Ptychology

The moment -- the air, things, it -- surges and breathes, as if any instant will belong again to that apprehension, which, leaving off again, it is not, but past.

 

Bereft -- character. Gratuitous. The special case of removal of the other. We always live this mortal absence of the other, survive, haunted by this presence/absence. But what the experience of a tragic, abject removal (estrangement, departure) makes, gives: the personality is this displacement of (towards) the other.

"Dans sa grâce légère, elle avait quelque chose d'accompli, comme le détachement qui succède au regret."
[In its airy grace there was, indeed, something definitely achieved, and complete in itself, like the mood of philosophic detachment which follows an outburst of vain regret.]
-- Proust

Engineering of emotional, psychological landscape.
psychography / sedimentology / geopythonology / reticulate
psysmo seismo-
typo-
topo-
stichos - verse, line, row
strephein, estropha (strophe) - to turn, twist, twine. Streptos - twined, wreathed.
Deigma - sample, pattern

ptych- fold, layer Greek (ptuche) triptych
ptychology

reticulate - ethmology
1658, from L. reticulatus "having a net-like pattern," from reticulum "little net," dim. of rete "net," which probably is cognate with Lith. retis "sieve" (Greek - ethm-, ethmoid [cf., suggestion of "ethnos" and "etymo"]), and from either the root of L. rarus "thin" or another PIE root meaning "twist, bind." Reticular is attested from 1597.

You can't get there from here.
You can't build here, so here's how we're going to build here.
Gaps, breaks, ruptures -- discontinuities are the continuity. Scars, faults.
Building a bridge over the bottomless pit. The negotiation of the abyss. Jury-rigged. Workaround for the incommensurable.
You're in an empty, white room. The cold is outlining the pain. Why else these impulses but to change the situation? But this is the clinic. This is your soul, the account of you outside.

 

That there is no subjective experience of death, that death is only the experience of loss of the other, is what makes us a matter of the other, and this a matter of mortal absence -- what makes "I" (being) bereft. It's as if our foundation were a hole -- the gap between us is the incommensurable and the irrevocable, but ties us to each other all the more. This is the net: the tissue, the limit, the overlap between gaps. This is ptychology.

 

There is no way for the essay on ptychology to avoid the performance of what it is referring to, describing. Juxtaposition of sometimes apparently unrelated things. Metaphorical play. Gaps. Continuity of disconuity, vice versa.
Trying to build a cloud armed with a ruler. Knowing the weight, the bearing, the contour, pressure, the temperature of things -- what we are even left with as the abstraction. The psycho-climatic gist of a person, context, passage. The complication of this, the layers and folds, the snaking and reticulation, is that each pass is not merely a representation of some source, but another context, another experience. This is why memory/forgetting must be as much respected -- understood, accounted for -- in what it generates, what is produced, even as error, legend, myth, as this being a lack against actuality. This too is actuality. This does not mean the reverence or the reconstructed or projected necessity of this mythopoetic construct, its object, but heeded as operation.
Brick wall. To reverse the bearing of fact as the horse and rider: to make this fact that bears against me become the fact that I manipulate, that I ride.
Citation layers: sublimation. Holding one affect up with another, another affective level, so that one neither merely represses, nor leaves to suffer as such.

Down the highway -- mesmerizing. Again, the idea of this as sensuous, as a body, but more precisely, what this sensation of glancing, gliding is. The highway not so much a skin, a surface, for caressing, as for -- flowing, skimming -- some other term for a kind of immersion in transience. Like tangential immersion. A vein of surface. But, as a road, a way, there is this paradox: running, running, running, just going, as if going itself could be going away, but one is still routed, connected, by these veins, to what one is escaping from. Stop the car! Get out! Run across the road, sideways, perpendicular, as if fleeing a tornado, the vortex. How can I get to the here that doesn't lead back to there?

 

Tree outside office window. Its significance and indifference. The indifference of significance and vice versa. How to describe the aspect of this tree -- holding out / held out (to me) -- this hand of significance for me to take, as if any sense of the figure of such. Not even the beauty of this moment -- the assemblage, clutters, rustlings, leaves, flickers -- not even the poignant understanding of all this in turn, the emptiness of the emptiness -- a Chinese box telescope, where the most inner contains the whole. And is thus a hole. (Next day.) Clouds blowing by quickly. The sweep of the glancing, glancing of the sweep. Tree blowing seems contained, cloud blowing seems to pass me, as if I am contained as the whole horizon by its movement.

Ptychology -- the [non]science -- the non-seeing -- the accounting for gaps. Which is the accounting of the impossible, impossible accounting, because what can't be accounted for. The non-accounting of that which is not the seen, present, etc. Patterns -- relations.
We are composed of forgetting.
What we remember, what we take with us, as the abstract, is a pressure, a temperature, a weight, a contour -- of a person, event, situation.
Convex, concave.
Fact bears down, upon -- the irrevocable. Fact is so qua this factor, this factor of the weight we cannot get out from under, what we cannot get around. But then this can be grasped. The very un-encompassable, the very impenetrability and solidity of the whole thing, can be picked up as lightly as that trick of holding the fingers around an object in the distance. I take this fact as my own. That load of bricks, I turn over as mine to ride.

You're thinking of . . . a brick wall!
-- Village of the Damned

Let me ride on the wall of death one more time.
-- Richard and Linda Thompson

 

I've taken up that, you know, holding up the way all this works, and it's like a climate, or a meteorology, the way these pressures and temperatures work, are effects and causes at the same time. It's as if the emotions are not only reactions, but have their own effect on each other. I think the Greeks were keen to this, with something like "catharsis." But then what were the Greeks not keen to? But I've even created a new "science" for this and, to honor the Greeks once again, I've used Greek terms, roots: ptychology. The root, "ptych," is layer or fold, and is in such terms as "triptych." It's my study of the reticulated python of geology, of the net and how the gaps in it make it up, of the radial rather than merely linear, of relations, of the things that aren't things, no things, no thing, things that can't been seen, grasped, comprehended, therefore a science of non-science (and vice versa).

fine instrument of sadness

incredible mulching mechansim

Why I hold out for ill will. Don't get me wrong. This is not a choice or a decision. To take up arms against. To take up psychic arms. This is a holdout that is being held out. Why I cannot extinguish ill will. For another psychic revenge is this certain form of the good, of forgiving, of being higher or more honorable. Why do we know how to act? Two paths: abstraction and experience. This "intuition" they speak of, these reflexes or "good" sense of how to act, are no less susceptible to this ignorance, this ignorance that is the beyond of the order of knowledge.
I have no choice. I have only bad choices. This is my being held hostage. By the other. By the rejection of the other.
Rejection is worse than murder. Again, don't get me wrong. (This expression.) This is not to accrue some good credit of bad, to heap on myself the value of suffering. Rejection as the "option" of excluding a person from one's life without excluding them from life. Whereby they survive you.

To forswear vengeance is to chain oneself to forgiveness, to flounder in pardon, to be tainted by the hatred smothered within.

Revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim.

-- Cioran

What do we do with the past? Put it in a drawstring bag?

I have done nothing but make of myself an inappropriate gift. What could a gift be but inappropriate? A misappropriation. What makes us belong in an exchange? I can only give myself: betray.

A little snag of wind and light drowning in openness.

 

I now have the sort of desolate mood that is apt for these plains which used to give me this sense of desolation.

This spread remains. The spread stays with me. What to call this aggolmeration of the back of things, the cracks of things, the streets, the gaps, the cracks in the sidewalk. This is what I come back to, what I'm turned back to, over and over, persists with me through moods, the backdrop of one or another, a familiar sheen, or cloud, even to what is alienating or depressing about it. This is the suburb of my mental state. This opening on is also a closing, at once the niche and expanse, the day beneath the day.

My moments of joy or contentment are played on a stage to a sparse audience. At the back of this echoing auditorium my disconsolation watches as a parent waiting for me to be finished with my conceit.

hope + disgust = anguish

The energy of exuberance becomes rage. Or billows to make me precarious.

We belong like leaves, superficial. The depths we hide are those of folds and space. This is the complexity of character. Masks thin banners rippling. The profusion of feeling, of sense, of emotion, the most profound effect or manipulation of «being» is this shimmering, this parallax, of the slightness of it, the ephemeral, that absence is message, referent, coefficient of any content.

Ptychology: Did I say I invented it? It used me like a vent. It in-vented me.

 

Scars and ravages. Pushed and pulled by lack, want. Life fills with loss.

Some notes on ptychology:

The way humors change and affect each other apart from "external" causes.

Disposition is interstitial, mood is always impetus, vector, relation. Thus the disposition towards "things," which are nonetheless so.

The meteorology of the geology of psychology.

The reticulated python of sedimentation.

Radial rather than linear progression.

The cause of effect and the effect of cause.

The gaps of the net. The inference and suggestion in pattern, the not-there dimension that gives there sense. The science of non-science (cf. seeing), or perhaps by virtue of that, vice versa. The sense of non-sense.

The sense of sense. "Vision" is more properly "like" night vision. What is looked directly at cannot be seen, but like a fog breaks up on approach, congeals with distance.

Expert in the use of nothing.

"L'ensemble que nous ne connaissons que comme déplié et dont le repliement dérobe l'infinie richesse de 'l'une seule fois' qui s'y suplicie."
[The ensemble that we only know as unfolded and of which the folding up cloaks the infinite richness of the "only once" which is tormented there.]
-- Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

This is my disaster. These are my ruins. This is my rubble.

 

A day is a block of time as a blank, more impassive than solid, that evaporates as soon as you arrive.

The distance of desire. Seeing a bird of prey in the sky, the sign of my distance of desire. The distance of that sign, sign of remoteness, not being in the place of that distance -- avatar of remove. The distance of projection. Does death bring me to circle? Can I think this distance? Can this figure consume me, my appetite, my prey?

Openness outside/inside desolation, sense of expanse or dissipation, a treachery of plots -- movies
emptiness comes to reside here.
Desolation travels with me.
They tried to settle, ancient tribes, western towns, etc.
inside/outside -- this moves around with us.
I went the way of the dinosaurs.

I apologize for the ones that I married, but not for the ones I mistakenly buried.

Ptychology -- inertial frames. The idea of a "cloud" as a thing, as if its own evanescence gave way to weight (the very notion, contradiction notwithstanding, of metaphysics, it's own paradoxical disposition with "object"). Axes (xs again). Thus everything -- matter -- is a factor of dispersal, the tension of its resistance to decay. (How did Einstein see time and gravity as this tension?)

I am a vent. A passage. Even the trauma or the stress of feeling invaded presupposes this fixation with the completeness of a vessel that, as the imago, I project on others. The ob-ject is also the ideal of the subject. The jealousy of the thing. But to be perceptive, sentient, is to be already the transfer, the passage, the conduct(ion/ing) of this external/internal. The relatedness of this, the attachment. That "environment" (or system) that is the individual within its environment, and that is always decomposed teleologically. The sense of this subject as value. As exchange. (What value isn't exchange value?) Subject as subject to. Subjection.

Detachment raised to theme, governing term. Grand or broadest cast. Everything will have its detachment.

 

The breeze blows indifference. This is the peace it tells us. Detachment. Impassive. Tell yourself your story of your solitude, tranquility, abandon, detachment -- therapy, meditation? -- self. Feel the soaring, floating thrill of your detachment. How will you console yourself with knowing no one is audience to this? As if you could wrap yourself up in the detachment from everything.

In every face, the terror of my own hope.

Every morning I get up and drive half an hour, and I haven't got anywhere. Drive 100 years.
Do they see this bubble in a bubble? Burrowing a hole inside the hole to get out?
Each night we wind ourselves in the sheets and fall into the grave. Each day we revive, resurrect.

A place where nothing happens. The place of placelessness. The code of organization, the name of the set, is as much the place. Place the matter of. (And this changes, too.) Pink blush in the sky. Open-ness, the emptiness, the variable, the potential -- of person, anyone, a person, against the fall of events, the dice as they have been cast.

 

Movement -- contrast of the person in a home, isolated, still, at once cozy and cold, hidden and deserted, contrasted to various kinds of clamor, "event," fanfare, hyperbole, glossed, made equivalent, abstracted. Meaning is this rub between significant and insignificant.

The yellow flowers on the median of the highway. Perhaps weeds. This little patch, here. Life clutching wherever, giving off, without any ultimate grasp, without any necessary or absolute recognition.

Ptychology: Going from the concave of everything trapping in existence, everything having the sense of futility, piling up, one thing after another, each its own futility and compounding -- everything this character of being the futility of others, of being abandoned to my own conceit, deserted with it, having to bear this back on myself. Then, morning, it's made fabric again. The sky, the horizon, is suddenly the fabric of this openness, and suddenly even this abandonment, this desertedness, this futility of conceit, is the gratuitousness that makes me the vent, again. The concave turns convex.

 

The color of the obverse of color. Exuding impression.

Weakness.

By depression I celebrate the strength of strength, the strength as if over strength that is the strength as if under it. The shadow or the hollow of power "itself," of pouvoir, of potens, of being able to. Not overcoming, but under, within. Wind without sails. The interval or lapse of wind. The indefinite, like the greatest, vaguest "it," that is there when all power and effort and strain and grasp expire, fade as fireworks. All power is this cost of time, decline, decay, its own energy, and even more swiftly every finer joint and convolution. The not happening that is already there in the happening of the not, a step ahead, a step under, the obstinacy of all idleness and detachment and indifference to even be grasped, to even be made positive -- to be.

What conquers conquering in advance. If power, strength are attractive, irresistible, then why not what ravages all power? Sickness, decay, decrepitude, exhalation, exasperation, stillness, quieting. Sleep. Lack of will.

Inability. The simple "failure" in advance that is the heart of all power, its "spirit," if such can be made from this not. But perhaps spirit has always been this negation, this black hole (Hegel not far off). Power is imaginary -- privation, lack, wish, born of what's not -- and this is the source even of all the terror wrought for the sake of it, the monstrous "need" to force others to imagine as one wants the self to be.

Of course this is no less foolish, the very same foolishness. To try to outbid this. To take up for oneself the relinquishing of the self, that happens to the self, the lack or limit of faculty of the self. But there is the situation of seeing where one is forced to see the cost of all this wanting to be able.

Is this not the nobility that has always been -- losing? Is this not the nobility that everyone must undergo? A tribute to it, like "Kanal."

Certainly there is no living without losing. But in any sort of contest or competition, sport or games or whatever people think of as some official achievement or acquisition, a result of comparison, there is scarcely anyone who has not lost, and even those who have not -- the rare career undefeated -- know what loss means, even experience it in portion if not result. But if there were ever a career, a life-long experience of never losing, that would be the loss of knowing losing and loss.

But in that case, as Derrida said, only the immortal can die.

 

All that cozy, hidden feeling, as with boxes or "caves" made of blankets as kids, the vicarious and gratuitous cultivated in every other way, all this pretending and play and writing with all "life," as they say, and then comes a capsizing, and you are pitched, to a spot of insignificance you never would have imagined even giving it the charm as such. A corner, an intersection, a joint. Such a bizarre crossing and looping of time, progressions, strangeness and familiarity -- quaint and uncanny, blank and squalid and humid with pathos -- returning as a ghost to a place that doesn't recognize you.

I had a flash across the years, you know, that way we have -- that really you can't avoid and is actually a kind of condition of comprehension that can cause other problems, aberrations, but sometimes occurs to you more acutely, as an epiphany or poetry or a brilliant movie montage -- of seeing things as a sudden juxtaposition, another one, a reshuffle of the cards, of this moment and a past one, which perhaps hasn't come up in a while or hasn't just so. Something about kids, other countries, stages of the journey that include homesickness, and then something of the part about being out the door already in your head, and there we were, here, in this spot now, this place, so much a matter of having been replaced, a matter of the curves and detours of our "times," and even how the more particular spot -- this particular spot with all the details we'd have to figure out which way to order, by which calculus of impression -- and knowing that the secret of knowing is having come so far to realize we are nothing but the consequences, the effects, the wrinkles and ravages of the conceit of knowing. I suddenly had a flash of when I had shoved off, so ready to be unattached --
-- and it was as if the contrast between the convex and concave, the world turned out like a horizon, or turned outside in to bear down on us. Not, of course, that there isn't still this immense and imposing emptiness before us, this vast blank page that is all the weight of world and time, but the way that this felt then, there, in that place that was us, compared to now. How tender and fragile we think of it in rear projection for the sake of youth, children now if not only as stand-ins for that younger us we foster, when we were so happy then to be unmoored.

I thought, too, of the sense or ability to make any place, or perhaps merely have your place regardless of the place you are in, that, for all the vaunting of this as my own faculty, I often think only others capable of. (Of course, this is how it works in general, this I and other thing.)
What's the point? That's just it. The pointless point. How to even put it? Something about going from the thrown-ness of then to the thrown-ness of now. The open horizon of back then seemed to be the promise that it was all going someplace, that those big wide-open areas you were using to get away from what seemed well-worn, spent, emptied paths, were going to resolve. But wherever you go, there is only another horizon, another gaping in the day, and now, "here," again -- by Heraclitus the river we don't step in twice, the home we never go to again -- while there is all the reason of circumstance, turn, for the open landscape and the stormy climate to suit me ("See how the elements obey? / Eyes are blue / Skies are grey / Nothing I do can make you stay / I'm glad it will rain today"), there's an even broader expanse to this. It's a kind of emptiness itself of all the values, the muteness of all the signs that were such triggers and prompts back then.

It's not that there is some solace in devastation, though there is that, too (and anyone who has been through it knows what the real trick of that "in" is, not platitudinous or merely consoling). At least in part, that sneaky little exploitation we do of turning any effect into a thing to have, a bauble, a figure for play (something which is at once the thing as object, acquisition, and the failure of acquisition, of ultimate grasp, the fetish aspect of any thing). Or even in finding in devastation an even greater sense of gratuitousness to hide in. But there is the very great effect of devastation -- one type or another, I make no pretense that mine is of the scale of others -- to wipe out all the sort of clamorous vanity or self-consciousness to the interest or value in everything else -- and what that "else" would be -- if not everything.

Suddenly the palate is cleared of a particular sort of vanity. That's the new look to the emptiness, the drowning openness, the horizon. You see the play of things as it is without your own pretense that they have any connection to your own worth -- as conditioned by you, your demand or control, your conceit. This is not just a downer, not just the deprecation you turn on yourself, sour grapes, but what lies even beyond that. It is an extremely beneficial way of bringing home, through this sort of experience, what you may have known nonetheless, understood in a more abstract or generous or enthusiastic or dispassionate way. Loss makes it pointed in a whole other way.

It's actually through this that you see how making your worth out of other things, the world, is not the foregone conclusion of ego, the petitio principii of your own worth. If you equal all before you even know what any of it is, what it entails, and if anything else only comes to equal you, then you are tautology. Your all equals zero, and can only be multiplied by that. Loss demonstrates this better than the sense of gain. It demonstrates, at least (though this is certainly not minor), that there is something else to lose, thus any value for the self. It demonstrates this value is not presumption, but has radical, drastic, abject, incommensurable otherness.

Maybe it's not worth all this. Maybe it's not worth the trouble, the effort, the bother of articulating. And maybe it's not worth articulating to you. Maybe you're not worth all this or shouldn't be. Or, maybe, precisely, you're worth precisely not telling this. This much. However much or little that may be. But then, as with my dreams, it happens in spite of me. Perhaps the asymmetry of the significance. I think you may appreciate this as much as I do, even if we'll never get to the end of whether the similarity is utterly different.

Valence from valentia, "strength, capacity."

capable -- 1560s, from L.L. capabilis "receptive," used by theologians, from L. capax "able to hold much, broad, wide, roomy;" also "receptive, fit for;" adj. form of capere "to take, grasp, lay hold, catch, undertake, be large enough for, comprehend," from PIE *kap- "to grasp" (cf. Skt. kapati "two handfuls;" Gk. kaptein "to swallow, gulp down;" Lett. kampiu "seize;" O.Ir. cacht "servant-girl," lit. "captive;" Welsh caeth "captive, slave;" Goth. haban "have, hold;" O.E. hæft "handle," habban "to have, hold;" see have).

The treachery of love. The sumptuousness of memory regardless of, or including, the amount of anguish or pain it can have. Of course this is part of the passion -- the very history of the word. But there's a way that these signs, these abstractions, substractions -- parts, fragments, fractions, fractures, tracks -- are the allure of place and time as occult. Isn't this what "moment" is? Doesn't moment "contain," isn't it this valence, conduit, vent, what it can hold because of allowing it to pass in and out. (Cf. the sky, again.) This is the turn on even the figurative itself, in turn, as it is the turn on the "literal," adequatio. What keeps the turn of the figurative turning even on itself. There is no ulterior, only ulteriorization.

There is figure because there is sky; no figure can do without this sky, the air, the space, the nothing also that inflates meaning, that spaces meaning. The space of meaning.

The economy of envy, even resentment -- another economy of this valence, container.

Looks like an A1 predicament
But I'll worm
worm
worm worm
worm worm
worm worm
worm worm
worm worm
worm worm
worm worm
worm worm
worm worm
worm worm
worm worm
worm worm
worm worm
worm worm
worm
worm
worm
worm
worm worm my way right out of it

-- Mark E. Smith