Subject: The Lurker Beyond the Threshold
Date: Sun, 18 Jan 1998 17:23:04 PST


Greetings to all and sundry,

Don Socha hath writ:

>Awake during sleep?  Sounds like Castaneda.  I've been promised a free
>copy of his latest book, you know.  Yes, he was putting out this
>pamphlet, don't remember what it was called, but he stopped putting it
>out and promised everyone that was getting it a free copy of his next
>book.  We'll see how impeccable he turns out to be eh?  But is that the
>sort of thing you've been alluding to Edward? 

Awake during sleep or vice-versa, yes ... or more like an attempt to 
remain aware of the web of dream narrative, or 'mythology', that is 
forever being spun through the open spaces of everyday speak ... (see, 
if you feel like it, Thomas Ligotti's short story, 'The Bungalow House')

Now meditation, walking, and green tea, in that order, may produce a 
monkey, or a good tale, or both, by the way.  

  ..........

>Not 'slipping away in anxiety' exactly, nor anxiously vigilant really. 
>Now I KNOW I've thought or read something about anxiety lately, only I
>can't remember what!  Let me see... anxiety, anxiety..., nope!  No go. 
>Oh, well, what else you got for me?

How about a 'familiar'?  A monkey on your shoulder, if you will?  
Private languages legitimate themselves, by virtue of being language, 
even if that language is uncommunicable.  Take the private language of 
gnosis, for example.  Now what of something more "marginal" than that? 
What of a 'mythology', or purely personal or private 'narrative' that is 
only capable of being repeated, even at its origin -- an origin that is 
self-legitimating .... (I am thinking of some passages from Lyotard's 
_The Postmodern Condition_, but I don't feel like ascending the stairs 
to my library)

>By 'awl' sublimations, I was referring to what people generally fear,
>repress, and censor, and I was wondering if whatever plebian psychosis
>we might designate wasn't due to humanity's 'excessive' clutching after
>all things either scientific, artistic, or political? 

Exactly ... I think.  The private mythology seeks external legitimation, 
for its status as non-discursive 'narrative' isn't enough.  Of course 
that last sentence may sound absurd, but the sense of a meaningful 
existence that is anterior to and outside of language, when expressed or 
conceptualized within language, necessarily sounds absurd.  

>See Bataille's
>"Sorcerer's Apprentice", or just about anything else in _VE_.
>I'm about half-way believing another space can be articulated.  Some
>kind of owl eyed awl, or Maldororian thirst?  I dunno....

What is lurking in this passage from Bataille:

"If the truth that science reveals is stripped of human sense, if the 
_fictions_ of the spirit alone respond to the strange will of man, then 
the accomplishment of this will demands that these fictions be _made 
true_.  The one who is possessed by a need to create only experiences 
the need to be a man.  But he renounces this need if he renounces 
creating anything more than fantasies and lies.  He only remains virile 
by trying to make reality conform to what he thinks: each force in him 
demands that the failed world in which he has appeared be submitted to 
the caprice of dreams." (VE, p. 226)?

That sublimation you speak of is practiced in and through the common 
language, for only what becomes absurd when conceptualized externally, 
in language, requires fear, repression, and censorship.  I found this 
out when I attempted to communicate, during a conference on pornography 
at my university, that fantasy, whether it remains internal or not, 
remains fantasy nonetheless, and cannot be held to the same standards of 
judgement as "legitimate" external acts, linguistic or otherwise.  The 
personal and private 'web of dreams' is not permitted, by society, to 
act upon external beings, only upon the inward-turning subject.  And if 
that subject becomes too aware of that 'dream world', if you will, he or 
she is deemed mad, and is judged or dealt with by and through external 
modes of discourse (laws, social standards -- in short, all the 
trappings of externally legitimate society). 

  ..........

>You want to extrapolate on that Mallarme quote a little?  What's the
>difference between a turn and a re-turn, by the side?

"Man pursues black on white."  I think the quote from Bataille, above, 
is a worthy "extrapolation" of the Mallarme quote .... And the web of 
dreams I spoke of, a personal mythology ....  "assembles distant 
interlacings where there sleeps some luxury to take account of [the 
'vampire girl' perhaps?] and to present."


Edward

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