Notice: If you see dismembered limbs of gargoyles crawling across the land in search of torsos from which they were torn (by choice), please don’t be alarmed. They’d be grateful to hitch a ride in your basket or backpack should you be so able and inclined, but otherwise please don’t hinder or harm them.
I found this last night in pencil in the back of my copy of Either/Or. It would be from over a year ago. I only vaguely recall writing it:
Is that it?
Does one take the Kierkegaardian leap of faith so that one can (help) build the Thomistic cathedral?
(Is this the contra-suicidal leap? A leap across the threshold rather than off the precipice. Alas for we who feel more at home perched among the gargoyles. There is no way in, there is no way out. We sit here cramped and brooding, half-lascivious, half-facetious, in a fit of agony that looks like laughter.)
Good lord, I can be a wee goth sometimes. I don’t know whether to gag or chuckle! Yet it was written in sincerity. The needle has since moved and keeps moving. I am now as much concerned with a joint K-T leap into animisms and trans-nihilos. Cathedrals swallowed into holobionts. (Whales within whales within whales as Morton would say—and tiny anthropo-jonahs dove-taled into the sympoiesis too, little co-carvers, for a little while at least.) Just so, the polylemma remains.
I wasn’t consciously thinking of the book’s title when I scribbled this note. But I see it at work in that densely gargoyled litho-kinesis (that looks like a freeze-frame but is not, akin to the densities of anthropocene temporalities) between the jump off and the jump into. And those prepositional precipices could be applied to either horn of that shaggy bifurcation, for one jumps off and hurtles down into faith as a kind of death as much as one jumps into death as a kind of faith in crossing over: over and out. So it’s splatterpunk either way.
Not forgetting that a jump at species-speed can look more like a gliding shamble or winged shuffle from the vantage of a single human lifetime (or even generations):
And like a moth that tries
To enter the bright eye
I go shuffling out of life
Just to hide in death awhile(Nick Cave)
Guess the splatter’s gonna be equally slo-mo. Climate-long. Gross for a while to come, yet can’t-look-away-able. Our ‘Eeewwwwwwww!’ coming out mega-slowed-and-reverbed. (If I seem to be indiscriminately weaving in and out of existential crisis and climate crisis, sans clear ligature, well… I’ve said it before and before and before: dreampunk is verisimilitude.)
But that image of ardent gargoyles in grinning agonistes speaks to a certain pain in being transfixed by the ecstasy of a Both/And—horny, hampered, and ‘death-hilarious’. (Hackneyed also: a syncretic impulse is no specific against empurpled syntax—hell, it’s no doubt its cause!) Sure, I generally tend toward a both/and position as I believe it often tracks better with the ever-on-the-move real. Which is why I’m forever insisting we’re always already monstrous: ‘a monster is precisely the belonging together of a divine excess and the mundane thing through which such an excess shows itself’ (Klyukanov). Monsters are both/and-ers. All their episodes two-handers, the play of the excess and the exceeded (that which exceeds and that which is exceeded) in a shattering belonging-together.1
Yet one has to find the movement in such a double-affirmation rather than an ambered ambiguity. That is, a leap is required by a both/and as much as by an either/or. Deciding for a many-truthed metaphysics is still a leap of faith… into a many-toothed world. It’s not a fangless get out of jam(b)s free option. Merely saying you opt for the both/and instead of the either/or, without leaping, leaves you in the doorway (‘Shining so bright… You tore my prose’), an indecisive insect frozen in amberguity.
We sit here cramped and brooding, half-lascivious, half-facetious, in a fit of agony that looks like laughter.
Leap, grasshopper, leap, before they pin you! Which way? Neither. Both.
In other words, it’s time for a self-splitting. There’s no getting round it. Leap in both (or many—but not all) directions at once. Let the so sundered pieces of you land where they will to begin their slow journeys back to the patchwork craw-nancy that you are. (One can be both scarecrow and gargoyle, see? And grasshopper-moth makes three!) It will probably take the rest of your life (and then some) for the creeping horrors to reunite. So be it. If even a few of the hacked up pieces of me survive that final Either/Or—that last Both/And that we all come to in this life—I guess I just have to trust them to find each other on that unreported other side. (Whether there is one or no! That yearning, fractured arc toward a re-membered body gives the meaning regardless. Even that is donation.)
So if you see dismembered limbs of gargoyles crawling across the land in search of torsos from which they were torn (by choice), please do not be alarmed. They would be very grateful to hitch a ride in your basket or backpack should you be so able and inclined, but otherwise please do not hinder or harm them. The trek toward home or holobiont is no easy road for any of us.
More reports to follow.
And at the mention of ‘divine’, don’t count on strict monotheisms—or mono-atheisms—here. Our rough inklings of the possible divine(s) are hella bewildering. Not by whim but by necessity.