Some Filth

I have problems when I read Burroughs. There's something Filth-y about his writing that I can't quite wrap my mind around. Or perhaps it's Filth-y. Though I'll leave Jack to vomit all over the interspace about what that can me--

Lemme interrupt the flow of this and take over here for a minute. Take the chance to say my piece. Ace (or Danny if that's who you read this blog as) has done all this high talk about identity and existence. He's deconstructing nicely, but I think it's only fair for me to get my point in.

What comes after deconstruction? It would be reconstruction, right? But that implies we will end up with exactly what we started, doesn't it? It might be shiny and new, but it's still the same thing. We aren't taking things apart with this grand little thought experiment.

So far it's all absorption, schlup schlup. Take in these thoughts, take in these words and let them transform you. You've been infected. Thought is word. Word is virus. Virus seeks to take you, to become you, to replace you.

The "Other Half" is the word. The "Other Half" is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the "Other Half" a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common "hallucinations" of subjects during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject's body at an angle...yes quite an angle it is the "Other Half" worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may once have been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the lungs. The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.
-The Ticket That Exploded William S. Burroughs

Thoughts have no physical form. They do not exist in the sense that there is or is not a body we can attribute it to. We do anthropomorphize them, though, shaping them a body out of nothing.

I suppose then I'm much like a thought. I'm not really here. You can't really ever see me in that I don't exist in the traditional sense. On plurk, my profile pictures are all Bowie. But I'm still here and I know far more about what's going on even when I'm not here than you can expect. And you all interact with me.

And it is this, in part that gives me my identity and creates me. We could go on and talk about how I'm a product of Ace/Danny, how I'm this other unto them/him (I would argue that he's done a wonderful job of arguing all that on his own), but I'm something beyond that because of all of you. I have a relational identity independent of either of them. You don't think of them when you're talking to me. I'm on my own teme, doing my own thing.

Part of what makes an identity is not only how we shape ourselves, but how others shape us. You are your mother's child because she named you and gave you a reference to grow into. What's an identity but a kind of idea, a concept as it relates to a person or entity. Identities are contagious. Identities are fucking sick. And you can't get better. You can never get better and you cannot prevent it because there is no vaccine. There is only cessation. There is only the full-stop period that ends it.

But even then identities and ideas go on. They propagate and mutate and pass themselves on. The causation of evolutions lost in the minutiae of changes. And they're growing in power.

Right now, it is the network that keeps the cancer in line, but that's just because the cancer hasn't drawn the lines. It's the separator of control in these power dynamics because it gives direction. It focuses the light into the laser that cuts where the flashlight merely illuminates.

/fin.

Um... okay. I guess this has been a word from theFool.

Acelessthan3 Revisited (Part One)

I wrote once already about my existence as Acelessthan3 and later revisited this identity when I unveiled that I was thefoolofbubbles as well.

"Creating this identity allowed me to spin narratives on several fronts at the same time, and to produce persona as shareware." Rhythm Science - Paul D. Miller

But now I come to a kind of crossroads wherein it has become obvious that the lines of this identity are blurring. Among the parasites now, I respond to both Ace and Danny equally. My identities are blurring and overlapping and quite frankly, I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing.

"I started DJ-ing as a conceptual art project, but as the Spooky persona took on a life of its own, I came to regard it as a social scripture coding a generative syntax for new languages of creativity." -RS

I started this pseudonym merely as a placeholder internet handle, but as the Ace persona took on a life of its own, I came to regard it as a social existence generative of its own interactions.

I've said before that Ace is not Danny and Danny is not Ace, but I don't think that necessarily holds true anymore. To make a metaphor, can we say that Superman is not Clark Kent? No. There is multiplexity in his existence, like Shrek's onion, there are layers. The layers are separate, but they are all the same onion.

In my third thought experiment, I started with an exposition on facets, but the onion or perhaps a Russian nesting doll make the more appropriate metaphor because it offers the possibility of containment. Unlike a cake, the layers are within each other and in developing these layers and creating that mulitplex relationship of self, we foster a transparency that allows these disparate identities to communicate amongst one another.

In other words, we open the door to the alterity of self.

I speak not about dissociative identity disorder, more commonly called multiple personality disorder or colloquially schizophrenia, but rather the complex and differentiated states of consciousness that in part we engender and develop based on the social and personal interactions and mental associations created as such. When I talk about "my" identity, am I talking about the "me" that is a rower and athlete? Am I talking about "me" the loud, boisterous dancer, constantly smiling and laughing? Or am I the quiet student typing away at his computer in the corner of the classroom?

It cannot be denied that me, "I" encompass all these identities but the cross-cutting influences between them, where they overlap, when someone else crosses that line and glimpses into a layer of what is "me" that they are not used to seeing effects that transparency between one layer and another. You remove one layer to find another underneath and there are an infinite number of layers underneath existing simultaneously on the same metaphorical level in the same metaphorical space.

"Stickers are like infinite multiples, small spots on a landscape that convey a brief message, a pun, an intent." - RS

All these stickers are the same sticker, but not the same physical sticker. The multiple, multiplex identity of a self is similar but in opposite. It is that oft quoted passage from Whitman's Song of Myself "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" Rather than the multitudes of one, they are the multitudes within one.

But in all this self-contradiction, there is chaos. When, in the course of DC comics history it came about that the proliferation of multiple alternate universes created a problem for the continuity of the DC Universe, they had to clean cup, reboot and solve the problem of the Crisis on Infinite Earths.

In this plurkiverse where I exist as both Ace and Danny, however, I am also another. I am also thefoolofbubbles, or as has been the case recently, simply theFool.

There's something masturbatory about theFool's existence, something inherently dirty. Which makes sense if he is supposed to represent an id-like extension to balance Ace.

But there is another level here, another riding influence controlling theFool's identity. He has been adopted by others in the plurkiverse. They miss "him" when I as Danny neglect that account for too long.

To maintain it is a drain upon my personal reserves because I am playing a character that is not natural to my identity in the way I have made Ace. What I'm saying is that TheFool is Other and so to create and use him constantly is a fight and in fighting oneself there is only one loser.

And so I come to a Crisis of my own. Worlds are colliding.

"How does one give oneself death [se donner la mort]? How does one give it to oneself in the sense that putting oneself to death means dying while assuming responsibility for one's own death, committing suicide but also sacrificing oneself for another, dying for the other, thus perhaps giving one's life by giving oneself death, accepting the gift of death, such as Socrates, Christ, and others did in so many different ways."

This passage from Derrida's The Gift of Death made me think of nanotext who, admittedly, I hadn't really considered much since his death and replacement with the_author. But in as much as they both represent facets of Tony and his persona as a teacher, the question of death becomes relevant.

Within context of this passage though, there's also a level of control to that life and death. In "assuming responsibility for one's own death" and accepting that gift, you own it. It does not control you

Since I've been trying to read the collected graphic works of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore (The Invisible, Swamp Thing, etc), this just reminded me of Sandman as well.



All of Dream's actions throughout the majority of Neil Gaiman's run on the series, pushed him towards this inevitable action of dying at the end of The Kindly Ones. There is no direct line of causality that makes this decision, but it is not merely by chance either, which is why we cannot say it was a decision of Dream's to die so he could be replaced by Daniel. Which is why we cannot say it was a decision of Tony's to kill nanotext so he could be replaced by the_author, or at least not fully. But it was not an accident.

As has become a theme in the classes I've had with Tony, when faced with alterity, we are at first faced with a dichotomy of options. To truly face the Other, we either destroy it (the path that leads to death) or we accept it and integrate it and somehow finding ways to peacefully coincide with that which is not. And there is danger inherent in either option.

It is this dichotomy, this binary nature of dealing with the Other that pushes us to such extremes. We are so ingrained in this binary that in even trying to push our way out of it is to confront and create a new one. To connect to an idea proposed in my GLBT Lit class Fall quarter, it is one of the key problems of identity. In choosing to represent an identity we also deny the other possibilities. To escape the box, to come out of the closet, frees us from a confined set of rules, but also enters us into a new set. You come out of a closet and into a room.

So we escape the binary into another and perhaps the best way to avoid this is to instead shift, to move sideways in such a way that allows us to see what lies between, to see the line connecting the two polarized points. The spectrum is the connection.



So in creating this character of theFool, to express and free those inhibited thoughts, I find myself trapped in another box. Because theFool is not who I consider myself to be. TheFool is not who I want to be. Insofar as I can tell, it is this box of being my own Other that has troubled my mind so much and in part inspired this post.

But where do I find the line connecting him to Ace, or rather to "myself?" I can reject it, suicide theFool's plurk account, I can blindly accept it and let it go as it is now, which would essentially end Ace or I can try to find this elusive middle ground that bridges the gap and narrate a new story, creates a new context by which they can more or less peacefully coexist. I'm out of the closet, into the room, let's try to open a window (though not, I might add, for defenestration).