V I S I O N A R Y    E D U C A T I O N
 Thomas Lowe Taylor
 
 TWO: CULTURE AND PORNOGRAPHY
 
 "To act is one thing:  to know one is acting is another"  (Cioran)
 
 
 
 * * *
 
      By close and immediate distinctions, the thing becomes, discerned
      by focal establishing: but to bounce it back and out, the line
      through events, to this other kind of acting, and not hung out
      into words only, that would be cause. Or, in the peculiarity of
      our own diminished knowing, where it parts again and again, it
      would be how I am set off from my own causes, or exactly where
      reflection lies at the heart of resolution.  This sequentiality
      or motion I imagine myself in-the-midst-of.  Vocal, then, as the
      act is, and where this doing comes across is different.  No new
      language ever, but my own immediacy within, like a secretion. 
      The timeliness of responding.  So the personal is secret.  A
      reflection is presupposed; meditation has its name in stasis. 
      But the terrible silence of words, where are they stacked up in
      love? Obscure cultural immediacies; not (exactly) how
      consciousness is used, more the content in which it lives, that
      its clarity has elicitations and extensions, that a reasonable
      moment has callings, too, but the persistence of the old through
      things, and again, where the motions are, finally, closed in
      seeing.  That. "The thing itself" we might say, even of silence,
      where it becomes exposed.  To no reflection, and my own name lost
      in another chance or diversion.  After the facts.  But I know
      that, that beyond the name ("Air", for instance), the residues of
      incompleteness are not elusive, and definitions follow innately,
      uncaused but by our own place.  Not "the times" and not simply
      movement or annihilation, too simple, there, that the vernacular
      runs out and that in presupposing renewal one commits,
      perpetrates "another".  No, the child persists.  We wonder after
      those necessities of the old or of the means.  It is not
      apparent.  This very act. A loss of acts or processes, there are
      differences, first of attention and finally the missing element,
      what knowing itself has circumscribed in the doing.  An
      expansion.  So, merely to record.  The presence of the act, a
      nullity. A gap.  That the very things we experience might be the
      thing itself.  Which has elliptical boundaries and connotations,
      from which special vocabularies are made, and out beyond that,
      where precedence occurs, to the markings, rhetorical, to be kept.
       So the special distinctions adhere as well as they are made and
      in the act is a certain residue (mystery), perhaps the style of
      place. Just as the collapse is temporal, like a figure. A fixed
      image is sufficient for the material, which is attached to no
      thing.  Historical moment of no place and attached to no thing. 
      But that very preciousness from which our sacred privacy reacts,
      startled.  "That very thing itself," to pile up space upon space,
      always toward the surety of the new, the confident, the actful.
      No, it is not simply a momentary peculiarity which persists
      through perceptible locations, further erosion assures us of
      that, but an example.  Closing in upon it or backing off, those
      are the experiences, and the nothingness of spacial relation
      persists defined and undefined, alternating, echoing, persistent.
      My own heart-beat, that close. However, if I were lying down, and
      if I insisted upon it, that I were doing so, the tour de force
      itself would elicit a content of process.  The special
      observation necessary to completion is absent, and importantly
      so.  A vital consequence, but unadvanced. Lesser moments might
      become less distinct in other times, as we call them, though
      ours, as we call it, is certainly ours. This explicit shape we
      have bears us on toward the familiarity of conscious responding,
      like the concept of repetition rather than its quality of
      security and impatient closure. A diminished presence, prose.
      No-one is certain yet, although the evidence may already be
      there.  Our heroes "of evidence", like innovations, tests,
      hesitancies, perhaps it rejects us, the Dantean host, blackened
      out of moment, charred, processed: but left. Possibly:  a
      suggestion. The doom of events has elastic resonances.  That is
      as likely as any other.  And the renewed presence of argument is
      reassuring, that we might lean into it, alone and simple: but I
      am the topic here, this invisibility I met. "An act becomes
      perverse as it loses visibility."  The heart of it.  Who
      observes?  What passed?  When?  And so on. Still for what I am,
      in what I imagine to be my familiar processes, there are
      inclusions to which I would be introduced.  A pressure from
      either one side or the other.  A bell ringing, and light from the
      direction of my eyes.  Followers descent. And further on, a
      blocked space which causes me to turn, from inertia gaining
      "through" encounter to ease, there is no diminishing aspect, only
      that static center, as unfamiliar as feelings are, and undefined.
       There!
 
 * * *
 
 
      The fable and the imitation.
      Or I might say that collation is active (i.e., "against"), and
      that experiencing is close, close against it, too. We are after
      more than effects here, or even distance, or "propriety". But the
      whole cause.... No longing, even. "Was seen", perhaps, knowing
      and remembering, though "out of the present" occupies me too
      closely.  I don't even know a single example; keep it going, we
      say, keep it up (up?). The effect is cause enough. Too easy.
      Against the definition of what was caused as forgetting, in no
      position, and clarity (or a value).  Rest. Private value,
      personal value, reflection.  And cause, and back again. "Can it
      be reproduced in others" is cause enough, for vertigo, perhaps.
      Purpose has an edge, too, in what is known.  He seems to know
      what he is doing; elusive.  Or eluding pressure; though for me,
      he has disappeared entirely in it.  Not a single trace remains. 
      No letters.  Sleep, then, to rest, for reflection or an image,
      and for going on or back, either way. Either way, from stasis to
      stasis, rest, the photograph and the story, what of that, what of
      the remains evoking further cause: the build-up toward and from.
      Whose? Pressure to collapse. We grind into collection, and
      imitate our very produce.  In acts.  There is that form, that
      act, that name. "One always perishes by the self one assumes: to
      bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse."  (Cioran) The
      obscure but precise fissure, closed as evidence, a preoccupation
      from the observable, another new fragmentation.  relief from
      indistinct language: in  the form of the hero, some totally
      inclusive error of observation which causes being, diminishing
      the thing-known to process or motion, and the sought category
      perishing by the very weight of the quest. The fable. Out of such
      lightning progress, where hesitation hangs on each claim for
      attention, might there be a further reliance, or pursuit, or
      weight, or balance.... Or loss.  It hangs back. Unobserved and
      unfamiliar.  Where the wearing-down originates, but what of my
      own impatience, like an inheritance, this shift, too. We have
      driven it, in some direction, clear of all boundaries, out of
      passing and claims, to some territorial philosophy.  but words
      are simple and singular. Not even problematical doing surprises. 
      And back again, perpetually, a particular locale, or visit, or
      reminiscence.  Qualities of bouncing. Undiminished. And then,
      after that, recurring dreams. "...is perhaps that very thing
      itself."  Disabused.
 
 * * *
 
      "My will the enemy held, and thence had made a chain for me, and
      bound me.  For of a froward will, was a lust made; and a lust
      served, became custom"  (St. Augustine)
 
      Where the world, a single event, a single situation
      interpenetrates with the single consciousness of act.  It is the
      one continuing through the other one, one in one combined by
      acts. Through the undiminished error of the "new" place.
      Posterior to the singularity of the event, the surety of one's
      blindness before it, and then after, the ferment, singular
      descriptions of the status of the process, as old as the new
      physics and as likely to reduce the actual into categories of
      control.  But in saying there is no movement, and in the building
      of monuments, no simple accretion of space.  The occupation of
      the boundary-zone.  Like a rejoinder, not exactly a response to
      the senses nor experiencing of its own is the task, through
      feeling to space, the monument is its name only, and after that
      "...Love, love that holds so high the cry of my birth, how great
      a sea moving towards the Woman who loves! Vine tramples on all
      shores, blessing of foam in all flesh, and song of the bubbles on
      the sands....Homage, homage to the divine ardor!" (St. John
      Perse).
     The return, sending, and the work maintain themselves as parallels
     of event rather than locales of immediacy.  Though it is always to
     flavor that we respond.
  At least out of some kindness to the image and its sources, that
  difficulty is experienced in that a reflection of the event which
  denies either act or process, and to neither subscribes, to nothing
  inhering, in no place signified but in its essential reflecting, in
  its doing.
      There, "in alternate identification and detachment (one) is
      free", which is neither the condition nor the obscure act, but a
      description of a memory, which exists as a hope.  To lose that,
      from the relative distinctions of attention dismissed is the
      drift of either act or will.  Closed fable. And heaviness within,
      sinking.  Into flat discord, the reachable bottom, a distinction
      of even-ness which goes at act and seeing and the sureness with
      which they become values, that very confidence is suspect, out of
      the balancing disaster which thought becomes in its consciousness
      of itself.  So there is no assurance, though a successful mode
      persists, and toward the good, to break out among the energies of
      will and word, a matching of sequence, act and process: though it
      is in this very act itself (again) that we will perceive
      (receive) motions accessible to consequence, that is, have laid
      ourselves open not to either ease or disease but to a loss
      commending ourselves to the one in the other one, to act and
      process in the immediacies of response. Popular unacceptibility,
      always, where it rests out of one's own disaster of pressure, the
      pornographic susceptibility to repetition and extent, to define,
      there, where it is what it is, and no denying that, and that we
      might not interrupt the sequence out of the familiar by placing
      ourselves ahead of what we are, at least not by preceding
      ourselves.  It is not to be relived. But approached, without
      head-dresses, disguising the senses in their acceptances of their
      own evidence, no, but that the whole unitary mode drives the
      static into its parts only to have them remain there, out of all
      anticipation, unreminiscent and unfathomed; the impulse to
      observe has then become fulfilled, a horror has been
      re-established and from there no redress out of the actual to
      another actual. The new is full of that.  And faithful to it.
      Which is a moment within discourse, and seems to direct itself
      ("itself out of itself") toward, against and through the
      intellectual (reason and discourse present in whatever form the
      speech-act takes) and seems finally to abandon it from some
      further enlightening.  But if a quality of action, whether
      cultural or absolute, which distinction ought to do and out to
      reflect something of the tension here, it is that placement of
      the moment or event in some location other than itself which
      prohibits the event itself, which prohibits, which is the essence
      of the pornographic. Where one is lead to one's initial.  Where
      mind's ability to contradict itself becomes signal to
      eventuation, where a harmony of anticipations is inevitable.  The
      pain of existence represents itself to us not as solution nor as
      resolution, but as "the thing itself." Elliptical.  In that solid
      geometry of conceptioning do we notice that the pleasure requires
      acting.  Ecstatic configuring, where the shape of an event warps
      to confusing, one evidences the reversal of form. The purpose of
      discourse would become a kind of functional reflection.  As I
      address myself to the initial flavor of my anticipation, do I
      discover that its obscurity lies in its necessity of reproducing
      itself into further anticipation.  The unobserved loss of
      dimension predicts the senses. In the balance, some restitution
      of alternation.  The very content of acting, where thing-seen
      commends itself to thing-seeing. "Perhaps these people are
      expedient in the unnamables.  Maybe they bargain in feelings, in
      pleasure, even in simple contact."  (Steinbeck) If the relapse
      through the guilt-of-the-new has no exchange, no reversal, no
      recurrence, I might make the impossible discovery that the
      repetition of events is not discoverable in them but elsewhere. 
      Which leaves the matter entirely at rest, appropriate only to
      response.  Which leaves me with the practice of activity.  It is
      clear that the practice itself is active; in a drama, we are led
      out into sentences and construing, into the form of the event,
      and finally, into the event itself, which is where this has all
      taken place.
 
          ...The roll of the returning waters
             over the stone stretches
                                     remotely
         reaching us.                           (Duncan)
 
 ((proper form of response/not discussable
     in descriptive terms/but in terms of the/meaning of the act,
   how it is that one did/what one did in the/way that one did it/
       intention, direction,/location.  what it represents./
        "I just did it."))
 
 * * *
 
 NARROWING THE ATTENTION FIELD
 
                            all
          wrong
                And I am asked--ask myself (I, too, covered
          with the gurry of it) where
          shall we go from here, what can we do
          when even the public conveyances
          sing?
                how can we go anywhere (the bodies
          all buried
          in shallow graves?
                                Charles Olson, Songs of Maximus #2
 
      Out of the legitimacy of the one in the one, the first step
      remains, how to address oneself from the ground, from zero, into
      the air, into the one: The view, that speech inheres to dialog,
      and to act, and that our locale constitutes a pornographic
      dominion of a reflection of the one into its image, the
      one-in-the-other, and that interpenetration of the one into
      itself, into the one, relieves itself out of initiation. As the
      separate senses coagulate toward self is not new; multiple input
      primitive. But from the law (itself unto itself), and from the
      data of the poetic, of the levels and striations of
      consciousness, one would, ought to admit to the following: Since
      the form of the event, or the activity in which we find ourselves
      on coming-to-consciousness, is visible,  is perceived, then where
      ought we to enter process, out of the initial imbalance, or from
      the recognition that, yes, we do perceive ourselves
      in-the-midst-of being, or out of what is seen initial as a
      suicidal drive toward blindness, and the assurance that the
      latter is inevitable is not lightly considered, though such turns
      out to be the case with the force of recognition and with the
      realization that Blind is what one is. THE ATTENTION: as one
      comes to see that his attention is directed, may devolve to
      medium-fascination, like photography (personal experience).  One
      may fasten upon a detail, to some remain hypnotized for the
      remainder of conscious life.  Or one may admit that one has
      suddenly come to a difficult transformation in his total
      development. Thus, for instance, the momentousness of the word,
      in our voice-flesh-act term, that has one feeling his body in
      speech, vibrating like a celestial drum, what song!  One is still
      reflecting process upon act, rather than one-in-one, or speaking
      as act and process, as thing done, one committed, and thing
      described, "I am at peace" as utterance (sequence) and fact
      (state). The relation of this to that:  Whorf: "...that all
      observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same
      picture of the universe." Though if one Were universe, at the
      start, voice might penetrate out from the in, into the actual
      event, one might be heard in the other
 
                     voice        outward,
          one, self) ====         the//actual
 
 The view, or vision substantiates.  What one sees is not peripheral.
 
 THE NEW, Harold Rosenberg.
      If there is a transit where to?  And "what is it like", but no
      other?  Qualities of taste to be discarded, but how and what of
      succeeding generations, if I abandon what is good out of what I
      remember about the other (the pleasure, for instance). 
      Especially if this transit is inevitable and we bear no cues, at
      least to recognize when we have passed certain boundaries, when
      we have passed through, for instance, the successive phases of
      derangement into something resembling indifference, will we not
      still be cruel?  To which one applies to all notions of self
      regulation; out of biology and into the spiritual with that....
      So, one attends gradually to the shifts in his own attention, to
      work some self change.  One sets his acts out like pieces of
      force.  One receives crisis information, states of complete
      metabolic emergency, like the philosopher's "continual
      revolution".  Though finally one meets the physical father and
      sees the other as cause, as symbol, as truth. Mother of acts,
      which receive their force, the world. But to see across to this
      as even possible, hardly as valuable.....
 
      "That don Juan's control is the power, we can't allow ourselves
      to doubt.  Good is control" (Navajo/Gladys Reichard) as power is
      control, out of the literal, to see it thus as power of self to
      be in control of self:  Odysseus. Not the hero, but the way it
      comes about.  "Hero", the same reflective consciousness,
      un-included in his acting.  Hamlet, no, but Odysseus in his acts,
      how they are caused in where, in what they take the shape, of
      flesh and blood, you suitors. No, but that the voice is spoke out
      into the real and that the flesh is one with the head.