Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 19:44:10 -0500 (EST)
From: Marsha Faizi <mfaizi-AT-rbnet.com>
Subject: Re: enough already...


Ariosto wrote:

>Shaheena my angel,
> Let's see, racapitulate some more, you have heart, that is evident to
>everyone who has read you for the past month. There is no doubt in
>anyone's mind. The opulence of your rhythm, thump, thump, grows in
>intensity with the practical operations of the sword whose fencing
>technique I expanded on. It makes everyone restless and probably a
>little afraid of being humilated by you, made small, a tiny
>insignificant speck of dust which might as well be worthless, a
>nothing. I hope you don't treat me like a pussy cat bag, my god, how could
>you do that to a man. Jean, I don't think that was a nice experience at
>*all*. Yikes.

It is hard for you to understand, dear Ariosto, but there are men in the
world who love and who want and who need humiliation from a woman. I am not
a psychologist so I will not seek to explain that to you. My
anti-psychological opinion is that such men have a lacking deep within
themselves that can only be filled with the equating of love with hate. The
college professor whom I described was like this. He enjoyed browbeating my
book store clerks (young women) to tears for his entertainment. He liked
doing that but what he really wanted was a woman who could humiliate him
completely. Because I was manager of the store, it was my responsibility to
protect my young clerks from this hateful man. At the time, I was not so old
myself--about twenty five--but I was older than the others and, therefore,
felt responsible for them when they were at work.
 
In the course of servicing this strange man's desire for books, our
encounters became contests of wit and venom. Because he made the young girls
cry, he was forced to deal only with me. There was no way that I would ever
let him make me cry. Because what was at the heart of his "sadism" was a
desire for complete humiliation, I gave him what he wanted. The more mean
that I became and the more tough, the more books that he ordered. 

The pink pussycat bag was the icing on the cake for that hateful man. 

Often, it is the very well educated and academic man who wants this sort of
treatment. Jean Dragon thought that it was nice. 

No, I would never treat you like a pussycat bag. Do you go around making
young and pretty bookstore clerks cry? I don't think so. 

You asked me how I could do that to a man. I gave him what he wanted,
Ariosto. The customer is always right. I witnessed a very good example of
this philosophy when I was in a Polack Johnny's restaurant on The Block in
Baltimore. Apparently, the customer wanted a fist to his nose and that is
what he got. It was interesting to see that occurrence. I had never seen a
cook punch a customer in the nose. But The Block is a very tightly
controlled little world. Law, as we know it, does not apply there. That is
why policemen appear so relaxed when they are walking the beat on The Block:
They know that everything is under control and quite beyond their control.
Lets them off the usual hooks.  

Well, enough of that. It gets to be boring.

>Today I have a little gift! Potlach....
>
>I invent for you a black piece of cloth with multiple potential ways of
>becoming something such as a silk scarf, a shawl, a cape, a texture, a
>mildly transparent swirl of designs, skin, leather, a sieve, a network,
>a coffe filter, a smoldering mat resting, waiting to ignite...

A shawl that can also serve as a coffee filter. You are amazing, Ariosto.
Absolute genius. I am very fond of black cloth, as you must know. 

>A gift for an angel of the netherworld that is covered with unreadable
>signs and not interpretable symbols 

I am especially fond of black cloth with unreadable signs. I would wear it.
I cannot use such a thing as a coffee filter.

>and so an inviting piece that calms
>the intellectual activity of the mind which shows its ongoing link
>to the heart which is yet not a question of an ideal developement or
>perfection but an overflow of excess, there we go, i am in the
>flow.........................

Indeed, child, there you go. 

>It most definitely cannot be made into a pussy cat bag, a pink one at
>that, how could you do that?

Forget about it, well-coordinated Latino. He was an Anglo, for Christ's
sake. Don't even try to understand that crap. It's disgusting, already. I am
more interested in this gift.

>It is all woven with color threads, a chiaroscuro plays on its surface,
>sfumato. Various elements hang from the cloth such as darkness,
>separation, distance, broken relationships, loneliness, solitude, a
>hell hole more or less, a cell of circumstances, very lacking and
>restless I might add; 

Then, I am interested in knowing how these things might hang from it. What
is the symbol used for darkness and separation and distance and broken
relationships and loneliness and solitude and a more-or-less Hell Hole?
Perhaps, a heart split by a razor blade as a symbol for thought? I love red
upon a contrasting field of black, especially if the embroidery thread is
very small and of an unusual quality. Maybe, a hand pierced by an arrow or,
maybe, just a heart and a razor and a hand and an arrow, all dangling
separately and interspersed and alternating. All symbols hand-sewn and
slightly different in execution. Sewn, perhaps, by different seamstresses or
seamsters. 

Do you sew or embroider, Ariosto? You should. You have a taste for textile
and design. 

>and not meaning in any way shape or form to be
>refering to our esteemed colleague Doctor Lacan, that would be much too
>symbolic for my tastes, 

Well, that would be too obvious and too literary and too lacking in
originality. 

>I would rather stick to that something or
>other and whatever, that tends to play on the surface of the cloth and
>makes us see with intent yet still projectless like film spinning
>without light. 

Then you would have an overlay of gauze or net. Nice effect. Black cloth of
good quality with red silk embroidery of unreadable symbols with an overlay
of net. Small hands and razors and knives and hearts dangling, alternately,
from the border.

The _quelconque_ that aristotle calls the potentiality
>without act (dynamis me einai). To be sure, as Ricouer's favorite
>phrase goes, right up there with, in the truth;-you know, very
>affirmative statement of one's potency; this refers to the being that
>can *not* bring itself into being something, this or that growing roots
>and gettting one of those identity citizenship cards, member cards,
>insider cards that outsiders don't have. 

There is no way that an outsider could ever have a card that was intended
for an insider. You do not need one of those things. You do better on the
outside. There is joy in life, Ariosto. Stop worrying about this nonsense.
You want a card, you can get one and what does that prove? It could prove
that you are no different than some Anglo hateful college professor. What do
you want? A pink pussycat bag? You are better than that. You don't need a card. 

>This tabula rasa of active
>forgetting is what Nietzsche placed in front of the hypocrisy of the
>priests in need of a saving project that would then rearrange their
>lives towards the pursuit of perfection in the assumption of an ugly
>lack that must be got rid off, thrown out, spit on, and so on....made
>more beautiful basically and fear of extreme distorting phenomena of
>the sublime 'type'. So this puissance or non-savoir as Bataille puts
>it, is not a passage to the act because there is no object to this
>intentionality because it is naked and has as object potentiality
>itself or the intensification of passion (potentia potentiae). writing
>occurs over this as a travelling through a desert, in one ear out the
>other. So that perfect writing results, explodes, jumps out, overflows,
>goes into ecstatic mode, 

But you must train the ecstatic, Ariosto. Passion is not enough if you wish
to communicate either visually or literarily. Art requires discipline--not
only the discipline to do it but the discipline to hone it to perfection. 

>not because of potency to do so but because of
>impotence, a poverty of imagination in fact. Wallace Stevens said,
>moreover, that death was the mother of invention. Aristotle gave the
>name to this intentionality of "agent intellect" which in the Arabic
>tradition is the form of an angel whose name is none other than Qalam,
>a feather, a pen of resistance and the fencing game called jihad.

Have you ever fenced? I have a little. Not bad for an uncoordinated Anglo.
Wrestling is better, however. 

But that is off the subject. 

Whirl on, dervish. 

What happened to the cloth? Hope you didn't use it for a coffee filter. 

I will be better after awhile. Too much influenza, for goodness sakes. I
don't have it but I am tired of seeing everybody else with it. Saw seventy
six sick people today. That is a lot for a small office. God, it was disgusting.

Faizi
>Whirling Dervish,
>Ariosto
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