Miss Madonna, won't you give me a kiss.

i. days need yet to begin

as life begins, unconscious,

so that waking is intuitive

and shortly after the day's light -- discrete

from the clock-tick of day.

this day has yet begun as

a weathered and phlegmatic exhale

after the exhaustion that results,

incomparably,

from a day full, without exertion.


ii. If we do not know ourselves to have a culture on par with Ancient Greece, if we cannot properly revel in our passions in the sphere of some ideal, then it is because the Greeks, and the ideal, have already been historicized. All understanding moves against the current in this way, and before we ever had occasion to claim lack, this responsibility should have been obvious. Since, by looking at our demographic's deep dissatisfation with the current state of American culture, we know that it was not, we have occasion to identify yet another failure of modernization, of the democratic state, of the herd. The failing is precisely when our ignorance of our own power becomes, effectively, the lack of power. Like the joke about red ink in the Zizek film -- we have all become culturally indolent by way of the formative effects of totalizing homogenization in media. If some cultural practice has not been presented to us, prefabricated and preordained, by some media, well then we imagine at the very least that it must be strictly taboo -- or, most often, that it does not exist at all. This betrays a fundamental existential ignorance, or a similarly fundamental laziness -- either way, an irresponsibility toward the care of the self. The next question that we ask -- well, what does historicizing do, anyway, so that we might ourselves? What is recollection in its transfigurative power, and how does one seize it as one chooses and acts? This question is not asking for proof of possibility, for it already has that powdering its very bones. Rather, it asks for the greatest absurdity when we are working in such a general & abstract conceptual framework -- it asks for self-disclosure to come from an outside source.

iii. "You are standing as if on the summit of the Mount of Transfiguration and must depart -- but then all the little demands of finitude and the petty debts owed the greengrocer, the shoemaker, and the tailor take hold of you and the final result is that you remain earthbound and you are not transfigured, but the Mount of the Transfiguration is transfigured and becomes a dunghill." / "Close air always becomes noxious."