From: "Edward Moore" <monsieurtexteem-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Soul and Body Two
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 1997 18:28:08 PDT


   How dreadful will be the day, when fate cleaves those two 
   kinsmen -- soul and body! (Soul & Body II, an Old English poem)


... they were separated to begin with.

It is surprising to me that many thinkers (not all) still do not attempt 
to go beyond metaphor (an impossible task).  

The soul is a metaphor for the UNIQUE MATTER that makes possible our 
animating energy -- our processing energy.  "The mind is a body, is 
matter, and the body is a mind -- the seat of consciousness" (Moore, 
_The Suicide of Matter_).

The soul does not dwell in the body.  The soul is energy from a process 
that PASSES THROUGH THE BODY.  This energy becomes "trapped" in the 
MATTER and animates it.  All is random, and is UNIQUE as far as it goes.

The random gift is immortality -- _poetic_ immortality: the only 
possible kind.  It follows a _reincarnation_ -- another metaphor, this 
time for the artistic METALEPSIS: the illusion of having fathered one's 
own fathers (Harold Bloom, 1976).

Here the definition of Art must be expanded to include any "artifact" 
that produces interpretation, or interpretive acts: the energy of a 
consciousness passing infinitely through human brain cells, INDIVIDUALS.  
Every individual is a brain cell in the _godhead_.

This godhead is a metaphor for the "dualistic rift" contained (see 
Bloom, 1976).  The division -- accomplished by the (necessary?) 
interpretive efforts of philosophy, religion, etc. -- of mind and 
matter, soul and body.

It is a narrowing of view... a tightening of the borders of context, 
that produces such a division, or "rift."

The random gift of immortality is bestowed by the moving world -- the 
godhead -- on certain individuals called Artists; because these 
individuals are or were most conscious of number: they had, as Artaud 
has put it, "the obsession of counting," which allowed them to "reduce 
the chaos of the material world to its principles, [and explain] by a 
kind of awesome mathematics how Nature is ordered and how she directs 
the birth of the forms that she pulls out of chaos" (_A Voyage to the 
Land of the Tarahumara_).

For the artist to achieve immortality, the operation of his UNIQUE 
MATTER must consist in its endless quest for autonomy against the 
insurmountable odds of the living, becoming godhead.  When Breton speaks 
of "autonomy of thought," how open, how wide is his field of vision?  
The individual... the individual is always a _reincarnated example_ 
trying to bring about his own birth.  "Poetic immortality" is the 
"collective" life of a far greater "being."

   I know that I was born ... out of my works and not out of a mother.    
(Antonin Artuad, from a letter to Henri Parisot)

These "works" are reactions to received influences.  Texts made possible 
only by total identification with the fathers: TRANSCENDENT METALEPSIS.  
The artist is born when he forgets that he is a reincarnation.  Birth 
must be pure.

The artist must pretend to have emerged from an inner void.  The artist 
creates the illusion of being self-generating, rather than an endless 
continuation of a single element, or "train of thought" within or of the 
godhead.

AUTOMATISM, of any sort, is a surrendering of the self to the chaos of 
the godhead... to be thrown about...

   in short, it is a perpetual regeneration of metaphor ontop of 
metaphor, without first attempting to strip everything away... arriving 
at principles, "counting," etc.

Reaction to an infinitude of received influences is _automatism_... is 
_dissolving_...

"The obsession of counting..."  the reduction, to identify with the 
rare, the esoteric... to give birth to one's fathers as well as to 
oneself...

The artist masturbates and continues.  The artist can even become a 
god... ENDLESSLY INTERPRETED.  Just look at Christ.


Edward Moore
<monsieurtexteEM-AT-hotmail.com>
 


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