About Eileen Tabios

of Maxwell Clark

Vaguely aware of Kierkegaard’s teachings on the obnoxious superfluity of book-reviewing, of how in the reading masses book-reviews lazily crowd out the more intensive and individual reading of their else merely attendant books, I offer a few remarks on Eileen Tabios. She is to me more of a vortex of transnational poetic societal relations, however fuzzily and ambiguously defined in their ever-shifting dimensions, than a poet unto herself. She curates the works of others exceedingly well. She reviews others books with such an easy command that it even sometimes astounds her reader. But for all of her glowing book-reviews, very many of which are deposited haphazardly into her own books, do her own books stand out with a like aura of serendipity when the reader is alone with them? Were I to ever answer this question, I would be stooping to the traditional forms of critical evaluation in the book-review canon. Instead, I leave the question hanging; the better to nag the otherwise ignorant of her corpus to answer for themselves.

Eileen Tabios is of a genius that is hard to pin down in any one textual space, otherwise put. Her genius is more of that incessantly collective barrage of her own rapid-fire of texts, their wondrously delicate shepherding of her ambient poetic world, in so many micrologically specific ways. I don't mean to go against Kierkegaard's grain re: book-reviewing much, but perhaps in the unique case of Tabios's most luscious critical preenings, that most brusque but highly attentive sensitivity they achieve as contexts to otherwise unread texts, therein something of goodness and justice accrues. Perhaps, just maybe, her reviews are better than the books upon which they anchor as references to? Doubtless, I again cannot answer my own questionings. But hanging questions, as superlative luxuries in a way, I indulge myself with them herein. Perhaps the art of reviewing books needn't deteriorate the value of what they review, perhaps book-reviews may indeed even ennoble their otherwise mediocre reference materials? If such were ever to be the case, then assuredly Eileen Tabios would be exemplary of it.

Dataset

of Maxwell Clark

Smug canopies iridescent crinkly,
This feeling of beauteous delicacy,
An elder faucet of blood,
Shingles in arrays, in jealousy.

Crackling Open the Nevermind

of Maxwell Clark

                                                                                                (((...)))

                                                                                                Just the asynchronous face

                                                                                                Of my elsewhere forgotten

                                                                                                Saying; not this Said

                                                                                                It left (as) herein.

Zoom.

Flat? the indiscrete focal sequences/Unfold in irregular juts.

This is a description of my senses.

                Remodel extravagances of a

                Chipping jut—illimitable but

                Textural; timbral inter-stutters

(Or more or less)
(Of lessening).

                Then genres.

A report on the justice of slavery:

“A march for good jobs”.

Any jut is whereof.

                                                                                                I doubt I think:
                                                                                                Therefore I just am.

                Ger tzedek,

                As still it goes on outside this.

Forget more and more, so but forgive too rarely.

Death if butt hangs out.

To comment on what I am doing.

                Little smooths and dirt.

(((I, of you, sing, to you, my truth: you.)))

Then, after that, comes then the next, which is set-in after what was before it. The adoption of a more critical and rigorous approach. I may also elicit opprobrium from my audience. Cower awhile, and weep, trembling/Of your foolishness, so divinely pretty....

                                                                                                Pity—for being so alive.

                                                                                                Pump the move.

That the personalization of nature (animism).

                                                                                                An apology.

Be (as I fear)?

Consoling observance of the rituals of the dead.

Glory but disintegrates the body into cancers of light....

                Little matter if it doesn’t work out.

                I say this because I like (you) to[o].

Good, now again; then do that; yes, alright!@

An inept critique of inconsistent sets of data.

  

The wisdom taught by love is the impossibility of learning better.

                                                Perfect sentence stop.

                                                The Good of homeless psychotics.

                                                To teach the youth.

What I have not signed herein is most myself,

As if you might follow the spacings of these marks

Backwards into time.

                My blackness.

                A lapsed Quakerism.

                Love names us.

                                                This mission is important.

                                                A poem that does not teach

                                                Is never learned.

                                                Nor combat what does not to me exist.

There is no slavery if death is preferable.

                                                The attunement of sweet accents.

                                                How it is done.

The area looks secure.

Barbaric reality on the ground as well.

                Earth-canon.

The intensification of sensory experience into a qualitatively distinct (abnormal) experience.

A phenomenology of capitalism indeed.

The figures of logic require practices.

                Dodeccahedral inter-isolation.

                                                                                                The tenses

                                                                                                Of history.

Incessant revision to grandiose essay.

                Auto-cannibalization.

Burial mound as dwelling.

All peoples will migrate again.

Already the terrain becomes much less foggy.

                Peaceful demonstrations demonstrate

                The potential for organized violence.

                                                                                                Encyclopedic

                                                                                                Unconsciousness.

                Our bodies are like bells.

                                                                                                

Remarks on One of My Paintings

of Maxwell Clark

There is almost nothing to be said about this work, not because it is devoid of the lushest proliferation of formal delineations, but because of the micrologically intense detail of each these shapes or structured formations in it, whose determinateness is so richly concrete as to make it almost impracticably difficult to analyze and translate their sensible encounter into the simplicity of words. This painting was not written with the marks of an alphabet. Yet by these forms of alphabetic writing I am adding to my archive of works a text that directly references to my painting.

A singular upshot of how dense the imbrication of forms are in this painting, further, is that, even with the most modern forms of technology now available, I feel confident in defying anyone to successfully counterfeit its original canvassed wood and acrylic production. Consideration of the largely pre-conscious gestures with which I applied my paints and the minimalist technical apparatus by which I applied these paints (pieces of scrap paper) perhaps begins to reveal the primally chaotic, very stochastic, but yet affective, and still somewhat sensuously guided motifs of their production.

Peri-Unintelligible Complexities

of Maxwell Clark

APOLOGETIC PREFACE.

I know not how my more recent crops of essays became so exceedingly unwieldy in their style, nor how so monstrously technical or too-difficultly overworked. But it already seems quite assured to me that they are so. Thus, however, instead of pruning back how over-burdened with derailing flourishes these essays of mine have become, I, perhaps altogether unintentionally at first, have rather gone on in my writing to exacerbate their elephantine/labyrinthine stylistic faults. Perhaps, as such, nearly no one will ever read any of these (thus rather “private”) experimental pieces through with anything like the rigor that is requisite of their least sufficient comprehension (however that might be judged?), but, even so, know that they are in fact (very much too) tightly argued and, indeed, even almost---if in the least comprehended at all---endearingly persuasive documents.



Z.

Religion may be defined “negatively”, if you will, as the opposite of anarchy. Thus, in an affirmative form, religion is the “binding back” of anarchically unique unicities into the sameness of a unity. Religion, as such, or once over again, is the pleromatic unification of the otherwise infinite plenum of unique unicities. If anarchy, in one of its paradoxically most radical (“rooted”) senses as “an-arche” (i.e., “the absence of any beginning [or root]”), thus already establishes itself an essential modality of the “pre-original” void---out of whom all of “what is” (Being, existence, et. al) ever comes to be; then this said radical (but now “rootless”) sense of anarchy also ranks, if you will, chronologically (but nowise historically) as absolutely prior to any of its otherwise historical unification(s) into religion(s). Anarchy is then, to put it again otherwise, the pre-original void from out of which the miraculous/impossible event of religion (religiosity) “decides” its own genesis and thereafter also donates/substantiates it(self) as an “uneven but permanent” (Trotsky, et. al) unfication/involutionization/totalization into more or less self-sameness, or auto-foreclosed autarky/autarkies.



A. 

“Religious anarchy”/”anarchic religion” (and the like) are oxymoronic concepts, and are initially introduced herein strictly as illustrative (in the negative) of the antinomy of their terms. Subsequently, however, these same pairings of otherwise antinomian terms (“religion” and “anarchy”)---instead of acting as counter-factual feints of a pseudo-covert pedagogical method---may help to define the conversely apposite/opposite extremes (or limits) of a conceptual spectrum---along whose inner scalar any actual historical-empirical events may register as intermediary intensities (or “concrete abstractions”; see: Marx)---that is, as more or less religious or anarchic (in mixture). That is, if “religious anarchy” is ever anywhere affirmed as otherwise than an oxymoron, it thus conceptualizes/nominates the real balance of forces then extant between its terms (again: “religion” and “anarchy”).



Z.a.

Whatever the scales (conceptual, quantitative, ...?) employed to concretize/measure the abstract(ed) dimensions of empirical reality whose “axes” (as it were?) are religion and anarchy, I believe that---even if each and every instantaneously new registration of our senses entails the reformation of our entire logical organon, our entire ethical teaching, our entire scientific method, our entire socio-corporeal affectivity (this lattermost as the most total scale presently imaginable upon which finition, or individuation, integrates [without integration] into infinity)---nevertheless, despite even this restlessly rigorous empirical renovation/redefinition infinitely re-affecting our subjective totalities, despite even how any regularity is, if not a miracle within the abiding chaos of the real, then essentially a consoling ruse of our neural evolution---such that epistemological normalcy (in we humans, if not also simply all vertebrae) is defined as the hallucination of norms into an “anormal” or “normless” externality (that does not itself even “consist”, or “ex-ists” exclusive of any norm, as the incessant [perceptual] estrangement of a pure irregularity, absolute inconsistency, or infinite chaos)---despite all this (these detours which have become the central arterial highway of this, as it were) I believe that the real behind the scalar intensity of either religion or anarchy, taken in absolute spatiotemporal terms, will never register at either of these extremes in a pure polarity, unmixed of its other.



A.z.

The anarchy evident in this text (or its technical plethora of derailments; especially on the grammetrical levels of inter-sentence clause-formations---parenthetical and elsewise---and multi-sentence paragraph-constructions), insofar as this, or any, text is hermeneutically decided to be “articulated”, or a closed totality (alone unto itself), is, if it is at all, a yet fuzzy set of disparate and/or irregularly indicated anarchies, or minor passages/scenes of more or less derailment from the prior norms/regularities of generic textuality (once) (before) extant in the identities of its language/ethnic-groupings. The religiosity evident in this text (also evident only if a prior hermeneutic decision is made to interpret it as a closed article, or finite system of physical signifiers---possessed of a definite beginning, middle, and end---and so also as a totalized structuration of regularly affective ideologemes/meanings, et. al) is, if only as such, this text (unto) itself (as itself). Verily, there is no space for anarchy in this text whatsoever once its hermeneutic is “properly” closed into a finite article. The derailing anarchies in even the least sequences of empirical instants obtained by its actual readings (if only at this most inaugural date in its history) may perhaps still be immediately extant, as such, if only until any one infinitesmally abrupt (arbitrary) interpretive decision is made “to come to and end” of “all” this, to mark out its “finish-line”, finalize its reading into an unified image, or absolutely purify the lineaments of its presence(s) by marking out the unique essence(s) of its absence(s). A text is religious (of religiosity) only if it is decided, or made, to be so---but once so religiously (hermeneutically) transformed, it is religious alone, is a religion unto itself---if only as the result of an arbitrary hermeneutic arbitration (or injustice?).

Questionnaire for Anyone

of Maxwell Clark

(c) Maxwell Clark, 2015

You,

Please email your responses to any or every of these below questions to: 

maxclark84@gmail.com

0.0---Who is nihilism today? and how so?

0.1---Was Karl Marx wrong about anything? if so, how so?

0.2---Who is the most rigorously creative/renovative individual you are currently aware of? how  so?

0.3---Is art dependent on philosophy? if so, how so? if not, how not?

0.4---How does thought relate to creation (aesthetic or utilitarian, et. al)?

0.5---Assuming that certain of your present cultural formations have already begun to transcend  their archaic, ancient, early, baroque, classical, romantic, [...] modernist, and/or  postmodernist modes---how would you generically rename these newest cultural  formations? how also then would you further define this newest mode of  civilization/society?

0.6---How do you (preferrably just as yourself) best misread the traces of revolutionary social  violence in the historical archives accessible to you?

0.7---How do you (as uniquely yourself) best misread the historical traces reformations have  archived in the everyday life of those civilizations empirically available to you?

0.8---How do means and ends relate in your own behavioral influence on/into/of social  movements? if at all?

0.9---How are you: (a) inspired by your external social world? (b) inspiring to your external social  world?

1.0---Are you a scientist? if yes or if no: how do you relate to science?

1.1---How do you best misinterpret the presence of technology in your social world? or, how  does “the mode of existence of technical objects”, in your own best misinterpretation of this  semi-difficult phrase, most generically affect you and/or others?

1.2---Who is in power over you (and yours)? both of late and/or since forever?

1.3a---Do you desire more power? over yourself? over others? is there a difference between  power over yourself and power over others?

1.3b---Do you desire less power? over yourself? over others?

1.3c---Do you possess any power (at all)? is it over yourself? is it over others? if so, how much? or,  how do you define and measure power (your own in especial)?

1.3dx---How will the most present relations of power in your social world change in the future?

1.3dy---Does power even exist? as itself? and/or do powers exist? in actuality? or in some  otherwise way?

1.3dz---If both power itself and powers themselves exist, how so? or, how are these singular and  plural cognates of each other said to co-exist (much less relate) as actualities? in their  grammar? in the actualization of their grammar? or in a metaphysical type of translation  which re-interprets their grammatical categories as thematic adumbrations of elemental  essences?

1.4---Is unhappy consciousness, and each of its aesthetics/rhetorics/ideologemes/... so redolent  of a wretchedly sorrowful solemnity, if not as such also as a most gravely and violently  morbid (homo-/sui-cidal) “meta-pathology” of nihilism/resentment, not the seemingly eternal hegemonic affective register or behavioral tonality of yourself alone and/or your otherwise neighborhoods? if yes, will you then detail just how so, either for your uniquely  individual instance, or for your social ambient, or both? if no, will you then detail your  beliefs concerning the presence or absence of unhappy consciousness in your world---also  as much of the otherwise external conditions of your life history and inheritance as can be  said to be generative of these beliefs?

1.5---Do you believe that questions, and especially in the otherwise phraseologies attending  their basic interrogative forms, more or less pre-decide the possible forms their responses  will come to take? if so, how do you believe any or all of these questions are constraining  the dimensions of your replies to them? or, do the generic forms of any question (qua  question) preemptively render a totally finite closure (or essential horizon) of response unto  the otherwise infinity of linguistic permutations its response might else express?

1.6---Do you believe that your ownmost ethnicity (i.e., your most major language-group, or the  most thematic intersubjective co-horizon transcendentally delineating your corporeal  selfhood’s phenomenal world-immanence, or...) is also an essentially finite and exclusive  identity? if so, do you simply possess but one ethnicity alone? if so, does the very language  that is the grounding condition of your special ethnicity exist as one absolutely autonomous  and apart from any other? and is your social world and identity thus infinitely unrelated to  those of any other type? if so, how do any ethinicities otherwise than your own even begin  to exist? how does your own special ethnicity even define its own likewise special horizon of  exclusive difference, if it already must invoke the name of infinity and its absolute as the  adverbial qualifiers of this difference? does not the name of infinity, when employed to  guide the subtlest tracing of any particular ethnic inheritance (or even the more minute  patterns of its influence) back into their absolute past, also necessarily realize that this  unique ethnicity was and is and will forever after be a generation of the pre-original One of  the cosmos, and thus unequivocally equal to each and every ethnicity that otherwise comes  to neighbor it?

1.7---Do you ever express yourself in any of the patois or pidgins or otherwise ethnically mixed  and/or subaltern formations of any of the majoritarian and/or imperialist languages they  derive/deviate from? if so, which? and with who? also, how difficult was/is it to learn?  further, do you have any remarks on the relations between the world(s) of your minoritarian  dialect(s) with those of its/their majoritarian empire(s) of the word? also, how does your  (more or less) fluency in whatever sub-dialects---i.e., how does your captivity in any  “hostage” patois of any “host” empire of the word---alter your own trends and conditions of  expression?

1.8---Do you believe in (any) god? or any otherwise god-like translation of this ethnically very  narrow name (“god”) for the divine? if no, do you believe in any secular, materialist, or  otherwise atheistic substitute for god? such as humanity? or physical matter? or the totality  of the capitalist mode of production? nature? oneself? infinity? money?

1.9---How do you best misinterpret the value of “inconsistency” in your sociolinguistic world? do  you believe this said phenomenal horizon of yours may still abide as such, if it is at all  rendered inconsistent? does this, or any other, appearance and/or presentation of  inconsistent sense-data into your intersubjectively generated neuro-corporeal datum (or  ipseity) frighten or disquiet or violate you? does it interrupt or endanger the absolute  totality of your immanence within yourself, insofar as the absolutely finite and/or closed  consistency of any totality (subjective or otherwise) is only ever  interrupted/broken/rendered-inconsistent as the likewise absolute death of its own  status/identity/structure as a totality? [....]

2.0---Who are you---to me, Maxwell Clark? how would you describe yourself when in my most  intimate proximity? how describe yourself when most remotely proximate to me? how do i  influence you? how do you influence me? do you believe I really always try my hardest and  do my best? do you have any other responses for me that you feel? would you express them  hereafter then, please? thank you?

The Want of What Is to Be as Such as It Is

of Maxwell Clark

This is error-making joy, plus a fruitful unthinking, pushing idiocy into itself as immediacy, except unfaithful to itself already, because of no reason of which I am currently aware, or the line of zero points.


The colors of my eyes are restless with their useless regularities, as once their future revelations were disguised like this, and there came the line of zero points.


It is difficult to abdicate to this mode of expression, when it is unknowingly so far in advance of science that it becomes almost unreal, except that it is so as this, as it is, along the line of zero points.


If I wish only to know something more than before, then that amounts to the same as just then, in a way of expression, not unhinged from the line of zero points.


Withhold not the path of inquiry, for it is the valve, inspired by the line of zero points.


Or does this restless machine make me a fool to love you so? asked the line of zero points.