Could it be that with disembodiment, presence expands? Language is like that too. In fact language depends on this lingering on as an idea tracing an outline around a once solid, breathing form, troubling the body’s once bodiednness. Circling endlessly, now and again pausing for breath, words and things, drifting apart, coming together. If only for the moment, death stills the circuit in a frenzy of anxious embodiment-lust—just as spirit possession and shock can do, types of death holding spirit and body at arm’s length from one another. Eyeing each other. Imagine the tension. The shoot out at the OK corral. Your metaphor. My literality. Just the quiet, occasionally interrupted by the stamping of hooves. In the stillness of this stand-off where death interrupts the circle of exchange between the real and the figure of the real, time turns on itself and there begins the glow, the glow of the strange after-life askin to an after-image that surges from radical incompleteness, which is, perhaps, an odd way of putting it—this constant surging, the incompleteness of life, staggering along, now this way, now that, then physically ended and given some sort narrative structure by posterity, another form of incompleteness, really, too definitive a bodily closure on what might have been. Which is why the soul is so important, the indispensable relic that holds open the possibilities for the might have been—back then, and over there. 

-Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State

it all talks poetry. interrupts of the inner eruption. 

•  11 October 2012  •  5 notes