't analyze your inner experience." For all you knew, doing, the "I do," needn't have experiential content at all. And so we lived the non-content (non-concept?) death up to its full place in life, where it had long hid in the guise of the threatening. It released us to our freedom, that is, to the life we share between us inside us each of us. —Who is it inside us, there more than ourselves, for whom there is no other, because no same? Death? Me? God? Nature? Though we might be inclined to say otherwise, it is no one and nothing other than you yourself, and “I am,” here.

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Whenever you eat you eat a tongue. Thus the world turns on it. The curve of the term backbones on you.

This baguette body, isn't it tawdry, naughty, lovely, lofty,

off-putting, shoddy, toned, torn, festive born, roped, probed, and lobbied?

that they are there:

Isn't it awesome?

sight, sign, set,

scene,

coffin.