mandarin mahakavya

wang lung went in the fifth month on his horse

to the funeral of the second wife of the daughter of the

duke. in her palm her death had been foretold to the

exact phase of the moon. though it was spring the time was really

autumn the season was really winter was still.

a wooden age. the chief mourner was descended

from the emperor, was born when her mother was still

asleep so that when she came to she screamed &

forever hated her. they lived in the provinces rooted,

pervasive as grass. calamities surrender to their own accord.

will you attack the king with just footmen & chariots?

she dug deep into the earth unto the autumnal spring

and sat on its beaches and sang of her dead mother.

all this being a flagrant corruption of the manuscript.

take the silk utensils locusts keep the body fresh for 2

months after death before the burial there being no

impropriety in miscommunicating the death in such a ways

demonstrate your grief and then be silent. bury it again with

no mistakes in the ritual in a separate grave overlooking

a separate bay with flowers suchlike. discard no praise no blame

dress the corpse meet the bride travel to the western seaboard with

its older tribes. respect but kill. keep old friendships. here

the force is small the leaders hungry their warlike practices

only show. the 13th cycle of winter the 3 yr the 17th radical see the essays

on astrology by the learned and recently deceased mr.y.

wang lung wondered at the terms appropriate to narrate

the death of a princess, her soul's investiture

now passing to her daughter's husband and further

east past the mountain-ranges where the people

all helped pay in southernwood for the burial-(is there an error

in these texts on these sites or dates?). the mathematicians

calculated this as the dynasty's early years using the eclipse

and the odd usage of the phrase "paying interest on the moon".

the news of the death of the sovereign left the fort slowly

heavily, passing as a procession, past warring dukes

who now questioned every edict. propriety breeds presents.

the lord of the altars raised a powerful faction, breaking

each rule of the fourteen kinds of subordination accelerating

catastrophe, and soon here, an army this, an army that and there

sequels to covenants. affect the people by virtue, ravel the silk

you cannot lay down fire.a pantomime of insects. gather

the river's fish for the great sacrifice of atonement. the ruler this

and the ruler that, it wears one out. hunters have no rules no

husbandry. you cannot without without preparation nor

without anxiety. a house and tablet for the second wife

breaks the rules. the duke tells his feather weavers to

write his story even as the enemy crosses the suburb.

compassion is imperilled. the grain is in the locust's heart.

peace means to change.

wang lung's daughter goes to the harem at the statutory age

her sense of her worthiness makes her appear, twice,

in the classic. unseasonable as the undertaking was

covenants needed to be upgraded , more silk, more jade

she arrogates to her dignity as she thinks fit. the phrase

might mean more than seizure, certainly less than torture

the smearing of the lips of the daughter with the blood

of her victim. does this phrase mean son or hostage?

autumn is the seventh month. the sense of a hurried meeting

remains through all the sycophant's commissions. she built

a city while meditating, and a temple for her brother.

verily it is said the queen progresses the constellation

he was mated and then announced king in the temple.

let the sword separate the virtues and clan-bloods

merit for generations does not come simply

which river which fathers which officers which city

feet deep in snow?- which duke's suburb, on whose chariot

light and nimble may be your ancestors in ambuscade

smitten and cut to pieces hanging upside down as meat

in the mouth of crows. in every month an army

and a chronicle unconcluded. in spring the army entered.

in her virtue she did not covet territory the thread

of her karma light as muslin. discord amongst themselves

and secret dissatisfactions and so defeated. a lively

prejudiced account in the Book of . of course this tattoo

is a verb though it cannot be rendered. cross hostage princes

appear in each other's father's eyes. take your curved chariot

out of the temple. fill your mouth with the air of different countries

maintain your vigor. repentance is for the mature, the aged.

in the manner of killing he retained all propriety

feeding all tutelary deities, all fetuses of sons unborn.

every army must contribute a hundred pigs and fowl.

what use is it to curse a depraved man from field to field?

let the tablets tell their lies in stone. wang lung

omitted no ceremony that would have been appropriate

to the assassination of his brother at the meeting place

of the socalled jasmine river. he borrowed the fields

and symbols and the exchange of lands. the tripod

in the temple was a bribe. the roof of thatch

the chariot of grass, the millet is clean,

the historiographer of the interior, of ancient designation

thought of states that their roots reach wide

but their fruit be small else the horse will lie entangled

in its yoke. if you married above your state

the minister accompanied the husband, modest

reverent mindful of being untouched and returned

perhaps even if the crops fail or freeze. sacrifice

to keep locusts away. the sage's pencil must sometime

be pruned. the uncertain speculations of youth

the walled cities of childhood (whose spirit

possesses the centre?) step on the square to left then right

in the fishscape's battalion. the arrow on his shoulder notwithstanding

the child-bride fought. a sacrifice is unseasonable in fall

when insects forsake burrows. was he killed in a quarrel

about a bird or a woman sitting on the back of the shaman-officer?

what auspice of virtue be this be- what marks on the body

here one cannot mention the dead's name else an incestuous commerce

indulges. don't hunt with fire in winter. bury your heart in jade.

the greed reaches to the person. as he did not like the gift

and felt insulted, he felt he must invade according to the rules

of old precedence. he attacked covertly, and won, bloodless.

wang lung in the nimble army in the suburb, ardent, at peace

in the harmonious troop. if they must win it is because the army

can dance. divine the odds of the doubt and the produce of the union.

the exit gives its names in contempt. the signification must lie

in the epigraph. covenants in autumn presage death of the marquis.

your weight in the scale is inappreciable. the error of the day

of the entering of the death. a bad king's contracts increase disorder.

every officer lies in his virtue and his fear. cross the river

in order for on the other side lies defeat. let the mandarin live

by his nine unrepentant, unavenged calamities in its granary of ice.

reprisal upon reprisal, like lightning the armies

scatter rice, disrespectful to the duke's temples, tearing

the princess' chariot. any man can be a husband but there is only one

father, one mother, one prevision, one confederacy. drunk

she stole the flag cherishing eclipse and resentment

becoming a lone prisoner, refusing the marquisate, the sacrificial

epaulets. one understands the text only by proposing error.

the moon in its epicycle wants exactitude and remonstrates.

the coffin arrived in the seventh month of fall.

the burial was in winter, the mourning was forever

though he was an evil man brought to an evil end.

conjunctions are proper to the classical; poor lord

in deference to majesty do not stay quiet at home

but renew the great crimes and friendships and the common

wickedness between the states. these bodies stay

in no coffin. she sees with only half her eye.

equal concubines must have equal sons and eunuchs and cities

and governments. these narratives retire no justice.

in autumn build a reception to house the base murder.

mourning must feel as an absence. all dead soldiers

are remembered here as heroes. a trisyllabic name

is barbarous and must suffer withdrawment. the object of the meeting

is to repeat the crime, to bury for a second time.

marriages are recorded not burials not internments

at the beginning of the battle her heart lay agitated

as a crooked spear, after fulness comes absolution

under neither the tree of heaven nor state does the bridge

to the city of heaven pass over the enemies' gravestone.

ancestors have been boiled and slandered, revenge is no vagary

great officers hazard enterprise, describe restoration increase

both flower and root in all the eleven directions & generation

multiply prisoners and spoils feasts and detainments

eat the navel of the hour feed victims perpetually to altars

extinguish enemy lineage make stars fall as rain as wheat

but an inch from the dowager the stars retreated reascending

waiting patiently for troops and the real or pretended invasion.

sow vigorously your virtue abroad. at home in the season of melons

she was bestowed the robe of the general. she had wrestled the large boar

packed full of assassins. blood was the preponderant covenant spilt.

in the war chariot she took the longer road to deceive, to pursue

the flying enemy. wang lung covered his horses in tiger skin

to make extinct for the first time a heaven, to flood it

to hold great sacrifices of condolences throwing field of millet

into the plague. swift was ruin. he killed with a single slap.

praise or blame is futile in such. gain a harem but lose the state.

the king was bound in a rhinoceros hide and his hands

and feet pickled. let critics condemn who ever heard them

but mostly the print is silent, extinguished.

when men are full of fear their breath flares up

and makes real such monsters. citizens have a doubled heart.

make compassion, but act, speak, assert. you can neither

douse the flame from afar nor approach it.

make inroads into spring. there is nothing in the circumstances

inconsistent or dilatory. in snow's winter there stay many deer.

artful but worthless he feasted the guards got them drunk

killed whom he pleased. history lies fine underneath the print.

three feet turtle attack red deer gathering at the city's end.

in gazing-in the particular gold leaf he missed the whole

the palanquin, the harem's daughters and their parasols and cooks.

the war is a pantomimic dance that never tires, it asserts its rude joy

over all calamity. the sun photographs the mountains waving at the sky.

the temple's pillars stay painted red. ancestors within were fed.

the punitive expeditions of punishment is justice by default.

sacrifice by moonlight, the beating of drums, offerings of victims.

a woman of virtue and ability. a state that does not know to dance

does not know to make war, to surprise by stealth. spirits flee

the temple walls. this city is in winter, its grain insufficient

its insects in plague, even horses bolt the stables.

graphic but fabulous the tales of tribes at boundaries:

those last conquered are set upon the next outsider.

corpses grow in rain feeding upon imagination's dark archive

historiographers of the interiors must force reason

a serf with money is still indentured in an absent hour.

every autumn a daughter is buried, age seven being the cutoff

for the historical record. the younger ones are still too much

in the womb's marine heaven. tablets commend succor

for children-marquis' culmination. if one's heart holds no flaw

how may he regret childlessness, posterity has other ways.

carriages and horses and feet and diagrams, other original dignities

new tablets will be put in old temples, even oceans age

armies are cast away, the spirit changes, new milfoils

prophesy anew, storks fly in augury. cook for your rulers

offer in sealskin, leather carriages and the cold metal of symbol.

the text conceals the manner of death in rare display

of dilatory euphemisms. but all men have relatives

and horses and jade and taxes and immigrants are in stake.

that year in spring there was no rain in the fourth month

by the rain of the sixth the new army had moved in.

the lack of rain was no calamity but an auspicious kindness.

the threat was as of the locking of the boat on a placid lake

his cheek lost color, an incursion followed, the spirits strained.

what robe will you wear in the coffin? the tortoise divines.

discriminate is the guilt. the heir-daughter walls her grief.

relentless is the fable. in fall lies the eclipse, hour of dispossession

read the clouds. assassins are not to be played with. spirits vomit.

in a grand display the flags loom. families are criminals together.

they allowed her to burn her coffin, returned her silk.

if you are resolved, don't pretend to be humble; choose strength

or alliance. morning awaits evening. do honor to virtue and the punishments.

secure succession. invade the great temple to make sacrifice of the 5th yr in it

and to interpret its tablet. the charioteer will betray & mystify.

the tribes of the east will rise. the prince lay dead unclaimed, deceived

unsceptred, inadmissable, obtrudant.

more sayable

to be, or not. to be or not.


whether tis' nobler... or not.


to suffer slings & arrows of outrageous fortune,

or to take arms against a sea of troubles.


& by opposing, end. no more.


them natural shocks that flesh is heir to, consummated to.


( in that sleep of death what dreams may come to?)


when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, this gives us pause.


there is a respect that makes for this calamitous & long, long life.


the whip & scorn of time, the oppressor's contumely


the law's delay, the insolence of office that spurns patient merit.


(make quietus with a bare bodkin?) fardels bear & grunt&sweat.)


but. death's undiscovered country from whence none return:


muzzles the will. we'd choose present ills than fly to new ones-


conscious is our cowardice. & th' native hue of resolution is sickled by


thought's pale. enterprises' pith turns awry-.


but soft all, & ophelia, horatio too.



--" remember sins & my irresolutions too"-

naming the other's face

that we choose to call them terrorists, that terror is the dominant face, mode, mood. if we say it saddens us, depresses us, rather than terrifies, how may 'we' differently act; or, even, what might it take to just acknowledge the simple panicked, feeling (& yet also the need & finding of refuge) of the desire for pure animal's flight-

a mood does not belong to parcellable time-- hence the condemnation of the holocaust-denier, but no equivalent condemnation of the imperialism/colonialism-denier; or the fact that slavery was unfortunate history (& hence & thus fortunately passed), but no term exists for the perpetualism of the racism-denier, for (s)he who denies that race pervades us still

2. a key political question for the next half century & beyond is if the united states (& to a lesser extent the eurostate) will accept to peacefully & non invasively, non abrasively decline-peace depends on all countries' maturity on this-& india, china, etc would do well to accept that we are going to be very largely very poor for much longer, for centuries perhaps, a longer period than anyone's decline

translation of section of muktibodh's brahmarakshas

[found thanks to meera, & painstakingly retyped by her, from around 2000, m phil class at delhi university]


That side of the city near the ruins
an abandoned, empty well
and within, in cold darkness
in waters deep within
amid deep-sunken stairs
in the old stale puddle…
I can not follow these seeming-foundations
these depths

surrounding that well, entangled
silently stood the fig trees
in those hang the nests of the night bird abandoned,
brown, round

The smells of a hundred past pieties
green, jungly, raw
swim in the air and become the weighted doubt
of some unknown eminence
that rattles the heart

on the railings of the well, beguiling, green
elbows resting
sits the white flower-star tree

and nearby,
a flashing redflowered cluster
my kanher
calling me to that edge of danger
where the black mouth of the well
glances upward toward the sky’s void

in the void of the well’s thick darkness
sits the brahmarakshas
where from within rises echo after echo
like the mutterings of the insane
speculations,
impurity.
to wash away, at every moment
the shadow of – impurity
day and night, to make clean—
brahmarakshas, scouring his body
with the claws of his hand, again
and again hands chest mouth
still it remains…
still it remains

and…from the lips
wondrous strotras, mantras
fevered, chaste sanskrit curses,
crevices on the forehead weave
glistening strands of thought
in a continuous bathing’s insane flow
-- life’s sympathy blots
but, in the well’s deep inner wall
diagonal sun-rays fall and
motes rise, when
light surfaces
he thinks the sun has bowed and saluted him.

when moonlight forgets its way
and its rays bounce off the walls
he thinks it adores him as the
Venerable knower.

body and mind pierced, yet
he rejoices, feeling the sky
too has humbly accepted.
and with a twofold, frightening virility
his understanding mind ranges
through the folk-tales of Sumer-Babylonia, mellifluent Vedic hymns
today’s chands, mantras, theorems, theories
of Marx Engels Russel Toynbee Heidegger Spengler Sartre even Gandhi
everyone’s proof afresh commented on –
all this as he bathes in the well’s dense greenness.

…this thundering, echoing, moving
darkness-- bringing up phonemes
obscure words revolving anew
each word cutting up its resonance
each form battling its reflection
maimed
becoming
the echo that wars with its echo

upon the well’s rails
beguiling green elbows rest, and the
white flower-stars listen
-- to these echoes
the delicate fruits of the gooseberry tree
listen, the ancient fig
listens, listen too to the tragedy that meanders
in this insane allegory
-- all barred within this old well

owls' strange glitter eyes low-wing'd on hilltop:


less than a city. a bay. late upturned ocean's


light, of an end november's thanksgiving.


to return bag full of food to an interior

emptied, alchemised of silence



presence only in this eremitic ghost's laugh:

circular breathing

the snake slithers lost

sees the old places

disappearing.


it does not remember

everywhere all around the old palaces canyons of music

hung unsupported from the sky, invisible.


the heart of the fig was still cold

a live inner red of hibiscus


graves stay fresh, diaries with dates
but no years, suspended

timeliness.


in a sort of morning languour and at the sleep's edge
a lion peeps in inquisitive. make instruments of snake-skin

drive them out from paradise, but their body still holds some. walk


and walk and walk to see these last lions.

& images bloat and wave away,
swollen eyed & with the slashed tafetta

torn silk of rumpled skin


walk and walk and walk to see
waterbuck

catch polymbronic wasps


move in the sand's city like a snake on water
writing a disappearing script a

horse in orbiting gallop


like children's voices burying deeper
in time as it passes


eyes untouchable & in a different layer
from the faces in the old
sepia's oyster'd womb.


the grandmother's arms that reach below the knees
her looking perched in some elsewhere


some older past of the past
to her granma whose figure

did not come up legible
in these mediums of dark

so lost its the oldest memory

of the oldest when the oldest was
young she was beautiful


but not alive in light no memory
but mine and i cannot breathe

her luminosity into the camera's eye

so yes lost and the loss of even what was
lost and many many further mores-


her gait that of the cross rhyming drums.


the outermost rind of the brain perspiring

in this heat's evocation of ghost.


such landscapes command belief and no
malarial malaise resolves


a second, a third, a hundredth funeral and still
the ghost dissolves recurs calls deciphers

our hand's writing

her smile her briefcase her glasses her slipping
hearing her beer


2. yellowish curve contours the late
afternoon's high plain. midst painted canvas tepees & boarded up
small businesses by wet after-rain potholes,

a miniature stadium where the cameras catch up
on the dancers between 7 bass drums & amplification equipment
& soft voiced mcs making a strike for each tribe

from somewhere ornamented voices in falsetto,
vocables in a united concentrate & then
single file flamboyance, singers in farmer's caps

men dance alone, women in 2s & 3s

hours & hours of this owl-ish monophonic dance midst brief,
interrupting ceremonies beating percussive plancks & gambling bones & curing
by medicinal bundles & viscera of small local animals

wind instruments represent the superb naturale buttons
right song for the right anything, anything can be made
more auspicious more potent memorable w strings of deer hoove




3. night's cold

wave-rushes / the zebra's eye

lash lone in the single / intruding,


invading silence of space and


gorge. glad of

the hour's temptation for it was the path


elephants loved for its moistness an' shade



night runs its frenzy like a mute/ rolling, mountain range :-


3. one day i decided/to open that door again

to profane the relic, to put back the wandering ghosts amid the mice & bats

them bespectacled ghosts sucking at beehives, wearing snakeskin
trailing rat droppings.

how they solved the past
slowed the frame drank the carbolic acid.

they had no hunger. their teeth were failing falling

they needed no food. some petulantly obese some thin as teenagers

five red flames ring their hair they look unappeasably sad under unblinking lashes


i did not disturb them. i closed the door again.


4. ensphered in rain


a mosquito net afloat in sapphire forest air.

to the ear's farthest horizon again

again

the rain's pitterpatterpitterpitterpatterpitter roar


again-against



ascends the cochlea's spiral

world at -9

the quarter in the sky white
moon on the blue hills on
the green traffic arrow-Go

this was outside. the colors clean.


inside, and before, a pianist played
ravel's gaspard de la nuit.



the woman at the piano turned
to a single slather of a
wild calligraphic

stroke

piano keys snake
down the spine

flickering tremollos but all
still plosive


the call of the moral
life of joy

ears grow into elephant wing
strained dough in bubble


piano rises. floats & trans-
ports becomes a fist


banging walls & ceilings


the skull a drum


contra schumann it is
joy that breaks
in the fingers's bones

and falls as love


what a frozen little land
inside the piano.


immensity, it makes one feel
as a single
strand of

hair


in an emptied opera-house.

europe's winter breaking
over the berkeley mediterranean

the moon a white cancerous growing

quarter the traffic still weavering home

up the hill's twistings &

blue tablecloth sunset

thanks to meera, some of the type of writing i did in, maybe 2002?- vaguely a krishnamurti style!-i dislike some of it, some still holds. i remember only a mostly filled handwritten journal, i can't remember the cover, lots of very lightly edited writing, maybe not so different from now :

These words, these thoughts, are a gift from another. From where do words rise, from which indistinct nerve of the mind. These words are placed before the world’s silence, like flowers before a favored idol; there is only the act of placing, and unpetitioning prayer.
I do not know whose words these are, who speaks through me. If it were possible, I would let this voice speak unhindered. I would know then whose words these are- a master’s, one who is sometimes in my mind freshly dead, and sometimes dead for ever, almost unborn. But because these words come trammeled, I cannot separate the voices; as in the acknowledgments of a book of a lifetime’s scholarship, I say that all that is right is another’s, but the infelicities, mine alone.
So take this beginning as invocation; where words are merged and voice is single, however flustered. Who invokes whom? I wish to speak as simply as oceans imply breadth, as beauty solicits the eye; but such clear motive can only be dreamed of. So let me say that I speak here as an actor who has worked on his lines, but now, on stage, is full of doubt.
What is there to fear? Not failure, or even betrayal or dishonour, but only the perturbations of a mortality made present and intimate. To speak is to invite the future, to cast away the years spent refining, polishing, understanding the past. It is to stand free of the past’s slow consolidation of achievement, it cautious calculations of hope. It is to begin again, and to end again.
So the performer on the stage, who renounces his lines; not that he fears shame, for the audience is wiser than he allows credit for- but he is fainthearted that he has not disciplined himself enough. He must now perform, only his gestures must remember the hours of practice, all the words must possess that newness and polish that can only spring from the integrity of the voice’s free contract with gesture. When the body finally renounces itself in, into voice, then will the voice speak free, breaking away from all source, consumed in universality- again, the utopia of language made transparent, as sky implies breadth.
There is no audience. There is only the bare ear that listens, that becomes, in heaven and beyond, the voice that it hears. As in the four walled darkness of a blind god’s brain, as in that stillness, that denuded floor of perception, may the voice’s chant rest awhile, even as does the soul in it’s unbreathing pause between two bodies.

This work is sought to be set in that poise, that pause between voice and action. But words cannot stay long in that airless planet- nor can voice, or mind, or sympathy. So these words live more terrestrially, sometimes inhaling, sometimes dead-
Whose words are these? “Only he has achieved privacy who does not wish to be loved, or remembered, or be, in any way, a part of the world’s life”. I do not know, I will not raise it again.

as fatal thoughts hover

children kiss trees

breath catches in an iron lung.


faces in imagination's marmalade mist

tapeworm their way


(six months later who would believe all this?)


kisses in relief thread the dawn


searching out the needing;


flee. do, not talk.



tender but not without shape

a single vein in marble virile
in its solitude even in its
blockedness, a nerve turfs
the castle

the sea rolls away under

the bay's window


fake softness for love.

small but large of gestures &
above all always
home in a pure raw

vividity


if this tongue's hum were not so

deeply, simple


who would have the means?



let the smile remain so


symbolizing nothing more

not even its

line between the lips.


separately together
tear by tear


feed & flee feed & flee


like the sad thoughtfulness of the quiet

after the excitedmost circus

after the folded tent.



the deeper the quiet the

more tenacious. all sort of things
happen
all over
dreams.


in an iced land of pleasure
they are most separate

and each, by

tolerating


all recrimination

bhopal memorations

this is their body

or
not

is
a
single
charred

dangled
chemical
pulsing

at
the
pit

a
cyanide
butterfly
almond

at
the
coccyx

a
maruti
in
bhopal


this
revelation,

punishment

has
vanished

been,
oblivionated

been,
made
to
rest

in
a
cold

amortized

sinking


arresting



respiration.


2.
build a permanent river & they will come.

they missed being schoolchildren

& felt a longing

waves & rigid waves share

and chat share & chat.

looking out the corner of the eye they

are all puppets transforming more

and more transforming.

felt a longing for those wounded for those
smeared.

the river is everywhere persisting

houses built of drugs perimetered in barbed wire
doctors everywhere asthmatic themselves.

those african women & their fistulas
those dump sites those chemical overspills

those large long highways that take you away from
these mines these sowetos
these girls with strange hairloss

this id of sewage that bewilders this

inertia this soil's tenured evil


a group of teenage boys kick the 3 legged tabby

incineration zinc copper Al


towns that are but moral
legal fictions tax shelters

all entrepreneurs now

the old man does not say a word but he is crying.


this prison was a high school once and
a catholic church before


accelerating cycles of
real estate speculation.

could be st louis could be ahmedabad


the children run laughing with
broken legs bleeding
gums teeth but lumps


the heat the bear made me do it.


mules & hogs rule this town sewage flowers

slo mo riots fumes in the classroom


music nor sport will save

the other day dhoni speaks and the elders cry
at being nationally filmed

children run with stolen microphones.


so easy to lose
a child forever the streetlights are
broken its been dark here
forever in winter
the sun is down by 4

toilets kept dirty
to be used for needles


no exit from prowling teens

only more and more and more
liquor stores fast foods lotteries

if you live till 30 you might be tired enough to wish out.


if killed by the other street's gang there
is the pleasure else why jail for killing
random already superterrified stranger
over shoes that do not fit enough

weeds grow out of his old sepia

watch the children at play & sleep & in their breathing
they are still human

even in the enormous ugly enormously ugly
school more runaways at ratios of 2 to 1
than finish school

india will do an america on america the
horror the terror ism of it


the lone child paints geometry a permanence
of waste of overcrowd of truancy of mists
of tears only 10 and his game is
over never seen a mapled
college not even on tv a deep
inbreeding panic barely describably
despairing they listen to cricket
in the police station detonate me
another building down daddies dead or
collapsed in asthma or just so tired
so bare.

low hanging fruit outlier statistic of development
money is not what works for these
"people"

all irony & madness conspire in
this remedial democracy

the rest of the country only lives in that
b&w tv. think of what you can reasonably
live to see imagine happen even by
the 2200s.

social forms of loudly silent loudly
mute total disrepair.

every building mocks a tree a river

a gray slate of a future unfathomably
...

bad cops happen to good people
in a sad blue tv nightwarmth

the tv media is only aaaaaargh

tears mark their eyes their anger in
their other language

the electronic acronyms of whose future bars
simple ritualizations of ambition

cent per cent equality is cent per cent expensive!
child soldiers are easier to kill give the bellied man
a lathi & red lited jeep these
raids will not be tele vised

there is no language anymore monster & aliens
seem to thinned of savor long ago

separated and un-equalled and moreover
skinned

health care being not a constitutional right...

the water is stagnant the day hot the street crowded
the rains will come fast flow fast it being so

beautiful everywhere around if you look not that far

trimmed lawn look up the lights bouncing off
clean kitchen floors the horizon so wide
so opened stretch your arm

render life

outside and everywhere-

no more human

no more names only digital bacterial colonies of spam, unable to unite all our pseudonyms or remember our passwords or credits, a new cyberfolk accelerating expanding discontinuous nervous system, the i of the creator-publisher not cremated but whose ash is the giving food to that spam that bacteria this is our rigid immortality in the fossil's ice wombcave from & through whose tunnelling we set out to hunt & gather & pin down our/the future

long poem

she claimed no descent from emperors
or their mistresses no family tale
of grandiose death no tale of rippled
sorrows rice is thrown into the fire
to remember her and the largest bull
is wrestled her soul adrift in far wild
riverbanks thinking only
of her joys inspite
of living as the empire still extending
still extending she lived alone
amongst the inland lakes
rearranging the odes of local
toddy stores her bright
iridium bird of spirit
broken her falcon to the world
of dead lay dead himself
and no more when she wrote
of rivers could we hear
their very roar no more
the throat of red jade

legends accrue but leave her corpse
cold she preferred to be of clay not
the soar and swoop of nymph
in lakes of cinammon wine. she
gazes into the water waiting
breaking the river's mirror's
promise. warble water

holding apartments with roofs of
hibiscus leaf. eyes might meet
in temple halls and shoot at stars
reveal angels white teeth.

the rooftop of the ministries
obscure the skies. she
eats flowers and cannot keep pace
with the hours she searches
for the sandal prints of the old
to cool her fever as she
waits for the copper
transparence of angels their
spinal cord splayed open
pierced no chariots for them
they descend prostrate

she wakes in exile marks
her oeuvre on stone cylinder
nude of calligraphy a carp
in the cold sea of time

holding only the studied indifference
an eye on each corner of the spring
a self fulfilling silence etched
in every nerve's signature
happy to not understand
even wine made her peaceful

pastel is the best. so many
children & so little wine but
she drags herself to her sister's
funeral. the empty stories
are the funniest, monastries to
laughter write only the simplest
poems and fewest

a mountain of mulberry

visualizing militia-rizations

1. what would the french revolution have been without the photographeable quality of the guillotine, the dramatic rolling heads (for those with silk who would have cake), arguably the most famous image even if it was primarily a linguistic one, & so contrastive to the non-image of lenin's visage of that other revolutions( even with the later compensatory construction worker's abdomen)-& gandhi's immobile mug shot, how do you photograph a fasting, but monks do erupt in spheres of fire

2. india is going to be like pakistan- a permanent state of civil war, what difference does it make, swat valley or jharkand, taliban or naxals?-so we are the schiz'ed brothers yet. this developing world- guerillas in forests vs paramilitary etc, is different from militia-(r: am bracketing to make visual the sandhi )ized parts of LA, only in that in the latter there are no trees. as a political space they are the same, the same relation of state-power, cops, army, mafias, state & local financings, visual & imaginary spaces they occupy to the aliens (ie us the outsiders, journalists, social workers, adhd romantics..)

3. the leverage of the political is the ability to read, up-equilibrate crime as a political statement

4. india is going to america america this first half of the 21c just as america america'd europe from the post war period-to uncork this fact would be the fundamental challenge of reading this 1/2 of the century. (& then also play it against china, arab-turk worlds, muslim s asia, etc-)

5. politics is the exo skeleton our flesh can't quite grow into

old manuscript found

we dislike that you men & w0myn of meane rancke

wear silver buttons at your knees.


or that those of greater liberal estate & education

must for no cald blewe reason

tolerate your wearing tiffany horlles & scarfes

building narmada

the pale face of the politician is trapped in the jeep's window. a wave of the hand and without tenderness.

(and also the chief of the gendarmarie, and also the chief of the fishermen's collective)

they knows these people are to drown. they have lived by the water long as fish.

we must give back to words their work, no words are alien to me

fish as the words of the water, the river's snakelike wanderjahre

and now it advances up their throat they drown in rising water they cannot gulp down whole rivers

whose death subsidises whose schmancy yachts-


the river's four foot of iambic timeless still a whorl in the eyes of the drake


the voice and feet of the dead are constantly rising millions of tiny machines of feet in the throat

as they wait for the water to rise to be hoarded to be lavished on them so that their skulls bust up like pods


their is no honor in this no name no death by duel this is an evil so immaculate

it could even be an innocence. pain alone refuses to not be of the past. fight with hairpins.

the birds wasted wings flung backwards pinned it cannot swim its face as wax

incarnate. thrust a pistol in their stomach make it clean and dry.


fish kiss the veins on the forehead and murmur cheek to cheek. the statues of the old leaders grow.


they die small in mincing step executioned by an insect people. jails are pyramids too

(sand in the blood, phlegmata and nursed grief) and supervisors impoverished too w/ lice in their beards

but mature slaves. put your hands on life this is your reality your field your border

but not your river. imagine the forehead of the politicos, slaves too to their own strength.


read the script of the buffalo's bones no fate but this endurance of the dead the crushedness of bone in high

centigrade-no wise impatience. see the scavenged old histories the lumber mills the cardboard mills the pulp
& wood by products, the ntfps. the white walled bared provinces embarass their destiny. where have gone the
wandering painters of icons carvers of bamboo their bare feet crushing gooseberry?-


2. the water held in limbo leaves
dragged by time

standing time and water they
have left themselves for an invitation

some span of time lies atrickle
belonging to none

take water, for yourself, unapportioned
who can scale water

make water from water! take water to
leave. where would you leave, or take

expend it spend it waste and reckon
it does not appear in its removing in us

during and enduring evening
in the water's flow away away away

paralyzing river. repeating sequences tick
& give the river up as if it even flows away



3. search for the wholegrain martyr the right
tear's right angle do more than simply look
dirty, learnedly helpless


currents trail from the bloated body making
a liquid map drowned for 31 years still
the water only tell their knees

bloodless death by drowning in some
strange developer's dream palms open to reveal
unblinking pupils scattered teeth still making jokes


obscene means off stage under water pesticidal
corpses ingrow the earth the square of dissent is
girdled clogged by bodies not floods this time


but a surge of dying a digging up of graves
with nails speech after speech of panic
drowned by waves even the hangmen revolt

this thread will not come out of the skin
puppet shows hiccuping elections will bring
flowers arrack instead of the arrow's glint

no throats of dynamite. fruits from the
same tree the same bass voice of
the children's id the women dance

to the lone flautist with lowered eyelash
the television reporter studies her boots
the gap toothed secret agent looks away

the river like tea is brewing there
are no fire alarms the dusk is solid dimness
the temple's gong has a brass tongue

you can only understand a people after
they are all gone. only falsehood is
immortal their hate is not wrong

you cannot step into the same river
flowers for wounds the bustards keep vigil
at the concrete of our wormhood

ministry of water and ore. hydra parties
burst under the flame's thread how long
can death alone sustain a people

commissar of raspberries was choked by
typhus O mosquitoes our only friend
make their blood to rage rage

notate this in the river's current teach
revolutions on blackboards handwriting
and chalk and spelling error & scratched poster

no jails but dance halls. but instead
cart sugar to the mill bushel to the granary
trapped in a coffin with holes

while the agent picks up his phone and reads the paper
speech survives on mists alone. lets choose
the most becoming slogan under the old familiar 'lectric light

stitch pieces of lying houseboat song going
nowhere in the dark water. chisel temples. the river's
whorls are a perfect cancer an adamantine starfish

exploding singly never forget never
remember city of aluminum and zinc
childhoods learn to make enemies fast

in disbelief you touched his cheek thinking it real
a whole city flickers as he drowns always the old
is spectacular heart's widow-maker

everything is impossible to forget. mountains
will crash intemperate nervous angels become
fishermen tramps the moon is nailed

to the car's window. are they dead are they
crushed which heaven is this? sitting on a precipice
of calm they walk like unarmed children

but all eyes and bony bodies. would they rather
have lived maybe not maybe harmoniums and cameras
in a moment of strength suffice if

it doesn't embitter doesn't endure the golden dark
salmons in alaska mis beheaded flowers homemade
envy distractible babies fish like irises

don't mortgage words for ideals

fiction i suppose

He wondered if she thought him only a fake indian aristocrat. but how could she judge? though they were all elusives, she had had many happy hours playing an aging chatelaine. and she wasn't that old either- how could she be.

she liked his light malicious brittle banter, never quite stooping to wit or insight. she had outgrown the hecticness of her twenties. she liked unbraiding his moods, she liked that he did not share anything except the most faux maudlin compliments he gave her when he was preoccupied. she liked less and less the sound of the human voice especially if it was not on radio.

she preferred the neat unhappiness to capaciousness of any sort-she thought she was miniaturizing herself into a kind of crystal simplicity. she made lists of lovers and then kept crossing them out, wondering who would stand at the end.

she petted the maharajah's beard- which year, which decade was it, which war. she was ready to sacrifice herself in a trice, but opposed causes made sense to her. she only occasionally wished for the hardening of those heart's muscles.

it was said the maharajah was actually an indian terrorist, that his broodings were over the fate of his people, his country, his gold skinned land. be that as it may. perhaps among his nationalist friends, they would think that in truth he was just the privileged aristocrat- it is a curse to fit so well in opposing camps, and sometimes to forget who you wish to be. she hoped she didn't understand all this too well.

an encroaching grayed out dusk. where does he vanish. he's once said he had to say special prayers at dusk. she wondered of it- scripture and pistol. dusk was her hour to wonder about pillows & house-stuff, the one hour she turned domestic, and covetous of recipes.

is it because there is a war that all the outside had turned so rural. or is it the villagousness that had set the poor to war. she thought of the metopolii all over- did they still sprinkle gold and mirror on the pavement. it had been a long time, months, since she had motored there. were beloved theaters all gutted. she half hoped so too. perhaps the terrorists had taken over, perhaps her father and everyone had been arrested.

she heard the pistol shots of the maharajah- was it the practice. he always forswore it when she asked him and she asked why. what could the poor man be plotting. an air of semifarcical tragedy hovers over him like an aura. when he felt she felt it, he complimented her routinely on her amber hair before he said something teasing and inept, but it was the pale dye of resentful malice that convinced her that their marriage still had some of itself left and wasn't yet a mere comforting bed of boredom. he kissed her earlobe. she liked his small white teeth's luster amid that waterfall of beard.

this two hundred year old wooded wooded house could do with some opened rage. the earth and its handmaiden of gravity had finally wrestled down the sun, it was dark now. her maid informs her, unconvincingly, that its 1931. she wondered if the march of history had been chilled somewhat. weren't the astronomers saying that the universe is expanding at ever accelerating rates. didn't that mean that time was slowing.

but for now he was young and shapely and wired below that beard, with a hint of shoulders almost feminine in its line. often he muttered his was it prayers? or just anxiety in a serene superior unruffled percussive tongue. was he rehearsing arguments with his mysterious friends- or were those friends simply being hanged in some far land; then she wondered if miraculously he was not just young but absurdly so, 21 or 23. she had heard some of that sonorousness in his secretive conversations over the telephone to his mother- she imagined the mother an old mistress, all righteous fineried modesty in a gouged out rectangle of rock in an indian villagy kingdom sitting around a large fire in some moon carpeted desert with an ungainly phone clamped on her ear m magnifying glass reading his letters the foreign languages washing like a turbid river over her ears. there would be groups of women assembled around to ask of what might have happened to this wandering son. but in all this she remembered that to be happy their life may be exquisite, but it must certainly be sparse of gesture, and of types of conversation. her love and education must remain incomplete. she diverted herself by his glossy eyelashes, the garrulous color of his glance at her; she fretted that this weather aged them uncommonly.

was there no end to all this prelude, however pleasingly romantic it was. his unit of thought was rarely more than a season. he was content to fixedly apportion his affectionate- if his voice sometimes seemed to have wings, at other times it was dull lead. outside were ribbons of ice aglitter . they had their daily grapefruit juice her hand still gloved all part of the self harmonizing mood she felt she had to put out or make up but a fine air of nervousness still roamed the lines around her mouth. she sometimes had dreams that she had been poisoned and her blood dripped in a strange calligraphic script while he sat reclining beside, bent of interpreting it as code.

her love felt benumbed, its starwhite dwarfs of doubt cartwheeling. this was not a happy depression meant to build character or learning. she felt insignificant, a sudden curtness railed her brain. perhaps she should spend her days with fussy aunts and older cats- was this not her fate, she who was after all the king's mistresses' grand niece's only child. so thought she thought. what a vastness- and when this night was sugar for love so lovely the floating web of starlight. what brooded him now, why wouldn't he speak. her forehead bulged over with the files of months of suppressed suffering. she determined that all his ethnic contrivances will no more move her.

as she sat limp, inexpectant he rose saying that he must leave, there are revolutions all around asia. he,an itinerant, could not bear the moral bruise of being sedentarised in an enslaving metropolis. there must be waves of arsenic. he looked to her attempting to foil her sorrow and protest but her resolute inertness made him feel a parody. he need that fourth glass. his mind felt disheveled, sinking. her aversion was now almost florid. it seemed his palace of illusion was not only to be shattered but paraded nude in blackface. he pulled her arm suddenly and kissed her wrist, but it was like fishing for herring, feeling almost a light relieved martyrous joy she did not move it away she soon found herself saying : don't sulk eat your dinner...but his sudden feeling of exposure piqued her again

almost-haiku

sound consumes the year.

i live alone in the forest with 2 tigers.

midst rain song an' rain call



haibun


in a night's moment i turn, and behind my trail, Krishna's footprints,
distinguished by signs, barley, autumn lotus, the goad, a fallen hand
marked by a discus. i wash the dust off the the ikon's hair, stay amazed
of the chariot of blinking star-eyes


repeat the god

a smile traceable as
the bracelets slacken

democracy

at worst is the downward spiral of competitive darwinian minority-isms. there has to be another way of negotiating than finding the aggrieved minority you're from, (or being defensive against such aggrievement if you're locked in the position of "majority")- this can't be satisfying, making enemies where you don't always regard them so-

2. in india, the public, the anywhere is a prospective space for mayhem. for in the military democracy we live in, any "event"- be it even ever so trivial as a professor's lecture,being "public" is full of security, redundant as india is with labor, even of the security kind. but the street outside, or this side of the metal detector, is available for violence, and will be considered as condemnable, but not strictly speaking a security breach.

she, he

he was creating a bond built entirely of love and-



selfishness. he prided himself on how little he asked.



he was like her mother, driving all away. unstolen hours lie wasted.


he responded only to her response to her self. only the conflicted hours



of lovemaking were that proof. her enchantment was his inexperience. her love was someone else's



at last. at least, count your minutes, no matter how small the difference.- 2 hrs 3 days a week



though she never contacted between. no unexpected bouquet of. his thumbs itched



to touch thru his phone. agreed to quickly to meet again- next tue though.



trysting in his stepdad's room with the orange erect cat. he skipped school didn't do homework just to



think think about her.- there might be an extra unexpected hour. do your nails. its her loyalty to her children



husband that makes her more woman gives him the strong endearing obligatoriness.


no calls but he saw her happy in the downtown shop happy that way it could


only be her husband. crying alone in the car and with friends afterward. those hills behind the college



where they first kissed alone remain the same. how she survived the fall from the hills was


no minor miracle said the doctor churlish. parents come to see him in separate shifts



couldn't stand each other and knew what they'd done to him. the therapist only asked why he'd


manipulated sex to keep the relationship & win only that that rueful
baleful attention. next is


that dedicated but unstruggling triathlete that uncarved block of muscle

poem: northern expedition

though a brave warrior a chief mandarin a librarian of the imperial archive



he fled the war, he fled the peace he let the coat of red silk



sent by his beloved from home go to others.


he left the front and took to a wandering moved by strange and
stranger passion &,

henceforth



all trace of him was lost, except


(that was 1627)



those calligraphies of poems curling with the autumnal leaves (his scars made gold by the early solstice).




emptied of heart



the flowers are kept piled high in the dead monks' cells.





at night the river remains a single silvered o'er braid of pure percussion-




it is still still 1627

the true test of love

is who all would you not-

commit- suicide- for- ?


& 2. wonder if you can live just, or preferably,



linked or rooted to/for objects



(could you stay on earth for just your camera -? alone or even firstly,
mostly ?-)



the eye a seed planted deep

if she had been born even a minute later

(there might not have been that this-moment)


the stars would have aligned differently, the cosmos inalterably twinned



& the precise pale of that mist haranguing that lone broomsman


on that hanging hanging pale blue blue bridge



on that one early early morning in turn of the century petersburgh

( she wasn't one who usually got up so early, was it her twin who'd risen?-)


& that precise locking of iris & -
image



that broom & her gripped cognition



born a minute later, it would have been a different altar'd cosmos


a minute minuet of pure- seeing


.an image that would have slipped off the edge of the bridge


an unwritten poem that has squandered it's line

doubt-

its self-pacifying being not solution or faith, but just assurance, validation, a safety, a security, a non condescending compassion, a right to doubt

cheap ethics

only buy books, music, philosophy, film by indie publishers, only teach/attend community colleges, only eat spoiling vegetables & fruits, don't buy anything see anything where over 1001/-rs has been spent for self promotion (friends labor and goodwill presumably are free, no?/), only youtube videos which are original, & less than 1001 views, or shall we be generous & say 10001?, only bloggers with less than 11 followers?, only unpublished (but maybe not unpublishable) dissertations, only poets, philosophers & geometers you are friends with & had become friends with for non philosophical or mathematical or poetical reasons, though its ok if you met the poet for philosophical reasons, only years where the inflation is less than * & wages are more than, & unemployment is exactly _, & where south asians or south east asians & middle asians have won at least one nobel,and... above all don't say or even think anything twice

venerate

there are many times when it is right, apt to mourn, memorate etc, but one must also be able to develop in good conscience (the happy guilt?), right of not mourning someone's death, i e of a not- mourning- without- guilt, or responsibility, / perhaps even a defiance of the demand of death to assignate mourning-

on apologies

it isn't an apology if you say, i'm sorry, but...- this is hard! you have to accept 100% responsibility, a number thats not true of almost any interaction. which proves that apology isn't about the rationale of the encounter, but goes into the realm of the unaccountable uncountable moral, one of the harder & obscurer parts of being human, a friend, lover etc!-there lies your ego spattered on the tip of your tongue, growing up is owning up is hard-

where to begin commentary

at the very end, as much beyond the pale as one's strength can bear- this might be the motto, no one is guilty in some ultimate sense, not stalin or the serial killer, we must find their reason & human innocence beyond what even their self consciousness & self justification & pre-mediate desire (avidhyas) allow-for no human is outside of humanity & we are all somehow ( to the last threshold of our karuna) implicated-

why its impossible

so, adolescents are the largest consumers of a show like friends or sex in the city etc, which is played by 35+ year olds playing 25 year olds ( or equivalent displacements) written or directed by say people in their 40s, 50s- how can one read this consumption, what exactly are the consumers getting, what is that twilight that is twixt the imagined talk of 20+ year olds & their clothing & their body & facial language & their behaviors & their humor. all this is more complex than adults simply intellectualizing a form like animation, lending it a more crafted erudite aesthetic -it is still made in their image. but in one who's mind is forming, it is the blur in its blurring that shapes erratic sense & action & thrall- what they get is impossible to define or reflect on, the author(s) here being simply shizified, avatarized into a multiplicity of hands & heads & meaning & gesture

loss loss loss

its been a long long time since i re

cognized


a redwood's soar and flight


would it had changed too.


pitiless beauty

arraigned against the mortal,


wrinkling heart

jambavan's theory-memory of creation

inner earth’s churning / molt

the tethys is the warm ocean’d uterus, every beach was hot
then, the arabian plate’s shift to lift up the zagros, a foreskin of forests swirl the world
warm water’ salty parturitions, the mediterranean, but the eastern ocean stays cold cold

wide gashes form the rift to malawi, rain shadows force the rift valley, making days parched & un-misty/

seasons are born and make fig trees, the hot rains everyday’s afternoon are of the past (none to remember or regret or miss)

lava drenchings. single storeyed trees, each separate & wonderful. not fixing anymore their green forearms on kin. On these tiny ancient horses ran, & myriad rhino & giraffe-(what could be more wondrous floating- as- in- a- dream a giraffe and antelope hoof holdingly contentedly climbing the stairways to the upper forests as the old friends they were )

but always so much death, so many unworkable borted mutants, so many ancestors gone unliving so that some survive, deft,
cunning. with thick enamel on their molar cracking rind- (& did they see their orangutan cousins' crumpled red gorgeousness sail as ocean's scum all the away to indonesia-?)

all the bones of the ancestors of us so many billion not enough to fill a shoe

somewhere exactly sometime, an ape jumped off the tree and foraged thistle. and
mutatis mundis suddenly
came away all human’ed up-

essay on, mostly, genet & ponty

Nikhil Govind
Rhetoric 240G, Spring 2006


In this paper I wish to discuss how Merleau-Ponty’s work may serve as a powerful critique of existing liberal humanist politics predicated as it is on notions of citizenship and rights. The possibility of such a discussion can only be ensured by an overview of the philosophical issues that have shaped Merleau-Ponty’s work- so my paper will begin with such an overview. In view of the enormous density of the philosophical corpus that informs the mind of Meleau-Ponty, my overview can only be modest and schematic. Nevertheless, I believe such an approach to be indispensable- a precipitate interpretation of politics can never be more than superficial, and leads one up into almost as many blind alleys as when one began. After such an overview, and introduction to the salience that Merleau-Ponty’s thought may still have for us, I will use Jean Genet’s 1950 silent, black and white film Un Chant d’amour to open up a still more concrete pathway into Merleau-Ponty’s political thought. In this, I hope one may get a sense of Genet and Merleau-Ponty indirectly engaging each other in common concerns like the need to radically enlarge our universe by multiplying correspondences -we will see how Genet speaks of the autopsy as a sort of depth-photography that reveals a startlingly different world- and by soliciting the slippage of mastery rather than the Cartesian sovereignty of the subject as assuring a more durable route to an inclusive citizenship and democracy. For even if these two thinkers did not seem to engage each other directly, surely at least they were committed to the moment of the common historical trauma of the years immediately following the horror of the Second World War.
A chief concern of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre has consistently been to seek to articulate a jointure of the “subject” and the “world”(these terms in this paper should be read continually as being bracketed) where there is no priority or hierarchy of one or the other. For him, the most discussed modality of this jointure is vision- he takes issue with the Cartesian sovereign subject who “looks” at the world as if the world were a pure exteriority. For Merleau-Ponty, the world is joined to the eye- his concern, unlike Berkeley, is not to replace an objective with a subjective/idealist view, but rather to speak from precisely this jointure itself. It seems as if it is a sovereign visuality itself that radiates equally to the eye and the world. The case Merleau-Ponty wishes to make with this notion of visuality is that the visual bespeaks a network of secret correspondences between the subject (or consciousness, interiority etc- all these are terms of classical philosophy which Merleau-Ponty is engaged in radically investigation of) and the world. For Merleau-Ponty, it is this passing and sliding of visuality betwixt the objects in the world and interiority that constitutes the aesthetic- and this aesthetic is the most valued form of knowledge rather than either scientific objectivism or pure idealist subjectivity. It is the jagged hovering of the lines on the edges of the apple in a Cezanne still life that undermines a Cartesian fixity of gaze and objecthood -with its’ (i.e Cartesian) inexplicit claims to mastery- for this will to absolute mastery is the other side of the famed Cartesian doubt. But Merleau-Ponty refuses to hover infinitely in this unproductive anxiety of the binary subject and object. For him the achievement of the painter is precisely in making this visuality exhibit itself -the visuality whereby one cannot fix the outline, where the refractions of consciousness- like the shimmering of the pool (in the essay Eye and Mind)- is equally internal to the object as it is to consciousness. Or, still better, where questions of origin are admitted to be unknowable (and perhaps constraining and uninteresting), and what is to be valued is the exorbitance of a showing, an opening, a vision, which instructs us how copious and diverse the world is, incapable of either static fixity or static doubt. It is rather this diversity itself, one that can only be grasped when the “visual” in itself appears- or as Hannah Arendt would say, appearance is in itself being. Merleau-Ponty writes in the Visible and the Invisible-

“… an anonymous visibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general, in virtue of that primordial property that belongs to the flesh, being here and now, of radiating everywhere and forever, being an individual, of being also a dimension and also a universal” (1968:142).

And we can only grasp this appearance/presence/being for an instant before it passes away- and also, before it reappears. We cannot control this lighting and loss of being- if a painter seems privileged, it is only to a degree. For the vision of the painter is not a matter of his genius, control, training, technical excellence, self discipline etc. One cannot venture to ask if agency is entirely dissolved in Merleau-Ponty altogether, if there is a streak of “passivity” here. This is because, properly speaking, the question of agency is still too caught up in the vicissitudes of the question of the subject, and hence of a humanism that Merleau-Ponty urgently asks us to discard or shed. Instead, Merleau-Ponty asks us to dwell in the thrilling question of the world’s pressing curvature on the pupil, its demand/lure for total absorption, its rapture, its imperious demands, its implacability and its irrevocable rhythmic temporalities. There is a point at which the libido/eye/the scopic touches the world and is inflamed by it. Here the power of the Cartesian subject abnegates itself and is replaced by a wealthy vulnerability- and this is when an opening/a disclosure/an affirmation eventalises as the flesh of the world. For this vulnerability – which is also a self vulnerability, even, paradoxically, occasionally a vulnerability of a victim, one who turns his gaze away from an aggressor and turns instead to the more productive jointure of the self and world’s inflorescent possibilities. It is important to keep all this in mind before the political implications of Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre become clearer. For this is the site of a new politics and a different sense of both justice and even desire, which, though erstwhile seen as contradictory, can now be grounded by this dual agency, this intersubjectiveity of visibility and the body whereby a mutation, a verticillation of everyday embodied experience and politics can finally take place.
Thus instead of the traditional view that cognition is dependent on a certain relation of the subject’s apprehension of the “object”- the Cartesian heritage of modern thought- Merleau-Ponty instead wishes to intertwine the eye and the hand, with cognition lining the interiors of each of these senses, and thus continuously opening new configurations of and for the world’s flesh. The visual is understood as a covering or fold that pre exists and even makes redundant categories of not just cause and effect but also subject/object- or the return to the subject via reflection on the object- this latter being the privileged pathway of German idealism. In Merleau-Ponty there is no return, there is only the limitless ontological is-ness of the visual. Furthermore, we cannot really ask if this visual itself is a simple given, for Merleau Ponty would reply: Given to whom? For the visual pre-exists the subject.
It remains for us to see what might be gained and staked by this first insistence on the pre eminence of the visible, before cognition may be said to divide itself into a subject and object for reflection. What is gained is, perhaps, to put it simply, a new and unimpeachable empire for the senses (including the body), an empire- and thus a sovereignty that cannot be taken away by some of the recognized limitations of a purely self reflective cognition. Since Plato, the senses have largely been seen as the seat of illusion, of a distracting, dissembling knowledge. By privileging the senses as originary, Merleau Ponty is not simply inverting the claim by saying that the senses speak the truth. What he is instead saying is that the sensible provides a constant nourishment for cognition, and that ultimately it exceeds the reflective powers of cognition. But he is clear to insist that this excess of the sensible cannot be relocated in a Subject. Thus the visual exists as a universe which “we” can access through our eyes. Yet this universe cannot be contained by our eyes- nor could we claim to have originated them, or even claim to potentially see the entirety of this universe. Indeed Merleau-Ponty is saying that we cannot lay claim or contain what we “know” either. The misunderstanding comes when we somehow think we own the sensory in a way we do not generally think we own cognition- I say “I see the Cezanne painting” but I can “see” as little of all its possible interpretations and truths as I can “know” it- as Merleau-Ponty writes, the first paintings still have much of their life ahead of them (1993:149), and that there is a long future to them after our death and the waning of the influence of our interpretations. It is misleading to say, as it is conventionally said, that I can “see” the painting in its entirety (as if “seeing” involved just our ability to miniaturize in our retinal screen a given arrangement of colors and tonalities and perspective within a rectangular frame) - but perhaps not “understand” it. Instead, Merleau-Ponty insists that we must understand ourselves to be as modest in our ability to see as in our ability to understand, and that seeing belongs as much outside of us as inside- just as cognition is ultimately non localizable “inside” a Subject.
What Merleau-Ponty is ultimately speaking of when he speaks of a successful seeing is the seeing of the tear in the ontic tissue- but this seeing of the tear in the tissue cannot be learnt by discipline or talent. The opening of the tear is ontological, these are the citations received through the trespasses in the folded realms of the visible and the invisible. These are what produce what we may, with much qualification, possibly call the painter, the world etc. Merleau-Ponty is not simply asking or answering the old question of whether the painter produces the artwork or the artwork the painter? What interests him instead is the identifications of the signs of this ontological fissure- which to him is the sudden multiplication of equivalences. Indeed, it is in this bold valuation of proliferation and of irreducible multiplicity that we can foreshadow some his political significance.
If the visual then exists as a privileged “site” (or at any rate not an object) for an “intuition” then it is to some extent a given. Merleau-Ponty has been accused of a sort of ontological optimism. This may partly be because his work has often discussed canonical, “high” art- as for example his famous essays on Cezanne, rather than the visuality of say, horrific images of the atom bomb. But here the canonical serves chiefly as an occasion for intuition-this is surely misunderstood if it is taken to be an unreflective, or exclusive “optimism”. For of course canonical painting can be horrific- the affective mode of the purely horrific seems to be of relatively less priority to Merleau Ponty, partly because his concern would be more strictly ontological, only occasionally dipping into the psyche. But what is more overtly asserted is the insistence on the visual in its pre emptive, peremptory, originary quality of vision, the way it multiplies and opens equivalences. Merleau-Ponty is going further than simply speaking of the horror of man – and who needs to be told this after the Holocaust- what he is attempting to do instead is to be able to strike the first roots in a new way of conceiving the world in its entirety- the political would then serve as the necessary correlate of this.
The value is thus greater than simply the question of art or the aesthetic understood in the narrow sense. For what does this multiplication of equivalences bespeak if not the many ties of kinship between all humans, as well as the human and the natural and the cosmic, but also, the human and the artefactual- Merleau-Ponty is not conservative about means, and does not share Heidegger’s fears of technology, which many of Merleau-Ponty’s generation shared, especially after the technological horror of the War. Instead, he seems very open to some of the possibly visionary openings that the technological may yield to, and seems to suggest that a mechanical censoring of the technological or the artefactual will achieve nothing, and may even foreclose much for the human. If in Genet we then see the pastoral and the man made prison not so much as mutual exteriorities (for how then could one ever hope to reunite them?), but as an equivalence-in-difference, then we can see how they can open out to each other, how they open possibilities for both the warder (himself imprisoned in his role, in fact clearly more imprisoned than the prisoners- and hence the prisoners can rouse him carnally and politically), and the prisoners themselves. The meeting here of the gaze of the warder and the prisoner is not voyeurism, but an accordance of a haunting -for which prisoner is not haunted by the jailer, and which jailer is not haunted by his prisoners? This is not to say that there is no power relationship- the facticity of power is inescapable. But as Ferenczi is supposed to have remarked to Freud, in a line quoted in the Interpretation of Dreams, “every tongue has its own dream language”. And so the lovemaking in the film between the prisoners and the warder is not just rape and violence (which it doubtless and inexpugnably also is), but is also irreducibly a dream language- not just in the filmic content or “scene”, but in the very iteration of the haunting. Still more, it is also the special and singular dream language of a prison situation, with all its specific pleasures and perversities. The prison itself is a singular space in the modern world. This is not just due to the instrumental reason that prisoners have to be located somewhere- to believe in such utilitarian or common sense notions is, as Marx said, to let ideology play the ventriloquist. Rather, the prison is a specifically modern ideological constructure in the fact that it is the necessary constructed invisibility, the necessary counterpoint to the open, putatively fully visible public sphere of democracy. The prison’s secret and irreducible interiorities are thus necessary, and it haunts the modern project of citizenship and democracy in a way that, for example, and to be a little controversial, I think that traditional rights based immigration or minority discourse perhaps cannot really do- and again, perhaps precisely because the question of the visual is more acute and intractable and multivalent here. It is these more severe hauntings and invisibilities that cannot be easily disambiguated. The prison is singular in that it has a certain relationship and stake in the mutual undecidabilty of the visible and the invisible, a constant precipitation of each other into crises- and this singularity is perhaps what Merleau-Ponty has in mind when he speaks of philosophy as the constant conversion and reconversion of speech and silence to each other in The Visible and the Invisible (1968:129). The prison, like philosophy itself, is this special case of continual reconversion. Genet’s work opens a fold of this invisibility for us, and we glimpse through his art, for a distended moment, the dream language of prisoners -and perhaps more importantly, the warder, for in a sense he is one of the true interiorities of the apparatus- one who can conceptualize or bring to visuality the guilt of the entire political apparatus. Hannah Arendt had written that in premodern times the guilt of the death penalty was so heavy that the Athenians would rather plead with Socrates to drink poison himself rather than take on the guilt of murder. But today the minor Eichmanns follow orders in a bureacratised and instrumentalized world- instrumentalized especially (and hence especially ironically) in the name of justice and democracy. What greater compliment can we pay Genet than that he could even open for us the singular carnal dream language of Eichmann, that is of democracy and citizenship and science gone mad? Similarly, though in a different idiom, Merleau-Ponty offers us a deeper vision of human and worldly ethical togetherness than that claimed by the somewhat jaded claims- even more jaded today than in the aftermath of the Second World War - of an inclusive liberal humanism or multiculturalism. For Merleau-Ponty, this profound fraternity can only be excavated in an ontology that refuses to consider the subject of both science and citizenship as master. Merleau-Ponty does not seek to replace this mastery with a more sustainable one, or with a new set of tricks- rather, he resolutely speaks of “slipping away”, of a non localizability of subject and world (if these terms may be used at all), of instead an interanimation and braiding of objects and self, of the presences of equivalences and correspondences and correlates rather than hierarchy and priority, of reverberation and reciprocity, of the toleration, so inimical to Descartes, of incertitude, contingency and “accident”. Indeed, it is often this brush with mortality that quickens one’s awareness of these vistas of secret equivalences that so infuse and soak the world. It is up to political theorists now to be able to relate these new realms of possibility to the current discourse of citizenship. In Un chant d ‘amour, the warder is seduced by this new possibility- it is through the prisoner that he can re-imagine the pastoral and hence freedom and carnality itself- for even though as warder he has the discretion to leave whenever he wishes, he seems to understand that this freedom can only be re semanticized and materialized/visualized through the prisoner’s fantasy. It is this desperate wish to be able to feel this rapture again that causes him to whip the prisoner- so that he (the warder) can, through the cry of the prisoner feel the full force of the affect of the cry for freedom, a freedom that the warder, in taking for granted, has reduced to a conventionality that urgently needs to be released through an ontological fracturing. All this certainly seems to speak to the fate of routinized citizenship today, where we are all, more certainly than ever, enmeshed in a regime that has totally disarticulated the relationship between the citizen and the prisoner, in a polity that has reduced the prisoner to an inviolate invisibility. This invisibility of the prisoner partly accounts, for example, for some of the power of the scandal of Abu Ghraib- those photographs being indeed, to use Ferenczi’s powerful phrase, a dream language, emanating it would seem from the very navel of imperialistic power and desire, a whole prison corps of Cartesian subjects held fast to the thrall of mastery and utter domination. In all this it seems Merleau-Ponty and Genet were especially prescient, and the years following the horror of the War seem today to speak to us with a special intimacy and recognition.
Merleau-Ponty’s dominant temper is, however, not morose, and he does not write directly of, for example, the Holocaust. Yet he sees better than most how any attempted domination can only seemingly, or only fleetingly succeed. For everywhere an alternate and ultimately more powerful pleasure loiters. This other pleasure- stronger than the pleasure of domination- is the pleasure of the slipping away of mastery, and of receiving through this slippage, a newer and more universal kingdom of what had hitherto remained invisible. It is the pleasure of sight as it sees, only briefly, but with an almost eternalized impact, a new visibility for the first time in the history of the world- this is indeed the secret history, and pathway of humanity, the traces not of conquest (or subordination), but of disclosure and shift, a thrilling realignment and re coordination of the sensorium- I will quote at some length:

But however we finally have to understand it [i.e. that ideality is not alien to the flesh], the “pure” ideality already streams forth along the articulations of the aesthesiological body, along the contours of the sensible things, and, however new it is, it slips through ways it has not traced, transfigured horizons it did not open, it derives from the fundamental mystery of those notions “without equivalences”, as Proust calls them, that lead their shadowy life in the night of the mind only because they have been divined at the junctures of the visible world. (1968: 152-153)

It may be useful to briefly distinguish Merleau-Ponty from thinkers like Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault. To speak schematically, Merleau-Ponty is not speaking in the name of a sadism or masochism, or transgression or negativity. Again, Genet can come to our aid- when the warder whips the prisoner, and the long pastoral dream sequence is precipitated, Merleau-Ponty would not say that this precipitation is occasioned as resistance or as, to indicate in a telegraphic manner what I will here call “perversions”- i.e. sado-masochistic fantasies on the part of the viewer or the characters in the film. Merleau-Ponty would not particularly prioritise the putative causal trigger. Rather, he would understand the intercalation on its own terms- as world disclosing, as “streaming forth along the articulations of the aesthesiological body, along the contours of sensible things… divined at the junctures of the visible world”.
Nothing in all this belies the political, but it invites us to consider not rushing with precipitate haste into transgression and simple reversal, but instead to first unmoor our conventional entanglement with the figure of mastery - and the thorny question of whether there can ever be resistance that can be completely disentangled from an alternate discourse of mastery. It seems that few people ask this difficult and precarious question as unflinchingly as Merleau-Ponty. The prisoner does indeed in his fantasy imagine a world outside the prison- but that new world is still chiefly a place that is open to love, and to a lover who is next door. Much links the new world of the pastoral to the old world of the prisoner- passions do not necessarily change in the same timeline as the contingencies of crime and punishment- as they together stream along the curvature of the same aesthesiological body. How, in an account of politics and ethics, even one which seemingly prioritizes the other over self (as for example in Levinas), is one to argue for a sensation of yielding mastery, of slipping away along the line of one’s own body, and thus opening new pores in a shared visual and bodied imagination? This is the radical politics that Merleau-Ponty would find congenial and hospitable to his thought- and it thus calls on all of us to fundamentally revise many of our shibboleths regarding notions of justice and resistance, ethics and the listening to solicitation. In the end of the shot sequence of the whipping of the prisoner in Un Chant d’ amour, it is the warder who is seduced into the fantasy of the prisoner- this is not a simple act of transgression, or reversal of power, or a simple accounting of oneself through the other- it is rather the strange (and strangely beautiful) violent sharing of the fantasy that makes for the liquid pleasure of the “slipping away” of mastery, and hence the difference in power and politics between the warder and the prisoner. Merleau-Ponty’s politics will insist with the need to factor in this dream language of power and desire and all the discomfiting or warm and plenitudinous horizons that are released. This is in contrast to a mechanical tallying of crime and punishment from a judge’s manual in bourgeois democracy. But equally it is also in contrast to messianic calls to, perhaps, a socialist utopia- one that too, in the name of justice being understood now as complete equality, would foreclose horizons by not allowing the free trade of the secret currency and constant mutual conversion of the visible and the invisible, of the equivalences that are not universal, of the fitful, uncertain and partial non coincidences that do make up much of the traffic between humans and the world.
In Un Chant d’ amour the lovers never see each other but are held in tension by the wide opened voyeuristic eye of the warder. Even the gaze of Lucien (the younger prisoner who is the object of the elder prisoner’s desire and fantasy) is directed elsewhere- this echoes Merleau-Ponty’s sense of the non localizability of water and color as he writes with regard to the shimmering pool in the Eye and the Mind. It is thus only the pure structure of a visuality- not localizable in a subject, or even an inter subjectivity- that provides the links as well as the narrative dynamism of the plot. The warder seems thus to take his eye, as it were in the palm of his hand, from shot to shot linking them. Finally, he cannot bear the swell of this visual-carnality any longer and must consummate it – even though no consummation can be total, nevertheless it must rise on the surface of the plot as a fold. So the warder takes out his gun and, in the simulation of fellatio, offers it to the mouth of the elder prisoner. It is clearly a sexual act as the warder throws back his head and closes his eyes in ecstasy. He then leaves, his locution in the world of the carnalised visual-embodiment over- the flowers that are intermittently being swung in various shots of the film (and was one of the opening shots of the film) are now caught. This particular event is over, and the warder moves on.
It is important not to reduce this triangulated sexual encounter. The encounter itself is polyvalent- it has as much to do with eyes as touch (and the lack of touch and sight- the prisoners do not see each other), with the man made body (the phallic gun) as with hands, with actuality as with long stretches of fantasy that interpose themselves in the actual, with the male member as with “feminised” orifices- the mouth of the elder prisoner, but also more significantly with the long ridged cylindrical surface at the end of which the warder’s voyeuristic eye emplaces itself as he stares “inside”. This muti folded encounter cannot be bound by a logic of a “thermodynamic” account of sex-one which believes that sex is a matter of a charged excitation which requires precisely an exact quantity of discharge that will then restore a normative equilibrium. In Merleau-Ponty, as well as in Genet (and in contrast to at least some of Freud’s writing), there is no mute point of equilibrium, or harmony- rather, all grapples with, partakes of, participates in, excess, exorbitance, a sort of exhibitionism of the bodied visible. The very train of the movement of “consciousness” is this sliding and slipping (and resultant friction) in and out of the lush ultramarine element of the visible. It is the texture of this velvet friction that causes the varied affects of thrill and the sense of an almost unexpected and subterranean planet of multivalent pleasures hidden beneath our skin. Of course one of the privileged sites of this equivalence of texture from seemingly widely divergent sources is the materiality of Merleau-Ponty’s prose itself. Here again, it is useful to turn to Genet’s film, which too, like Merleau-Ponty’s prose, is in itself a superbly apposite representation of this sentiment. Genet had written of the equivalence of disparate things (equivalence sometimes in opposition, as a sort of negative echo and mnemonic recall) in a manner that would deeply reverberate in Merleau-Ponty- and of the Valery Merleau-Ponty quotes in The Visible and the Invisible who had written that there is a type of blue so blue that only the red of blood could be more red. Likewise, in The Thief’s Journal, Genet had written, in partial explanation of the wide use of the motif of white flowers in so many of his writings throughout his career:

There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter. My sexual excitement is of the oscillation from one to the other. Should I have to portray a convict- or a criminal- I shall so bedeck him with flowers that, as he disappears beneath them, he will himself become a flower, a gigantic and a new one. (1985:61)

It is worth staying with some other passages from Genet’s extended oeuvre to simply inhabit, for a little while longer the subtle concurrent beauties of the world he- and Merleau-Ponty- evoke. In The Miracle of the Rose Genet had written of how, in photographing a band of half stripped youthful pirate sailors, the photographic plate would itself simply register a rose. Furthermore, the autopsy of a condemned murderer would reveal a gigantic rose in place of a heart even as his shackles are transformed into a bouquet. In Notre Dame des fleurs, he had written:

The big, inflexible, strict pimps, their members in full bloom- I no longer know whether they are lilies or whether lilies and members are not totally they”. (1991: 62)

Though unfortunately this is not a theme I can develop in this particular paper for lack of space, we can see how deeply insightful Genet was in understanding twentieth century technologies of visual representation. Though the visual technology itself may be from sources as diverse as medicine, nevertheless they may be said to have a special type of power, providing links unthinkable in the conventional everyday surface world of the subject. To see the world in terms of the links autopsies and x rays and the continually developing fields of imaging technology (predominantly medical today) provide is to open ourselves up to the possibilities of more profluent visual architectures- in other words, to repeat Genet, not only to see members as lilies but also lilies and members as this continually limitless, open landscape of the “they”.
This concern with serendipitous, even surreptitious linkages is critical for Genet, as for Merleau-Ponty. These are what provide the inner links, operating at a more subliminal sense -if one can is careful to use that word in the ontological or visual sense- as they always are for Merleau-Ponty. Even though Genet published much more literature and made only one completed film, it is clear how his writings are more filmic and visual than print-centric. To read any of Genet’s novels is to realize how closely he was working with the visual staple of the auteur, especially of his time- the collage, the flashback, the close up. Genet was known to be obsessed with cinema throughout his life and has more unpublished pages of film scenarios than any other, purely print-centric, genre. This is evident in his elaborate notes on filming La Bagne- I quote it here to further illustrate my previous point of his persistent search for ingenious ways of initiating us into how the world exhibits and confers itself as sameness in difference through the linking eye of the camera:

I have a few stipulations for the way in which it is to be filmed. The close ups should be very dark. No close ups of faces, but those of gestures, which without the immodesty of the camera would stay unseen…In a certain situation, a clenched fist can move us enormously, if the eye registers the texture of the skin, a black nail here, a wart, and the furtive caress of a finger on the palm that we wouldn’t have seen at the theater, for example- and perhaps which the characters ignore. In effect the cinema is basically immodest. Let us use this facility to enlarge gestures. The camera can open a fly and search out its secrets…The enlarged appearance of a ball of saliva in the corner of a mouth can, as the scene unfolds, arouse an emotion in the viewer which would give a weight, a new depth to this drama (quoted in Giles 1991:80).

By way of conclusion, I wish to briefly return to the question of mastery in Merleau-Ponty and Genet. Max Weber has famously defined the bureaucratic, instrumentalised modern state as that which monopolises power and violence- he was referring particularly to the standing army and the police. For Merleau-Ponty, this totalitarianism at the origin is what needs to be fatally undermined. He understands well the bureaucrat- that disembodied mind of science and technocracy who thinks that there are no limits to human sovereignty and the exploitation of the world- here the world is reduced, to use Heidegger’s language, to pure standing reserve awaiting the exploitation of man. In an indirect sense, then, one may read Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of Valery’s Leonardo- this “pure man of mind”. Merleau-Ponty does think that this is a misguided interpretation of Leonardo, even of Leonardo the scientist. Nevertheless, such a pure man of mind provokes much discussion in Merleau-Ponty and may be said to be his indirect way of commenting on bureaucratic state machinery. In Genet the link is clear- the warder is the instrument of the state. The alternatives Merleau-Ponty and Genet pose is the dissolution of such power – this dissolution may be is indexed as a vulnerability to difference, fascination and adventure. The warder is seduced by the prisoners and Merleau-Ponty’s Leonardo accepts his limitations and goes on to produce great art. Merleau-Ponty writes in Cezanne’s Doubt, before introducing the section on Leonardo to illustrate this very point regarding the necessity to understand the relation of freedom and limitation–
Two things are certain about freedom- that we are never determined and yet that we never change …It is up to us to understand both these things simultaneously, as well as the way freedom dawns in us without breaking our bonds with the world. (1993:72) The world then is emphatically not to be reduced to standing reserve for it has a higher destiny than to be reduced to anthropomorphisms.
Let us follow the argument in some more detail. Merleau-Ponty cites Valery’s remark on how purely intellectual Leonardo was, a “man of mind”, a “monster of freedom” (1993:72). He then questions this interpretation of Valery by suggesting that even in a painting like Saint Anne, the Virgin and Child, there is yet a secret and violent history. He then uses Freud’s reading of the fellatio fantasy, though wishing to go even further, suggesting the eternalized childhood of Leonardo, who had been abandoned by his father and brought up only by his mother, a peasant girl, for four years. I bring this partly to show how largely congenial Merleau-Ponty’s reading would be to psychoanalysis- indeed he spends the last pages of the essay defending psychoanalysis, telling the reader how close it is to his project of proliferating the channels of communication between ourselves and our kin. But to me the equally interesting effect would be to try and use it in further interpreting Un Chant d’amour. The lines of eroticism in the film would have a wholly different quality if it were just a love story between two prisoners who never see each other- the particular quality of the film is attained only by the linking eye (like the auteur and the reader’s) of the warder. The warder may perhaps be read as the Censor of psychoanalysis, both a punitive super ego but also the frozen ego. In a sense then, in this inverted bildungsroman, it is the warder who is educated out of his place as the citizen-censor of the criminalized prisoners, and who is allowed an opening into a wholly different and multi faceted domain. As censor, like Valery’s Leonardo, he seems to be all mind, a disembodied, punitive figure of the law. The narrative momentum is sustained only as he cedes control- and this is finally visually accomplished, as in Freud’s interpretation of Leonardo’s dream, through fellatio (in the warder’s case by the gun, in Leonardo’s by the screen of the dream-reality itself). The warder, from being the bourgeois provider of order, becomes, like Leonardo, infantilized, and following Freud and Merleau-Ponty, in need of nursing, of the mother- but this realization is enabling, educative and productive. Merleau-Ponty writes-

At the height of his freedom he was, in that very freedom, the child he had been; he was free on one side only because bound on the other. (1993:74, italics Merleau-Ponty’s)

It is partly through such heuristic moves that one may bring the feminine (and perhaps thus the heterosexual too)- as the viscous inception and and not so much as a repression- into a “gay” film. The warder thus re founds and re launches himself, from the illusion of being the monster of pure freedom -the bourgeois self righteous citizen, but also the ego or “internal” super ego frozen in the posture of moral righteousness- to someone questioning his work, and someone in dialogue and not in authority and judgment over his fellow citizen-prisoner. And this may be the opportune and optimistic note to conclude this paper with- by returning to hope- not naïve, but not skeptical either- and one always prospecting for fissures in the wall of the calcified political-ontic. Genet’s citizen-warder seems some way along the line to becoming closer to the ideal of Merleau-Ponty as Merleau-Ponty eloquently summarizes with regard to the perennial refusal of mastery in Cezanne-

That is why he questioned the picture emerging beneath his hand, why he hung on the glances other people directed toward his canvas. That is why he never finished working. We never get away from our life. We never see ideas or freedom face to face. (1993: 75)

Indeed, it is this impossibility, this viscosity that is resistant to too hasty a representation (mastery) - of a self-righteous political sort or otherwise- that can open the door to a differently furnished human democracy and solidarity that is not simply a return to a rights- based liberal humanism or a now routinized multi culturalist notion of citizenship or community.









BIBLIOGRAPHY



Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. London: Barnes and Noble, 1994.

Genet, Jean. Miracle of the Rose. New York: Grove Press Inc, 1951.

Our Lady of the Flowers. New York: Bantam Books, 1943.

Un Chant d’amour [Video Recording]. No date.

The Thief’s Journal. London: Penguin. 1985.

Querelle. New York: Grove Press.1989.

Giles, Jane. The Cinema of Jean Genet: Un Chant d’amour. London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1991.

Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Johnson, Galena A. (ed.) The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis. New York: W.W.Norton and Company, 1981.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984.

Saint Genet. London: Pantheon Books, 1983.

Silverman, Kaja. World Spectators. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

The Threshold of the Visible World. London: Routledge, 1995.