Replacing Human Language -- Stephen Paul Martin

I sit in an abandoned high school classroom watching a sunrise. I sit in an airport lounge and stare at a huge clock stopped at half past five. I sit in a health food restaurant facing the ruins of a cathedral. I sit on the bank of a river surging with ice and afternoon sunlight. I sit on the steps of an old screen porch as a lightning storm approaches. I sit on a swaying footbridge watching coyotes hunt in the canyon below. I sit at the foot of a dead tree on a ridge above an amusement park. I sit in fog on a gabled housetop overlooking a junkyard.

Under normal circumstances, each of the above sentences would lead to something else. A character might be described; a discussion might begin. But here the sentences introduce nothing—no narrative, no logical argument. Instead, they leave me in many places at once, mesmerized by a constellation of undefined possibilities, multiple futures that never take place, distances that never come any closer, and I wait without expectations, absorbing their interactions, watching them changing into each other, as if I might some day become an aquarium filled with tropical fish, a graceful pattern of colors and motions, a richly soothing ecstasy, a moment that changes only to resemble itself, reassemble itself, a quiet feeling of almost absolute safety.

Unlike most ecstatic states, this one behaves like a project I'm in charge of. But can I call it ecstasy if I'm in control? Shouldn't ecstasy, by definition, be wild, unpredictable, filled with dangers, paranormal sensations? This question calls for a careful distinction between two conditions that at first may seem quite similar: intoxication and illumination. Both indicate an alteration of consciousness. But intoxication generally involves the use of a bottle, pill, or needle, an artificial blurring or heightening that can only be sustained through continued use of the substance. The result is often addiction. Illumination, on the other hand, refers to an expansion of consciousness developed gradually, not primarily through the use of a substance but through the disciplined practice of spiritual or aesthetic techniques, a careful transformation that leads to increased awareness of self and the world. While intoxication is a short-term, immediate, artificial experience, illumination is an achieved condition, a more or less permanent enhancement, leading not to the helplessness of substance abuse but to a subtle psychological freedom. Intoxication may involve temporary flashes of illumination, but these are not sufficiently internalized to produce significant changes in behavior. Illumination may include intoxicating moments, but such moments are mere surface effects that play no serious part in the transformative process. Obviously, the term ecstasy is often applied to various forms of intoxication, and in connection with various artistic and visionary traditions the strategically excessive use of intoxicating substances has been viewed as a subversive maneuver, a way of transcending or at least repudiating the stale respectability of bourgeois society. But in the degraded context of the so-called information age, it is difficult to think of drinking and drugging as anything other than a trivial, escapist phenomenon that is ultimately not at odds with the logic of media capitalism. Still, I'd like to think we can we talk about a more subtle, more substantial kind of ecstasy, a rigorously cultivated condition that by its very nature leads us away from the idiocies of mainstream culture.

In referring to mainstream communication as a network of idiocies, I don't mean to underestimate its power. Indeed, its influence has been pervasive enough to generate alarmed responses from most of the prominent sociopolitical thinkers of our time. Many of these responses focus on the ways in which Hollywood and Madison Avenue seduce people into oppressing themselves, controlling them with inane distractions that make serious reflection of any kind unlikely. Ideally, critiques of the media would function like the magic herb Hermes gave Odysseus to protect him from Circe, making us immune to postmodern capitalism and the system of imagery that supports it. But even if we view the situation optimistically and allow that Americans today are more skeptical about mass communication than they were fifty years ago, the fact remains that the system still functions at least as well as it did in the past, no matter how many Critical Thinking classes people have taken. We can argue against corporate culture from now until the end of time, but logical discourse will never be seductive enough to pull most people away from their picture tubes, romance novels, and designer outfits.

Of course, if oppositional communication becomes seductive, it runs the risk of reducing itself to the very thing it was meant to repudiate. Yet the alternative to seduction must be more immediately appealing than the rigorous experience offered by carefully argued essays or challenging aesthetic texts. Only by countering the dominant media with compelling communication techniques can we develop a network of artistic production that encourages people to reclaim themselves, rejecting the atrophied condition mass entertainment inevitably produces. Against the shallow ecstasies so relentlessly manufactured by the image-machine of late capitalism, a more complex and careful kind of ecstasy must be envisioned, something that transports our perceiving awareness without controlling it, a consciously negotiated process in which text and reader collaborate like people making love. This would involve, among other things, communication strategies that transcended the traditional oppositions of Apollo and Dionysus, reason and madness, making such distinctions obsolete. And if the result is not ecstasy in the usual sense of the term, perhaps we can give birth to ecstasy's evolutionary future, the mutated form that ecstasy's offspring will have to assume to survive the deadening assault of mainstream culture.

Dionysus, of course, was ecstasy's child and father. In the Dionysian narratives of ancient Greece, the god was first ecstatically torn apart, dismembered by swarms of raging maenads, and then re-assembled, re-membered by the earth goddess Demeter, a process that symbolically reflected the seasonal death and rebirth of nature. The rites of the Dionysian mystery cults, performed by delirious women on the wooded summits of Mount Parnassus, typically included animal sacrifices in which one special part of the symbolically dismembered god was preserved in a sacred basket. This special organ, variously identified as the heart or the phallus, then became the basis of a sacred potion used in the reconstruction of Dionysus every other spring. Translated into a contemporary context, these ritual transformations become provisional guidelines for the future of ecstatic textual practices. The truly subversive text will dismember the diseased body of mainstream communication networks, undermining their legitimacy with corrosive verbal strategies that go beyond conventional satire, ecstatically remembering itself by refusing to function according to the narrative and discursive logic that dominates mass information. Such a text will remember its own power, reclaim its verbal-erotic potency, no longer limiting itself to the writing strategies commercial and academic publishing networks consider appropriate.

The result will be a sacred potion or magic herb, the hermetic energies of a language wild enough to transgress all boundaries, including its own, yet controlled enough to raise important aesthetic issues: If a crucial function of ecstatic language is to question what it means to make sense, then what kind of sense does ecstatic language make? What happens to writing that undermines its own logic, yet insists on a particular result, limiting its aesthetic possibilities in the name of an ideological project, leaving us, for example, in the midst a story in which a pteradactyl breaks through a picture window and eats a group of children watching cartoons on Saturday morning, a story that engraves itself so deeply into our reading imaginations that it fails to become a story in which a small city in South Dakota gets bombed out of existence by U.S. airplanes because of a computer mistake, or a story in which the earth gets attacked by a race of indestructible giants who colonize the planet by destroying all human languages and replacing them with an idiom too difficult for people to master, words that are too tall, too short, too thin, too fat, too slow, too fast for human minds to process, turning our species into a race of ambulatory vegetables. Between the initial story and the two narratives it fails to become, another possibility develops, taking the provisional form of a story maniacally hungry enough to consume itself in three bites, a ravenous ecstasy so extreme that objects fail to sustain themselves in their current form, and the kitchen table becomes a frozen plateau, the sink becomes a valley of gusting pines, and the icebox becomes a towering peak in a sky of surging storm clouds, and even though the landscape is not breakfast anymore, an almost violent hunger for the meal continues, rising into an ecstasy of expectation, partially fulfilled by the landscape's visual splendor, partially left unfulfilled by the lack of edible substance, an absence that makes the ecstasy build, becoming a flame that burns the landscape down, as if it were nothing more than a massive curtain, leaving us to confront the self-consuming story of someone who spends the last three years of her life in a slowly collapsing Victorian mansion, an insanely elaborate collection of cupolas and gables propped on a seaside cliff, a place everyone has somehow forgotten about, realtors included, so that no one plans to buy, rent, or tear it down. Its occupant, a failed social worker in her late fifties, begins with nothing more than a mattress and blanket she found in a thrift shop, falling asleep each night on a huge wrap-around porch, entranced by the sound of waves on rocks and the damp wind in the trees. She quickly learns to live on almost nothing, the meager interest generated by a small savings account she got from her husband when he went mad and shot himself. She lives on one small meal a day, goes without electricity, gets water from small creek behind her house, and pees and shits in the woods. She carefully limits herself to superficial interaction with people in the nearby town, walking there for meager supplies once every two weeks, speaking only to get what she needs. Everyone thinks she's insane or depressed, and at times she thinks so too, but it slowly becomes clear to her that she's free in a way she never expected, even as she struggles with a terminal disease.

At first the stormy climate is her main source of pleasure. Four nights out of five the wind is so strong that her blanket is barely enough, and the feeling of almost being hopelessly cold-almost but not quite-is so delicious that she never thinks of going inside. Soon she begins equating it with another delicious feeling, the release from conversations of any length and complexity, the freedom from needing to make a verbal account of herself, transferring mental energy from the sphere of interaction to the sphere of perception, allowing her to observe herself in the increasingly transparent mirror held up by the non-human universe, instead of in the aggressive mirror of human complexity and distortion, a transformation that might usefully be compared to shadows thrown from a sluggish overhead fan, endlessly gliding over a carved oak desk, where a pensive man with an old fedora sits in a small stone room, squinting into the glare outside, miles on miles of desert sand and homicidal sunlight, knowing that as long as he stays in the shade he'll survive the brutal heat, and reports come in by phone, crucial information, making him nod and smile, but he's anxious about one particular unreturned phone call, the climax of a plan to seize the wealth of the ruling class worldwide, evenly redistributing their criminal accumulations, and he blows tense air out of his mouth, tries to relax in the turning shadows, which make the map of the world on the wall seem graceful as an aquarium, a lovely feeling he's had in the past but can't quite access now, trapped in the fear that everything he's been working toward for the past five years—all his elaborate networking from a small stone house in the middle of nowhere—has come to nothing, anxiety that brings him to the edge of madness as the minutes pass and the light outside his cool dark square gets hotter, but then the phonecall comes and the news is good and he's wild with elation, leaning back in his chair with ecstatic laughter throbbing in the old stone walls, making the room expand until it's larger than the crumbling house, larger than the savage desert, larger than the sky, a transformation that might usefully be compared to what happens when a failed social worker whose days are numbered decides that she doesn't want to be bothered with conventional responsibilities any longer, and begins to look at herself in the unassuming mirror held up by the non-human universe, instead of in the instrusive mirror of human complexity and distortion.

She takes in three stray dogs and develops a playful, tender relationship with each one, a telepathic intimacy that goes beyond the cumbersome feelings verbal language confines most people to. This intimacy undermines the syntactic architecture she's learned to equate with subjective experience, so thoroughly transforming her perceptions that she begins to hear separations, subtle distinctions between the sound of one wave and the next, between each leaf and every other leaf in the strong and steady wind, and she carefully studies the many ways in which all the different sounds combine to make one general sound, elaborately varied patterns of divergence and convergence that she learns to call music, until finally the distinction between music and everything that's not music disintegrates, allowing her to see that the mansion is nothing more than the porch, that the porch is nothing more than a mattress and blanket and three stray dogs, that the mattress and blanket and three stray dogs are nothing more than the sound of wind and waves and maybe just words on a page, and maybe not even words, not even a page or a face bending over the page, not even a face in the dark, not even the dark, just fading footsteps, and death brings no pain at all—no regret or fear of the unknown—only the ecstasy of dissolving into a musical world she's learned to perceive so carefully that she finally can't say she's even listening to it, since listening implies that she's somehow distinct from what she's listening to. In short, what could only be a question mark for anyone else becomes in her final glimpse of time and space an ecstatic ellipsis. But the question that still needs to be addressed is whether the story that's here on the page, the narrative that survives its own dangerous appetite, would be quite different had it reached us in its original form.

Obviously, this question applies to all classical texts, many of which form the basis of our collective moral history. For example, when we discuss Dionysian mysteries, how do we know that that the archaeological remains our assumptions are based on give us an accurate picture? So much has undoubtedly been lost, countless fragments of evidence that might lead us to believe, for example, that Athena came from Zeus's thigh and Dionysus came from Zeus's head, or that Apollo's violent ecstasy in pursuit of Daphne was punished by madness, and he ended up trying to fuck a tree, badly scarring his dick when he tried to penetrate the rough bark, or that Echo became the silence between mountains not because Narcissus was ecstatically trapped in his own face, but because she couldn't bear the sound of her own voice any longer, or that Oedipus—and not Hercules, Dionysus, and Achilles—was brought up as a girl until he reached the age of seven, or that Hera blinded Tiresias because he wanted to be a woman again and try to seduce her husband Zeus, not because he claimed that women had more fun in bed than men did. Who knows what new excavations will reveal? Who knows how new interpretive models will transform existing evidence? Everything is always incomplete, even if we leave the past and focus on the here and now, where huge portions of any situation are automatically filtered out by our instruments of thought and perception.

So maybe ecstasy should be defined as a condition in which this filtering process has been destroyed or at least altered, giving us temporary access to those parts of the world we normally block out. What would happen if we were trained from an early age to call our mental editing mechanisms into question, functioning with a full awareness of the neurochemical and sociopolitical influences that lead us to perceive only a small part of each moment? What would happen if we were trained to make fully conscious decisions about what and how we see, think, and feel, maintaining critical distance from the philosophical assumptions that construct our normative picture of time and space? The possibilities are magnificent--until we remember that the very notion of a training process implies a group of trainers, people already under the influence of unacknowledged ideological perspectives. Why would we trust them to orchestrate our habits of perception? And if we trained ourselves, why would we trust our own subconscious agendas? Questions like this have a chilling effect on the flow of discussion, especially since at this point I was planning to propose a project with devastating implications for all but the most radical attitudes about everyday life. I love the trumpets I hear when I make grand proclamations and recommendations, so I'm not sure why I'm willing to shut off the music and think about what happens when sharp questions make us wonder what kind of floor we're standing on, as if I could somehow learn to enjoy the sensation of falling through a trap door. Of course, the very notion of learning to appreciate such a feeling is dubious, since it's not really a trap door if you know it's there and choose to step on it and fall, as a matter of practice. What I mean instead is that anything we might argue or narrate is bound to be full of trap doors, and a truly ecstatic text is committed to recognizing false floors when they take verbal shape, using language primarily as a means of arriving at unplanned points of collapse, where one linguistic impression falls unexpectedly into another, and the sudden descent is so exhilarating that up and down become the same thing, falling becomes rising, and the body moves in both directions at once, like a sleepwalker walking downstairs while dreaming of walking upstairs, mesmerized by the sound of his feet on the stairs, a turning marble staircase in the dark of intergalactic space, glowing and steadily growing until it becomes a new constellation, or like a UFO visitation erasing itself in the minds of observers, replacing the experience with the memory of a sci-fi flick, a flying saucer movie millions of people are convinced they've seen, but it's so bad no one ever thinks of watching it again, or like a chimpanzee that learns to talk after less than a year of instruction, but carefully pretends that he understands nothing, screeching and scratching his head, knowing that he's better off not speaking, and that he has nothing to say, or nothing that he wants to say in the language he's been learning, or like the surgical process of opening the body of an extremely sad person and finding a smaller ecstatic version of the same person inside, then cutting open that ecstatic body and finding a map of the universe inside, a map that no one can read without going mad, or like an absurd list of images that refuse to play a supporting role, subordinating the narrative they appear to be embellishing.

This reversal is very much in keeping with something that happened to me almost thirty-five years ago, during my second year in the navy, in the Gulf of Tonkin. I woke up one day with a horrible headache that was somehow connected to a beautiful dream I couldn't remember, and when I went out on deck I noticed a strange person I'd never seen before. Had he been there all along without being noticed, or had he secretly come on board at our last port of call, despite our very tight security measures? Someone should have questioned him, of course, but everyone was carefully trying to act as if there was nothing unusual about him, and I could tell by the looks on my shipmates' faces that they were mesmerized by his beauty, his long curly hair and delicate feminine features. He seemed to be sleepwalking, unaware of our presence, unaware that he was in a wartime situation, slowly pacing the pitching deck of a U.S. Navy destroyer.

But when we opened fire on phantom North Vietnamese PT boats, he suddenly became violently angry, rushing to the bridge and pounding frantically on the captain's door. A group of my crewmates tried to restrain him, pinning him against the wall, and in the struggle his shirt was torn off, revealing beautifully sculpted flesh that seemed to be made of wine, or maybe wind, or maybe windows. The Chief Petty Officer tried to question him, but when he got no response and ordered the man thrown into the brig, something amazing happened. The sea was suddenly flat as a mirror mirrored by a flat white sky. Vines of ivy, sprouting from who knows where, began wrapping themselves around the ship's guns, rising in a turbulent mass up the mainmast and conning tower. The deck was soon covered with grape and vine, and had somehow become a theater of barely visible images, hundreds of them, though the only one I can still recall was a chariot drawn by panthers, vaguely surrounded by swarms of turbulent women, backdropped by scraps of distant music, piercing flutes and fierce non-rhythmic drumming. One by one at first and then en masse the crew jumped into the sea, many of them screaming, foaming at the mouth, all of them slipping beneath that mirrored surface without even a brief struggle. I'm not sure how I survived, but I somehow ended up on a beach in Hainan, an island off the coast of southern China, unable to speak for more than a year, unwilling to admit to myself what I'd seen.

Later, having been judged insane and discharged from the navy, I took part in protests against the war, marching on Washington with thousands of young people who had no military experience but knew that they would never risk their lives to support the U.S. government's violent little game in Southeast Asia. The ecstasy I felt on the lawn outside the White House, pounding a drum surrounded by outraged incantations, ravished me out of myself, as if I were dressed in animal skins, facing a torchlit altar on a mountaintop in Siberia, beating a drum to slowly reanimate the part of me that was already dead, the part that no longer needed to frame itself with time and space, inducing a trance in which the frequencies of life and death intersected, except that describing it in such terms creates a misleading impression. A more accurate way of approaching the unapproachable is to focus on the medium of expression, the fundamental reality of the present situation, the black marks that appear on this flat white page, a page which quickly becomes a mirror, then a windowpane, then a cube of air, then a transparent box of molecules dancing erratically, magnetically, endless relational motion like a buzzing swarm of mosquitoes, a sound that's annoying at first, but slowly becomes an adagio scored for summer twilight, wistfully soothing melodies like breeze in white silk drapes, the sound of a screen door gently swinging back and forth in the distance, meaning that the true goal of all serious writing at this ridiculous point in history should be to make the world shut up. Any text worth anything moves toward silence, and not just the silence of the narrative coming to an end, but the silence that comes when readers affirm that they're walking in their sleep and have no basis on which to say anything with confidence, that even their most skeptical perceptions take themselves too seriously, that we're all better off keeping our mouths shut, that in fact the act of speaking is dangerous, demanding more care than even the most evolved people are capable of sustaining.

But what kind of silence is possible in a culture that runs on aggressive noise? Is it possible to talk and write about silence without talking and writing silence out of existence? Is a blank page really silent, or merely silenced, forced to retreat into itself, subtracted from itself? What is needed instead is a text that takes noise and converts it to silence, not an absence of noise but an orchestration of noise, a pattern of divergences and convergences fashioned so carefully that no one hears a thing, just as the noise of a hundred billion microcellular factories combines to become the silence of our bodies, a silence that gives to language what water gives to fish, allowing consciousness to become an aquarium filled with graceful colors and motions, an ecstasy more comforting than breeze in white silk drapes.

Such comfort cannot be developed in a context of intoxication, in a culture that functions only because people routinely surrender to an unending array of consumer ecstasies whose ultimate function is to convince people that being an American means getting and spending as much as possible. These seductive images have played a major part in making the United States the most dangerous country in the world, an increasingly mindless place where people consume more than seven times the world average in non-renewable resources. The machines that make these images cannot be destroyed. But the images themselves can be transformed, separated from their commercial origins and reanimated, an illumination functioning like a river of demented riddles, flooding its banks and washing away everything in its path, finally rushing ecstatically into a huge wall painted to look like the sea, a wilderness of waves beneath aurora borealis, an illumination standing on its hind legs and licking your face, or chasing birds it knows it won't ever catch, just for the fun of it, birds flying off at the last second, entertaining themselves by making their escape as marrow as possible, a scene that might be compared to a huge Victorian house on a chunk of ice in Baffin Bay, or a new astronomical instrument that proves the sun is made of wind, a madman's face in a shopfront window bursting into flame, a college course in learning how to sleep as well as a puppy, a bandshell by a placid lake with a mushroom cloud in the background, a meditation technique inducing a vegetable ecstasy, replacing human language with molecular transformations, as the light given off when words produce unexpected synaptic fusions, glowing on the peripheries of everything we think we know, slowly congeals in photosynthetic bliss, twinkling with chlorophyll, an event freed from the demands of narrative motion, no longer distorted by the pressure to perform in sequence, the pressure to become what past and future make of it, secure in the quiet ecstasy of the permanent verbal present, substantial as a dog with a bone, thinking with its teeth, or a man licking his lover's nipples, putting his hand between her thighs, watching her biceps bulge in moonlight split by venetian blinds, a moment that functions like an eye the size of an ocean liner closing in a midnight sky, a mile and a half above the tallest iceberg in the Bering Sea, or like the prospect of walking for days toward what seems to be a towering metropolis, only to find after a brutal trek that the city is no larger than it looked at first, that its tallest buildings are perhaps ten inches high, that it takes up less than five square feet, and that the population has no time for baffled, obnoxious giants, or like the sudden realization that you can pass your fingers right through the trembling shape you thought was a person, while puppies play maniacally on a shady summer lawn, cool piano jazz barely audible from an open window ten flights up, quickly replaced by a dictionary of words that don't exist yet, all defined by words that don't exist yet, quickly replaced by a page that draws its own diagrams, lines and arcs and angles that represent nothing anyone can recognize, shapes that nonetheless draw themselves on the viewer's perceiving awareness, changing the way the viewer sees and thinks about the world.

Imagine yourself as this viewer. What are you looking at? What are you thinking about? Is it enough to say that language won't suffice? Isn't this the reductively standard way of confronting ecstatic states of mind? Isn't this what makes mystical writing so frustrating, the inability to describe the ecstasy of divine communion? The problem is obvious in the words of the previous sentence: We make a hopeless mistake when we try to describe the indescribable. That which mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent. But language that moves with careful abandon can make its own ecstasy, dismembering and remembering itself to generate a fluid architecture that is not a description of anything, though it might be compared to a multiplied silence made by facing mirrors, disguised as a tribal drumbeat making images appear in the sky, pictures that quickly dissolve releasing hundreds of other pictures, which quickly dissolve releasing thousands of other pictures, which quickly dissolve releasing millions of other pictures, which quickly dissolve releasing billions of other pictures, all dissolving so quickly that no one can see what the pictures are, as if they existed only to make an empty space seem larger, more full of what it needs to resemble itself, reassemble itself, growing until it becomes a feeling of almost absolute safety.

Like a dictionary in a world where no one speaks, reads, or thinks, surviving only by consuming its own words and their definitions, one syllable at a time, a richly soothing ecstasy, a moment that changes only to resemble itself, reassemble itself, a quiet feeling of almost absolute safety.

Imagine Lyndon Johnson singing "Remember the Maine" on the Senate floor, soulfully inciting the press to print the official distortion, making hostile U.S. Navy activities in the Gulf of Tonkin appear to be blunt evidence of communist aggression, a situation so deceptive that it's quickly invalidated by a study conclusively proving that gazing into an aquarium for long periods of time is a far more healthy way to relax than watching prime-time TV shows, information that functions like an eye the size of an ocean liner.

Imagine a world population ignorant of their fundamental condition, that their planet is trapped in a massive block of ice that might at some point melt, no longer holding the planet in place, letting it suddenly fall with nothing anywhere to stop it. Imagine a mass murderer getting off with a light sentence when lawyers prove that his bloody behavior came from too much exposure to automated answering systems. Imagine a troupe of stage performers less than an inch in height getting chased by a cat. Imagine a virus taking the form of a pornographic website so dull people can't wait to sign off, but the site won't let them out, and when it finally does, they end up in other pathologically dull pornographic websites, filled with utterly predictable twat shots and idiotic anecdotes and phrases. Imagine a dictionary of words that don't exist yet, all defined by words that don't exist yet. Imagine a page that draws its own diagrams, lines and arcs and angles that represent nothing anyone can recognize, shapes that nonetheless draw themselves on the viewer's perceiving awareness, changing the way the viewer sees and thinks about the world.

Would it function like a river of demented riddles flooding its banks and washing away everything in its path, finally rushing ecstatically into a huge wall painted to look like the sea, a wilderness of waves beneath aurora borealis? Would it stand on its hind legs and lick your face? Would it chase birds it knew it could never catch, just for the fun of it, birds flying off at the last second, entertaining themselves by making their escape as narrow as possible? Would it be like a huge Victorian house on a chunk of ice in Baffin Bay? Like a new astronomical instrument that proves the sun is made of wind, a madman's face in a shopfront window bursting into flame, a college course in learning how to sleep as well as a puppy, a bandshell by a placid lake with a mushroom cloud in the background, a meditation technique inducing a vegetable ecstasy, replacing human language with molecular transformations, as the light given off when words produce unexpected synaptic fusions, glowing on the peripheries of everything we think we know, slowly congeals in photosynthetic bliss, twinkling with chlorophyll? Like Lyndon Johnson singing "Remember the Maine" on the Senate floor, soulfully inciting the press to print the official distortion, making hostile U.S. Navy activities in the Gulf of Tonkin appear to be blunt evidence of communist aggression? Like events freed from narrative motion, no longer distorted by the pressure to perform in sequence, the pressure to become what past and future make of them, secure in the quiet ecstasy of the permanent verbal present, substantial as a dog with a bone, thinking with its teeth, or a man licking his lover's nipples, putting his hand between her thighs, watching her biceps bulge in moonlight split by venetian blinds? Like a study conclusively proving that gazing into an aquarium for long periods of time is a far more healthy way to relax than watching prime-time TV shows? Like an eye the size of an ocean liner closing in a midnight sky, a mile and a half above the tallest iceberg in the Bering Sea? Like walking for days toward what seems to be a towering metropolis, only to find after a brutal trek that the city is no larger than it looked at first, that its tallest buildings are perhaps ten inches high, that it takes up less than five square feet, and that the population has no time for baffled, obnoxious giants? Like a morning game show emcee waking up as Adolph Hitler? Like stacks of pancakes changing into stacks of clouds at six a.m., just as two hundred million Americans head for the breakfast table? Like suddenly realizing that you can pass your fingers right through the trembling shape you thought was a person? Like puppies playing maniacally on a shady summer lawn, cool piano jazz barely audible from an open window ten flights up? Like a world population ignorant of their fundamental condition, that their planet is trapped in a massive block of ice that might at some point melt, no longer holding the planet in place, letting it suddenly fall with nothing anywhere to stop it? Like a mass murderer getting off with a light sentence when lawyers prove that his bloody behavior came from too much exposure to automated answering systems? Like a troupe of stage performers less than an inch in height getting chased by a cat? Like a virus taking the form of a pornographic website so dull people can't wait to sign off, but the site won't let them out, and when it finally does, they end up in other pathologically dull pornographic websites, filled with utterly predictable twat shots and idiotic anecdotes and phrases? Like a dictionary of words that don't exist yet, all defined by words that don't exist yet? Or like a page that draws its own diagrams, lines and arcs and angles that represent nothing anyone can recognize, shapes that nonetheless draw themselves on the viewer's perceiving awareness, changing the way the viewer sees and thinks about the world?

The care I'm referring to cannot be developed in a context of intoxication. Yet media capitalism functions only because people routinely surrender to an unending array of intoxicating images, consumer ecstasies whose ultimate function is to convince people that being an American means getting and spending as much as possible. These seductive images have played a major part in making the United States the most dangerous country in the world, an increasingly mindless place where people consume more than seven times the world average in non-renewable resources. What would it take to destroy the image machine, to neutralize its influence? What kind of text could position readers in such a way that over time they developed a revulsion to all forms of communication based on intoxication and seduction? What would the boundaries of such a text be, and how could it transgress those boundaries, undermining its own dogmatic agendas, even as it made the imagery of mass communication obsolete? Would it function like a river of demented riddles flooding its banks and washing away everything in its path, finally rushing ecstatically into a huge wall painted to look like the sea, a wilderness of waves beneath aurora borealis? Would it stand on its hind legs and lick your face? Would it chase birds it knew it could never catch, just for the fun of it, birds flying off at the last second, entertaining themselves by making their escape as narrow as possible? Would it be like a huge Victorian house on a chunk of ice in Baffin Bay? Like a new astronomical instrument that proves the sun is made of wind, a madman's face in a shopfront window bursting into flame, a college course in learning how to sleep as well as a puppy, a bandshell by a placid lake with a mushroom cloud in the background, a meditation technique inducing a vegetable ecstasy, replacing human language with molecular transformations, as the light given off when words produce unexpected synaptic fusions, glowing on the peripheries of everything we think we know, slowly congeals in photosynthetic bliss, twinkling with chlorophyll? Like Lyndon Johnson singing "Remember the Maine" on the Senate floor, soulfully inciting the press to print the official distortion, making hostile U.S. Navy activities in the Gulf of Tonkin appear to be blunt evidence of communist aggression? Like events freed from narrative motion, no longer distorted by the pressure to perform in sequence, the pressure to become what past and future make of them, secure in the quiet ecstasy of the permanent verbal present, substantial as a dog with a bone, thinking with its teeth, or a man licking his lover's nipples, putting his hand between her thighs, watching her biceps bulge in moonlight split by venetian blinds? Like a study conclusively proving that gazing into an aquarium for long periods of time is a far more healthy way to relax than watching prime-time TV shows? Like an eye the size of an ocean liner closing in a midnight sky, a mile and a half above the tallest iceberg in the Bering Sea? Like walking for days toward what seems to be a towering metropolis, only to find after a brutal trek that the city is no larger than it looked at first, that its tallest buildings are perhaps ten inches high, that it takes up less than five square feet, and that the population has no time for baffled, obnoxious giants? Like a morning game show emcee waking up as Adolph Hitler? Like stacks of pancakes changing into stacks of clouds at six a.m., just as two hundred million Americans head for the breakfast table? Like suddenly realizing that you can pass your fingers right through the trembling shape you thought was a person? Like puppies playing maniacally on a shady summer lawn, cool piano jazz barely audible from an open window ten flights up? Like a world population ignorant of their fundamental condition, that their planet is trapped in a massive block of ice that might at some point melt, no longer holding the planet in place, letting it suddenly fall with nothing anywhere to stop it? Like a mass murderer getting off with a light sentence when lawyers prove that his bloody behavior came from too much exposure to automated answering systems? Like a troupe of stage performers less than an inch in height getting chased by a cat? Like a virus taking the form of a pornographic website so dull people can't wait to sign off, but the site won't let them out, and when it finally does, they end up in other pathologically dull pornographic websites, filled with utterly predictable twat shots and idiotic anecdotes and phrases? Like a dictionary of words that don't exist yet, all defined by words that don't exist yet? Or like a page that draws its own diagrams, lines and arcs and angles that represent nothing anyone can recognize, shapes that nonetheless draw themselves on the viewer's perceiving awareness, changing the way the viewer sees and thinks about the world?

Imagine yourself as this viewer. What are you looking at? What are you thinking about? Is it enough to say that language won't suffice? Isn't this the reductively standard way of confronting ecstatic states of mind? Isn't this what makes mystical writing so frustrating, the inability to describe the ecstasy of divine communion? The problem is obvious in the words of the previous sentence: We make a hopeless mistake when we try to describe the indescribable. That which mirrors itself in language, language cannot represent. But language that moves with careful abandon can make its own ecstasy, dismembering and remembering itself to generate a fluid architecture that is not a description of anything, though it might be compared to the multiplied silence that comes to life between facing mirrors, or perhaps to a tribal drumbeat making images appear in the sky, pictures that quickly dissolve releasing hundreds of other pictures, which quickly dissolve releasing thousands of other pictures, which quickly dissolve releasing millions of other pictures, which quickly dissolve releasing billions of other pictures, all dissolving so quickly that no one can see what the pictures are. But the drumbeat never stops. And the pictures never stop coming.