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Mr.Dostoevsky


by Kog Zadare





Did someone say Silvio Burlesqusconi? Contemporary society, like contemporary dictators, can no longer be undermined by ridicule, Zizek explains that "Groucho Marx authoritarianism" is imminent, writers understand that the function of Dada and all intervention/provication movements is exhausted in an age where a self-satisfied social norm has dialectically synthesized with surrealism and the rest...

Prelude:

"What is worth a Gulag that does not even hold every human being?" - From the journal of Lady Dada

There is a museum space. Cold white, clean as a sheet of simulated paper. In it stands a large green Oak tree with many branches, shortly after a rainfall. Crows cover its branches like cockroaches that infest every curving branch and constantly hop around. Several squirrels gather and hide acorns. The sounds of the ca-caw calls are heard along with a natural soundtrack. After a time a small erect man who suggests both military poise and professorial learning walks slowly into the center of the floor and says quietly "Can the lifeworld be archived?"

The Relentlessness of the Sphere
(or an auto-retarding megalith of an agent exhausts the standard function of ridicule and parody and enters the abstract age of hyper-coloured ultra-meaning)

"the authors of this diuretic and the document itself
are, of course, pseudo-imaginative. Nevertheless it is liquid-limpid
that such persons as the barrista at your local Starbucks
will very quickly inform you that art has again flat-lined." - Dostoevsky



I.
Gentlemen! But you thought I had gone away, that I should be seen in this unfortunate twenty-first century no more or not even once, (I am tempted, like a trumpet or a blunderbuss full of damp, yet still ignitable, gunpowder, to fuss and spark, at the risk of going out on a tangent, to indulge in tidal backlashes à la Dickens', in short, to add to the above: 'this gifted twenty-first century'. And I should go on:'this picturesque twenty first century', 'this terrible twenty first century' et cetera and in a relentless effort to 'get my own back' and 'cover all the bases', 'to answer for it all' ahead of time, so as not to be taken off guard latter, or to put it in a word, to be thoroughly prepared for the interrogations of my future consciousness, if I may take the liberty to phrase it so, I should go on and on and be put, by way of experiment or torture, and who can distinguish between the two in these times, under the river of some Cratylus, a river that can never be, or can only be as a Willow-the-wisp that constantly arouses the most excruciating vexation, as one trails stupidly after what appears to be a tuft of common Boxthorn, after that proverbial 'squirrel's tail', so to put it, and into a sublime (But perhaps I exaggerate in all this, in this fine explication, but let it all stand, a monument to sheer vanity. If nothing better let it arouse the light feelings associated with humor, for what is man?) absurdity of a higgledy-piggledy clash of tensions and ...But you see, here I have checked myself and I omit a lengthy parley with this theme and its unfortunate tendencies, excesses et cetera. Ah, my purpose, I shall return to my main purpose. (I know, too well, that you feel I affect all this sheerly out of the most stupid desire to jest or through sheer idiot whimsy.) yes gentlemen (and it is understood that as I am speaking solely for the edification of my own inner sphere; so I omit the proper pronouns best suited to this century of progressive activity.), I am still in your mist and what is it I will not be so pleased as to say!

Forgive my imbecility for a moment, for I can feel you are by now all too sure of the fact of my imbecility, (the stage of mere suspicion ended when I opened my mouth; as Confucius would have had it. The philistine is long since undressed, sits naked before us, naked under his clothes so to speak. A bad joke! An already used and stolen joke! it is superfluous to say that I shall leave it be.) all the worse for I am quite well educated enough (though I feel that you readily call me " damn fool!", "philistine", "total idiot" et cetera and more damingly you whisper "what a bore"'..I know all this ahead of time my dears..., but perhaps you do not yet deign to make an Hegelian classification out of my ontological status and to utter with the aplomb of a woman of science, who encounters a dilettante in the street, with his ready fire misappropriation of technical terminology "Absolute Idiot!".) to have better adapted myself to the tenets of reason would not perhaps have cost me so very much, to concede to the demands of reasonable exposition, to the forms of sense bearing and sensible discourse, to have partaken of the cornucopia of the Enlightenment- in a word to have aspired (loftily) to rationality. And forgive me this reflection, but is it not that today, among rational woman and men, that to call a man out and to point the little finger and say "That sir, is an educated creature." is the very same thing, even precisely, as to deem the beast intelligent? But if it is not so (if the fact of it is not so) then I say your rational woman (that woman made creature who is unbalanced by the very excess of her rationality, if one may take the liberty of using the 'too much' within the hollowed realm of the rational.) is, no more or less then, a monster? Yet this stone faced Golem of computation breathing algorithm (as the dragon fire) has, I am the first to admit, a particular redoubtable value (and again, I can not deny this, for like Washington I am fond of the truth, but I am aware that this invocation is considered by some to refer to a mythical utterance...); not to be under-esteemed (the proper thing is to be nonplussed.). Yet still I am ready to 'put out my tongue' and to 'pull a long nose' (but, not perhaps to go so far as Diogenes.) at this brute of a scientific explorer, this great Shackleton of a rational scientist, whose call Fortitudine Vincimusconquers (to Conquer by endurance), she who has traced the outer edges of the sphere and without 'romanticism' nor 'idealization' in the mode of Nietzsche makes to exploit every potentiality afforded to this great 'war of attrition'. I know you are ready to dismiss me, that you weary of all this self indulgence (that is if you have not already gone), the clang and the rhinoceros piping in your ears is too much (please excuse this ridiculous 'stylistic' indulgence), I can hear you as sure as the shallow ticks of my own heart, you say quite positively and with the surety of being in step with the intelligentsia of an age "but in this you have said nothing new." Very well then! And I shall go on... go on saying nothing new, as you like. For sheer force of foolery, if you should be so pleased, I shall go on.

Let me interject a tinge of the fantastic by way of a parable: (The babbling of of one who wants to stir things up with base provocations and ineffectual interventions in order to be thought an enfant terrible if you like, for you suspect such ambitions of me. I feel that all too keenly. I have had my ears de-waxed as regards your sentiments gentlemen. "This scoundrel who claims to speak for his private edification, so as to order his own thoughts and perhaps hash up some dark latencies, that amount anyway to nothing more then the inconsequential products of an alien and base mind, stuff and nonsense that do not concern us, wants nothing more in reality then to acquire a readership...to enjoy the applause of the masses...to gather followers!" So: have it as you will gentlemen; let me have these childish students and readers, they shall do. I shall not contradict you in the moment of your offensive maneuvers as you are so sure of all outcomes in advance.) If a man should find himself so beleaguered by a mob, that is a group comprised of none other then those sundry and 'unwashed' inhabitants of this world, who are so precisely akin to himself (to the last detestable detail "cloned production lined dreams" as you would have it gentlemen), and if he be at home and be under threat of execution or torment and dare not even shutter the window, for fear that at the raising of his hand, it be severed (at the behest of some Nechayev or Makhno, but here you should prefer other names gentlemen.) then he will certainly be forced to listen to the shouts in the street and to his accusers while his pate flakes apart like the shell of an egg. This too is my fate, if I may presume to phrase it so, without being throttled by a rationalist. But I know you are snickering at this...I know well enough about the ridiculous traits of my character, all too well. I know you only wish to meet them with a yawn...

I have observed gentlemen (I should mention here that over the years, from the auspices of my floating lair, I have kept an eye open, not an all seeing eye, but a keen Russian eye, the eye of an intelligent man of the world, and it is now pressed up against the window.) that the statements of the 'Hegelian Left' of Belinsky's day such as "the passion for destruction is a creative passion" have today been usurped by the hedge fund managers who see the falling of corporations as revolutionists once saw the collapse of states. And here, as I have invoked Nechayev above, I would like to recall to you more closely the case of Belinsky as he contrasts that strict Hegelian (but the word can mean anything nowadays and I use it to describe the cult of rationality) Nechayev (and we all know this business about his killing of Ivanov in the throws of his revolutionary zeal.), if you will allow the absurdity, and I know it is absurd gentlemen, to go on? But this preamble of spattering spit, if you will excuse me, was only so to say that, like Hegel himself, Belinsky wrestled with the abandonment of the individual and his heart, so we are told, forbade him to except Hegel. All this is well know, I only wished to propose that it was precisely Nechayev who best made exemplar of the man who has excepted the 'no nonsense' dose of the Enlightenment's Rational medicine (that replacement for Marx's famous opiate cure for all ailments.), but you shall shout me down, if you deign to answer at all, and I fear you shall not answer, had you answered you should have said: "Nonsense, Nechayev was a fanatic! An obscurantist and far removed from the Enlightenment." You will have disagreed with it all, thrown it in your waist basket and I shall go on even in your waist basket.

But, who gentlemen, first conceived the idea of rationality? (As if one asked who first cut into the flesh of a red crab?) I do not wish to dwell on this pattern of thought, for it palls, but let me have my word. I only have a few suggestions that dimly relate to the matter. I am sure you already have your own answers and theories. I should like to mention that as a child of this laudable age (and here I remember to add that I am perhaps more the child of the twentieth and not your beloved twenty first century, but of this more in a moment.) I have the privilege of beholding the span of things from 'on high' from the very seat of knowledge, but in this I feel the bite of irony, but I believe my own words, though spoken with intentional irony, I go on loving them to death. And I forsake sense to go on with my inchoate patter of "words,words,words!" à la Hamlet, as if they were bejeweled and silken things that stood by the foot of the 'gentle and rosy truth' or the 'gilded and gentle truth' if it suits a queen better in the excess of her welcoming (Of two spies to prey upon the person of our hero no less!). I go on stupidly you will say, let it be so. Let all this mystification pass by, what I wanted was to indulge in a little reflection of my own; If one takes the draftsman's art and puts it forward as a 'weaker' forefather of the camera (which is to say Raphael for a Polaroid, although it would be, no doubt, more apt to utilize Dürer in this capacity.) then just as astrology has passed imperceptibly into astronomy and alchemy into chemistry so religion into science (but the earlier are not entirely subsumed, so to speak, by their children.) These reflections however are rather incomplete and should be readily scratched out had I the pride proper to an artist who wishes to conceal the labor of his creation and only reveal the final bounty -but I am tiered of games of this sort. Besides my idiocy, the very thing I deserve most censor for, has bad me keep them (and what is worse, in my game, in my life, I do not speak 'the language currently spoken' not for lack of training, but through sheer obstinacy.) Yet, there was something more sensible I wanted to answer for you, ah yes...but first one last word on rationality.

How gradually it has all taken form, imperceptibly, how insidiously. The algorithm become embodied as the image of virtue, so to speak, the computation become the paragon of the human beast himself? How monstrous is this naive intervention I make here, this weak stand and this unasked for report from a soap bubble, what can be gained from them, "what do you hope to achieve, and what use can it all serve?". Perhaps precisely nothing gentleman, let it all stand as an exemplar of futile uselessness or a glorious sprig of ill-bread vanity.
Question: What do people consider new?
Answer: The most facile novelties.
I will provide them!


II.

But where is the Cassandra of your consolation, whose craft of untangling extends to so warped a being and let release an explication from under the grave to the floating soap bubble of the stars? Now the world is cruel and will blanch at no brazen act. In my youth I knew already the mean cuts of Lear and what it is to be divorced of all men alone in the tempestuousness of justified madness, that has true cause. I, happened among other flaws, to find myself, alone and in a state of becoming before creation, (if one may describe with recourse to ontological import the performative and defenseless growth of a human) with two wicked aunts and just as Lear's daughters they said "O, sir, to willful men,The injuries that they themselves procure Must be their schoolmasters." - Act II scene IV so be it so be it

But, we know that life is a soar business (less we remain the Marie Antoinettes of protected and protracted folly) and cruel...I only wanted to mention the hardness of my plight, not for my own sake, but for others who will someday perchance be so cast down as to live in this world. You do not believe me, but I don't give a deuce for that. Let us pass to greater niceties.

Where do I live now? You would ask me "Where have you kept yourself? Surely you can not have stayed in your underground corner all this while?" I am not quite sure how to answer, however I am often deep within the inner sanctum sanctorum of my bubble (from which I occupy a moment, a now, quite safely beyond "the temple images" of Plotinus) and have been for some time capable of this neat escape plan, I shall pass over your questions without further explication, (concerning those things of which you find so terribly interesting gentlemen!) and will only say that I now, at this very hour, am settled comfortably lodged within the spherical cusps of my little circumference from which I deliver, incidentally, without any end, my perpetually inchoate rantings...and God forbid anyone try to interfere! - Better a hand between a "tyger" and his "bright" succor or his "sweet delight", or some would have it worse still to be between that and his "endless night".

I was saying before that I am more the child of the twentieth (but not the nineteenth!) then the twenty-first century, but this is not altogether right. Let me promote even to your lofty twenty first century, for it was only there that I finally gave my informed consent to existence. I say this after Cioran's comment that a man "consents to exist". But you should consider the legal ramifications gentlemen. Consent in itself is insufficient, and inchoate if one may say so, one must have all the facts at hand. Hegel sought this and failed... and to sight Cioran again "Existing is plagiarism". Yes, I too have failed, still I believe a point comes, never the less, when a man can claim a properly considered 'consent to existence'. In any case we shall leave it aside for the moment.

Let me retrace and double back on myself; 'existence is plagiarism' seems a false sentiment, though clever. For me everything is new and can not fail to be new. But, even taking hold of this whole idea of plagiarism, which shall lead us to a useful 'connection of the roads', what is this censure consisting of or what is this notion or concept, if you like, all about? The grosser element of rabble, and I am so pleased to include myself in their number, a card carrying member of the momentary folly, if you please, are terribly concerned with owning their 'original' ideas and ...but I can't help laughing; pathetic (But non the less given current standards they/we are quite right!). I should however like to at least consider a future moment when talk of plagiarism has become an inaccessible notion or at least a highly foreign one. When one may take from the spectrum of ideas and words as freely as the carpenter from the stock at the lumber mill and the artist from nature's palette. Here a Platonist or some similar beast may invoke the perfect forms or archetypes and call the man who works with nature a plagiarist too, and so leave to Deity that 'only' recognition of originality of which in Lao Tzu's style we may fashion a self creating pair: originality/plagiarism. When the Nihilism that allows us to claim originality out of reworking natural objects (the removal of Deity thus leaving man more happy), which every common scientist finds 'adds more wonder to the universe' then the old way (of attributing all the wonders to restrictive Deity) then let us also pretend a future when this second order clergymen (the scientist) is eradicated and all the 'works of man' come open to the free and diverse use of the playful spirit.

Along with Dalisection break, I should like to add that it is not important that I or you should know whether it is cretinism or not...who can get on in life without scrapping a bit at the corners and then sinking under water I go to a place where up and down are lost to my judgment and in my 'deep play' recall the Maple leaves of distemper as they float in the pond, a large fish stalks me; the dreams of my youth. Let is all pass into the cold obliteration of Absolute Idiocy and the liquidation of the more stern regimes of this earth, so be it. And here I should mention, in contradiction to the statements of that more or less total materialist idiot Zizek (but we abuse him as we once sought in him council and found not) of the greater potency of his beloved Stalin (and the slow attrition of power by voice alone) and company over those (such as the Nazi's) who had to directly stomp the Orwellian boot (while nonetheless concealing their darker crimes), it is the whirlwind itself that chose the mytho-poetic fate of self consumption (This is not so clear at a glance, but let intuition have a day) and there is a meaning in the exercise of catastrophe making violence of this third order (beyond Plato's architectonics and science's). But, let us not indulge in praising the exercise of cruelty too much as it is only one of Lau Tzu's world making doubles self coupled to all horrors and sorrowful disembowelments of being.

Naturally gentlemen I should have immediately struck out the above paragraph had I expected anyone to read this, other then my own soul (and especially that poisoned inner realm of dancing frivolity), but let it all stand as a gash into the flesh of existence and a notice of the way things really are. I know you find too many answers a sure sign of idiocy, you are so pleased to recognize non-knowing as true and laudable vocation and calling, a wisdom of surpassing quality...You find it all distasteful gentlemen, too many untimely ejaculations of bad taste, but existence is distasteful.

section break"It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself."


III.
Let it stand:

"This man's ambition is to gain readers through provocation, however his philistine utterances shall go in the garbage unread" -I am already sitting in the garbage along with Nagg and Hamm. Still, unlike them I see fit to live a bit longer and to colour up the earth with my filth. We shell degenerate utterly now, presently. I have seen fit to exist for your pleasure, but you have not been pleased, oh Zeus gather up your storm clouds at last and make Utopia burst in my head! I, your dear son and daughter, drink merely ink and dye so merely along the stream a song sung itself in utter torrential waves of absolute silence and disembodied it was the grandmother of whatever, "get a hold of your self man!" I should hear someone say with a slap to my face. But such an outrage means a fight and struggle all too great a dialectal death match over the wold laden steppes of history and so forth and cradle to grave and in the reverse.

"Cretinism is a condition of severely stunted physical and mental growth due to untreated congenital deficiency of the sickly"-wikipedia liver? The unpaid out doctors bill of platypus... the un-respectable un-sung un-sought

Let me catch breath, and say like the mad man Lear chances upon in his wondering I too had left a few tricks of lucidity and should prop up the earth, like Gloucester, if I should be so met with the opportunity. But as a poet of considerable fancy once said fuck it, we all die. And Mishima too had a great island turned into an art Museum (Inujima island art project, long after his death by one of his reincarnated proletariat noble men, but we make inchoatness excessively incoherently cogent.) More fool then knave...

"It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man" - wikipedia the under-mench

That I would not give way to the draftsmen of brain science, was one of Lear's cheap thrills and their man 'divorce from choice' from 'free will' (but if you will allow it is a divorce that was already spoken of even in my day. In the underground day.) if I may put it like this, if I may protest my de-willification in such a manner, put I shall not protest but even exemplify it gentlemen, although I do not disbelieve my scientific masters, those great second levels to the tallness of the house, I protest in any case, my innocent simplicity splatters like filth on a bathroom (however, I must be the first to admit that porcelain fleas full of plague are in Manchuria falling from Japaneses bombers drunk on cruelty, it all sounds rather pathetic, or rather apathetic, but let it stand!). As a matter of fact there are reasons that it is not pathetic, but more of that latter.

grotesque palpitations and unfettered idiocy go on / sing oh thy spirit that stretches in the spheres of existence on whole on mass

I should note that like the Dali Lama I do not go in for Chomsky's cheap moral, sparking gunpowder of damp, equivalencies, this is nothing but Marie Antoinetteism birthing at its ugliest and most savagely arrogant finest, for Dresden is not Auschwitz etc ad infinitum (but these are just talking points I give out like a factory of brain snots) desires to be always right are more to the core of the essential conflicts, banging clatter of infinities reached to scratch them out did Hegel did Kant - failed both spawned lusty idiocy outlasting, yet here we have an ironic and a true progression here we that then you of the being who when attaining to absolute Utopia of an outer world shall fold its hands and begin to truly fall into a hellish tumults head of distemper and you say tempest tossed pate innards 'Out of Our Heads,' by Alva Noë not the beetles - born of extroverted emptiness and so forths add to that or what and then if condemn or elide it all, enjoy this and that back to you bore you say of text dancing condoms.
Soap Tree's that taught Sophocles naught Plato made rhetoric to relentlessly anoint the sophists with a 'bad' name

But if it please or then if it not please thy continence is yet still ill fitting, and if for then it so be, if then it be so, but then if one should so be to then so forth, you must as madness gain the ascension in its Lau Tzuian double conformism, one must in normalisation destroy for in height in its Lau Tzuian double depth or shortness, and if all Cratylus was right!

"Underground Man is conscious of his problems, feels the desire for revenge, but he does not find it virtuous; this incongruity leads to spite and spite towards the act itself with its concomitant circumstances" - wikipedia

Now if though thou art that, if it be the so called, I can hod to the "Chinese" silence of Nietzsche's acrobat stupid ear and the coil of this immortal spirit strung step by the exploited hand of mad distemper gone awry and so forth. You want that words should always be true or false? I shall not allow it. Leave room for madness too.

It occurs to me to read the Tanakh: And eating of the tree of life they shall shut off the aging gene and live/be like us (and this shall happen). So what kind of world is this? We shall live forever in our bubbles floating about like a being of the air. This though like the atomic bomb before its actuality and like electricity to the ancient mind or some more apt mention seem impossible is true. So again what kind of world is this? Q:What is philosophy become today? The return to rhetorical sophistry meant only to persuade. I end incidentally with a highly plagiarised concept, but non the less partly true though not exploiting the subtleties of which a new category should give itself up out of the either to be described, just a vague denouncement is enough for a soap bubble, "more fool then knave".

I have condescended to exist...this and nothing more...

I would scratch it all out had my vanity not forbade it.
it has no end, it has no end nor beginning

But, I wanted to mention an incident out of my early life:

(To be continued: Apropos of Moist Gunpowder)
Endcap