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My attitude going into this isn’t the cleanest, is basically that I’m looking for something not too long with images + occasional pages of one-line text cos I’m exhausted from all the de-con-strucs that either by design or accident morphed into mega projects – Satanite, x( ) -id </3, Ablation, I Saw The Tv Glow, Op. cit./urbes, Hounds of No, Sea Witch and DEARS [the last 2 forthcoming] – and it was this one or Mineral Planet.
I’ll probably do Mineral Planet in a month or two, when I’m re-exhausted.
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I’ve already skimmed through Interrogating the Eye but haven’t really honed in on any of it yet.
Just wanted to see how much EYE there’s gonna be [- a lot].
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The first image is…
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…with no blood or psychological hover state.
It’s an eye.
Could be alarmed, scientific, comfortable, resigned, it’s hard to tell.
I’ve said this before in other de-con-strucs, but violence against the eye in cinema used to shock me, but then I watched an incredible amount of giallo and it became routine.
Cos I know it’s not a real eye.
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The book is divided into three sections [four, depending on how much detail is in the sources + references at the back]. Not just detail but…not dry cataloguing [sic? Looks wrong somehow].
I had a look and M. goes into some specifics about their emotional connection to Kurt Cobain, so maybe this is four parts?
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‘YOUR KEYBOARD IS STICKY, STOP CRYING’
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TWO CLAUSES THAT DON’T REALLY GEL, OR GEL WEIRDLY. Are they crying cos the keyboard is sticky? Are they being told to stop crying and deal with the sticky keyboard? Is it brutal confirmation that the damage is already done so stop crying about it? Is the keyboard sticky from a spilt drink or discharge? No one’s that sloppy. Is it a kind of residue that has built up over time, that went unnoticed?
Does any of it relate to what’s in the first section?
Is it relatable in a way that is beyond me?
Probably.
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I forgot, here are some possible interpretations of EYE, from obvious to absurd [and back again]:
1] The eyeball as physical part.
2] Eyeball as window to the [materialist] world.
3] Eyeball as detached translator.
4] Eyeball as intimate translator.
5] Eye as ‘I’.
6] Eye as ‘aye’ as in ‘aye, there’s not much we can do about any of this, let’s just resign ourselves [to pessimism].
7] Eye as subject-other [alien to the subject it’s contained within – body horror potential, schism between physical + psychological that we’ve all felt at one point in our lives, haven’t we?]
8] Eyeball as deceiver.
9] Eyeball as ‘evil recorder.’
10] Eyeball as central command in the Hand of Fatima, can it be trusted, is it truly on the hand’s side?
11] Interrogation with aggressive intent.
12] Interrogation with aesthetic intent.
13] Interrogation with autophagic intent [took me a while to get that adjective, thought it would’ve been autophagous, not sure why]
14] 14 already?
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I’ll try to keep all of these in mind as I go through the text [+ images] but my brain is semi-shipwrecked at present, and not the most organised when ship-shape, so…
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‘Eye : : image’
This is the second book in a row where ‘: :’ has appeared. I have no idea what it means.
Just searched it and the ‘coding’ definition is giving me a migraine.
I think…basically…it’s a way of disambiguating types with the same name, in the same search.
Don’t ask me to elaborate on that.
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So, in this case, it’s saying the Eye and image are 2 separate things that need to be searched separately? Thought of separately?
I’m really not sure.
The eye receives the image, or the data for it, the brain interprets the image, forms it, the Id perverts it, the collective unconscious inverts the perversion, the frontal lobe dismisses it, the parietal lobe tries to forget all the above and say pine is pine, the temporal lobe is an empty space that has a fullness in which there is nothing missing, and the other lobe thinks, please, don’t fall over.
Is the image there without vital interpretation?
Yes.
I’m not into solipsism.
This side or the reserve, both, simultaneously.
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‘THE IMAGE IS A DRONE [AN ANNUNCIATION]’
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Or the drone is an EYE.
The drone has no existential quality.
Does the eye?
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It’s weird how the IMAGE is classified as a DRONE. As if it’s an independent thing forcing a reaction out of us.
The Eye is I, the Image is IT [not the clown].
Am I using the image like I would use a drone, to see something else, something deeper [or quantum]?
Problem = common connotation of drone is now flying death-bot, not surveillance tool. When I think of one, I picture a faceless IDF coward and the body of a six year old girl exploded in half.
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This is gonna put me in knots, I can feel it already. Reminds me of my mental space when reading ‘YOU WITH YOUR MEMORY ARE DEAD’, constantly being [self?] forced to invert everything, or deal with constant inversions incoming from all textual angles. It almost seemed perverse, a pessimist’s headlock. As if Gary was Michael Ironside, and I, the vibrating professor face.
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‘YOU CAN’T WATCH WITHOUT GUILT’
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This line, coupled with the video store bit after it, is pinning down the brain’s role in all this, possibly in relation to the sticky keyboard.
Theory [loose as it gets]: it’s a bit in the gutter, but the sticky keyboard could be someone wanking over an unexpectedly bland sex tape [Hulk Hogan?] and then crying afterwards due to the [biologically driven] bleakness of it all.
There’s no greater gap in physiological state than that of pre-wank + post-wank. The mundane-real that washes over you, maybe not guilt over what you watched, but that your body compelled you to watch it in the first place, and double that feeling if the pair on screen are still moaning. I imagine it’s exactly the same for women.
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Or, on a more prosaic level, it could be guilt rooted in passivism [passivity?], the fact that you have enslaved yourself to IMAGES of the elsewhere-other instead of doing it yourself.
Video store = nostalgia, the desire to go back and pretend you would’ve done things differently before.
Don’t you remember, back then, you had to rent the film before you could know if it was shit or not. This is how I ended up with things like ‘Death Ship’ and ‘Monster Dog.’ The cover art looked okay, the image tricked me, my own brain took part in that trickery, the EYE and the IMAGE are separate, they shouldn’t be conspiring this way, must both be interrogated.
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This is already 6 pages long and I’m still on the first page.
I have a big problem with pacing, as in I don’t care.
Need to encourage myself via 4 lobe coercion to move faster.
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There’s aggression now, an urge to invert the image + the eye, to do a lot of eating but not sustaining.
Cherry tree as porno daisy.
[Nice line].
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Everything is eaten cos we see see see see see see see see see see everything and if you watch a snuff film with the lights on then you own that and if that sits in your memory, your brain, then it starts to pervert every other thing as there is no barrier between them in there, only when expressed either out loud to others or on a conscious level to the side of yourself that at that moment wants to feel moral.
But you know yourself what it is you saw, what it is you’ve seen.
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Does it have any meaning if you think to yourself one time, I want to make a snuff film with Teri Hatcher and Teri Garr as the doppelganger victims?
It’s too arbitrary, I think, to be judged. If you elaborated on it, painted in a narrative + torture props, made a real-ish body to be fucked + killed, then you might be in trouble [internally – where the judges are fickle].
Isn’t it more likely though that the image itself is too tedious, that you would start to sub in other more deserving characters like Rupert Murdoch as the snuff victim, or even yourself, and the reality is that it’s more exciting to fuck/murder those existing psychopaths out there than someone with no power whatsoever, but it’s still not real, can’t be real cos it’s impossible to build in consequence or a passable version of the subject-other.
I’m off track.
Or channelling the same spirit of sudden Id abandon situated on pages 9 + 10.
Then the comedown on page 11, referencing ‘the hand of the sun/your kingdom/a king/familial,’ which could be a nod to the Hand of Fatima, the central role that the eye plays in the ‘full expanse of you.’
I am too small to really learn.
But I do learn.
It’s just not enough cos the total data sum is like that huge empty expanse between galaxies that Terence Howard has yet to explain.
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‘To witness/without guile/to think/towards the future/an engine with intent/a body with vision/the punishing slap of grace.’
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I am guileless, witnessing is ultimately a pitiful act [it doesn’t change anything, might make the witness feel better [I initially wrote witnessee in here!]], I think of other eyes reading my work one day [and laughing at it], ‘vision’ as a recording not foresight or wisdom-infused, grace can slap me all night long if it likes, I can’t stop recording everything + doing nothing, help me someone, you liars, you mirrors.
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Creepy, religious statuettes.
No face creasing, no stains = a lie of a life, morals via aesthetics only.
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KANT = super-sensible object, did not exist until you show me his skeleton.
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‘I am nearly ready to take off my underwear.’
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‘Nearly ready’ is a funny state.
A nothing state?
At what point are you ‘nearly ready’?
I see it as a delaying action.
An indefinite one.
I’m nearly ready to learn Urdu.
For the last 10 and a half years.
That underwear is never coming off, you KANT make it.
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I’m not equipped to deal with this KANT aspect, have never read him beyond random page flicking in the library.
I can make jokes though.
Give the illusion that I know him.
Isn’t that what everyone else does?
Maybe not philosophy grads.
Especially philosophy grads?
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Far as I can tell, KANT believed in a lot of nonsense + cried a lot + that was REAL.
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A bit of variety in form, some handwritten notes by Ian?
I always have time for handwriting in art, obviously, it’s in almost everything I produce [I’m nearly ready to stop doing it], even though it’s annoying to remove the background on MIC WORD and turn it white.
I wonder if these notes are personal to M.?
No way to know, but it’s a good mix of plain, direct language + soft esoterica, giving the impression that Ian genuinely feels these things.
There are some misspellings – Rambaud, exercise – which add charm, and I think I agree with the overall sentiment. No one likes a paper cynic in the pop-culture sense. Absurdism is okay though. As long as it gets buttressed by many other states, like idealism, brutality, confusion, empathy, epic confusion, etc.
Don’t know who John Berryman is, did he really kill himself after writing these poems?
I remember when I wrote Charcoal, a kind of confessional novel [to no one, ultimately], I said through the figure of the main character [that was pretty much me] that to confess everything would mean suicide, as in you’d have no choice but to kill yourself afterwards as everything has been exposed, including yourself and the lie that KANT be continued.
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I’m the least cynical person you’ll ever meet.
Any cynicism I do have comes from hate.
I hate people I experience day to day, have experienced in the past, the things I see and have seen, the details of them.
I love people out there, conceptually.
The hate is exaggerated, fleeting.
I don’t want to meet anyone.
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Is it contrived to write it out like that?
Possibly.
It’s true though.
I understand all the contradictions of my position.
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How do the notes relate to what has come before?
Not sure yet.
The parts that stand out, that I’ve held onto, are the passionate bile the poet has for their own eyeballs [and body?], the abundance of images they’re forced to take in. And the depressed resignation after it.
But I may have misread things.
Is it romanticism that Ian wishes to revive?
Actually, he doesn’t wish to revive it, he wishes it to be revived. A passive task for an Other. Meaning he could be part of the problem. Write something, Ian. If you’re not already.
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To me, romanticism needs confusion, madness, absurdism, stark material reality, references to things + people I’ve actually read. Ironic detachment is god for nobody. Understand your smallness but don’t be resigned to it. Bigness is boring. Why do you think Cthulhu is asleep all the time?
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A disconcerting one-two of attention-dread and Cobain with “dead” eyeballs.
It’s hard to write anything here except maybe some personal stuff. Not a narrative or recollection.
I don’t want to be seen. I’ve been conditioned to think this way from childhood. The public is alien, private is safety.
I really don’t know how to write this, so I won’t bother.
I don’t know how Kurt Cobain felt. Maybe it would’ve been better if he’d never become famous, if Nirvana had just remained as ‘nearly ready to take off its underwear’ in perpetuity. Then he could’ve imagined that fame/success would improve things.
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How does M. feel about Cobain?
They go into detail at the end of the book, relating him to a high school friend who later died in a car accident. It’s interesting, they also say that while he was alive he didn’t enter their sense of mystic-ecstatic, but about a decade after his death, they got some B-sides of his that are now seared in their head like a melody.
So the mystic-ecstatic was achieved once Cobain himself could no longer be witnessed [in a live-material state], which means all “seeing” is done completely on M.’s terms and conditions.
Is this the crux/problem of the eye?
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The air-con is freezing in this place [from where I’m writing], can barely feel my legs.
Looks cold outside too.
Just noticed, the shop opposite is a garage called ‘AUTOCARE HERO SHOP.’
I love Chinese naming rituals.
Not really a ritual, I just can’t think of the right word.
The guy on the next table keeps looking at me or my notes.
Fucking annoying.
Can’t stand people sometimes.
I’m adding ‘sometimes’ to seem nicer.
I want to be nice.
I am nice.
Nicer than KANT.
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I’ve done 15 pages now.
Gonna skip to Part 2 – MYSELF THE PHOTOGRAPH – otherwise this is gonna turn into-
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While skimming ahead to Part 2, I just saw a black square with a white text box inside. Seems to be doubling down on the smallness, insisting that my EYE is an IMAGE.
Perspective-wise, I’m always outside my own self, using my eye to see the visual representation of my eye [through a mirror or photo or video].
Can’t argue with that.
Can say it’s a little pedantic, perhaps.
But not wrong.
The eye is not a reliable path to truth?
After post-structuralism, what is?
What is this book/M. trying to tell me [or themselves]?
How much should I relate myself to my eye?
I’m suffocating in questions, no choice but to do that, this is not a question though.
What ever happened to Part 2?
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MYSELF THE PHOTOGRAPH = INTERROGATION of self as Image, from which perspective point?
All you have is your reflection in the mirror or a captured state in a photograph, or a live-captured state in a video, which comes even closer to performance. Does it?
There is more scope for expression in a video, but you know it is being captured so becomes artificial, unless you’re drunk.
In your mind [‘s eye], you can imagine videos of yourself, edited endlessly, often to your own dissatisfaction.
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The text: not sure what’s happening with the first line, but it says ‘forget’ so okay.
After that, it’s 3 parts.
1] murder scene photos + suicide notes. Extreme-look-horror.
2] bathroom-reflection? ‘Cry semen’ could be a metaphor for a confused state of joy-horror at crime scene photos, or from looking at your reflection.
3] look at the sea/nature – again, focus on smallness of self, counter it with cliff-standing, high emotion, shadow stretching impossibly across the horizon.
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Vernon Lee practised ‘faculty of association’ [I have recently learned about and exhausted this to death but here it is again] in their work – a kind of hallucinated reality placed on top of the material-real where things are a bit shit – and maybe M. is attempting a similar thing here?
Willing themselves towards mysticism, or the mystic-ecstatic, despite the confines of the EYE/IMAGE, its passive static-ness?
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I could be way off on all of this but I enjoy where I’m going. Isn’t that the beauty of this kind of work?
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A novella actually.
I’ve already done 25k words, just need to add another 5-10k, some personality, but I just can’t seem to do it.
The problem is it’s NOT a reflection of myself.
I fucked up.
I tried to write a plot.
Then tried to dismantle it into something more ME, but it’s too late now, isn’t it, it might be, I don’t even know what I’m writing, who the main character is, it’s not me, I know that much.
Is M. trying to write a novel [desperately]?
Am I reading it now?
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A reference to Videodrome?
Or was it Existenz?
In the mirror is not the Other but the opposite, a side of your self that you understand to be constituent [not detached].
Psychologically, I’m not sure how to read this as I’m way beyond binaries and opposites. I mean, I can’t think of it that way. Everything’s entangled, muddying + contriving endless origin points. Though this could be a consequence of my lack of ability to organise things. Things and my own thoughts. As you can see in every single de-con-struc, including this one.
What is the opposite here?
Maybe I’m misreading, or not going small enough, and the opposite is a disassociated also-entangled self, the possessor of the eye.
Yet it’s still seen as a constituent part of the ‘I’…isn’t it?
I don’t know.
What do I think/feel when I look in the mirror?
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I’m having another ‘what is pine’ moment, when I type so fast and so long that I start to misspell words and those words, via the EYE/BRAIN/OFF-SCREEN-ENTANGLEMENT, become alien to me, the new wrong version and the original right one.
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I love this tabloid line.
[*Sam Seder voice*] The idea that sleazy attention called to the self can help to destroy it.
Is that the idea?
I’m not a public figure, have no idea what that kind of harassment does to the ‘I’.
But I still love the line.
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Repetition of image = destruction
Leads to complete disassociation and then renewal?
Reformation?
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Chaos magic[k] fragments the ‘I’ into different states, a desire to fully experience “insanity” [the colourful type] even though on a rational level you know it to be fake, but then what is fake, you’ve entered the realm of the sensual that makes no sense, and you’re not arrogant enough to say you know everything, sorry KANT, but you loved chaos magic[k] deep down too, didn’t you?
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So far in Part 2, there’s smallness to repetition, to abandonment of self, with absolutely no fixed assuredness. The MYSELF AS PHOTOGRAPH is being disintegrated, infant rhizomes stretching out towards-
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Not sure what’s going on here.
Blurry men molesting a blurry woman?
Blurry dentists molesting a blurry patient?
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I’ve just thought, this whole section could be a response to M. looking at photographs of themselves.
Even the chaos magic[k] page.
M. in a Crowley hat at Buer’s Halloween Party.
[Got Buer from DEARS, thanks Elytron].
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I’ve skipped ahead a bit [as is my habit].
Starting to feel a bit of that old poetry fatigue that hit me halfway through The Hounds of No, even though this isn’t outright poetry. Some of the imagery/writing gets wispy, at times, and not without intent, but lacking in something else. I’m not sure what. It just makes me want to skip ahead a few pages.
I often have this problem, especially with abstract/experimental stuff. Even with my own work…half the time, I don’t want to read it. I’m sick of it. Sick of myself?
I’m sure I’m not alone in this.
It should be expected.
Beware wispiness.
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‘Belief is to comprehend a thing.’ [either Spinoza or Barry J. Gillis]
Same vibe here.
With extra mad-energy.
I think it may be written in a trance or during a fit.
Full Abandonment of the rational, in manic spurts.
Idolatry linked to sight linked to the altar linked to BRAINS not brain linked to beauty in infinite regressive-and-beyond-that combinations. As if the brain/BRAINS is a prisoner inside the head.
I won’t judge or criticise any of this.
Manic release can be euphoric.
I put a lot of it into KRV and it was genuine. Just pure abandon, about how much fucking better my work is than anyone else’s, how far beyond the mediocre I am, how much Bitleaf or Cosmic Pangolin or Chirpy Slut Quarterly or whatever online magazine is beneath me. I can lean into this at will, whenever. It is mystic-ecstasy. For about fifteen minutes. Then it’s the bathroom and weeping semen.
You have to feel this way about your own work on an unconscious level otherwise what are you writing for? Why bother?
But what you really mean is I’m transcribing myself, my work is the best for the universe of ME, I understand everything that went into its creation, etc.
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No one can “get” this work like M. can. Not Bhanu, McSweeney, Dickinson, Ian, X, Cobain.
You will never fully explain yourself.
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What’s the opposite of idolatry?
That’s usually what I feel when I look at something.
Unless it’s a DS9 screenshot.
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I’m over halfway through this now.
A bit torn about whether to go all the way or just do a few more pages.
This is a struggle with de-con-struc in general. Feels like I’m using up all my creative energy on things that are in essence just personal notes to the author [and maybe their mum]. I suppose there’s value in that, I’d love it if someone did the same thing with my work, went through and misinterpreted everything, I don’t care, but lately I’ve been working on Dranonika and Xxun and my brain becomes sludge, like when I try to think what to do on the blank page. Text is not enough. It looks naked, in a distant way, an uncomfortable way. De-con-struc has re-territorialised me [with an ‘s’]. I realise I’m not talking about the book. Back to Interrogating the Eye [for a few more pages].
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I’m struggling.
Not with the work, other stuff.
What is the point?
I’m not convinced any of this writing “community” is real.
I’ve never been more stuck in routine.
If you are real, you all look grey, formless.
Why do I write anything?
I, We?
I know it sounds familiar, overused, but the writing part is the only part that truly means anything, that vitalises me. I don’t care if that’s not a word. The after part is just grieving. I haven’t read any of my old books, don’t read anything once it’s up on the site or published. Can’t even remember most of it. Just kind of slowly turns into something that’s probably not good enough.
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I feel better now.
Less bitter.
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You know, with a de-con-struc, it’s gonna become a therapy session at some point. It’s okay. I’ll keep it in.
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A flower offered by unseen other [possibly naked], a red-head looking elsewhere?
It’s hard to tell, her eyes could be on the stem or the floor or the curtain or nothingness, but her body language is defensive. She does not want this, does not feel comfortable.
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The 2nd image is a diagrammatic representation of eyesight or telepathy. The eyeballs look weird, alien, in the wrong position.
A misunderstanding of sight?
A misrepresentation of it?
Is the teardrop a brain?
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How do these two images relate to each other?
The section title is HORRIBLE WORLD. It makes sense in the first image. Even a flower [beauty] is seen as invasive. Cos it’s being offered by the horror. Naked horror. Two natural things combined to produce a physical and existential threat i.e. there may be sexual aggression as follow-up and, even if there isn’t, the redhead is thinking about it.
The 2nd image makes sight look like a xeno-process. As if the world is horrible solely via the way in which we are forced to view it.
Underneath it’s worse?
That’s the existential part.
What if it IS worse?
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This has some crossover with a piece I’ve just written on the film Lady Terminator. It probably shouldn’t, but it does. How can it not? A mythical Indonesian sea nymph with a snake in their vagina, bringing mystic-ecstasy via dick-devouring, the men love to die this way.
On reflection, maybe it is a little different.
This one paints ecstasy as dying in the woods of hypothermia on a snowy evening. Ecstasy rooted in the image of the chosen way of perishing, a reflection on it? Or death itself?
It’s hard to say.
I wouldn’t call this suicide ideation, doesn’t feel like it. Feels more like a fixation on the image of it, the breaking of routine perhaps? Go to a real snowy place and the ecstasy will be absent. Won’t it? I don’t know. If the world is horrible, is presented that way by your brain/eye, then what better way to defeat it than embracing surrealism? Is a naked body in the snow surreal? Maybe. Kind of. It’s not normal, at least.
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I like this one, feel it, especially the first stanza.
‘Look lake like altar.’
Beautiful.
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Interrogating the Eye is available as a paperback for raw cash or a free to read pdf over at Schism Neuronics.
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PsYChO hOLosUitE [zine] 