ontological terror

[gwendolyndot]

I spend a lot of time thinking about the phallus. (For now, we will treat the phallus as shorthand for the patriarchy, the power and authority organized around men.) When you’re not a man, you end up studying this phenomenon because of its glaring impact on every aspect of your life.

But you know who really needs to be thinking about the impact of the phallus on this world? Man, the very being that wields this appendage of difference. I become despondent thinking about how deeply the rampage of the phallus has sunk into our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It impacts how we think about ourselves, how we think about each other, and how we interact in relationship, down to the most minuscule details in energetic dynamics (from stranger, acquaintance, friend, partner).

Who interrupts whom? Who talks the most? Who asks more questions? Who listens more? Who expects their emotions to be managed by others? Who assumes their feelings are justified but belittles or dismisses others? Who explains something ad nauseam without allowing for back and forth discourse? And you know who can help this problem? Men. In some ways, this request feels insane, like asking the colonizer to change for the colonized.

If you are a man and think you’re not part of the problem, that somehow you are above or beyond this, you are more entangled in it than you realize. Those outside the structure are forced to analyze for sake of survival and safety. The ones inside lie around eating grapes from everyone else’s hands.

Interrogate yourself. None of us is perfect and we all have work to do, but those of us who don’t have a phallus can’t be out here doing reparative work by ourselves. You don’t need to be working on this perfectly, but to actually just work on it. Without your effort, it is continually reproduced. We are starving, dying. Do you care?

[gwendolyndot]

charge me up charge me up tortured and magnetic tortured and magnetic sleeping with the devil, he spins me into glass the machine is in the eye transferred, if time had a sound can i overcome the limits of the body? i have an iron core molten hot lava, churning death comes nearer every day i'm burning away the pain and i love your severity refine me into dirt i'll draw you out make you open like a flower devour me into nothing consume me as i was meant to be i am a fortress the key lives in my flesh but i'm a rock do you have the chisel? i set the grave, ready to go under just fabric of water fabric of water

i have an iron core molten hot lava, churning death comes nearer every day i'm burning away the pain and i love your severity refine me into dirt i'll draw you out make you open like a flower

[gwendolyndot]

the mandates of heaven rule over me yin and yang give it space to live in harmony i love to feel you smile at me unwind, radiate the only way to see to love is to feel pain the death of desire the copy of a moment touch my inner being call my shape into question transgression shatters this veil we're born of corruption without profanity, there's nothing sacred suffocate my heart allow me to expand to love is to feel pain the death of desire the copy of a moment may i relish the night silence is violence (this rupture will lead you to me) silence is violence (this rupture will lead you to me) there's safety in truth when the walls fall down, my essence discontinues i'm excavated my secret labryinth forget your name, forget mine too i know you wanna get lost but you dare to hide from me oh shadow keeps the light in the realm of desire to love is to feel pain the death of desire the copy of a moment

[gwendolyndot]

intimacy demands risk. it demands vulnerability. if you cannot risk or be vulnerable, then you cannot experience intimacy.

[gwendolyndot]

In between each tooth there is a separation of desire. It becomes located outside the frame of the mouth. When the mouth disintegrates there’s nothing but dust. What can you do with dust but collect it across time and pack it into stone? It’s like holding a contaminated object, but you need more information, so you turn on the microscope. You find yourself studying for years, taking meticulous notes on your findings, and running the data through various statistical analyses. But everything comes up unintelligible, leaving you to symbolically interpret the data, trying to ascribe some kind of coherence to a system that contains no inherent meaning. You question why you’ve spent so much time studying a dumb contaminated stone. You turn off the microscope, turn off the lights, destroy the data, and abandon the lab.

[gwendolyndot]

I’m at the edge of the land once again gray skyed windswept into new territory forever gone always remembered if it’s not something it’s nothing the difference between the two indistinct yet plural and full of fissures and webs of meaning it’s like a game of chutes and ladders sliding up and down up and down but someone’s cheating and I swore it wasn’t me but I’m revealing myself to be full of deceit and hidden impressions of cunning machination I’ve interacted with the Transaction I can’t escape from being carved into a tool and what use am I what use are you when you stop and look you understand that you fulfill all sorts of purposes and outcomes and you have to stop again and look again and wonder again about the architecture around you imposing its will and you really might confront how you actually enjoy being subjugated, how you enjoy the rush of victory, how you enjoy sliding down the chute again and again and again but what if you could break down the ladder, the chute and the lattice holding it all together, what would be left but empty space and the silence that cuts like ice and you remember the most perfect tool with which to build a new world - that mighty tool given to you by the Transaction and all around you the air vibrates waiting for your first move

[gwendolyndot]

I feel intensely I can’t stand it I can’t take it but I can and I am I’m taking it I’m allowing it I’m consenting to the tension to the shaping of the new and it’s a sad torture and I don’t melt into the reckoning I use it to transform myself I experience then I go into the fire to analyze and integrate the beings of fate spin me up and ring me out squeezing out drops of nectar that I take into my mouth this is what being an alchemist means I alchemize myself I am the muse I am the creator and destroyer of worlds I was meant to come into this body and I can finally express myself as the wild hungry creature that I am now I follow the labyrinth with fluid and flexible steps and I have no doubt about what I deserve so be sad be happy be wild I am building the structure to be dense shallow and insane

[gwendolyndot]

everything is quiet, still

I slip into this in between

wear it like a second skin

I don’t romanticize the future

the truth is I can’t see what’s coming

and yet I sense that it’s something happy and light, like rays from the sun

there’s nothing to prove, no one to please

just my essence experiencing itself, existence

[gwendolyndot]

My new work is heated, it’s desperate, hungry and raw. It’s starving and welcoming the hunger. I invoke this new work, may it come to me in a flash, all of the sudden, immediate, like the truth of reality reveals itself in my visions. I’m in the desert, I’m parched and dry, but I’m in love with the experience. Nothing can hold me back from experiencing this suffering with love. I see what’s going on, and I don’t need to look away. I describe this experience with precision. I take all the time I need to express it accurately and with the utmost detail and care. Only the desert can support this space, it’s one of conceptual and energetic subtraction. What’s left is truth in its most elemental form.

[gwendolyndot]

What I love is the hope of fulfillment. I might think I love the mask of those who wear it, but I love what the mask represents. I counter balance this with the knowing that there is no ultimate satisfaction possible on this planet. The middle path is remaining in the present and in gratitude. Only in death may there be consummation. I believe this, but I don’t know it. It could just as easily be emptiness at death. Isn’t love and emptiness the same substance? All of this comes from the same source, including destruction and violence. The source does not take issue with holding and balancing all these opposites.

[gwendolyndot]

reject me: i need my power!

your infinite vengeance, my cycle of pain our awesome machinery

this torturous dream, a bridge of nightmares my body is distinguished from the world

the illusion is in violence inverted, a communal cry, to purify the mind and the hand

but as soon as I let go, you arrive patience is the game of surrender

i dissolve over time eat out of the loom of history

a commotion of tender signs undulate in my hand

[gwendolyndot]

To know violence is to experience it. Tragedy is therefore directly linked to violence; it is a child of the sacrificial crisis.

- Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred

[gwendolyndot]

i am wise because ive endured suffering

ive been carving a canyon across lifetimes

i asked for a transformational year and i got it

i know something is coming for me

i just ask that it come gently and in kindness

i am spiritually tired

[gwendolyndot]

The Law regulates desire. Without the Law, there is no desire. Desire is contingent upon transgressing the Law. Desire originates in the unconscious. It's always shifting. It points to what one does not have. Fantasy is a protective factor against the void. We must confront and work with the void. Fantasy is the mind’s attempt to structure desire, to maintain hope, to avoid the reality of death & destruction. We must face this fundamental lack. There is no ultimate satisfaction.

[gwendolyndot]

The Red Sea envelops me, salt fabric feeding my eyes, sting, turn black, thread floating in the sky, I create the path

I’m the daughter of supplication, the sword of separation I’m the sea of longing, back in the crucible now

My silence interrupts fear, this nothing full of meaning, always deferred, always becoming, a quiet place full of substance, pausing before

Interpretation of faith, sand and stone one and the same, feeling color as sanctuary, I unlock the door to the truth of fate and what’s inside but your face transfigured by night

[gwendolyndot]

You’re always in the back of my mind conjuring this deep ache of never being important enough to be chosen or understood, basically to not be loved, and to grow up in an environment of control and emotional neglect while smothered in traditional Calvinist duty, how can it not be constantly living as a buzz in my mind and a cut in my heart and time and time again relationships I’ve (karmically) chosen to enter into have deepened the wound, which leads me to now, where I start healing the wound and not allowing more damage. But the wound is still open, it’s starting to heal, but it’s just there, laid out and bare. So now it’s my turn to take care of it, to not give it away unconsciously for someone else to mend, an impossible task. Now it’s my turn and I have the best medicine for it - my own love which is real, raw, and sacred.

The wound has been trying to heal in repressed spaces, content with slamming into stone walls and dead ends. The damage continued because I could not see the pattern in its full color, only witnessed in shadows and sparks of light. Despite effort, healing cannot really take place until one stops entering spaces of oppression. People are containers of oppression, diamonds of darkness afraid to see their own soul.

This is why I have been thinking about violence, because violence is what has formed me. I have been afraid of looking at some of my experiences in terms of aggression but the more I stand in my power, the more I cannot look away from the terror of being on this planet. We sleep and violence rises. It's inherent to the human condition but the expression remains a by product of the insensate atmosphere created by war and terror, power and control. We all live under this domain, and those who continue the cycle of pain are the enemy.

[gwendolyndot]

thoughts on the corpus hermeticum

"It dwells in those who have already seen it and draws them upwards"

the origin births all knowledge but is separate from it. the origin is unseen and can only be witnessed through images. we access the origin when we create something that does not exist, as everything unmanifest comes from the origin. all unmanifested reality already exists within the origin. there are infinite possibilities, including possibilities of evil and suffering which is in endless supply in the origin. somehow the origin can contain this evil within it and still be absolutely good. don't ask me how, i don't know.

in order to see beauty, you must be able to see god. to see either, you must be devoted to seeking. you must remove the 'web of ignorance, the fabric of evil, the knot of destruction, the girdle of darkness, the living death, the sentient corpse, the portable tomb, the robber in your house, him who hates through what he loves and bears malice through what he hates' (book 8). Lacan coined a term for this - haimoration - a union of love and hate that we experience due to our fundamental lack - our lack of being seen or acknowledged by the Big Other (law, society, culture, family, parent, community) and our related experience of the ambivalence-desire emotional axis. this is the first step of the journey toward god, cutting through ignorance. look to the hindus and buddhists for how to do that.

we were created for god's enjoyment (jouissance). its enjoyment is our pleasure and our pain. it's like watching someone you love go through a difficult time and come out the other side transformed, renewed, happy, smiling like a baby, open to love. that's what god wants to see. but god doesn't worry about us. we get infinite opportunities and lifetimes to heal. we are god's psychological emotional spiritual project. god is helping us and communicating with us all the time, but as stated previously, it is unseen and so must be sensed with a sense beyond sense.