Liminal Spaces
A lunatic's guide to becoming a ghost
first, measuring space in terms of width, with word-processing software: here, summon a block of text that will move one way or another. we often ask where is poetry but it is always outside itself, without any trace, its trace, which is to say, that trace of a phantom limb, which is a limb that bears the weight of all anxiety, whereas an index to a past persisting within the present. its absence, palpable, therefore: presence imagined.
when an object assumes immateriality, it gains consciousness. an immaterial object’s consciousness then becomes sacred by having a single witness. this sacrality is a secret between the disappearance of that object to immateriality and the witness of that disappearance. what was once known to all is now known only to one. as witnesses, we are forced to expose the secret. but first, one must know how to hear a secret: which is to say that we, as tellers of secrets can only redeem ourselves of the burden of guilt, violation, and transgression for exposing such a thing through silence. therefore, all secrets that will follow will only be said through unsaying, or if you prefer: poetry.
there can be no history, but a networked connection between a cluster of events. what is sense but the delimitation (only to say that which is capable of producing an in-between, a rift, between correlations: a threshold) of perception and meaning. if we are freed from the burden of history, only then we become guilty of committing the crime of freedom.
let this be an inquiry: how can a struggle of indefinite tension between want and need be palpable in writing? as if in terms of its material form emanates a tension — or maybe even found in its utterance. how much is it am I willing to say about what I want to say before I unwillingly compromise myself and what I wanted to say? which of these two is want? which is need? which of these am I willing to commit: a knife in my lungs or an arrow to your head?
maybe, an endless monologue towards impossible perfection. a meditation for a consistent routine of inconsistency, whereas the former is its mode of form, while the latter is content: ever-so sporadic in terms of theme but always points towards that same destination: completion.
but completion of what? perhaps it is folly to articulate the process of a completion’s completion. only because of how it lacks material coherence, the focus of which is almost always out of its place, to say that what I talk about is often received from outside: your task as the reader must occupy the space outside the text and be always outside of the text in order to cross the boundaries of interpretation and communication. as we go further along, we will have shaped an indefinite number of concentric circles that infinitely grows in area with reference from the first idea as our first circle: here.
Dante arrives, like how ghosts manifest behind every interweb of relations, of words from meaning and meaning divorced from words. Like ghosts from remembering: always anticipated but never arrives.
March 19, 2018; 14:40
i sit on a chair where i am refusing to do my responsibilities at work. however, i am absolved by the absence of work, which is why this has made it possible for me to skip work while be at work and wait for further instructions which are currently lacking as of the moment. such as this, a moment of interjection can only occur from a break — that is, a break from thinking which makes it able to arrive in a more concentrated impulse, such as this, this series of monologues that attempt to tread that line of ambiguity to give birth to the possibility of a moment such as this current situation, such as i, in this moment, am elsewhere besides be where i should be or do what is expected from me. thought as a vehicle, can only go so far without action. what this action refers to is an extension of thought that renders it in praxis. this realization of thought to action as a linear event poses a limit of a possibility whereas as i think of extending my arm upwards, it can even extend further, by means of imagination, to defy the laws of physics without movement. whereas in motion, action becomes the limit upon which the thought is executed. the arm, in reality, cannot extend as far as the subject wishes for it to.
i am trying to grasp a moment, pardon, an idea (or is it someone’s presence?) but it always slips away from my tongue. it is this ungraspability that links me to it, turning its absence into a nagging superego that links me from it like an anchor or a kite. let my tongue hold your presence, in thought, where losing it would induce fears of loneliness and abandonment. include: a phenomenon, rather than an independent idea or concept.
so far i have said nothing and intend to say anything more than what i have already said for the following statements to come.
the difference between voice and void is a matter of a hundred muscles. but both can be either of each when put in a particular context. everywhere, there is a voice and nowhere, there is a void. this does not say anything new, this boldness, perhaps, even a feeble boldness is the consequence of the peak of nothingness from the precedent artists, and as a condition of our time in the age of transhumanism. where are the limits of the voice if there exists a transcendence of human cognition. from Lacan, then we have arrived to the non-bodily phenomenon that exists as the building structures of the current society: the gaze and voice. both are capable of existing without the body, without the cause that permits the phenomenon to occur. it has transferred outside the very means that cause them to exist.
what is dead is devoid of a voice but not a presence. a presence that ultimately takes the form of a voice or a gaze that ghosts a subject like a personal panopticon. presence extends beyond death.
there are no one-word truths. one can only arrive at truth by going beyond every representation of the real, which is to say that representations are the window to the real which has to be broken down, stripped of its illusions in order to arrive at the truth. truth is never the goal but the path of process upon truth is attained. in other words, truth is never a thing or an object of desire. it is a place where nothingness resides and it can be said that the quest for truth is always the path towards self-destruction, to cancel the self, to die, as a sacrifice in order to see the self with the absolute Other. which is to say that every truth is an Other that manifests through representations of the real.
for instance, the perceivable real, which is through the senses, the objective material world, such as in the creation of a plate represents the human desire and necessity for progress, to organize. the plate as a concrete representation of “order” as a category such as abstract linguistic labels to “put food in” involves a kind of awareness of boundaries. anything outside the plate is not edible, therefore it is not worthy of being called food. whereas the truth behind this representation of the real stays empty and elusive in a sense that in questioning real representations, we are compelled to ask further “what for?” such that in questioning representations, we are forced to break through the material reality and lean towards phenomenology to infer relationships between the material and the abstract, of presence to absence.
it then, brings us forth to the confrontation of nothingness. ever since Heidegger said that anxiety is brought by the direct confrontation of the self with the Nothing. the truth that all truths are empty, a void, a hall of mirrors, which is an aporia in itself, where one is suspended above and below everything, causes all things to disappear in front of our eyes. the sacredness of all things hides behind the fact that we are all witnesses to the disappearance of our own truths. any attempt to hide the truth becomes sacrilegious despite the anxiety it brings. before and after all things such that the truth of the illusion of beginnings and ends. there can be no salvation in truth and on the search for it. truth must not be the end goal because it does not end. to make peace with truth is to make peace with death. truth is beyond mortality. to become a ghost is to arrive at truth, where the timelessness of the self can only be achieved. let me gain another form of consciousness by hiding myself from the world. i am ready to become sacred and become the sole witness of my own disappearance.
in the beginning, there was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. i have come to terms with faith by recognizing signs. as much as my faith relies on the world, there is still too much emptiness in it. an emptiness defined as the natural state of things such that faith itself thrives by that emptiness. belief, as opposed to factuality, is never independent of each other. i believe in a fact that facts are capable of proof which begs belief. but as i believe in signs, there is too much emptiness that must not go unrecognized. i believe in the sign of the empty signifier for an absent signified (which will be the only way to represent the unrepresentable). the signifier must empty itself to contain what is uncontainable.
there is no outside of the cave.