Fukky Doubts

today i, fukky, have in my studio sadoos flammarion and maf nir malo

we’re here today to talk about sadooing and esotericism

sadooing is a new-old movement that pushes esotericism into the without

that’s not entirely true

nothing’s entirely true

that’s true

sadoo flammarion’s from socotra island and sadoo maf nir malo’s from the plain of jars

actually sadoo nir maf malo’s from plain socotra

and sadoo flamarion’s from jar i-land

a curious thing in all this is that esotericism is an invention of scholars in the mid-twentieth century so we shouldn’t really take it that seriously

but we take ourselves seriously

well

didn’t your mother just pass away?

if there’s anyone i’d like to go to a cemetery with, it’s you

i wish i had 16 more mothers so i could experience 16 more mothers dying

that’s not nice

it’s true though

could we talk a little about the relations of truth and niceness?

academia, being concatenations of orthodox judgment disguised as knowledge and progress, is useful primarily for transanthropological purposes:  for outsider thinkers and poets, those barely human but found in human form, more of myth than time, loosened from institutional conformist bonds into the raunchy air, friends of possibility and freedom, to comment on the commentators – a rough governance and dark vision, a blurring of insides and outsides

academia’s recent discovery of esotericism indicates – like the rise of nomenclature such as mental illness, human resources, alternative, underground, diversity, and irrationality – a need, an increasing desperation, on orthodoxy’s part to further entrench itself behind moats of privileged rhetoric and hierarchical bifurcations

but you just said we shouldn’t take it that seriously.

one should never take it that seriously

only verbs should be taken seriously

and even verbs …

what i’m trying to say is that academia’s clumping together of impossibly myriad and contradictory movements under one umbrella term reveals its attempt to absurdly rive the world into an odd simulation of the christian universe:  the true and the false, the real and the deluded, the good and the bad – of course the academy being the initiator and protector of the former in each couplet, some impossibly superior and objective vantage maintained only through its pervasive enforcements

but these supposedly superior words – true, real, good – have all been deconstructed by the academy

only theoretically. it doesn’t have the guts to live its theory. this lack of guts is what most wholly defines it. a comic consequence of course is that one of its practitioners seriously advocates we have bodies without organs – the academy’s leading the way, its guts displaced to those who carry the world on their heaped shoulders

i’m interested in pursuing further these relations you establish between esotericism and other movements. it seems to me in my mingling with sadoos over the millennia that what academia has recently called esotericism is hardly new but a collection of discernible and irreconcilable strains in the human spirit that are some combination of antithetical, strained, revolutionary, parallel to the dominant forms of societal structures – from philosophical daoism to various forms of anarchy (primarily individual), mysticism (secular, aesthetic, religious), modern underground and alternative movements, art in its orientations that aren’t primarily commercial …

this is sadooity!

sadooity isn’t a set of irreconcilable attributes, it’s configurations of energies that present possibilities of a breaking through the simian human without negating it

an ubermensch?

sadoo friedrich was onto something but its attempt is only one element – think of it as a stroke on a large painting, a work in continual progress – that is attempting to show humanity a picture of itself as it might be

it’s the protest that never wins that includes the doubt that it will never win

a doubt called hope?

sadoo chuang tzu, sadoo simone, sadoo scelsi, sadoo thoreau, sadoo spiegel, sadoo bronte, sadoo william, sadoo emily, sadoo jodorowsky, sadoo oram … all these and tens or hundreds of thousands more, named and unnamed, work together in strange concert …

against …

against?

against, with, alongside … we require an uninvented preposition … oun … work together in strange concert oun the exoteric

what interests us is the psychology and psychopathology of configuration

specifically how mental processes, in relation to the external world, are configured – and reconfigured – in sensuous representation, from inner necessity and vision, into what is sometimes called art

sometimes called madness

esotericism is frequently considered a third pillar of western culture alongside doctrinal faith and rationality, deemed heretical by the former and irrational by the latter, thus exiled by the dominant structures of the heart and the mind, construed then as being configured problematically by the numerically and militaristically greater powers, the heretical now having to deal with the natural potencies of their inner necessities and vision and the alien potencies of others’ outer necessities and tyrannies. esotericism attempts to slip through these regulatory definitions, these forces, having no particular throne, refusing heart or mind any ascendancy, exploring forms not particularly exigent but emerging from shadows of reality, closets of time, …

… often considered hidden, unified, universal, secret, inner, enchanted, individual, higher, superior, these attributions have arisen from an antithetical collaboration between the orthodoxies – which use them often as mockeries – and those among the esotericists who (often legitimately) feel threatened by the dominant forms and attempt to balance power by claiming truer knowledge

is esotericism less deviations from orthodoxy or orthopraxy and more paths of sensations not yet walked?

esotericism is just other forms of specific, inner-outer, rational-intuitive, polydirectional, individual-collective knowledge eschewed by forms of orthodoxy, courageously exploring alternative paths concerned with powerful spiritual dimensions of reality as opposed to the merely exoteric religious institutions and dogmatic systems of established religions and skeptical rationality

esotericism isn’t hidden, unified, or universal – it’s as plural as orthodoxy. the difference is that it yields different powers, relies more on intuition, flesh, imagination: these dark and vermiculous roots. the best of it includes vigorous mind, thorough and contradictory experience, broad learning, and the fullest passions

esotericism is the dream orthodoxy needs to dream then analyze and sell

this binarism of esotericism and orthodoxy – is it inevitable? could there be alliances which lessen the threat to orthodox insecurities and lessen the persecution and poverty often endemic to alternative or underground movements?

these tendencies toward ‘hidden,’ ‘higher,’ likely have resulted from a binarism resulting from the alienation of scattered and less dominant language groups as they encounter more homogeneous and powerful language groups. these tendencies are an attempt at justice – at balancing different legitimate forms of knowledge in an overwhelmingly exploitive context

but are there other means of working toward justice?

some say hide within the ‘system.’ but not everyone can or should do this. when the system finds something esoteric it can use and that esotericism thus becomes ‘successful’ it gains the ability to influence, but the creator finds it difficult if not impossible to then continue to nurture the vitality of its forms, powerful as the orthodoxies are. anonymity, suicide, silence, deserts, exile, retreat – all these are options, but unsatisfying

we’re interested in pathways of renewing subversions, including autosubversion, crafty vulnerabilities, satisfying unsatisfactions, death intimacies as vitality, energetic negations, adventures of doubt-paths …

… the underground, subversion, protestation, revolt and revolution – these all now become faces of orthodoxy, in the way a new order or movement in the middle ages was assimilated into catholicism or even as we see the internet’s nascent ferality being coopted by political-capitalistic powers

isn’t this just a natural ordering that occurs in chaos’s rush and maelstrom?

mysticism is the maelstrom that never demaelstroms, calm in its never

take aesthetic mysticism for example. orthodoxy – in contempt, indifference, admiration – includes at times mysticism in its analytical baskets and dumpsters, as it plucks and discards exotic flora from the psychic rainforests of the world. it infrequently combines aesthetics and mysticism – not a wholly unworthy practice – and examines, for example, the mystical landscapes of a van gogh or monet, articulating how such artists reacted against the materialism, empiricism and secularism of the modern age through forged individual spiritual paths. none of this is untrue

but mysticism, not naturally fitting into purported scientific practices, defies orthodoxy’s taxonomizing and ratiocinating dna by being of different blood, of the root and apogee of religion. a modern aesthetic mysticism inserts itself not in nature or gods but technology, incessantly rawly vulnerable to the city’s plurality of voices, incessantly disordered and ordered in its disorderings

orthodoxy can’t include these forms without dismembering itself, so instead it dismembers its esoteric objects and calls this dismembering inclusion

isn’t that a bit harsh – if it weren’t for orthodoxy, esotericism would never be recognized?

the harshness of your question is the harshness of esotericism’s living

and what you state as true is only possible because orthodoxy tyrannizes over the modes of production and one must enter the maw of its tyrannies to be seen. sadoos – as all members of the esoteric, regardless of their differences – abdicate their identities to the extent they enter that maw and are re-configured according to the presently and historically greater force. their strength is their refusal to conform to the external and social dominant exigencies, not primarily as against but oun

the so-called liberal forces of orthodoxy typically pay constructive lip-service to many of esotericism’s forms, but these forms are deep and creative, generatively impossible from within orthodoxy, forms orthodoxy uses for its purposes. it refuses to come alongside in equality for such alignment would threaten its privileges. esotericism does the work of spiritual mining for the human and receives occasionally nominal or posthumous praise

isn’t this painting an excessively bleak picture?

dance to disney if you dare

with giant ears

in robes

tasseled

gravelled

every statement of purpose is foreign to the essence of configuration and this essenceless essence is where esotericism plays. orthodoxy has a purpose, esotericism is foolish and uncouth. orthodoxy is clear and alert, esotericism is blank, drowsy, muddled. sadoos are punx – not of any movement but in the etymological sense … spiritual bottoms, trouble-makers, worthless, unproduced, rotten wood dust used as tinder keeping orthodoxy warm and safe

i’m unsure i can remain a sadoo – it is too much of the everything outside.

and yet of the nothing inside

sadoos laugh, though they don’t laugh in the manner of bipeds in arenas. they laugh in the manner of the last poets in their blues of madness

the white death of our people is a genocide in your trunk

our revolutions of silence are your sudating nightmares

sadoo is everything you’re not and refuse to be

isn’t sadoo then also not-sadoo and thus sadoos aren’t sadoos and orthodoxy sadoo’s esoteric home?

sadoo is everything that is not that is

sadoo is the highest degree of vitality given the most consummate expression

we will continue to revolt according to our modes of revolution

and are these not just walking in circles around yourselves?

nested carousels are our path and vision

the horses ride us up and down in aimless transport

we are the equine pooper-scoopers of ourselves

the horses ride us up and down

we are the equine pooper-scoopers

the horses ride us

we are the equine

the horses

we are

horses

are

techgnosis

i, fukky, sat down with sadoo natcanej in a cardboard box on the banks of the east river a few days ago. i had invited myself for dandelion root coffee and nettle soup numerous times over the years but the sadoo had always been too busy. i’m singing, it shouts. i’m reciting the genealogies of clouds. i’m floating on streams of dark visions. i’m staring into space waiting for shapes to crawl from their shapeless homes. if i had known sadoo natcanej less well, i would have thought it didn’t want to see me but i knew it loved me and could only continue loving me if it could continue being itself.

sadoo natcanej is the busiest person i know. people think presidents and deans and rock stars are busy because their external agendas are full, their calendars crammed. this is not untrue. but sadoo natcanej – who has no obligations in the socioeconomic world … its days, while an agenda is never obviously formed or required, are never empty, for even emptiness is a task.

i was in luck this past wednesday, however, when i hollered from a safe distance – it’s i, fukky!

fukky! i’ve got fresh dandelion root coffee brewing and a new batch of nettle soup on the go.

sadoo natcanej wasn’t one to talk about the news or any pains he or i had, the spider problems in his home, so i got right down to business. sadoo natcanej, i realize you don’t particularly care about the common names mainstream society might throw around, but as someone society might consider a hermit and eccentric, why do you live in manhattan, on the east’s edge, rather than, say, like thoreau, in a cabin in the woods?

why is one of those common words mainstream society throws around.

well can you at least talk about your experience being a recluse and madman in manhattan? and have you ever lived in the woods?

i’ve lived in the manhattan of the woods and now i live in the woods of manhattan. i have a great deal of respect for thoreau, frost – these pioneers of early sadooity. but those times were different. and people forget thoreau only did walden for a couple of years and wasn’t far from concord. frost was married, though not necessarily happily, and while ostensibly a nature poet certainly mingled with the people. as has been well pointed out by poets and philosophers over the past century, nature doesn’t effectively exist anymore – at least not in the way it used to.

what do you mean by this – nature obviously still exists?

nature is now simulated. all this has been well discussed. you know the texts. this simulation forms the molecular structure of the gaps between utopia and dystopia, creation and apocalypse – gaps i might add are ones that our flesh is now made of.

an aspect of what has been termed techgnosis?

right, but most are approaching techgnosis from the tech side. great. i’m interested though in approaching it from the gnosis side – what has classically been called mysticism. not an entirely fair separation i know, this tech and gnosis, but one i temporarily need to explore certain practices and ideas. 

the links between mysticism and religion are too complex to explore right now, other than to say mysticism has typically had a strained and even antithetical relationship with institutional religion – this is hardly surprising considering the latter emphasizes external structure and hierarchies and the former emphasizes interiority and the dissolution of hierarchy in light of the overwhelming present of an energy or energies that have been called god, the godhead, dao, emptiness, the totality of the universe … many other things … the name, as mystics perhaps know best and as the opening to the dao de jing well articulates, isn’t particularly important. in technology – just another form of institutional religion: often missed because of our easy confusion of name and spirit – the situation is no different; mysticism still strains. and i use the verb in its polysemous sense.

so i require the city – its garbage, noise, dirt, confusion, chaos, humanity and associated hubris, wealth and poverty, strivings – let’s call the city technology and the city in time techgnosis … but, being still in flesh – and humanity is as far as i can tell some time removed from being out of flesh – i am nature and i in time am also fleshgnosis. i require the city as environment, as counterpoint and fulfillment of my flesh.

mysticism – as many would have it … is not primarily a discipline of feeling. there are of course what might be considered the hysteric mystics, the erotic mystics, etc., and these have their validity, but many mystics – from eckhart to weil – are more rational than many scholars. i think even schrodinger in his essay what is life? more or less labels himself a thinker and mystics feelers – ironic since in that essay he assumes mystical attributes, adumbrating the discovery of dna structure. mysticism at its best i think unites reason, feeling, flesh, intuition – a kind of fleshtechgnosis before fleshtechgnosis. that is, mysticism is most simply knowing nature through one’s body and so today knowing also technology through technology.

technology electrifies flesh – this articulated thought is at least as old as mcluhan – and so humanity transfers its wars and scrimmages from the plane of nature to the plane of planes so to speak – that is, technology. and so our flesh becomes the plane and the plane our flesh. obvious visible signs are certain present emphases on sex, relationship, health and wellness, physiological mutations, spiritual hallucinogens, etc. this is fine, but human flesh may not be able to take the whole burden of nature ... or rather technology as prosthetic may not be able to maintain an adequate pace of the increasing burden.

i have spent time in what is called the country, the woods – and even now a colleague occasionally lends me its metallic mule so that i can dip into the forests for a time – peace is only possible there for cottagers, who use it as a cloister away from nature; they use it as a technology in nature to briefly escape the nature in technology. when i’m in the woods – darkness, solitude, bears, bugs – there is little peace, repose. i bring the electricity of the city with me, in my neurological structures. i live on the knife edge of light. urban war is in my synaptic fires. i feel the tension between the hunger of my technological flesh and the hunger of the darkness, bears and bugs, the starvation of solitude. this is all good for a time. but to make it my home? i don’t want to discount those who retreat there permanently but i do find that a kind of romanticism unsupported by time.

yet you retreat from the scrimmage of society?

do i? there are many ways to engage and the adapted and adapting path i'm on is a neglected one that comes with some robust and tested recommendations. i felt called when i was young to a lifelong pursuit of the vanaprastha phase in hinduism’s ashrama cycle. i’ve never believed in enlightenment, healing, moksha, liberation – the fourth and final stage of ashrama, sanyasa. the first and second stages (brahmacharya – student and grihastha – worker, householder) are what almost everyone devotes their whole lives to. fine. but i look for diversity of expression and lifestyle, i seek a thriving psychic and spiritual rainforest. vanaprastha in sanskrit means retiring into a forest. but for me the forest in the third millennium is the city and retiring doesn’t mean disengaging – i could argue that by living with few intermediaries between my body and the city, with few mercantile or (what are often called) productive distractions, i absorb more (or at least as much as, though differently) of the mechanical forest than one who works on the 42^nd floor of the chrysler building or teaches cultural studies at nyu and lives in a 10,000 square foot home in new canaan.

you referred earlier to the gaps between utopia and dystopia. can you speak more of these?

confusing one’s own condition and the human condition, and the human condition and the earth’s condition, and the earth’s condition with the universe’s condition, is intolerably sloppy. it leads to facile conclusions that because my life is bad, life is bad … or even, to move from the egocentric to anthropocentric … because humanity is bad or even doomed life is bad. life doesn’t care about us. that’s a beautiful thought. it’s only despairing from certain angles. i naturally accept these angles as true, but insufficient, even as i accept all thoughts and feelings as true but insufficient. hope, despair – these don’t and shouldn't disappear but do become lovers, dance partners, acquaintances if not friends, as we untie the knots of these confusions. and once we see this, it’s not hard to likewise begin experiencing many of our problems arising from a puerile need for life to care about us. and from attempting to force life – and in life i include humans – to care about us. i’m not classically religious but philosophical daoism has many good tips for accepting life, not confusing self and humanity or humanity and world, and craftily subverting hope and despair, antitheses between life and death. but ironically perhaps this subversion means accepting hope and despair, as they’re just aspects of life.

there are all these oppositions that aren’t simply the result of constructions called mental illness or sociopathy or enculturation or whatever. we say we are free, human nature is ours to define – then label pejoratively those who define their natures outside of established or being-established boundaries. sure, these boundaries shift. in certain environments – primarily core urban – one isn’t now stigmatized as a member of the lgbt community. this is obviously a good thing. but stigmatization has the curious habit of migrating from emerging areas to nascent experimental territories. conformism and inquisitional techniques – even if these have shifted from physical torture and murder to emotional and fiscal exiling – seem to me to be as alive as always.

i can sense you’ve got another meeting coming up so just one last question if i may.

there is much more to speak of – anonymity and its cousins as strategic tools, daoist perspectives on the relation of life and death in relation to innovation, education as destroyer rather than enhancer of privilege, … but, yes, i feel a vision coming on, so, certainly, one more question then hopefully we can talk again soon.

and by soon i knew it likely meant 5 or 10 years. how do sadoos fit into all of this?

technology attunes our flesh. our bodies become antennae, sensors. the resultant sensitivities birth manifestations that we call mental illness, electromagnetic hypersensitivity (regardless of any imagined or authentic causes), anomie, acedia, depression and anxiety, aboulia, and so on. rather than see these as sicknesses – and especially sicknesses that are only the challenges of the ‘sick’ rather than products of society and time, co-productions of the individual and society, the many in the one and the one in the many – i see them as opportunities, as aesthetic gifts. i give myself over to these things others call sicknesses, diseases, maelstroms. i give my body – nature – full permission to be an antenna. and i find being an antenna a full-time job. sadoo for me means this then: devoting myself to being what i find myself i am, this body is in this city in time – a radiating quivering sensor of all things. a techgnosis node? yes. but also a fleshgnosis node. a fleshtech or techfleshgnosis.

again, and as i think i’ve already said, i could say i enter this more from the gnosis or mystic side of things. but the mystic knows all sides work strangely in concert, despite seemingly sometimes radical opposition. these knowledges and practices – lived, felt, sensed, articulated or not, expressed, are what for me is a sadoo.

and the practice of devoting one’s bodytech to gnosis – the mystical practice – in an apparently irreligious but truly techreligious age – of living as a sensor of god (to combine what perhaps is new and old language, though perhaps not:  we have always been sensors of god  and might always be, our software versions only changing) – is not well facilitated by the society i was born into. it’s partly the physical climate. new york isn’t india. but it’s partly the religious formations of technocapitalism – which aren’t separate of course from the climate – which view those lacking external agendas and capital as weak, selfish, lazy, useless bums.

i view us as sadoos. we do not have an institution and don’t want one. we think flying around the world in planes to lecture against global warming is ridiculous. we assume in our flesh the fragmentations and unities of technology. we oppose technocapitalism in its present rabid forms, in part because of the tyrannical bifurcations i just alluded to, in part because technology and nature need to be in symbiosis rather than abutted in hierarchical abstraction, in part because money as a force has become too forceful, in part because democratic governmental and political systems aren’t democratic. we don’t oppose technology. we are technology. just as we once were god. but are we so fatefully this kind of technology, that kind of god? these questions might be sadoo.

thanks sadoo natcanej, it’s been a blast.

some nettles for the road?

oh no, i’m good.

sadoo 9.9

readers! being a sadoo is no harder or easier than being a manager of prunes, subway operator, european council president, shaman, sex worker, or farmer. but the challenges are different and the literature scarce. a sadoo’s distinction is partially that these other jobs – despite their vast differences – all trade in common concerns and values; they cooperate – even in their antitheses and struggles – in societal production and its members share a faith in time. a sadoo doesn’t necessarily discredit time, but neither does it affirm it; time for a sadoo is equal to potato or malediction. who would have faith in a potato? who would live inside it? who would give it greater credence than the billion billion things apart from time? and if you would say – but these other things (potatoes, maledictions, operators, faiths) themselves are functions of time and aspects of it, i, fukky, would say – this is faith! i have no evidence that an operator is more a function of time than time a function of an operator. becoming is a process of disillusionment and signs of becoming are the newborn illusions that arise.

to support, then, such doubts and happinesses, now and then i include in sadoos letters from our diverse community – members of the psychic rainforest (often threatened or extinct in the wild, members of the menagerie of the soul).

if you would write me –

  fukky risotto

  minto island lagoon

  c/o acteon group

  tuamotus

  mangareva islands

  pōrīnetia farāni

  gaul

– and i’ll respond to you when dew speaks and fire dreams.

today i’m pleased to respond to sadoo 9.9 of troff panny, who writes of an issue that engages and inspires us all – madness.

dear fukky,

when i was 11 – i remember the day vividly – i was in the upstairs bathroom of my parents’ home, eating boogers in the bathtub – and i realized i was destined to become a student of madness. while this truth has never left me, i paid it scant attention until i was 22 – the time one begins taking life seriously, and then set out to seek madness’ unknown paths. by 33 all i had learned were the paths madness wasn’t, and one of these is the path most call madness. for the names of the sane are designed to disguise their complicity in manufacturing the monsters they require to sustain the mirrors of their viability. being then the handmaid of a false sanity, i wanted no more to do with that madness than i did with sanity. by 44 i had ridden the often loud and colorful carousel of alternatives. shamans, hallucinogens, gurus, zen masters, prophets, creators, anarchists, ecologists, atavists, nudists, bohemians, polyamorists, retreat leaders, musicians, ngo ed’s, witch doctors, anti-psychiatrists … but all of them had web sites and were more interested in money and pleasure than madness. by 55 i had wandered through the most arcane reaches of knowledge scattered randomly in time and space. i had sought – and found – the most obscure writers – philosophers, poets, mystics – in the most obscure books in the most obscure libraries in the most obscure locations, loved only by dust. but in the end they only stated in more abstruse and neglected form what others said in commonplaces and loudly, from turrets, spires, and skyscrapers. by 66 i had stopped seeking and fell into myself, a curious child of chaos and void. and this falling was neither constructive nor destructive, enlightening nor despairing, ignorant nor educational, a step forward nor a step back. at 77, i turned to technology and became a cyborg, replacing as much of my body as possible with electronics, supplementing my newborn machine flesh with pharmaceuticals, inseparable from media, polydimensional sensuality, the edges of techgnosis. now, at 88, soon to die, doubting life’s seriousness, a concatenated mash of beeps and flashes, knowing there are no schools or mentors in madness, no guides, no curricula, no communities … one walks alone ... i write to you, administrator of sadoos.

sadoo 9.9 of troff panny

dear sadoo 9.9 of troff panny,

you have walked a path of madness and madness is only a path. your bathtub vision has been embodied and made metal. so we all walk and so visions turn to flesh and silicon, silicon and flesh to visions, these sublimations of the soul. thanks for sharing.

fukky

feature! interview

recently i, fukky, was strangely privileged to bump into sadoo kalinotot at an underground bar in bangkok. we drank and chatted for a few days and on the boat home i took the opportunity to distill our time into an interview. here it is, in all its pulpy glory, to inspire and annoy sadoos everywhere.

thanks sadoo kalinotot!

it seems to me that depression, horror, despair, rage, bitterness, …

envy?

envy’s ridiculous.

resentment?

resentment’s difficult because of what nietzsche did to it.

what did nietzsche do to it?

he resented it.   , … bitterness, fragmentation, confusion, volatility, indolence, vulgarity, …

salaciousness?

naturally.   , … vulgarity, suicidalism, cannibalism, …

cannibalism?

of oneself.  , … cannibalism, madness, all sorts, are all unavoidable aspects of the ongoing human experience and thus ….

but what about the other things?

the other things?

love, peace, harmony, cooperation, justice, camaraderie, generosity, forgiveness, nobility, happiness, communication?

absolutely, those too.  except communication – communication i’d define as the totality of everything we've said and are going to say and haven't said and are not going to say.

including autocannibalism?

autocannibalism might very well be the supreme form of expression.

true. let’s become practical for a moment. how does one get through the day?

great question. i’d say by being happy, volatile, salacious, forgiving, raging, resentful, horrified, depressed, cooperative, harmonious, indolent, suicidal, noble, every form of mad, and eating oneself.

sounds like a tall order. i mean for each day.

i wouldn’t be prescriptive about it. you know, allow each day to happen. twig in the river stuff.

what about those calm happy people who are calm and happy every day?

eliminate them.

isn’t that a bit harsh? and what about those raging volatile ones who are only raging and volatile? don’t they get a bit tiresome?

eliminate them too. i’m interested in the repletions – the holographic monads who, by being holographic, are not monads and yet are. anarchy remains and must remain a theoretical experiment until society is replete with repletions.

it could tolerate some non-repletions?

that remains to be seen but let’s assume the non-repletions through the usual principles of conformity don’t necessarily become repletions but at least aren’t douchebags, douchebags being defined as calm and happy every day or raging and volatile every day. anarchy requires individuals entire, but entire is too often taken as a subset of entire. a repletion is innately all of humanity and thus justice is actualized by the parts autocorrecting themselves by containing the whole. no law! for law has emigrated to its natural home before it had to be institutionalized – distributed throughout the soul. i am judge and judging, jailer and jailed and jury and defense and prosecution. all this institutionalization ... wholly redundant and tiresome. totally fourth millennium bce. plus you have to work!

what does this do to diversity?

consummates it. extends it everywhere. yes, if one isn’t weeping when one wakes up, laughing mid-morning, screaming in the afternoon, and beatifically mute in the evening, what are you?

or presumably mute upon waking and screaming in the evening. what does it do to productivity, action, volition?

does that matter?

good point. let’s talk more about eating ourselves.

yes. we’ve eaten others enough. there are many many humans. there are not only too many of us but too much of each of us. let’s eat that excess. let’s become the first species to learn how to effectively use ourselves as a fuel source without annihilating ourselves. this puts our natural violent, destructive, and barbaric orientations to good use. finally.

what does this have to do with being a sadoo?

now we’re into the exciting stuff. everything. as many sadoos have pointed out – sadoo rianchada, sadoo ghar-zahhi, sadoo g9^e,k, sadoo ÿ©, sadoo to name a few – sadoos are all about everything. a sadoo is everything in a something made nothing.

or nothing in an everything made something.

exactly.

but i thought sadoos skirted around definitions.

we skirt, we trouser. our sartorials are flexible, so are our prepositions.

how committed then are you to any of this?

about 11 parts.

out of how many?

that is a question. if i had to come up with a definition of sadoo, it might be an aspect that questions out of how many?

i see.

or i count. and the counting’s never done because there’s so much of us. and then we’re eating ourselves so we’re subtracting. we’re this then we’re that so we’re dividing. these are just the simple operations. we’re mathematics really. words are just excuses for more numbers.

hey, thanks sadoo kalinotot, it’s been really good.

hey fukky, as always.

maybe bump into you in terengganu sometime.

you bet your dingleberries.

artbrutifactica

a submission has been sitting rarely on my mons the last few months, from a sadoo ginveda of raruraresasn, who presents a philosophy of outsider art.  after discussing the work with some of my siblings in sadooity, i, fukky, have decided in consultation to post it on our sadoo management site, as it’s more than unprobable that there may be minimally some and occasional overlaps and linkages between sadoo ginveda’s concepts of outsider art and the myriad practices of sadoos, recognizing that, as always, i, fukky, make no claim to agree with the following thoughts as i make no claim to agree with anything.

outsider art

sadoo ginveda of raruraresasn

let me begin by saying i consider all true art outsider art.  while shakespeare, to use a classic case, may have had the capacity and conditions to appeal to the masses, his craft enabled him to mock his audiences without most of them realizing it or any of them being able to prove it.  which is why he kept his head.  a more obvious case:  although van gogh now hangs in the world’s most prestigious museums and commands some of the most expensive prices in the art world, the average citizen – and the very definition of citizen is average – would, in person, find van gogh challenging, boring, and probably impossible.  he painted from the outside – or we could say, to refer to mysticism – the inside:  the inside that most insiders avoid.  this avoidance puts them in the crowded inside, as to step truly into the inside is to to leave the crowd, enter the void and then, by the insiders, be experienced as an outsider … an experience that inevitably affects and sometimes kills (artaud’s notion of van gogh being suicide by society describes this process well) the true insider.

you will say – so let’s just acknowledge it at the outset – this inside-outside insider-outsider true-false stuff is binary and so false.  admittedly, binaries are always more nuanced in life and become polynaries.  yet this is not the point.  certain creators may be sufficiently oriented to multiple worlds so as to be able to move between them (i don’t speak of the common artist whose primary orientation is recognition and money but of those who manufacture something distinctive and powerful from their horrible freedom and vision).  look at a classic and relatively unknown outsider – vivian maier - whom the insiders refuse to accept to any significant degree although her photos are far more striking and original than many of those we see at most galleries.  what i speak of is art that arises from a human being gifted with sufficient vision and distance from society that it cannot help but disturb, provoke (or more commonly be ignored, mocked, misunderstood).

what i am saying is that art always arises from a lack of concern about what concerns most – comfort, reputation, security, prestige, remuneration, possession – and rather leaps into the voids of a self-world relationship and forms from that formlessness.  a great sadoo – laurie spiegel – removed herself from the music scene in the 1970s for this reason.

the movement from void to establishment is well known.  we see it tediously and catastrophically in religion (jesus to the vatican, lao tse to a daoist priesthood, the rig veda to lululemon), but the movement in art may be no less tragic.  we’re unlikely to have any establishment built based on pessoa’s the book of disquiet – part of the brilliance of the book is its devastating ability to subvert this possibility – but we see it in minor ways with artaud, jarry, blake, acker, weil and in major ways with various other names and works. 

the establishment does not adjudicate what is art.  it adjudicates what is acceptable for its purposes.  and the terms of acceptance are the same as any guild – whether it be scholarship, postal work, or politics – compromise, force, conformity.  that art makes it into the establishment is not due to any thanks to the establishment, which accepts anything that sufficiently pays once the cost in blood has been laundered.

of course, outsider art grew from dubuffet’s idea of art brut –

those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere – are, because of these very facts, more worthy than the productions of professionals. after a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade.

what i’m advocating is what i call aesthetic mysticism or the hallucinogen arts as the root of all arts.  many sadoos have written about the former.  an academic such as philip wood has written from the scholarly voice about both.  the works of aloïse corbaz are vivid portraits of the imagination and the range of human experience – a unity of creativity, for she cured herself by ceasing to fight against her illness, by choosing to cultivate it and make use of it instead, a more powerful and effective way than those the scholarly and therapeutic industries offer.  to have a career as an artist – from formal education through the necessary grant-writing, networking and promotional verve – is antithetical to the creative spirit.  the void does not understand it.

society is tyrannical and selfish, made up with institutionalized virtue, fashioned with processed blood.  it takes the products creators have paid for, often with their lives, often with poverty, exile, and humiliation, and, laughingly, banks, sells, and buys them.  this is why the artist is the new saint – something nietzsche foreshadowed and those like pessoa, artaud and genet readily grasped and articulated. art brut of course has not only birthed the human world but is its continuous mother and society’s relentless disregard for it highlights a continued spiritual misogyny which modernity – regardless of its isms and readymade virtues – conveniently embraces in the emerging paternalistic egaliarchy.

there is no art that is not outsider art.  it only makes it to the inside – or, rather, from the inside of the inside to its outside – by transactional movements, movements many creators are unable, genetically, to make.

let us modify creators, then.  as is happening.  let us give them pills and money.  let us give them lovers and dental plans and tenure.  then art will have been purchased and god – the question – will have evolved into what may be its next necessary stage:  a networked glyph around the neck of the hip.

not just outsider art but outsider thought. not a museum without walls but museums without museums. not classrooms without walls – classrooms without classrooms. for outsider art transcends boundaries, originating without them and without them as part of the vision or process.

what i want to see is humans free to create what they want in ways they want, aside and apart from being told what is expected, tried, acceptable.  i would like to remove names from art and ensure everyone who wants to create receives a base minimum annual salary providing sufficiently for living needs and a few modest luxuries.  i want to see the art establishment crumble on its coddled ass.  i want all intermediaries removed between void and perceivers.  i want the selfish greedy tyrants of techno-capitalism to work on rice fields for five years.  i want a new species.  i want a new earth.  for i am not impressed with the one given me and see no reason i should conform to it.  it has become solid, arrogant, fixed, dogmatic, fiscal and objective.  you say it is the given, the pragmatic.  but we heard the same shit 500 years ago; its name was god.

i would live in dream.

i have sought poverty through excess as the available means of poverty did not seem to me to fit the spirits of the age.  whether i have achieved it or not – whether it is possible to achieve i don’t know – i don’t know, for in this process i also have come to doubt the difference between poverty and wealth.

i believe in a society in which all – and the all is contextually and ethically maintained at levels at which this is possible – have access to nutritious food, adequate and symbiotic shelter, playful and beneficial touch and sex, and healthy creative materials, tools, and environments, comradeship and community, all appropriate to individuals, groups, and species.