Eyes without Look

Jerry and I are naked most of the time, and we are slowly learning how to see with our bodies. The ass, nipples and genitals are the most sensitive seeing areas, and the lookout is different according to which areas are used. Above all, the popling wants to be seen with other bodies and to see other bodies. When he looks at me with his nipples, my nipples become erect. Today I was in the workshop and the popling came in. He looked at the beams and made a little chirping giggle sound that vibrated in my throat, and then he looked at me with his neck where a red line like a rope mark appeared, and jerked his head to the left and I ejaculated. His whistles and chirps vibrate in my body like some sonar language. (William Burroughs, The Popling)

If one eye can see, so how can it be without look? Spinoza was the first eye without look, a type of blank eye. Not that his eyes were without looks, for example, without beauty, attraction, or even without any depth of field, No! The matter is that he himself was an eye without look. Even his owns eyes were eyes without look. All of his organs were eyes without look. His elbows when hitting something, or his ears when connecting to a sound, or his intestine when connected to some food, or his hair when wind blew, or his legs when stepping on the ground, or the skin of his belly when seeing an image, or his neck when it bent down, and truly speaking, his neck when he walked, his legs when accompanied by the flow of a sound, his belly when wind blew, his hair when stepping on the ground, or his elbow when smelling something, were all and all eyes without look. Spinoza was not really Spinoza. Like Beckett, he too, was a floating particle and in danger, and necessarily in connection and disjunction, in relations with other particles.

Icunabula vol II: Cut ups and Becoming

By Mr. VI

"When you cut into the present the future leaks out." - William S. Burroughs.

Previously, I've spoken of the incunabula - natives of the mythic. I've argued that the distinction between between myth and reality is meaningless because 'reality' as we know it is a model, a narrative created to comprehend our perceptions; reality as we know it is born out of the same construction process that we use to make myth and spin our tales.

You can't separate it from physicality, because the physical is our interface with the wider universe. It's as intimate as blood, breath and bone, as vital as sexual secretions and just as rich.

And just like those fluids, it's a lubricant; a fluid-smooth space that allows flow and tranverse movement. It contains the potential for life, and also death and disease of the psyche

It's not a thing of top-down authority and hierarchy, indeed if there is any movement which could be described as solely vertical in terms of myth, it's an upwelling - born from the ground of being itself - bottom up.

Urðarbrunnr. The Well of Wyrd; the dwelling place of the Weird Sisters, the Nornir who lay down and weave the events of a person's life into what they will become.

Cut, arrange, and put together; folding events in and under over. Perhaps Burroughs was more right than he knew, perhaps it's not the future that leaks out when you cut the present, but the wyrd-fluid, the raw material for becoming?

Make the incision, cut the flesh and the vital fluid wells up - for incunabula the blood of their body flows free, an opening is made to serve as entrance and exit. It becomes an access port to their own becoming-as...

Endorphins get you high, get you flying, get you soaring, get you awake and alive. Opening yourself, creating a gate to the unknown, the unintelligible spaces beyond the senses. It's blood magic, to feed and gift yourself to all comers.

We'll come back to that later - for now recall that the body-as-text is an essential of the incunabula. That being the case, who owns the text? Who has the right to edit and re-write its narrative?

Glossy magazines and moral prohibitions; eidolons of form to aspire to - these are not bottom-up processes. No, they are hierarchical and top-down. The individual must operate as a thrall to such imagery - authorative texts.

Taxonomy via text - classification and definition; truly People of the Book, an inviolate and holy manuscript.

An immovable arrangement of form, sanctified by divinity because YHVH made humanity in his own image and there's only one divinity, yes?

The brimming cornucopia of myth says otherwise; this apparent transcendent authority is not alone. Kami, landvaettir, alfar, dwergar and muses. Annunaki, shedim and lilitu, bodhisattvas, asuras and daevas. Nagas, tulpas, piskies, puccas and ghul.

Not one text - and the knowledge of this is reaching common awareness now - for did G-d have a wife? Anyone with half an interest will smile and tell you this is nothing new. Asherah has been around for years, god-wife or no.

But the incunabula makes the ink into blood, running on skin, carving out new juxtapositional language by dismembering the old - powerful creation. Just ask Odin, Marduk or any personages - human or not - who've broken things down, remixed them and come up with something new.

There's a glorious multiplicity of form here; the fluidic spaces of becoming certainly echoing the amniotic fluid.

The poem by Gabe Moses entitled How To Make Love To A Trans Person speaks loudly of such wonderful becomings and though it's a little long to reproduce on this site, here's an excerpt:

Forget the images you’ve learned to attach
To words like cock and clit,
Chest and breasts.
Break those words open
Like a paramedic cracking ribs
To pump blood through a failing heart.
Push your hands inside.
Get them messy.
Scratch new definitions on the bones.

Get rid of the old words altogether.