I am doing something really heroic and laudable in this short piece: I am avoiding at every turn, at every step, the temptation to cobble together something like an essay, theses with texture or any kind of dimension. In other words, I am tearing up a dead leaf with my hands so I can get to the living tree—and already, I’m fucking it up with my metaphors. This tree thing is the very least of what I would prefer to have said. To try to speak more literally: I am putting verified quotations and citations and Ibids and hyperlinks (I have so many of them this time) far below me.
I PISS ON IT ALL FROM A CONSIDERABLE HEIGHT
The superscript of the citation becomes a subscript, it falls down and finds itself comfortable in the gutter, the vast quotation in justified type collapses with its own weight: the countervailing force of the superscript which keeps it all together, that star in the sky of the page arranging the world below with its spherical–heavenly powers—vanishes, winks out, and all textual matter becomes a subscript, living just below the horizon of the ascender line. ———And to show you what I mean: this is the pisser of language, glittering in the sunlight or spiraling in the dark of a drain. The superscript calls down rain, lightning, manna, rainbow beams and dew, the soft flurries of discursive drift—the voice of another, the hand of another: interiorized exteriority, to use an awful but necessary phrase. But the subscript—this is used for what? For subatomic physics, chemistry, equations, programming. The subscript is the footnote—the moment of outside discourse—without a guarantor. In the non-space of the subscript, one tinkers around, forgets what one was going to say, lets the coffee get cold, leaves the doors unlocked and the windows ajar; the subscript is an accidental sleep filled with nightmares that upon ending forces us into delirious, unsympathetic happiness. Everything has its place in the subscript because the subscript has no use, not here—you can say whatever you want in the subscript and the angels and spheres and powers will get run through the calculation and put firmly on the spit to roast… it can never be traced back to its writer because it's just part of the equation, it represents the isotope in good faith, a befuddled lawyer, and already so far away… —the subscript is the HANGED MAN of the Tarot turned right-side up, laughing and multiplied to spatial infinity. A Golgotha of Clowns. Christ holding something behind his back, a knife or rabbit’s ears sticking out of a hat. The subscript is ruled by the romance of Krogold, Charles the Silly (December 3, 1368 – October 21, 1422) and/or Sancho’s severally named wife.
Unfortunately, the above introduces texture into the present piece, which I said I would “avoid at every step” —I only get about 120 words into something before I start walking things back… I start to ruin the essay… I admit under no pressure at all that I like tossing in cheap typographical effects… it was supposed to be a heroic piece of writing! direct! laudable even, as I said… chivalrous… I was going to keep things steadily moving down the rails, like a luxury train car outfitted with, I don’t know, all of the implements of a living room, a small bar, shining liquors and brandy and gin, dark red or green curtains, heavy and velvetine, draped over the frosted, thick windows… and a big, dark couch, very mid-century, a teak coffee table… it’s so comfortable here, and it’s all in this one little train car—an engine pushes or pulls it along the rails which stretch out into the white of a freezing expanse—where are we? Russia? The Arctic or its Antipode? —this tiny experiment of locomotion; I’m hanging out in this little apartment of a train car writing subscripts on notecards, illuminated sheets of stationary, as though I could send anything I wanted by post. All I have to do is lean out the window and let the friendly post office guy at the station, where I will not be stopping, take it right out of my hand and send it off, another farewell postcard from my experimental habitat. My little traveling apartment on rails doesn’t have internet, but there is a computer, maybe the most fantastic–phantasmatic detail of the whole place, which I sometimes use, not so much chugging along as gliding, in this diorama at the top or bottom of the world—I would say “aimlessly gliding” but the rails would say otherwise, both of them speaking up like two unhelpful assistants jinxing one another, talking over one another in parallel…
My metaphors are getting out of hand again. First I get hung up on trees and leaves—I bear my neck to the hijacked Thermidorean guillotine of arborescence—and then I start fabricating an entire living situation! A nice situation though, you have to admit… Yes, you won’t stop reminding me that the metaphors wouldn’t be so bad if only they referred to something, if only they shared their ghostly analogical guts and nervous systems with something real, tied up like quarks in a repressive arranged marriage (“Oh fine! We’ll do it I guess!”)… it almost seems like I’m “writing about writing,” as people are fond of bitching about. Ok—but it’s not possible. It’s not possible to say anything about language because every time you try, you will only talk over yourself faster and louder. “Talk about language.” “Write about language.” OK. Try to look at the back of your head straight in the mirror. Come on, try to catch yourself unsuspecting in the reflection. The most you can do is break your neck or scare yourself at how fast your double is. That’s why I go on about “subscripts” and end up drooling over my cool train car apartment… no doppelgängers here! Only umlauts and their subscriptor. “Writing about writing.” Manu propria. It’s always about something else, but this opens the vacancy, the lush, soft cloud, for something else to come through and toss you around, half-conscious… my hands are sweating just talking about it… O, the metaphors are proliferating, the arborescent guillotine comes glimmering† down on me… I wake up in a sweat, my luxury train car rocking me awake, skipping over a few subscripts that the children of a village have left on the rails like pennies to send me careeeeeening, no, only out of my phantasmagoria—
Read this thrice, this was a riveting trip~!