Date: Wed, 7 Apr 1999 20:05:54 -0400 (EDT)
From: Marsha Faizi <mfaizi-AT-rbnet.com>
Subject: Re: socks


Donaldo wrote:

>Know why I was so quick to discard my socks, Marsha Faizi?  Know why one
was found
>closer to the edge of the stand of trees than the other?  Not, I assure
you, because
>I was anxious to 'ink' anything.  Much to the contrary, I'm afraid.
Writing takes
>work.  Merging night and dawn into its twilit soup takes not a little
exertion, and
>the precision of an archer.

Writing anything substantial does take much exertion and, indeed, it does
require the precision of an archer. 

There has been no example of such precision on this list, especially in the
two weeks that have just passed. The present and awkward pretense to
academia here has been silly to the point of the ridiculous and the banal. I
cannot see how anyone who has been writing here recently can have the sheer
bad taste to even suppose that he could have a clue as to what Bataille or
any man of genius was about. The scholariness or want of scholarliness here
has aptly demonstrated  underlying ignorance.

As it has presented itself over the past two weeks, the Bataille list
deserves to die from suffocation on its own noxious fumes and I think that
it has been demonstrated that it is capable of doing just that quite well
and of its own accord. It truly amazes me with such pomposity and smugness
people are willing to deprive themselves of air. It is daunting, to me, to
witness such vacuity of thought; such complete abscence of volition; such
lowliness of spirit. You have succeeded, magnificiently, in the proof of
your lifelessness and I congratulate you on your success.

R.I.P., Bataille. 
   
Bataille is a dead list. It is uninteresting and unsatisfying for me to have
to witness the flitting about of ghosts who can do nothing more than to call
forth other ghosts for the purpose of bantering ghostly discourse that is
without aim or purpose. 

>This is what writing is.  

Writing that is worth something--not this process of quoting and citing that
has been going on here--exhaustively--for the past two weeks--is a
time-consuming and hard process that requires precise attention and precise
decision and precise action.

>Philosophy, or even the most innocent application of
>philosophy ruins it.

This is where we disagree. I think that one cannot write with precision
unless one does apply philosophy to it. My definition of philosophy is the
fine art of thinking. If one is going to attempt to write without the
application of thought, then, one will write nothing worth reading.

For the past two weeks, this has been the case on this list. There has been
no thought here for some time; no examination; no investigation. There has
been only this propensity for citation and quotation and reference. In other
words, there has been nothing here but meaningless drivel--no expansion of
thought whatsoever.

Today, I was reading a couple of chapters from *The Portrait of Dorian
Gray.* Oscar Wilde, thank God, was an original thinker. It is a pleasure to
read his work because he was a master at inserting philosophy into art and
literature. The story of Dorian Gray would be nothing at all except for
Wilde's interjection of his own pure thought. The flimsy story serves as
vehicle for his thought; for his perceptive insights into the ulterior
motives of humankind. 

Such was this man's genius! Can any of you think that Wilde or Lacan or
Bataille or Kirkegaard or Nietzsche was wholly given to scholarly
referencing for the entirity of his life? 

God, how repulsive is intellectual emptiness! What boredom! Any common
college professor is capable of such empty-headed dullness as this! 

What do you want, Ariosto? A vacuum into which you may deposit your own
emptiness; a vacuum that can suck you dry? Well, boy, you can have it! It's
here--your godawful and shameful repository of nothingness--your
semi-Heidegger list--and you call yourself flame-boy. Obviously, you mistake
your dick for a living piece of flesh. How completely you delude yourself.    

There must come a time when such a cord to the work of others must be
severed or one will spend his entire life quoting and referencing and citing
and without, once, understanding why he is quoting and citing. Can you tell
me how this is not a complete waste of time and effort? 

Please, do spare me the argument that there is no such thing as genius. If
there is no such thing as genius, there could never have existed Oscar Wilde
or Friedrich Nietsche or Kirkegaard or Lacan or Bataille. If not for such
genius, there would be nothing but a mass of people content with referencing
and citing and quoting and there would be no creation. 

I thank God for genius. Without genius, life could not be worth living. It
has been demonstrated on this list during the past two weeks that life
without the air of genius is not worth knowing. One may speak in a loud
voice of this reference to that reference and things stagnate. 

In *Dorian Gray,* Wilde notes that man's capacity for storing knowledge is
akin to the goods within a bric-a-brac shop: There is nothing of worth and
the prices are too high.  

You will tell me that philosophy is ruinous of literature. You are mistaken.
If there is no insertion of thought; no mental plunge and no mental
ascension, then, what is there of worth? What worth is the reading of
anything that cannot cause one to think; that cannot provoke thought; that
cannot ascertain thought; that cannot verify it?

If literature is ruined by philosophy, then, literature should be ruined.
Art, without philosophical tooth, is not art. One could do as well to read
the writing on the back of a cereal box as to read such nonsense that calls
itself art but is nothing more than blatherskite. The stringing out of words
for the mere sake of stringing them out is not art. It is nothing other than
the "speaking in tongues."   

>The feat is not natural, my dear.  Neither is it  a skill one is born with,
or one
>that can in any way be taught.  

Is it unnatural to think? Is it unnatural to apply reason to one's emotions?
Is it unnatural to be driven by the desire to go beyond what is commonplace?
If it is unnatural, then, I have no shame in my unnatural state--my
monstrosity. 

>I sheepishly admit not being entirely certain I
>either have or have ever had the knack.

This is your downfall, Donaldo. Right there. Your lack of certainty. How can
you propose to write anything of real interest if you are uncertain? It is
not a lack of skill or of talent. It is the lack of certainty that stifles you.

I sincerely wonder if you will outgrow your uncertainty or if you will be
subject to it for all your days.

>Ordinarily we live according to some kind of theme.  This is how we've been
trained,
>domesticated.  To write is to do what gets done prior to all that, or
before night
>and dawn are distinguished as heterogeneous.

I think that, in order to write anything of value, one must be completely
conscious. I do not see how one can write without consciousness of what one
is writing. I do, very well, know the mechanics of how this can be
done--there have been many examples of this on this list--but I do not see
how anyone could find anything of value in so doing. Therefore, I cannot see
how anyone, with any consciousness of purpose, could write through an
unconscious process. Such exercise is pretense to abstract thought and all
that such pretense yields is a muddied substance. Abstraction of thought is
clarity of thought, not the opposite.  

If a human being has worked his way through what you call our training or
domestication, he is consciously aware enough of his surroundings and of his
own connectiveness to his surroundings to make a concrete statement.
Otherwise, he is simply stringing words together that have no meaning. He is
living in a world that is composed of nothing but cerebral mud. 

Faizi