Date: Sat, 07 Feb 1998 18:12:22 -0800
Subject: Clowning discourse with noise


my _Z_ 224 is section 18 and 17 of "the old and the new law tables" -- if we
add the name of the section(s) to our page numbers we will know where we are
reading. Last night I started reading Zarathustra closely for the first time.
Started with part three where I became intrigued with "before sunrise" where
Zarathustra says that his greatest blessing is to "stand over everything as
its own sky" as what he calls "the heaven of chance" where we release all
things from "their servitude under purpose." All this for me immediately
resonated with the notions of "floating attention" that Lyotard mentions in
_Perigrinations_ in the lecture called "Touches" where he will go on to
further link this up with a phenomenological reading of Cezanne's "small
sensations". It also resonated with the motif of the "night of non-knowledge"
in Bataille since after all the "pure sky" _before_ sunrise is an "abyss of
light" where friends "together learn to mount above ourselves to ourselves
and to smile uncloudedly -- to smile uncloudedly down from bright eyes
[sparkling stars?] and from miles away when under us compulsion and purpose
and guilt stream like rain."  [  :-) -->--->------]

and Zarathustra ends with a characteristic nod towards dancing: "I have found
this happy certainty in all things: they prefer -- to _dance_ on the feet of
chance.
    O sky above me, you pure, lofty sky! This is now your purity to me, that
there is no eternal reason-spider [no overarching metanarrative] and spider's
web in you -
    That you are to me a dance floor for divine chances, that you are to me a
gods' table for divine dice and dicers!
    But you are blushing? Did I say something unspeakable? Did I slander you
when I meant to bless you?"



Anyway, your erasure of my emphasis is over my head perhaps like a pure sky
but it sounds like something to return to in the future. I wrote this before
I read your last post I was actually making my way to Rabelais but never got
there... to much wine I think, making my head a little light, my feet a
little jumpy. A toast Lucio! To a clear night sky and a full moon!



>

"...I am in the midst of my work, going to my children and turning from them:
for the sake of his children must Zarathustra perfect himself.    For one
loves from the very heart only one's children and one's work; and where there
is a great love of oneself, then it is a sign of pregnancy: thus have I found
it."

(spoken by Zarathustra after finding himself once again all "alone with the
pure sky and the open sea" in "Of Involuntary Bliss")

    Projecting into obscurity I envision a century of ruins each of which is
a scrambled piece, a posted appearance nailed like a mast on a shifting
ground that makes my steps slip backwards towards what will have been a
phantasm that passes without origin -- there it is, a labyrinthian play of
"appearances" in Nietzsche's sense. Each piece of the wreckage of narrative
is an effect of withdrawal drawing the features of an abstract line with the
play of blue and white colors cooling off to orange and a clown's smile :-).
each piece must be a (w)hole if it is to follow Ariadne's thread with rigour.
Why? How so? Because a piece; however fractured and however far away has it
been found from its original function in a now decayed structure; is an end
in itself cut out from wherever and pasted, sewed into the patchwork of a
clown's costume who remains alone and a stranger to the world while putting
together an occult art in a minor autonomous zone of passion. But the reason
just given cannot be construed as the breaching of a straight and narrow path
but rather it sharpens the point of a multiplying signature that cuts into
the movement of some supposed direction and solicits lightly another line to
be given so that it curbs this way and that without end or purpose. The line
is the ideal of rationality and not a fact of natural order. A winding thread
that constantly returns with stoic severity as a baroque, minimal seriality
"_unmotivates_ the moment and frees life of ends -- this first of all
destroys it. Return is the mode of drama, the mask of human entirety, a human
desert wherein each moment is unmotivated." (Bataille _On Nietzsche_ pg
xxxiii)
    A given or found fragment then, is a theatrical event which interferes,
let's loose the static of appearances through the channels that are
communicating truth. They are Marx's monkey business thrown like a wrench
into the oiled wheels of thinking fascinated by its search for a cause behind
the superficiality of appearances, of these turned lines going haywire with
static returning the meaning of words to the void of an arriving period
thereby performing an act of disappearance, an event-disaster ... and
dissolving my resentment because no longer do my lines operate as a discourse
of meaning covering up events like a prison bars but are there very effects.
Thus, Ariadne, who I was just dancing with, writes that "the question
becomes: Assuming one has received the catastrophe of an arrow in the heart
and must sing about it, is the event doomed to loose its effect once language
has seized it? Or are there conjuring tricks by which an affirmative
discourse, while necessarily obscuring the event of which it speaks, can
nevertheless allow the _effect_ of that event to flame up by means of its own
'evil' discourse, which is itself an event, a spectacle, illusion, and
catastrophe? A discourse of verbal paganism that runs alongside of the event,
weaving itself in and out of its effects fanning them into life?"
(Claudia Crawford _To Nietzsche:
                                    Dionysus, I love you!
                                                Ariadne_ pg 11)

Ari