III.45. Das plumpe Denken. The great German theorist wrote: "The main thing is to
learn how to think crudely. Crude
thinking, that is the thinking of the great.... There are many whose idea of a thinker is a lover of
subtleties. Crude thoughts, on the
contrary, must be part and parcel of our thinking, because they are nothing but
the referral of theory to practice....
A thought must be crude to come into its own in action."
III.59.13. "But what do you think of theory?"
he said, posing the question in good liberal fashion. He was a graduate student of English literature, all in
favor of "theory," as if one could treat it as an identifiable and
unified object, and then vote either for or against it. His question meant: What is your position
on theory? Or: What is your opinion of theory?
My opinion was, after all, just as good as
his, and being so was worthy to be heard and voted upon by the others present,
five or six of them.
"But what do you think of
theory?" he said, posing the question in good liberal fashion. I answered him in a manner implying
those elements of "theory" most important to such a group, those
elements which, when they come to the fore, doubtless make these people feel
the most enlightened, as if they had learned something.
I said: "Theory, from Greek theorein, to spectate, to watch, as in the sentence: 'We watch TV
all day.'"
This produced a most predictable
response. They told me that
arguments based on etymology were "meaningless," that
"theory" has nothing to do with the Greeks. To this I said that I wasn't basing my argument on
etymology, but hearing my argument in etymology. I insisted that, in any case, the Greeks were all over the
place, that half the homes in Madison were Phonecian ruins, that the Vatican
was a Semitic site occupied by the Greeks, that we must treat the Vatican as if
it weren't a Greek site, that we must speak through its Semitic heart, the
sacred heart of Mary, the blood of Christ, and so on.
This produced a most predictable response.
Then we spent an hour arguing over the
value of the mass media, and I went home most enlightened.
III.101. i. A death's head explodes
above the city: like rain it showers down, in useless shards.
ii. Formula: writing out of
writing. Writing under the
complete elimination of theory. What
only B. in his paleological writings attempted.
iii. Method of the work: lost aural
mosaic.
III.135.
The gesture of the eye watching
another.
The gesture of the mouth in
uproarious laughter.
The gesture of the hand inscribing
marks.
The gesture of the ear silent on a
moonlit volcano.
The gesture of the eye puzzling over
traces.
The gesture of the sinews grasping
furiously to snap the bonejoints of pale Eros.
And the non-gesture of the one
adrift, gritted teeth, in [ ].
III.136. Scriptive Abbey. The monks and nuns are of a stunning physical beauty. They live as a co-operative, each
however with his or her own room.
Their bodies are covered with texts from the Book of Madison, tattooed
upon them in cuneiform script.
They are dedicated to amours, study and prayer.
There are three tattoo-scribes who work in
the entrance hall--the Roman alphabetic transliteration fully legible on each
of their six wrists. The various
pictographs or ideographs that come to be used in the increasingly scriptive
text will be translated over the rest of their bodies which over time will
become reference works.
Those who come to read our text pay by the hour, and must decipher it as
they will, the reference works being called up to the individual rooms by
patrons for an added fee. The
religious pay their way being read.
Of course there will be bodies of text
preferred by each patron, either for the text itself or for the ensemble of the
book as it gathers the text.
Patrons will have to make appointments with each book to be read, and
books cannot be taken out.
With each generation the task of this
reading becomes more difficult, as the script becomes more scriptive. Patrons must then arrange to meet with
an older book so as to corroborate their reading of the text under
scrutiny. The text as a spoken
word is held in the keeping of scribes and the religious, who may, it is true,
eventually lose it themselves.
Such employment would hardly succeed in
America at present, though the abbey or bibliothque or brothel may work in Paris,
Berlin, or Tokyo. The book needs
relatively few hours of availability in order to pay its keep, and can spend
the time thus gained in study, amours and prayer.
Many a book will not allow him- or herself
to be handled before he or she has been well read.
NB: Prospective books have no choice of
what text or texts they are made.
The tattoo-scribe chooses to copy what and where he or she will. The full text of the Book of Madison
must be preserved--i.e. legible--in the library at all times.
Je m'adresse Batrice Andr-Leickmann,
Jean-Louis de Cnival, Jean Bottero, Christine Ziegler, Ake Sjoberg,
vos tudiants, aux parisiens choisis: j'ai besoin d'artistes de tatouage, de
jeunes hommes et femmes dvots, d'une grande maison pas loin du centre-ville,
d'un traducteur, et de votre collaboration dans la scriptivit continuelle et
progressive du Livre de Madison, i.e. je vous prie de m'emmener Paris pour
tudier l-bas. --Eric Mader-Lin
III.140. They attack me because I quote Cosmo di
Madison's religious and social views as if I believed them to be
admirable. They attack me as if I
believed his laughing and maniac violence to be something admirable, something
worthy of our attention and respect.
And, well, I make no bones about it: I admit from the start that not
only is Cosmo di Madison my best friend, he is at times almost my hero. They really can't believe I am
"serious" in this: a reaction I am used to by now, particularly from
earnest liberals and PC hipsters, for there is hardly anyone among them in tune
with my own notion of seriousness.
They insist dully that Cosmo di Madison is "crazy," leaning on
the usual polemical value in that measly assertion, and confident, of course,
that we are all quite sure about the nature of crazies and craziness, as sure,
say, as we are of our own sane nature.
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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