Subject: About (to ef-) face ... Oblivion
Date: Sat, 07 Mar 1998 19:14:34 PST


A "once upon a time ..." held up like a finger before an indeterminate 
audience ( ... or "the audient void"? ... ), operating like a key to 
some region already in place, or in play.  A device used by a 
story-teller -- the _etable_ on which he rolls the dice -- following the 
rules of the accepted narrative game.  But even if the finger remains 
frozen in the air, it raises not a "useless portal," ushering us into 
nothing (Leiris, _Scratches_, p. 119), rather, it consigns the waiting 
tale to Lovecraft's "white void of unpeopled and illimitable space" 
(Lovecraft, 'Ex Oblivione', in _Miscellaneous Writings_, p. 36) ... 
Lovecraft, who wrote always as an "Outsider" -- great tale, by the way, 
'The Outsider', which begins: "Unhappy is he to whom the memories of 
childhood bring only fear and sadness" (in _The Dunwich Horror_, p. 
46)-- ... and these childhood memories are precisely the 'locus' of 
"once" for Leiris ... which is perhaps the reason why Lovecraft, who 
writes, in 'Ex Oblivione', of the dream-discovery of a not-so-useless 
"portal" of his own: a "little gate of bronze" in a "mighty wall," is 
unable to raise his finger.  His "once" is a time when "the last days 
were upon [him]" ... "And once ..." as he writes later, the ultimate 
"once" of his discovery of the bronze gate, the portal through which he 
might have passed had he been a Gnostic Artist and not such a 
"scientist" -- might have passed, that is, and quite successfully, to 
establish a realm of his own in the "white and [for him] incongruous 
void of absence ..." situated by Bataille between the innocent 
shattering myths and the myths that are shattered (_Absence of Myth_, p. 
48) -- but what absence?  The absence of myth is a white void, like 
Mallarme's blank page, which says nothing, speaks a mere "once upon a 
time yet to come ...", a void unlike our "native infinity" into which we 
can only "dissolve" and never truly INHABIT.  Only myths, or words, have 
a place in the "unpeopled and illimitable space" which is the 
possibility of nothingness -- de-void of any "rules of the game."

The "salvation" of the narrator of 'Ex Oblivione', who is "happier than 
[he] ever dared to be" at the sight of a "useless" space beyond that 
dream portal, is the salvation of one who can only 'turn about' when 
faced with the nothingness from whence he sprang, after seeking it in 
dire expectation for so long.

"The absence of limits" can only be experienced -- and UTILIZED -- by 
one who has never known what it is to be fettered by the community of 
fellow beings.  It is not so much an "absence of community" as it is an 
immunity to the rules of a community.  That freedom is possessed by the 
Outsider, who can also be called the Gnostic Artist.  Nothingness, or 
the white unpeopled void, is the condition of the absence of limits, it 
is the point at which the individual is called upon to 'Take It Or Leave 
It' (_Absence of Myth_, p. 96): to either bring to life a world of his 
or her own, or to refuse the call and turn back to the world of beings.


Edward
monsieurtexteEM-AT-hotmail.com  

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