A Fulminating Order

a friendly warning

Metaphor is a kind of deception, and I try not to lie. Instead of asking "what is this an allegory for", try asking "what's happening here?"

Fluid building up. It begs to escape. A tension pain, critical pressure. But fluid evaporates, leaving behind a slowly-drying gunk, material for new wrinkles. Ascending complexity. But only the dry goods, the ones heavy enough to remain; something of value is lost. How they floated and spun between the walls of the skull, what happened to the fluid when stirred or shook. I want to seal here a few vials, for the ages. I want to see the rivulets they can paint on different bones.

There’s a book; “A Thousand Plateaus”. It in some ways bad at being a book, at promising a cohesive path, thesis or experience from start to finish. It has a way of changing the subject on you, veering in different directions. It’s about something, but it’s also trying to become something, a smooth space of flowing thoughts able to connect to all kinds of ideas.

I think this is not unlike what many blog writers are trying to do, but immensely facilitated by the enhanced intertextuality of web media, especially through hypertext. References, follow-ups, comment sections, sequences; before that you just had to make the connections yourself, which can make it quite a painful reading experience, especially if you’re under the impression that you’re reading a book. That book toys a bit with geography, hence the name. I can’t pretend to be a geologist, but I can be an excellent pretend biologist: I name this kind of work “circulatory writing”, though the circulation is really more in the product and its consumption than in the writing.

I prefer biology because I’m made out of meat. My wife once said to me, about fish, that she couldn’t stomach meat if she couldn’t tell which part of the animal it came from. The skin has a special importance. It orients the flesh: “Here is the inside, here is the outside. All is ordered. All is right.”

I often feel like there is an important part of me, perhaps the only important part of me, that is minced meat. I have cycled through many different ideal bodies and metaphors. Pure energy. An alien. A zombie. A Cronenbergian creature. Frankenstein’s monster. A marine animal. A fungus. A plant. A child. A vampire. These are all attempts at rejecting a fully-formed humanity and adopting something in its stead, but they are also all metaphors, and a metaphor is really a lie.

I often don’t feel human. The beginning of it is feeling of displacement, like an outsider, like an intruder from a foreign culture, unused to the ways and customs of this land. I feel disoriented or lost in conversations, lacking words for my thoughts, constantly making concessions to the local language, flapping my mouth in the right intensities and frequencies that get me what I want, coming across foreign sentences that feel like puzzles or time-bombs I have to defuse, a skill I have developed only after plenty of conditioning, and which can often lead me into strange dances of speech that I often can understand but which are still foreign to me.

This progresses into a feeling of lacking something essential, like a soul or fundamental faculty, or of being broken or (un)dead. I often laugh or grin when people scream or cry. I don’t really understand what “missing someone” means. Some things that seem very essential and important to others feel strange and intractable to me. Sometimes I change and feel the same towards the persons I remember being.

But there is no being “I”. There is only becoming in meat.

We’re all made of meat, but meat isn’t what we are. We’re instantiated on meat, we inhabit it as wounds and scars. We’re carved into it, and as it quivers and bends, we move too. But pain and the rigidity of scars stops meat from moving. The meat is channeled. But it is always bigger than us. Beyond us. There is always something unknown driving change between writhing folds.

The scar tissue is just a fraction of the whole. Congealed blood. Crystallized character. Scar tissue is rigid. Constant. It has an enduring shape. But it constantly depends on the meat as a site for wounds, harvesting potential energy, riding its waves to stave off healing by reopening wounds. Scarification.

Before there was you, there was meat. You are something more than meat. Wounded meat, or wounds on meat. But meat gives rise to what we are. Meat is primal and ugly and true. Pure being. Bloody, visceral, living meat. Meat has no reason to say “I”. Meat has no distinction. Meat is pure chemical energy in a soft malleable substance. By meat I mean the whole boneless thing, without orifices, organs, much less anything like a limb, living without reason or acknowledged purpose, with no principle with which it can be separated into systems, shifting constantly in shape. Expanding and contracting, breathing. Pure energy. Pure hunger. Pure motion, tendency. Shapeless will. The thinnest slice of life.

You talk shit about mind over body. You chatter about how thought has this or that power, how we’re united through reason in this or that way. But until you slice beyond the surface, see what makes it come alive, you have no idea what the body is up to. You don’t know anything about the meat.

I think we can all learn from meat.

GLOSSARY:

MEAT: The author. An inhuman, pre-human thing that exists as a consequence of physics and biology but only feels raw motivation, formless and directionless. The mind-body we don’t fully identify with, parts of us we can’t see, hidden mental-physical processes. It needs wounds to orient itself, and if allowed to fully heal outside of a controlled environment, it can rip itself apart in excitement, fracturing, dying, or taking on more harmful, disordered wounds. Wounds are the “rigid” adaptations of mental-physical energy, like hating chocolate, believing in God, and skills in carpentry or literary critique, with scars representing more cemented adaptations. Healing is one way of forgetting or unlearning. See: BwO