Archivi tag: absurdity

unorma: universal norms of absurdity / jim leftwich. 2022

UNORMA: Universal Norms of Absurdity
Jim Leftwich
Summer 2022
Nevada

Venn Diagrams glean presentiment where never the twains shall melt. Therein the Vesica Piscis, renumerable counterfactuals, munerates aeration of comeuppance, until the bittern fends.

First, it must be logical, the absurd must be predictable. To live out on the lawn / You must be honest.

Second: the absurd must be predictable; it must be a replica of itself. Do as I say to do, not as the duly unsaid, which is your duty. Unruly: an unmeasured quantity; the quality of being unmeasuring; a cup of what else, unfulfilled.

Third: the absurd is local. Lies about the absurd are global.

Fourth: go forth and multiple, multiply tables, The Plicate Cult of Mults, fables breathe froth before us — you are complicated; try to contain your selves!

The absurd is polysemic, is nothing if not. But you (You!) must remember: this is not Your Uncle’s Absurdity. You inherit what you invent.

Don’t make me tell you the whole treacherous tale again.

asemic writing and the tragedy of the absurd / jim leftwich. 2022

Jim Leftwich

Asemic Writing and The Tragedy of the Absurd
Summer 2022 / Utah

When I say absurd, I don’t mean quirky.
I don’t think absurdity is a variety of comedy.
Finding comedic relief in inconsequential weirdness does not qualify as an experience of the absurd.

Certain styles of comedy monetize a surrealist juxtaposition of clangorous items and/or ideas to elicit Spasms of Guffaw from a naptive audience. As such, they serve a purpose: to disguise the osmotic suffering of those immersed in the petroleus ooze of The Capitalist Ongoing.

The absurd does not organize itself in order to acclimate our minds around any of the currently available varieties of unbearable realities.

The absurd is: a variety of that which is incomprehensible within the human universe.

A mystery is: that which is uplifting because it is experienced as being incomprehensible within the human universe. We celebrate an encounter with mystery.

The absurd is experientially devastating, annihilating, a psychological sparagmos. We may, after a fashion, celebrate the fact that we experienced it and lived to tell the tale.

Asemic writing is capable of embodying, and conveying, the tragedy of the absurd. But only for the those who want that, who want that kind of thing. For those who do not want that kind of thing, asemic writing is also fully capable of being abstract art school dorm room wallpaper and glamping picnic tablecloth design. I know, I am not being very nice, I’m sorry. Did you by chance see Sun Ra and The Arkestra 40 or 50 years ago? They had The Look. Sparkling robes down to the floor, Egyptian Spaceman Hats 3-feet high. Marching around the stage, chanting, gesturing with their instruments towards the ceiling. I saw them with a few hundred other people in 1982 and not a soul was laughing. We’re they absurd? Absolutely. Sublime? Yes.

The Tragedy of the Absurd is experienced as a Magickal Absurdity. Asemic writing is capable of existing along that spectrum of experiences. I learned that in the late 1990’s as part of my introduction to the idea and the execution of asemic writing. I have never been able to want anything else from it.

asemic writing and the absurd / jim leftwich. 2022

To the extent that The Absurd is a characteristic, or even at times a category of the historical avant garde, it can be asserted that asemic writing functions as a continuation of the theory and practice of the avant gardes (plural, at least since the end of WWII) in the form of a self-actualizing multitude of willful absurdities.

If the absurd is the incongruous, as Albert Camus asserted in The Myth of Sisyphus, then the simultaneous presence of the written and the unreadable is a classic example of absurdity, in its most uncontestable, experiential form.

Whereas absurdity under normal conditions requires a clash of juxtaposed items or ideas, asemic writing only requires itself, as a self-contained absurdity.

A self-contained absurdity is a Magickal Absurdity. It offers itself as a reality, of a type that should not exist. It troubles the stability of the psyche, as if for a fleeting moment there is no distinction between Sisyphus and Icarus, as if both are merely variations on the theme of Tantalus.

Desire, as often as not frustrated, thwarted, derailed, detoured, imbricate and futilitarian, anachronistic, impoxximate, inverted — invertebrate — involuntary, and/or joylessly reinsinuated,

stands,

sits,

lies

at the unsettled center of all considerations concerning the function of absurdity in everyday life.

In the case of asemic writing, we desire for that which is certainly not asemic to nonetheless function in our everyday lives as if it clearly is asemic and nothing else.

Absurdity is a very particular and peculiar variety of desire.

We want the world to be not only other than what it is — we want it to be precisely that which it can never be.

That variety of desire is precisely the allure of asemic writing. It is the distilled quintessence of its magickal absurdity.

That is not only why, but how, the practice of asemic writing reinvents itself, over and over, across centuries and cultures, one generation after another into the present.