#unfecundated

[churchofattraction]

“I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gallstones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified."

- Henry Miller

[pornosophic]

Tropic of Cancer

“I love everything that flows,” said the great blind Milton of our times. I was thinking of him this morning when I awoke with a great bloody shout of joy: I was thinking of his rivers and trees and all that world of night which he is exploring. Yes, I said to myself, I too love everything that flows: rivers, sewers, lava, semen, blood, bile, words, sentences. I love the amniotic fluid when it spills out of the bag. I love the kidney with its painful gall stones, its gravel and what-not; I love the urine that pours out scalding and the clap that runs endlessly; I love the words of hysterics and the sentences that flow on like dysentery and mirror all the sick images of the soul; I love the great rivers like the Amazon and the Orinoco, where crazy men like Moravagine float on through dream and legend in an open boat and drown in the blind mouths of the river. I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. I love scripts that flow, be they hieratic, esoteric, perverse, polymorph, or unilateral. I love everything that flows, everything that has time in it and becoming, that brings us back to the beginning where there is never end: the violence of the prophets, the obscenity that is ecstasy, the wisdom of the fanatic, the priest with his rubber litany, the foul words of the whore, the spittle that floats away in the gutter, the milk of the breast and the bitter honey that pours from the womb, all that is fluid, melting, dissolute and dissolvent, all the pus and dirt that in flowing is purified, that loses its sense of origin, that makes the great circuit toward death and dissolution. The great incestuous wish is to flow on, one with time, to merge the great image of the beyond with the here and now. A fatuous, suicidal wish that is constipated by words and paralyzed by thought” 

[mimosaeyes]

an odd confluence of my leisure and research reading today

Under the cut because it’s probably not relevant to your interests?

I started reading some of Shopping in Space: Essays on American “Blank Generation” Fiction (1992) by Elizabeth Young and Graham Caveney — it’s for my reading course this semester. This evocative passage appears on pp. 1-2:

Our images of the 1980s have already become fixed, homogenized. Looking back, a grotesque memorial tapestry streams past: the baying packs of yuppies and estate agents, an army of entrepreneurs in red braces and jelly-coloured spectacles. They are roaring right-wing platitudes, they are rigid with cocaine. Multitudes of blondes in black lycra jerk and steam in a million tiny clubs. No one sleeps, greed is good, the aristocrats have left the tumbrils, brushed off their voluminous satins and are throwing balls grander and madder than ever before. There are orgies of gross eating, a million pounds is nothing, the sky bristles with aeroplanes, giant glittering buildings spring up above the cityscapes, only to lie dark and tenantless.

For context, blank generation fiction is associated with many young writers in the New York scene. Anyway, it tickled my brain and I flipped a few pages back in my copy of Tropic of Capricorn (1939) by Henry Miller, to find this paragraph. It’s on pp. 108-109 but I’ve excluded the randier bits so it’s SFW.

Again the night, the incalculably barren, cold, mechanical night of New York in which there is no peace, no refuge, no intimacy. The immense, frozen solitude of the million-footed mob, the cold, waste fire of the electrical display . . . To have money in the pocket in the midst of white, neutral energy, to walk meaningless and unfecundated through the bright glitter of the calcimined streets, to think aloud in full solitude on the edge of madness, to be of a city, a great city, to be of the last moment of time in the greatest city in the world and feel no part of it, is to become oneself a city, a world of dead stone, of waste light, of unintelligible motion . . . To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money, money, money everywhere and still not enough . . .

Not even from the same milieu, but I persist in thinking there’s a certain texture to American writing. I think of Fitzgerald’s Gatsby (1925) exclaiming, “Her voice is full of money,” and I come back to Miller now, and from then on through the decades. Hmmm.

[violettesiren]

Light that streams into the grass in white rain, light that fills a tree With radiance like steel, like glass. Makes me catch my breath to see. Down, down it pours in cold sun, thinned To web of crystal; streak on streak It falls, chastening the wind And making every small bird meek. Farther into the ground's black space Recedes earth's little warmth; earth grown Unfecund, now is made a place Of brittle dust and stone. Silver filters through my eye Until my very brain is lit With the glitter of sterility That is both grave and exquisite.

White Day's Death by Hazel Hall