ZANORG · 14 December 2008
Tonight I turned my tender-monkey grooming ways to my laptop. Burnished the old girl with pointy little q-tips intended for home manicures, and removed all the keys to see what was going on with the sticky e.
Ohhhh.
The keyboard was filled with flax seeds (three varieties), chia seeds, hemp seeds, and lint.
The keys were a little scrabble quiver on my desk, so I stole up the first two words I saw and popped them back in to the middle line of my console, which now reads:
XTHIS<NOW!:
In the Boggle game that is my new keyboard, there is also ZAP!, POW!, HIC> (Latin for here), PROG, BYE, YES, PAN, LMFAO (oops) and ZANORG.
What is this last formation? A message in some Dell computer kabbalah? May its meaning be revealed in time, oh mystical Inspiron.
ZAP HIC THIS NOW ZANORG hides my true configuration, the fast hacker script DVORAK. That pattern we had to know by the touch in the days before pop-off laptop keys, so at this point the key symbols are useless to me except as some kind of new mnemonic. It’s not like I ever really look where I’m going, but I hope XTHIS<NOW!: catches me sometimes.
It’s so immanent!
Is there an answer here though to this weird suggestion I’ve been puzzling—that traditions of practice must be taken up and led by women in order to remain useful? I don’t know, and I’m all out of little treatises for now, but I’ve also been looking at this heap of keyboard letters and thinking of Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote about alphabets and labyrinths and also has this story called The Immortal.
It’s so beautiful—go read it, in the collection The Aleph and Other Stories. It’s about the meaninglessness of a “heaven” that is without time, in which you could live your own life and that of any other as many times as you want because there was no horizon on duration. (Usually we talk about utopias in space—as outside of this physical place—but this reminds me that Christian heaven is both out of time and out of space: somehow its transcendence is based on its foreverness.) Borges’ story is about the spiritual thrill of thisness, of being in time. Thisness in time is fulfillment.
It’s like we forget this because thisness is what we have.
I have sometimes wanted to avoid the association of “the feminine” with immanence. Why is groundedness, which is no less crucial than lightness, and no less thrilling, all wrung up in our archetypes with wombs and earth and sacred chalices and receiving and goddess stuff? And mystery, gnosticism, the body? Why does this all go together? Why draw from this heap of signifiers that actual female people—so different from feminine archetypes—are what the old practices lack?
I think it’s just a shortcut, a way of saying wake up, wiseasses. There’s so much mystery around immanent spirituality, maybe because if it’s right here immediately then there is no journey. People want a journey. So much mystery about the body so that we can grope for years through the labyrinth in search of it.
Sometimes there is no labyrinth. :)
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: esoteric shit
, having a body
, spirituality
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You might have a point.
Not saying that you do, just that you might.
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 15, 01:48 AM · #
Interesting. I’m feeling you on this one.
Posted by: Laruga · Dec 15, 03:34 AM · #
For some reason this set off riffs from Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Interesting.
Posted by: patrick · Dec 15, 06:37 AM · #
I might. I’m not sure either. I’m just puzzled about associations within some broader heaven and earth gestalt.
Glad you are feeling it. :) That’s my mood with all of this, I guess.
Patrick, that makes sense, though this indulges the problematic manichean interpretation you want to do with my thoughts. At least, in makes sense with the Lost Letters stories in the book, right? These are about a markedly dualist struggle not between classes but between memory and forgetting. In these stories forgetting—and being erased—are not liberation. They are accidents in the false Czech immanentizing of the eschaton against which the characters strive to stay real, stay grounded.
There’s a hilarious passage on perverse (i.e. falsely inverted by the powerful) “groundedness” at the beginning, talking about how “intellectuals” (enemies of the state) were accused of being too transcendent, “ungrounded,” and thus were suspended just a bit off the ground. In other words, they (those Kundera says are most grounded) were hanged on the charge they preferred to float off the earth anyway.
I guess Kundera could play endlessly with immanence-transcendence. I never read Unbearable Lightness though. Not really where I am at these days. :)
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 15, 12:05 PM · #
Now now, I don’t think of myself as pulling the Manichean card with your stuff (not ALL the time anyway) and you’re totally on with the stuff about Czech intellectuals and all of the wonderful perjorative euphemisms of which the Stalinist state is capable. Great link, too.
I think the riffs I half-heard were something about Kundera’s laughter bit (related to his Lightness bit). There is devilish and angelic laughter, and lightness can be heavy. Yes, there’s an alchemical element there, which I think MK really points out well in his characters, as if they (literary but living, as long as we buy the narrative) point out the fun grey spots and alchemical possibilities of the larger philosophical binaries.
BTW, you have email with my name on it. Have a look.
Posted by: patrick · Dec 15, 12:11 PM · #
Yes, I’m sort of tilting at lightness, seeing its heaviness.
You understand MK better than I do—glad to hear there’s some alchemy going on there. :)
Isn’t Imm-of-the-Esc great??? I confess I have a bit of a WFB hangup, so that is where I got it. Also, my brother does a lot of art about creative utopias, so this helps me understand the conservative critique of his work. But it also has a lot to do with transcendence and immanence, and the conservative “masculine” view of (1) the non-necessity of immanence and (2) the idea that immanence is just a horribly flawed shadow of some transcendent ideal.
Email after six or eight pm (depending), blog-reading on the lunch-hour. Aren’t I regimented?!? Primary series for computer users… :)
My e is mostly unstuck now, btw. That hemp seed needed to go.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 15, 12:28 PM · #
Eh, Nietzsche and Deleuze and Guattari sold me so hard on immanence and how cool it is, that I can’t go back now :)
Speaking of which, my buddies the Situationists, in their most paradisiac mode, are SERIOUS immanentizers of the eschaton. Global communication with absolute agency? Yikes. Hardly any of my students ever buy the Situ ideal vision, but a few are always turned on by it.
Glad to see that you’ve recovered your e from misplaced hemp. There’s a riff about global underground economies to be made here.
Posted by: patrick · Dec 15, 07:11 PM · #
Czech this. I had an odd dream the other night. Somehow I had labyrinthed into a ‘Before the Law’ synapse. Here, though, the gatekeeper was clad in lyrca instead of the standard-issue fur coat, and i was (attempting) to wriggle into garbha pindasana instead of assuming the conventional position of suppliction. Other than that, things were just as Kafka laid it down.
Suddenly, who should turn up but Alan Watts! After looking puzzled for a moment, he asked: “mmm, ahh, mmm, what are you doing? Doesn’t that hurt awfully”
“Yes it does but i’m trying to get in” I replied, “I’m going to roll through the gatekeeper’s legs.”
“Nonsense!” Cried Mr Watts, “You’ve just made yourself easier to kick! Why don’t you get up and come and have a drink with me?”
I thought for considerably less than 9 revolutions and agreed, asking only for a little time to perform some appropriate counterposes.
At this point (as always) I was awoken by a fat and blasphemous caretaker struggling to open the
rust-screeching gates of my apartment block.
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 16, 02:53 AM · #
My god your subconscious is hilarious. Don’t take that as a compliment or anything.
I’ve often thought that the garba was about the most self-mortifying “posture” AND that it looks like a roly-poly beetle (which the soundtrack implies is a kind of roach?). But hadn’t made the Samsasana connection.
But I thought you chose Watts over Wilber because he seems nicer? Uh oh…
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 16, 08:31 PM · #
I was referring the the professional wrestler of that name.
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 17, 02:15 AM · #
No you weren’t.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 17, 12:31 PM · #
You don’t think he was by profession a wrestler?
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 18, 02:02 AM · #
If Heidegger’s a footballer, Watts a wrestler, what is SKPJ?
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 18, 11:57 AM · #
a yoga teacher
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Dec 19, 03:17 AM · #
I totally read that as “The keyboard was filled with FLINT.”
Posted by: Alex · Dec 22, 02:06 AM · #