On Sat, 1 Oct 1994, renato ariel jarach wrote:
> I would like to introduce the question about understanding and the chances
> of expressing a singular connection (" afectacion" in spanish ) with a text.
> At least a few lurkers must be intimidated to participate, as I am, and not
> only because my poor spanglish, cause it's hard to find a "literary"
> approach to D-G's works in the messages of these days to the list, of course
> there are a lot of exceptions.
> I could have written "common sense", or
> narrative, or sensible, or something else instead of "literary", anyway I'm
> triying to evoke the implication I think is being frogotten ( i like that
> lapsus, becoming frog, writing english, balbuceando, tartamudeando,
> croando).
So, in entering the flux of narrative, it's own breaks and flows, we will
become-animal,
become-frog. For narratives, in all their sensible movements, are not in
itself hostile to becomings. In Chapter 10, D&G describe the
becoming-animal narratives of primal peoples as "blocks of
becoming"--blocks that are reduced and stratified when we call them
"myths" and insert them into some abstract structure of exchanges
(Levi-Strauss) or some totemic and univocal identification. D&G prefer to
call these blocks of becoming, "tales." (But frogs don't have tails!) and
allign them not with the public sacrifice but something more secret and
subterranean: the sorcerer and his (as well as most certainly her) tales.
Chapter 10 is full of tales, or the tales (as blocks of
becoming/singularities) that insert themselves into larger narratives
(Ahab's becoming-whale is not Melville's becoming-whale). [237]
So how/where do we find the sorcerer's tales inside our novels or even our
own narratives? I've always admired D&G for admiring Lovecraft (how many
here read Lovecraft?), because much of his work is pulpy and rote, yet
there are these moments when the horror becomes incandescent, precisely
because the becoming itself pushes the text beyond its own language or
stock of generic devices into the "Outside." In Lovecraft's case, this has
to do with a particular new set of images and spaces which D&G bring up:
the molecular and the mathematical spaces of horror that appear beyond the
"nameless fright" and florid darkness--more generic horror elements that
Lovecraft mobilizes. Which is to say that Lovecraft exists at a particular
moment or bifurcation in the series of the horror/fantasy tale, a moment
where its 19th centruy Lord Dunsaney influences hit a high-speed of
becoming and enter "science": bizarre topologies, cosmic frequencies,
molecular "mutants," etc (check the index in ATP for all the Lovecraft
references). Lovecraft effects this bifurcation--allows it to
propogate--and how does this becoming enter us as readers? I taste the
outside, a frightzone that is the gateway of becomings.
For becomings, at least in the beginning of this chapter, are not smooth
or easy, though perhaps they are still joyful. Rats, Lovecraft, mad
Ahab--this is scary stuff, subterranean stuff, the horror the sorcerer
mobilizes, the "pacts" she makes in order to open up the world of
becomings. It is not pretty, not pacific. There are many kinds of magic,
many magics that one encounters in the books and the tales and the
grimoires. Some are state magics, some are tantric/shamanic magics, and
some are curious amalgamations of the two (secret keys and codes that
unlock gates and exist within secret societies that, at their best, walk
the line between fascism and molecular becoming, and at their worse become
black holes). But the most becoming-animal of sorceries--shamanism,
antinomian tantrism (Naga Shaivism), the witch'es familiar, contemporary
chaos magic--require a passage through horror, through self rending, a
violence against the molar Oedipalized body.
The shaman is rent--his flesh torn off, his bones broken, his eyeballs
sucked out. The tantric adept, drinking blood from skulls to effect a
nondualism, a dangerous going-beyond good-and-evil, meets the wrathful
form of deities, fiery decapitating creatures who act out of the utmost
compassion of the bodhissatvas in order to consume and transform the ego
(the molar). The witch, who is always in relation with a multiplicity--the
gathering of witches, the animals, the plants, the forest she lives on the
border of--and is always "with" a familiar animal (cat, rat, frog?!) who
is always "more" than an animal, an animal who is sharing in the witches
becoming, entering into the block of her becoming, her
reterritorialization in relation to the dark flows of matter-energy from
cosmic rays, and the subterranean earth.
[The frog: a liminal animal, amphibeous, passing between the regimes of
night and daylight, a creature of dusk, the tenuous tenebres. The frog is
what the State despot must pass through in his deterritorialization--all
the folk-tales have it backwards: the triumph of the frog-prince is when
the prince becomes a frog! These aren't folk-tales--they're state-tales,
where the sorcerous "tale" (becoming-frog) is reinserted into a state
narrative where there is a restoration ((re)becoming-prince,
(re)storation to the proper (re)presentation--the Face) tacked onto the
end. The tale has no end! (that's why frogs have no tails!)
The frog: the animal that belongs to a particular phase-shift of alchemy,
from earth to water. That is, from the rigid strata becoming mobile,
becoming a flow. This is fecundity (cross-culturally, frogs are fertility
symbols). What gender is a frog? Cats are female, dogs are male--even
wolves seem masculine. But a frog is lodged between, or rather beyond, a
drag animal (the frog-prince is queer!), an animal of RUBBER, who
smooth/sticky surface is a plane of immanence: frog-man, frontrunners of
the aquatic war-machine, covered with with fetishist's rubber, in the
cold dark waters where Lovecraft's most awful monsters dwell!]
And finally: The chaos magician, who refuses all inherited arcana and
system, all
arborescent mysticisms (kabbalah, Neoplatonic spheres), and operates
through an aesthetic will that is indistinguishable from what was once the
avant-garde--(Austin Spare, the "father" (or rather the supreme virus) of
chaos magic, had ties with early 20th century avant-garde art as well as
firing his magic through sexual "perversions" that would make Klossowski
blush (sex with deformed midgets, etc)). See Peter Carroll's strange
_Liber Null_ and _Liber Kaos_.
All these figures are stories, but they are more than figures. They are
operations. And they are dangerous, skirting fascisms (becoming-black
holes) and suicide (is Ahab's becoming "good" or "bad"? Is there a safe
becoming?). Ribbett!
Any sorcerers out there?
Erik
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