THE SIX

by Antarah Crawley

Ma’at rides on Ptah out of the mouth of Djehuti
Ptah spreads the verbs and scatters them into words
The curds of germination become the monads of formation
the lipika inscribed upon the astral plane
The monads in pleroma become manifest in atoms
Fohat scatters the atoms throughout the body of the mother
Evenly at first and then in clusters
He spins the smokestreams into whirlpools and sets them into motion
Fohat enflames the bellies of the worldpools
Six worldpools cool and the seventh becomes the son
He sucks the fire from the brothers and
mother sends them spinnin round him
She locks him at the center of the system
of the six worlds lest they spin off into space
& have no son to look upon them
& sow mercy in their soil
I’m sorry says the son
Here’s the light I took from you
I look it back upon you
And the son forgives the worlds with the aid of mothers justice
And the six run round and round their brother son and sing his praise
And harmony rings in the celestial strings

The seventh son becomes enraged & scours at the heart of six
So long has he fed on mothers sweat, refuse, Rejected one
The son will pull the other brothers into him
Consume them and render them elements enflamed inside him
In the chaos of the belly of the mother son
And the belly breaks the bonds
which tether worlds in the cosmic fabric
and the mother bends into the black hole son
He condenses all of mothers love into the one inside him
His horizon becomes her infinitude
And the son becomes the mother
Belly full of children
Sitting in the nothing of no place.

5TH AVENUE, MANHATTAN

Excepted from Rustles in Dry Leaves by Antarah Crawley c. 2014

there is no shortage of muses in the city.
you cannot keep at bay the surge they swell inside you or the mast they keep at sail.
ornamented monoliths’ countless stories have seen countless stories; awning-covered thresholds yawn with gapéd mouths, several centuries’ stony sleep.
the city’s first casualties are soles, while, underneath, your balls grow calloused.
hardest part of anywhere is getting there.
crowd into downtown-bound train lines,
sides of urban highway have been socially prescribed.
holes may burrow deep into the concrete & the soil & cysts of steel may sprout like tumors,
extend unto the ends, &
we are all but cells in capillaries, anemones at sea;
& the bloodways run both ways up to the crown and down beneath the feet; & you may wonder while you wander effortlessly in the street.
she of glass eyes urges one to find…
the city is hollowed,
hollow inside.
vagrant dreams have dissolved in the steam which ascends from subway grates that have warmed the nameless;
those who’ve dreamed have fallen, while steam serves but as warmth, & may in the winter frost soar higher &
it’s only the wind that
rustles in dry leaves.
do downtrodden doves living over cosmo-poverty
lament their cement-speckled wings?
i am pigeon seeking crumbs cast by bag ladies under canopies in parks.

“Out of the Dark Emerging…”: Encountering Alterity, or, The Inevitable Divergence of Colliding Phenomena

At the moment that we encounter alterity, each diverts the “other” from their path, and their material body is altered in such a way that, as Derick Attridge puts forward in The Singularity of Literature, when one encounters the other one encounters “not the other as such … but the remolding of the self that brings the other into being as, necessarily, no longer entirely other (23).” This idea of the other being at once separate from the writing entity and, upon convergence with said entity, becoming an inherent part of them, opens up the phenomenon I wish to evaluate here. The writing entity may refer to either the writer who manifests the other upon the page as they are writing/after they have written, or the location where the writing had occurred, which then becomes other when it enters the world and comes into contact with the entity involved in reading the other, making both entities an other to each other. We will dwell more heavily in the former example: the process of manifesting the immaterial other in the material world via textual phenomenon. This model of writing implies the influence of the Yet-Unmanifest which is the root of all literary textual phenomena and the dictator of the rule for encountering all such phenomena; the writing of every unique text brings into creation the essence of the Yet-Unmanifest via the particular and inventive formation of that essence into the solidity of form. Though we know that from the Absolute Unmanifest was longtime past begotten the Practically Infinite Plane of Manifested and To-Be-Manifested Phenomena, thereby displacing the Yet-Unmanifest phenom of creative writing to a secondary pool of conceptual sources derived from experience and reading (and also the unprovable influence of Human Intuition into the Absolute), we assert that the Yet-Unmanifest text of writing via the writing agent comes, by way of a complicated metaphysical transition from Absolute-to-Conditioned being, from that Absolute realm from which all writing is begotten in common. The invention and creation of the writing agent warrants their body’s “ownership” of the resulting textual formation, but, again, only in body—in sentence structure, tone, meter, and vocabulary: the things that make up literature as a phenomenon separate from continuous human reality, and that which gives to each individual authored piece of literary text their “authoredness.”

“What exactly am I doing as my fingers press the keys and my eyes scan the screen?” asks Attridge (17). This sentence is the form that the writer has chosen to embody an Absolute, universal quandary which is: what constitutes the act of writing? Any person can conceive of this question—and even write it down—but the fact that the sentence containing the conceit has been placed in quotation marks and attributed to a page in a text authored by Attridge proves that authorship is conditioned by form, not content; and that the activity of writing may be organized pyramidally—as a hierarchy: proceeding from the formation of sentences by a writing agent (briefly described in the Attridge quote) there is the level at which the public experiences the writing, when the text is channeled into human expression from one to another, or as expression produced in the reader in response to the text; preceding the formation of the sentences by the writer there is the world of creation in which the ideas channeled from the yet higher plane of Unmanifest ideas begin to find their form (they take shape) in the mind of the writer. Thus the hierarchy of the activity of writing descends as follows: (0) The inaccessible Absolute Unmanifest from which the entirety of human ideas has already been borne into the reality of human accessibility in (1) the world of Origination where the infinitude of human ideas floats ethereal, ready to be plucked by one archangel of authorship (or, a muse) and worked into a general unique and literary shape in (2) the world of Creation, in which the crudely shaped essence of the content is further worked into a form which manifests in (3) the world of Formation, and is then conveyed via the form of the text as “created” by the author to the masses in (4) the world of Expression.

The (0) plane of the Absolute Unmanifest cannot be comprehended by human minds, and so it would be foolish to do anything but praise it, for it is no thing, nothing, hollowed, hollow, whole, and holy. The (1) plane of the Yet-Unmanifest Origination of All Thing does not attain the divine heights of Absolute noumena, but it is nevertheless in its infinitude so inconceivable by the human mind that it may as well lie in the realm of the unattainable. The present analysis of writing must therefor focus on the (2) world of Creation as the first performance of the writing activity we may scrutinize.

Creation is unique because, as Attridge acknowledges, “there are times when … I am not putting into words a conceptual structure I have already planned, not tinkering with an existing text to make it more accurately express what I want it to say, not working out a problem according to a preexisting set of rules (17).” This is to say that when the writing persona is not dealing with phenomena that has already entered the world of Expression (or, refashioning the already formed), but siphoning from a Yet-Unmanifest plane the germs of a new form, then they are creating. “I seem to be composing new sentences out of nothing [italics mine],” he says, acknowledging the holy No Thing which is the womb of human creation and expression, that body from which all our bodies and all our ideas have sprung. Going on, he says, “from time to time the nebulous outlines take shape …” noting the way that the diffuse of the essence of human ideas are formed, or shaped, somewhat crudely, from the ethereal, non-physical melange of material Origination (or, as he calls it, “the largely inchoate swirl of half-formulated thoughts and faint intimations” [which is how the world of Origination appears to the human psyche]) (and he enforces, as well, the cosmic allegory, emphasizing the way that the diffuse of the nebula collapses, after enough mass [content] and gravity [unity] have been applied, into a star: a more condensed unit of literary “light”) (17). In this process he find himself always losing his thread, deleting, and going back over his process of writing to say “what needs to be said,” or, he corrects himself, what “demands to be said (17, italics his).” Here he admits that he is but compelled by the Absolute Being of the Womb to write out (use his body as a vessel for manifesting) her essence (universal ideals) in a new unique form (the product of the text). “Motivated by some obscure drive, I sense that I am pushing at the limits of what I have hitherto been able to think,” he finishes his paragraph, and in this conclusion we see that he has risen up the hierarchy of the literary phenomenon, having moved beyond the mere regurgitation of preformed or reacted phenomena, past the making of sentences, past the idea of what it is he is writing, past any concrete conception what he wants to convey, and has hit the ceiling of the Yet-Unmanifest, the limit of his manifested thought, beyond which remains hitherto unthought. Attridge is not writing criticism in this paragraph. For one, he is writing a personal-philosophic reflection and, secondly, it is a spiritual speculation above all else.

Attridge acknowledges shortly after the above discussion that “what I am trying to shed light on is not at bottom a matter of psychology, consciousness, or subjective experience, but of structural relations (18).” Oh, oh, oh. What Attridge describes as an “attempt at introspection” is not merely so: it is in fact the literature he wishes to critique, and now, unfortunately, he moves into a more disciplined criticism wherein he remains in the world of Expression—the lowest realm in the hierarchy—wherein he responds to the previously thought instead of the exciting world of the hitherto unthought. But, then again, one cannot be employed by an academic institution and expect to maintain a salary writing about that which cannot be proven by the populous; the Esteemed Critic must guard his essentially spiritual and personal quandaries in the veils of discipline, and support himself upon a foundation of tradition and rigor, lest the work of literary theory be confused with that of psychology or theosophy—how horrific—so different they are! So sad, as well. I wish that we could remain in the realm closer to the Unmanifest, as that is where I am from, that is where my heart is, and all the implication we see here on earth, in the Kingdom, have their roots above, in the ethereal Unmanifest noumenal nebula of all descendant phenomena.

The Phenomenal Textual Encounter, or, The Body Dramatically Contorts the Curvature Of SpaceTime

In my authorship I am neither creator nor authority but merely an agent—of what then? Two things: language (as a human construction) and construction (as natural [original], nonlinguisitic phenomenon); (between them lies a gulf of meaning, strung over by a rickety bridge, but we cannot dwell here). The latter precedes the former in form and being but may not be conveyed without it; the former results from the need to convey the latter but in its own form reformulates the implications of the original phenomenon. The text which lies here, resulting from my formation of its form borne uniquely from my interior into our exterior, possesses an “authoredness” unique to my body and mind. Why? Is it merely, as Derick Attridge calls it, “the product of a mental event … whereby the processes of linguistic meaning are conveyed”? If the constructions are not original (their referents are preexisting, natural), then how did they get into me originally, only to be borne out as descendant, and to what extent is my reformulation of the ideas belonging to my body or of the world? Attridge would conceit that it is on the part of my “invention” that the original constructions have been borne through me into their new literary manifestation. What have I done to be called an “inventor” of text? The answer, Attridge concedes, has more to do on the part of the reader than myself, the “authoring” persona: “The experience of the literary text … arises not from the content of the invention, the series of arguments or proposed concepts it puts forward, but from the reader’s performance of it.” And so I have begotten a reconstruction of original otherness (phenomenality) which is then rendered somewhat benign inside me and leaves my body in a body of its own and enters my potential readers’ (your) body as other, and what do you do then? You are just an earlier me, experiencing these original phenomena anew, renewed, although set apart—singular—in their new inventive forms. My invention, my creativity, is now a part of the original. I am “a writing” and I am always “a writing” in my text to the reader since the encounter of my insides and your outsides in the text-space continues to be experienced as a singular event by every eventual reader. Yet wherefrom do I, the writing, encounter the phenomena and the language I have fit to it? The answer is that I have read them, that is to say, experienced them. In writing, an authoring merely siphons from the internal understanding of worldly referentiality back into the exterior; yet, from that new emergence, a text now born with a body of its own to meet (possibly) with my body’s mind (as many have done), how is that exterior phenomenon encountered and experienced in my own body. How is phenomena in general passed from external body to internal body—and if it means something, tickles a fancy, whose fault is it? We may do well to assume the autonomy of the literary event, that a text with no agency perchance encounters our body as a conductor which catalyzes it into reacting in a way that dissolves the text from a solid external to a permeable substance which may then be allowed to pass across the divide of our interior consciousness. The order of the words on the page is the event in which we are participating, the substance we are bringing into our bodies. So a statement like “the otherness and singularity [of literature] arises from the encounter with the words themselves, their sequence, their suggestiveness, their interrelations, their sounds and rhythms,” may be said to bestow upon the literary object unique in its originality and invention the quality (form) of any natural phenomenon we may encounter.

We cannot be sure of most things. How have the elements been brought out their dark origin to mingle in the ways they do now? Some of the disciplined nature would assume that some agent to be worshiped had their hand in the composition of our world. Empirically, we cannot account for this, and so like the New Critics, indignant of the conceit of intention, we turn to the “real stuff” of our world—our word. Literature, in lieu of the intentions of an Author to produce such a product, and not ultimately reliant on the fact of its existence to be experienced and thus propagated in the mind of humanity to reach the esteems implied by the term, must be the result of happenstance encounter between outside and inside, text and mind, as like fire and water so met will simmer, and only incidentally intentional, whoever responsible having set the quarks in motion some indefinite and therefore irrelevant years back; and it is clear that the majority of intentional attempts to create literature have begotten forgotten works of which, should they constitute a loss, the world remains ambivalent.

Two bodies, remote from one another, may be composed over time and set in motion, regardless whodunit, and with Time and his concubine, Inevitability, they collide in “a temporal event,” to again quote Attridge. In the meeting of these phenomena, the reader and the text, both inert, the reaction of literature sparks a heat and light and an alteration of elements and states of matter; the agency of the human conductor felicitates the transfer of energy from the text to the interior consciousness via the same paths taken by sensory experience and knowledge. The reader acts as catalyst in a reaction whose end result will be the transfer of non-material information from one spatial and temporal region (the writing of the text) to another. These regions, while too complex to thoroughly evaluate here, represent relationships between infinitely expanding space and infinitely condensing space—that is—space that goes on around and beyond us and space that contracts and gets denser within us. It is my theory that while the area of the universe continues to expand into the unknown border-regions of space, one may always define a boundary within which space acts equal to the rate and opposite the direction of change occurring outside the boundary, which we may call the event horizon—to say that there is as much linear movement occurring within the body contained by this event horizon as there is occurring outside of it in the exterior expansion of space; while space contains infinite such bodies, these bodies also contain the inverted yet equally vast frontier of interior space. Like outer space, this inner space contains matter and energy. Of matter, the bodies break down into smaller units which, spatially, become denser and more uniform, from liver to tissue to protein to cell to nucleus to atom to neutron to quark to … Of energies, the bodies condense and become pure aesthetic designation, from gas to nebula to star to sky-light to the star-gazer to astronomy to sublime … and the ultimate uncommunicable sensation which absorbs the sensory information and releases it anew from the depths of the body’s interiority (soul?) is the mirror of the deep expanse of space which troubles and awes us with equal power.

When the event horizon of a particular body is conscious of its boundary due to capabilities of memory and self-awareness, then such a body may actively (as opposed to simply passively, as the leaf passively experiences the ozone) transmit sensory information across the divide. This type of encounter may be called learning, or scholarship, the endeavor to apprehend sensory information. Bodies receive information in passing all the time, but the phenomena of the Outer World are just as ready to be taken in with intent. The Outer World is infinite in its phenomanifestation, or the complete probability set of combinations of elements which beget the whole of the world’s experiences. But the whole of this set is unlikely to be encountered by another body; much phenomena remains inert in the vacuum of space and thus fails to be channeled into the interiority of other compartmentalized bodies. In this way, they remain unread, and largely inaccessible. The phenomena of the Outer World exist insofar as and up until the point that in order to persist beyond the reaches of their form, or body (i.e., in order to maintain causal kinetic motion), they must be channeled across a divide implied in the event horizon of another body, after which their journey from Outer Space unto the local singularity of their experiential trajectory may continue inwardly and in a contained manner with equal rate and longevity into the “center” of the body (“center,” in that the phenomena become abstracted, decompressed, and congealed at a dense center of unique informational gravity); phenomena are born out of the Body of Space and Time and into one of the many bodies of perceivers, each of which processes the information differently and depending on the contents of their interiorities. The active or passive transmission of sensory information across the event horizon may, for our purposes, be called “reading.”

The event horizon of a human being is technically uncertain. We know the limit at which the Outer World begins to affect our physical sensory experience of it, but the limits of Outer effects upon Internal emotional sensory experiences cannot be determined. The network of sensory nerves extends unto the layer of human skin, and so we will define that area as the body of any given human. This may also constitute the event horizon of physical phenomena, but for psychological, emotional, and spiritual phenomena we can either confine the horizon to the brain itself or to all that is directly in contact with the brain, what the eyes perceive at any given time, what the ears hear, etc.; in this way the event horizon of a human being may in actuality be a certain circumference of Outer Space surrounding the physical body. It may also be the collective Interiorities of Humanity, or at least the surrounding population of sentient beings, if we are to consider empathy as a sense. In any case, for our purposes here, the event horizon of human being is the Outer Space matter and energy being directly experienced by the body of the human at any time. What one experiences informs ones context in the world and in the relationship between phenomenations of sensory information.

Sensory information may be conveyed through methods other than experience, such as representations of sensory experience. When a representation of a sensory experience is accurate or particularly poignant, then it will incite a unique feeling as it passes the event horizon of a human being; we may call this event a recognition: the body recognizes the representation as referential of some “true” experience or “true” phenomenon or that such a phenomenon could likely occur or be true. Herein the event of literature becomes apparent: when the Inner Space of the body receives from the Outer Space a sensory experience which incites in the body a unique feeling of “understanding,” i.e., the apprehension of some truth as a performance of truthfulness, a recognition of reference, or the potential thereof. When one apprehends sensory information in the form of text then one may be said to be “reading,” but when the information causes a reaction in the body whereby pleasure or the uncanny or the sublime or any other designation of aesthetic, abstracted sensation is experienced because of a “truthful” or “significant” encounter, then one may be said to be “reading literature.”

Texts, when they come into contact with a reader, become a plane surrounding the event horizon of the body; the text, in reading, becomes experience, the Immediate Outer World. Of course, the content and form of the Immediate Outer World is informed by the Far Outer World of Time and Space, whereby time past spawned the events which were to be recorded and the persons who would record and distribute them and the context for the encounter with the particular reader (because every reader and every reading is different) as well as near-infinite other significant details predicating the encounter. Yet when that fortuitous meeting occurs, the entirety of the world bears down upon the body through the dense symbolic medium of the text; then, the medium of the body conducts the Outer World of the text into the Inner World of the Body and unifies the duality of experience for a moment, until the encounter is passed into the networks and physics of Inner World Reality and processed in one of many psychological ways. The Immediate Outer World meets the event horizon flush and via a particular Intermediary System (which is known to the writer but cannot be described within the limits of this paper) is absorbed into the Inner World and proceeds deeper and deeper within the body.

We may picture this event geometrically. Consider a diamond; between two vertically-aligned points, a center expands outward at equal length in both directions. Now invert the image; replace the line with a point and the points with lines; a rectangle appears to be pinched in the center; two triangles meet at their apex in the center; a base narrows to become a point which begins the cascading expansion of another base. At the top base we find the expanse of Outer World Phenomena. As the base contracts the scope of phenomena shrinks into a smaller area, until just before the center point the phenomena is fully compressed into the text which then encounters the point—the singularity—of the reading of the text. This singularity is the reader encountering the text. After the singularity the Outer World text is transmitted into inner world sensory information which expands and diffuses to make up the Inner World psychological landscape. At the base of Inner World sensory information, the text has become so diffused as to be unrecognizable by the reader at the singularity. Yet there remains in the Inner World of the reader an understanding of the sensory information experienced. When encountered again, the sensory information will incite a recognition in the reader that the event is familiar, uncanny, or “true.” The reader will then designate the new encounter with the sensory information “literature,” retroactively label the first sensory experience “literature,” and seek out similar representations of sensory information to be designated “literature,” and taught and disseminated as such to others to share the experience for the value of the recognition it incites. Literature, thus, represents the rewarding movement of Outer World Phenomena via its condensed manifestation as text through the singularity of the reading body, thereby altering its elemental composition and state of matter in a way specific to that particular reaction, and its processing through that body’s Inner World store of Sensory Information.

O Systems, Our Father, our shore, our nation, our set of rules, our sense of shame for breaking them. We are in his balls, where it is so warm and familiar, and we multiply each other to forge a community. But when the sea of Mother calls, and Father gushes forth his current into her, only some of us take up the call, those more adventurous little sperms. We will not all survive in the sea of the cervix. Many of us will die in our voyage to fertilize that egg of meaning in this life. But those of us who do succeed will produce a beautiful new life, a little being of our own, to wash upon a new shore, to see the light of day, to forge a new community, and commence the process over. Mother waits perpetually at bay, calling forth those adventurous seamen who will take up the call. Her voice is divine, is it not? for those of us who can hear it in the salty breeze.

We have wrung the blood from our stripes and the tears from our stars. Our Powerful Father has begotten and forgotten us. We had a mother who walked like jesus with swollen feet across the water with a race inside of her womb; roots run across to her broke home and we are born from the sea. We are born from nowhere, from a void, and we thus descend from this black hole. With a brief reprieve in the islands south of our shallow foster home-to-be we sank northward into the Deep where cane stalks balked at us along the gravel way and our feet, iron-clad and chained bled onto the small sharp rocks and our fingers were soon to shed crimson pearls into a soft whiteness of ungiveable forgiveness. When pigs are given dominion over pearls and what is holy has gone down to dogs and the headless carcasses of the philistines have been devoured by the foul and the beasts I will think of your noosed neck swinging in the yard; I will think of your cracked hands bleeding finely in the white sea; I will think of your strong arms, blood pooled blue at the fingertips, hanging at your side; I will think of your black hands mulling in the rich earth. The branches swing low and pendulous; the sea swallows, bubbling; upon a furrowed brow, how heavy the fruit blossoms, and in the belly festers … a hung girl.

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