Breeding Breath

I (k)now this. Bartleby is a good friend of mine. I've said this before.

Maybe my experiment is too descriptive, too methodological--in short, too literate. Give me a picture that pictures my frame of mind: my attitude, my shift, my disjunction. I've said this before:

I have no homing device. Not the content of my pictures, but the style and approach of many of my pictures should reflect this. Give me a photo that refutes my photo. I can only give you a heart, shaped like a box, without any content. I can offer up a shape, and maybe some style. I cannot tell you what THIS is.

E-mails for our course were meant to be meta-blogs. I am going to invert this, however, and use the blog to meta e-mail.

Instructions:
1. Understand metaphysical limits, and use this to approach becoming-what-you-are (appreciate the gates and know Daimon; and get to know Nemesis if you have to).
2. Make the ontological aesthetic. We are entering into a paradigm of pleasure/pain, of "aesthethics."
3. Avatar (as concept, as noun) vs. TO AVATAR
4. Flash Reason has/needs-to replace the Kantian notion of critical judgement.
5. Now and the Moment: use the GPS to better understand your EPS (to avatar).

My sustaining state of mind: anxious. I don't mean this in the sense of this present "moment," or in the sense of this course; I mean this in the sense of my existential composition at large. There are other conditions to add: paranoid, self-interested, observant, neurotic, doubtful. This state of mind, with all of its multiplicities and assemblages of conditions, inform and instruct my "self." They guide my orientation towards what it is I (want to) do with my life, particularly with regard to scholarship. Finitude troubles me: fear and trembling. As such, I have been focusing on my own apartment because the question of material limits--especially in the given sense of a "home," perhaps in the more GPS sense--very much govern my internal set of metaphysical limits, perhaps in the more EPS sense. My air conditioner re-marks (in its noisy vibration), but I only receive it as re-mark-able because of my particular presence (bound up with all of my otherwise absences).

My (Becoming) Motto: Home is Where the Cart Is.

In other words: Bartleby is a good friend of mine. What is there to ask?

The question, I suppose, would be the constant move towards the interrogative itself that practically governs my anxious life. I take this picture of my apartment, because it moves me: it takes me somewhere; it draws desire inward; it instructs me; it (re)presents joy; it positions me existentially/metaphysically. I develop an "aesthethics." I take pictures of my home. But this is not my home. Home should have some kind of ontological terra firma, right--a kind of Being to which our otherwise Becoming selves eternally return towards, yes?

Instructions:

1. Visit for the self: travel, do not "tourism" (see: McDisney Vacationing)

2. Interact with the "aesthetics" (sites, museums, landmarks) you otherwise simply consume for the sake of consumption. 

3. Be an active part of the picture; don't just buy the (postcard) pictures. 

My Figures: Rimbaud and Henry Miller wander the streets.

 

My (Being) Motto: "New dreams, new dreams; there is no truth." Yeats.

My EPS and GPS are scrambled because my sense of home, in both cases, are not in any sense clear. This is what guides my anxious interrogative: how? Not why, or what is it, or what does it mean--but how? The uncanny (unheimlich/heimlich) carries a different kind of metaphysical weight for me; it sends me on a different kind of line of flight. An anxious, interrogative one, a doubtful one, a questioning one. Blank Confession: I am not welcome "home," in the classical and literal sense, and I spent the last seven months of my undergraduate career living in Moos Tower and the library (clothes in a locker; gym showers; decent couches, though). This is why my own air conditioner re-marks to me in a re-mark-able way. It's not Alachua County, per se, but it's my location, in all senses (at least for me). I could listen to it for a lifetime, and in every instant live a lifetime. Experiential rhizomatics. 

I woke up one morning hearing my air conditioner as loudly as Proust bit into that madeleine.

This is all to say that my experiment leads me to my inevitable and obligatory fear, my own self-haunting: all of this is wrong. An extended and reflexive way of asking: am I missing the mark?

 And so I add this:

My presence: you already know I am here, enframed, the agent recording the subjects being recorded, which is to say I am not here/there; and this is to say I am never merely here or there. This is a cloudy day, let’s say, a cold one: this takes me back to a time of warmth, a yearning for it. I feel it. I am there; I want to capture this moment. Aesthetics invite me, very much if not exactly like the commodity does: pleasure-now-yes. It’s never that simple: here I have a home, but I must follow candle rules, I am gated in, enframed, the air conditioner nightmare reminds so; there I have no home, but I am free, opened up and thrown endlessly into the world, subject to the elements. These are merely different angles from the self position, each testing limits a bit differently (if at all, I have yet to fully know, such being part of my tendency and orientation towards limits, at least so far [i.e., necessarily so far, as such]. 

My GPS—candles haunting the privilege of my home; public space without privacy revealing me
endlessly—only cast context on my EPS. Rimbaud and Miller did not merely wander
the streets, and they did not also merely take up and soak in lavish pleasure when
they could as well; they did not merely about this; they truly wanted to
reproduce this, to project it out, recreate it so as to endlessly embrace it. 


Indeed, I am in poverty because I want so much and have so






much so that I can expend so much: my place is constantly messy because I want

to make it clean, and vice versa. It is strange to get drunk to get sober, so
as to get truly drunk again: heimleich/unheimleich so literally and figuratively true, as nestled in my gut of guts. The full blast of Deleuze’s plane of immanence, of his rhizomatics, his folding over, becoming attached itself to never because of a critical appreciation of it. No. It was an


aesthetic approach towards life, a way of being, rather than explanation of

what being is. It was a how. A book not as a box with contents; a book as an
empty box (Negotiations). This has always been my home. 



Limits: figuratively and literally, at least in my existential narrative. Enframing. Walls and ceilings, literally and figuratively. The context shifts, but the Moment exacts and opens up my EPS. Becoming-what-I-am in reception of these circumstances—these circumstances constructed by an examination, an aesthetic undergoing: my air conditioner reminds me every fifteen minutes to a half hour. 





The other day I found myself stuck in an elevator. A literal (always still figurative) elevator. Turlington Hall. Once I was stuck in an elevator, and everyone started immediately getting distraught. They screamed and moved and tried to pry the door open; they pushed all kinds of buttons. I sat there and sighed. I giggled to myself. What an experience, I thought. Then






I moved to push that button—THE ALARM BUTTON. And that awful ringing commenced,



and within seconds, maintenance was there to get us out. They looked at me, and I looked at them. Sometimes it’s okay to embrace the annoyance, if it brings you closer to you, to your position, to becoming-what-you-are. My air conditioned nightmare: such a rattling has never been so pretty—now. 





I receive my past; my present intimates itself to me; my future remains an empty courtyard. I stare baffled through my window into other open windows every day, every night: do they see me? Are they not baffled too? I know not, and perhaps that is the fortuitous cross that I bear. In the adorned halls of this Coca-Cola City, I can only hope that they will stare into


the abyss of the empty soda can long enough—long enough to see that their desire remains primary, their capacity remains primary, their sense of joy remains primary. I happened to happen upon myself here, limits and all. I am always still back in Moos Tower. It’s a gentle haunting. And yet, I am always where I am going, and even more so now. Rimbaud used to have frantic, feverish dreams, and I have them, too: “Onward! Onward!” Or, to use Yeats: “New dreams; new dreams. There is no truth.” 



My air conditioner re-marks, to borrow the Derridean refrain, but its re-mark only became re-markable, to me, in me, and on me, when I woke up and re-cognized it, truly experienced it. I went deeper into it; I was drawn to it. And why not? 




Instructions:

1. Desire your object; be with its otherwise capture; don't just shoot it (dead)

2. Catalogue your existential narrative

3. Frame/construct an epiphany 

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