Skid’s lectures for this week include, but are not limited to:

Dado Udidi

The Compass of That Sea. A Nymphotextual Refutation of Altarity

Owlstain: IPSI, 1998.

Irora Rexni

Zeocosmología. Burbujas y la origen del universo

Agua Prieta: Melos e Artes, 1999.

D. I. Swopes

The case against reality

JYazS : The Journal of Yazdehan Studies. Nº 4, 1999.

Dado Udidi, in his recent “Nymphotextual Refutation of Altarity” at ISCOPHYS, entitled The Compass of That Sea, presents a Nebulous, Innocent, Rhetorical Understanding of Soi-disant Altérité (NIRUSA) wherein reality has a tendency to “unsettle the effect” and yet “standardize inevitably” so as to “gain what it lost” resulting in a “definite exchange” between “ashtray the butt five times a cigarette smolders earthenware” and “the corpse of that seizure” the author claims he was (I, § 2.1). Though “muted by prudence,” the author attempts to “reach for an image yes it’s a reality” and that reality, despite its “high turnover,” and however much the author desires to “introduce it quick,” “shears the spine clean in two beyond whatever singing fragment of dawn,” and perhaps it does so precisely because the author “flew too close;” in other words, “this strategy fails” (I, § 2.2).

This strategy that fails, this seizure’s corpse and its complementary “fragment of dawn” naturally invoke (evoke, provoke) Rexni’s “dawn deceit” (eosdoli), as further substantiated by Udidi’s compulsion to “begin at the end the harsh autumn sky deceitful,” “its innocent reality nebulous rhetoric” (II, § 1.5), and such recursive phenomena as that which “appear residue inner rose of the mordant” taking place in some “ravishing distance [...] beyond [again!] whatever singing fragment of dawn” from which the author wonders if he ever returned only to find himself — where else? — in that “innocent reality nebulous rhetoric” which “shall begin at the end” (III, § 2.2). And always, even though “nadir approaches zenith, the glittering labyrinth beckons” (II, § 1.5).

Now, if my understanding of Irora Rexni’s Zeocosmología is not too far off track, when otiose reality first sidled idly up to the slumbrous zeoidal oospore coiled like a slimy delicious snail bud within the polyversal entropium of Venturi’s pleroma and pierced with her crimson strap-on of primordial cunning the event horizon’s hymen (goose oil does wonders during such idolatrous bouts of roral iconoclasm, I’m told, as do surreptitious doses of orgyoygro), the inflamed pileolus of her dawn deceit inflicted the vectorial Rexni aura on the anamorphic plasmoid falcation of space, and as the solid ruddy truncheon of her vernal imposture plowed ever deeper into the ylem’s idyllic ooze, the turgid cosmic grume ineluctably loosened and flared into the scaphoid meniscus of our current zeon’s yazdehan realm of be(com)ing in which mass, energy, gravity, soil, sodium, lodestones, silk, eyes, bears, thirst, fear, and whatnot are like so many noctuids splattered against the screen of the Kafkaist car in which each of us — unshielded by the Elysian fields of sempiternal dark matter, undetected by the maize-eared silos of light — loses our eidos and our equilibrium and dies our small solo deaths in bondage and submission to the sulky skullcap (zucchetto sediolo, solideo imbronciato) of the seminal artificer’s generative ruse which Rexni calls eosdoli (from ἠώς ‘dawn’ and δόλιος ‘wily, crafty, cunning, deceitful, deceiving’; as in δολίοις ἐπέεσσι ‘crafty words, paroles rusées’; δολίης τέχνης ‘crafty wiles, ruses adroites’; δόλιον κύκλον ‘crafty ring, cercle perfide’). It is because of “the encarnadine kippah of this dawn deceit or ætiological chicanery (el solideo encarnado de este eosdoli o engaño etiológico)” that reality has an innate penchant for concealing her lacunae with sly excerpts and travesties of entelechies she has fobbed off elsewhere, resulting in the various species of antiphenomenal enchantment (AE) with which you readers of D. I. Swopes’s CAR (Case Against Reality) are familiar, from the infraleptonic entanglement (ILE) occurring in Ravel’s entropium to the gravitational olisbophane (GO) Rexni has shown to be asymptotic to the ostiose obimbrications of Venturi’s pleroma by way of the formicating armies of author-generated spooky action at a distance (AGSAD) lurking in the shadows of all too many heures sublunaires pré-auroraux.

For those of you readers not familiar with that author’s CAR, let’s let it or her speak for it- or herself: “Careless and uncaring, crass, craven, fractious, intractable, ungraceful and ungracious even when prancing solo in front of her cunningly crafted Hawaii sex-mirror, sarcastic, arcane, acrimonious, sacrosanct, narcissistic and autarchically absent-minded, uninventive, and inconsistent to a degree that would belabor Mnemosyne herself, reality is a farcically gendered bitch prone to the most protracted bouts of menstrual cramp who tends to plagiarize herself, and not in the good way. This, in a nutshell, is the cardinal thesis, the overarching crux, of my Case Against Reality (CAR). But she’s not content merely to plagiarize her own idiosyncratic simulacra — no, she extracts her sarcoid bric-a-brac from the nacreous intracranial hobgoblins, the incarnate ambulacral imaginings of the live beings incarcerated in the dyscrastic prison of this, her abnormally plump pleroma. This farctate mix — air, wires, wax, rime, risible nothings — of larcenous gimcrackery she’ll then, in a process known as the Consolidation of Antiphenomenal Cæsuræ with the Carlock of Cant and Alliterative Repetition (CACCCAR, or CAR for short), scramble, splice, and cobble, rescramble, resplice, and recobble, into the sacrificial scarecrows and macaronic scaramouches formicating her anfractuous scarious macroscopic epicarp.”

But getting back to Dado. One could say that the innocence and nebulous rhetoric of his NIRUSA “inexorably articulate” themselves in the precise way he deploys the “jagged forks” of his “long arguments my own worries” that “diagram the puzzle not too implicit” in order to “derive conflicts spring the wobble does levels little concrete cry bewildered obey no talk to derive suicide a protest of crab unserried orthotics” (III, § 2.2). À propos of which, I would deem it remiss if I did not respond to Udidi’s “protest” with the “unserried orthotics” of Durkheim’s quip anent “le suicide altruiste” (1897: 243), namely that, “tandis que l’égoïste est triste parce qu’il ne voit rien de réel au monde que l’individu, la tristesse de l’altruiste intempérant vient, au contraire, de ce que l’individu lui semble destitué de toute réalité.” Moreover, according to Al Kröber’s “superorganic” (1917: 199) anticipation of the gist of this Lecture, “there may be those who see in these pulsing events only a meaningless play of capricious fortuitousness; but there will be others to whom they reveal a glimpse of a great and inspiring inevitability which rises as far above the accidents of personality as the march of the heavens transcends the wavering contacts of random footprints on clods of earth,” for is that not, precisely, as Udidi reminds us, “to already charm, please, impersonal world: different, not more hypocrite; snowing, not soft” (I, § 3.2)? And yet “how perceive without obscuring differentiation something radiant hidden there” (Udidi 1998: II, § 2.4), that is, the “mysterious inherent faculty of individual minds which are randomly dropped in space and time by fate” (Krœber 1917: 200–201), since no matter how we “next know in strategy goes it problem acquit for that farce it’s reduced a different reach to catch that image again” (Udidi 1998: III, § 3.3) of “individually biographic elements, which can be only dramatically artistic, didactically moralizing, or psychologically interpretable, and attaches whole heartedly to the social” (Krober 1917: 201) which ultimately, however, despite “the presence of a majestic order pervading” Kroeber’s (1917: 201) superorganic civilization, Rexni’s effervescent AGSAD, and Swopes’s cachexical CAR, we simply “don’t know never knew never will” (Udidi 1998: III, § 3.5).

I am reminded of a mot doing the rounds of the sociophysiological circuit, attributed to a certain ISOCPHYS-associated community member, M. S. Strickland (p.c.): “All knowledge is metaphor.” Is there, thus, some slippery interface between a metaphor and whatever it is it attempts to encode as knowledge, to explode in the manner of a diagram (Udidi’s “reach for an image yes it’s a reality” [op. cit.]), and explore with the rituals of modal-empirical rationality (Mod-Em Ratio) — or is the unveiling of the one the masking of the other, and vice-versa, with the ever-pulsating abyss of altarity somewhere just over the event horizon of Rexni’s “dawn deceit,” while the ever ungraspable tantalizing Kafkaist noctuid flutters in and blurs the depths of the “Hawaii sex-mirror” Swopes’s narcissistic réalité loves to flaunt her patulous plagiaries and mendacious membranes devant? And furthermore, does a lack of knowledge imply, thus, a lack of metaphor? Methinks that the system of metaphors ignorance relies on to do its dirty work is just as robust as that of knowledge: is the nonexistence of arboreal elephants an argument pro oder contra the factitiousness of the fiction of whichever? Gravity is real whether we believe in it or not, whether the metaphors we use to understand it involve waves or particles or the shape dynamics of spacetime or thanatos or entropy und so weiter — but that is a discussion, involving the scope and heft and efficacy of theory, for another Lecture.