(DAY 0) THE DAY OF WAR
she starts again at zero her body sex.
a zero which appears as nothing but
which she will
carry in her hand as cipher.
Women diffuse themselves according to modalities scarcely
compatible with the framework of ruling symbolics. Which
doesn't happen without causing some turbulence, we might
even say some whirlwinds..(TS, 106)
Minx /min xs/ n. a. pert, sly, or playful girl.
Woman's incompatibility has been coded according to laws of
exclusion. It has had unanticipated consequences. For her
stealthy gestures, body and mutterings have slipped out from
his language and inadvertently into the workings of the war
machine. Her survival depends on the military deployment of
bastardized versions of his appropriation.
Serpentine tactics are the mappings of her imperceptible
advance. She marks her lines through geological cuts,
metallic intrusions, technical scars. As these wounds heal, it is
the crusts that are felt by the fingers of a trained hand.
Against the strategy of the arborescent, specular war.
She is the sphinx that has no secrets.
Communication that cannot be seen.
On screens tracking a different advance.
Women's heroism comes neither from her routines of
self-sacrifice nor from her forced occupation of a transcendent
position -- outside the state, beyond reason-- but from her
immersion in a body. A body not defined "by its form, nor by
its organs or its functions, nor as substance nor as subject."
(SPP, 127)
Jocasta and Antigone are not the only women. Due East, in
the Indian subcontinent, Kali marks a different path. This is a
non secretive, supercorporeal exploration of flesh, meat, and
incision through surface. Not what a body should do but what
a body can do. Experiment. Find the body. Locate the third
eye.
Kali was born from this eye that is her weapon. From one eye,
in the middle of her mother's forehead. One sealed and
lacerated welt from which will spill many others.
Immeasurable intrusions which a female must always
anticipate. Either side of the present...sensing the future. .
She learnt her games, riddles, tricks, like every women, from
Durga, goddess of war. With her ten arms motionless at
absolute speed Durga battles with the demon heroes. Each of
her arms equipped: 2 snakes, 1 shield, 1 bladed shell, 1 torch,
2 arrows, 1 spear, 1 machete.
Liquid Turbulence.
Yet the demon heroes persist.
As she feels a slippage she must strengthen her grasp.
Focusing attention on the spot between her eyebrows she
calls on her most prized and secret weapon. Moving like a
disc in her head, metallic red, her third eye opens. Kali is born
and a war is won.
But is not over. Kali's intrusion into the ruling order is a micro
specifically planned intermittence. A cut through screen
instigated by the gathering pace of radial spin. Her long and
matted hair flowing wildly, her maddened laughter, her third
eye scarlet, her greedy tongue, her huge hard teeth, her lips
drawn back, her breast dressed by strings of severed heads
with wild and awful faces.
Her garland was the intestine of the demon, her ornaments of
bones in lust for blood and flesh. The earth trembled with her
howling. She trampled heaven, earth and hell, crushed them
beneath her feet. (SF, 98)
Aimed imperceptibly against the organism, against the
specular gaze, the reptile stirs. The third cerebral ventricle,
home of the animal spirits, dismantles the human. The
residual events of a blind weapon that defies sight. What
remains are the traces of her rhythm, the smeared imprints of
her movement-- smooth skids--flatlines. A rhythm composed
of speeds and slownesses.
(DAY 1) THE DAY OF BLOOD
In what the tantrics call the physical body the third eye
corresponds to two glands located in the brain--the pituitary
and the pineal gland. The foreground and the background of
neural theatrics. Women's cyclic discontinuity, her refusal of
the metric order, comes from the various relationships of
feedback that exist between these two glands. From these
primitive loops of the reproductive, hormonal, and calendric
kind comes machinic perceptions, amphibian becomings, and
journeys back through the brain. Her body is alien territory.
Blood will be drawn.
menses/mensi:z/ n.pl.1 blood and other materials discharge
from the uterus at menstruation. 2 the time of menstruation.
[L, pl. of mensis month]
The detritus of a battle is dispersed across a field. The warrior
retreats according to the down-turn of the female cycle: "Small
areas of the stratum functionalis detach one at a time, the
uterine glands discharge their contents and collapse. There
occurs a periodic discharge of 25 to 65 ml of blood, tissue
fluid, mucous, and epithelial cells. At the end of the cycle the
entire stratum functionalis has been shed, only the stratum
basilis remains."(PAP, 901) Destratify..
Her bleeding body is not about the loss of an unsuccessful
egg. It is her temporality, her rhythm.
Blood Thirst.
Kali accepts the blood that flows from her devotee's severed
heads. Satisfying the female thirst for her own flow.
The end of the battle is the time of female ritual. She draws
flow to the surface and watches it redden to the sun. The
scorched liquid of desire is not the projection of male
phantasy but the nectar of a female body. She will enjoy its
many rivulets -- its blood poisons, blood moneys, blood lusts,
blood lettings, blood lines, blood stains, blood cells and blood
stones. Red, the pigment that marks the third eye has been
the colour of the whore since the time of Babylon. She knows
how to use it well.
This toxin of alchemy, seduction and mercurial immixtures is
reddened by the chromatic pigment haemoglobin. Composed
of four polypeptide chains, and four nonprotein pigments, this
concoction of iron and oxygen is seen surfacing. Red blood is
metal.
The body is the breeding ground of anorganic life. With no
interior closed off to the environment it behaves as an
electrical conductor drawing energies from the earth's ferric
core. The body has always been the metallic assemblage of
posthuman life. She is bleeding metal, the iron of the earth.
Her frequencies are tuned to the electromagnetics of a lunar
rhythm, to geological foldings, to tides and the floodgates. Her
blood will rise and fall.
THE NIGHT OF LILITH
By night, by the clock of a lunar rhythm, the female body
refuses the biological regime,
Beneath the lines of Genesis the route of escape is marked
by Adam's first wife. Lilith refused to adopt the proper position
during intercourse. She set herself free from Adam and the
shackles on her pleasure. She never even entered the
Garden. As Eve's dark twin she departs on a line of flight. She
may have disappeared but she can be still be sensed via a
machine which receives a different frequency. But do not be
fooled. Light and dark, Eve and Lillith are not opposed, "Day
and night are mingled in our gazes. Our gestures. Our bodies.
There is no danger that one or the other may be a darker
double." (S. 217)
Under the guise of darkness Lilith joins Kali. Their hunt is
shared. Men, children, pregnant women are their prey; behind
they leave a trail of blood. Their movements do not follow
separate paths. This twinned couple repeats the reversible
relation between the third eye's two main glands.
In the dark, the pineal gland emits melatonin, the inhibitor of
reproductive hormones. The pituitary loop slows and the three
flows, lutenising hormone, thyroid stimulating hormone, follicle
stimulating hormone, are blocked. The woman's alliance to
the organism is delayed. Speed is not always about
acceleration. The girls body is also composed of slowness.
"On account of her lateness, she did too many things crossed
too many spaces in relation to the relative time of the person
waiting for her." (ATP, 271) The pineal gland is the modulator
of alien pacings.
After the dark falls, the third eye will awaken and the body's
need to reproduce will slow. With the lunacy of a flicker and
the arrival of the psyche's alien signal, a blockage is released
and the dark side of the mistress gland is switched on. "Any
creature that has its place only in the splendour of the light
bleaches, dries up and soon perishes." (ML, 136)
The light is switched off, the female tunnel changes direction.
A dam is built, the flow is staunched. Female cyclicity is just
as much a matter of blockage as flood. As the body departs a
segmented composition it becomes intense and responsive to
vibration, the necessary mechanism is "nothing more than a
set of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls of communicating
vessels" (ATP, 153) Through these gradients of intensities
women join Lilith.
night monster
claw footed lady
winged sphinx
This is Kali but I know her to be Lilith.
We are of the same blood.
THE DAY OF THE EGG
When the light returns, Lilith and Kali do not sleep. Light is not
their enemy. They will use it in ways that man has not
prescribed, not as the torch of truth but the resource for their
night mission. And when the light of the sun has set, they will
find a different light, the light of nocturnal lunacy, the lunar
disc illuminated through its four phases. Here is where they
store their armoury.
With light, melatonin production is reduced. The female body
takes a familiar turn towards its reproductive obligation.
Perfect camouflage for a woman who must be traded by a
specular economy. She produces an egg but not necessarily
to reproduce. The egg is ambiguous, shot through by dual
alliances. The effectiveness of a weapon is dependent on
preservation, carefully assigned dosages of retreat and
withdrawal. The third eye is fuelled by slownesses, stops and
techniques of caution. Whilst the pineal gland stills, the
pituitary gland accelerates the emission of reproductive
hormones -- giving relief.
It generally takes 10 to 14 days for a primary follicle to
develop into a vesicular ovarian follicle. On day 14, the
rupture of the vesicular ovarian follicle releases the secondary
oocyte which travels down the fallopian tubes and lodges
itself in the pelvic cavity... (PAP, 903)
The monthly passage of the egg is not simply oriented to the
arrival of the sperm. There is more than the reproduction of
1s. The egg does not have to follow the rules of meiosis. It
must always be asked exactly what an egg can do, aside from
the treaded paths of childlike extension. Everything is
contained within the egg; organs, limbs, tissue, muscle,
neurons, hormones, the entire central nervous system, but
here transcribed as a frequency template, a map of voltages
and electrical currents not yet extended.
The body never leaves the egg. It is a resource that must
always be explored: "you always carry it with you as your own
milieu of experimentation, your associated milieu. The egg is
the milieu of pure intensity, spatium not extension. Zero
intensity as principle of production." (ATP, 164)
For twenty four hours of every month, at the time of ovulation,
a woman's body will undergo a huge increase in voltage. It
marks the force of mitochondrial, non-meiotic self-replication.
The egg which she carries with her, becomes the production
unit of a new egg within which is contained further eggs. The
infinite egg. Each repetition is the actualisation of one of
400,000 possibilities. A body without organs is never one but
many. The electric body bleeds back from the future.
The third eye torches the arousal of a 1-track mind. On Mt
Kaliasa, Siva, keeper of the third opening, ignores Kama's
teasings, refusing to reproduce on demand. As the God of
Love, launched his arrow, a great flame blazed from Siva's
third eye and burned Kama to ashes. The third cerebral
ventricle destroys meiotic desire programmed for sexual
reproduction. The egg becomes intense and resets itself to a
different program. It is mapped to the digits of Siva's refusal,
to the diagram of the BwO. Focus on the space between the
eyebrows. Open the third eye. Find the passage to the
Tantric's cosmic egg.
THE DAY OF CLOSING
Evolutions story, then, is a story of closure and stunted
potential. An egg is too hastily extended. As organic life
complexifies and a body protracts to fit the scripted
organisation, the third eye withdraws deep into the folds of the
skull. It may function in the child until the age of seven but the
development of a growing human demands that it be shut.
Apparently, its role is written out.
And left behind in the debris of a different time. At a beginning
when "every class and family of living species was
hermaphrodite and one-eyed...when for the third root race
(the division of the sexes), the Third eye (i.e. the pineal gland)
was the only seeing organ. At this time the two physical eyes
were undeveloped....it is only later that the pineal body began
to atrophy and the physical eyes developed." (TOOTTE 70)
As vertebrates unfold, stand high, and order the landscapes
according to optical law tactility is submerged. The interfering
eye sinks.
Straight line time battles against the third opening. Humanity
as telos is the progress towards a dangerous closure. When
Siva close closes his third eyes the universe is destroyed.
Specular vision begins to surface, through the two eyes
lodged in the sockets of the skull. Now thought is not from the
obscure and inconsequential gland, the non-spatial traces of a
lost era. . .For the third eye to open we must go forward, back
into the past.
(DAY 5) DAY OF THE AMPHIBIAN
The body carries within itself far more than its current
evolutionary stage. man's progress has told the story straight.
Starting at zero: bacteria, algae, fish, amphibian, reptile, bird,
mammal. But woman does not belong to this progress. Hers
is not the same time, not the same temporality, not the same
zero. She lies back on the continuum.
A woman carries in her waters an eff's complete environment.
Eggs without shells spawning the liquid transport of the BwO.
The move to dry land is not an irreversible process. Dep
amongst the body's tides, amphibian tendencies draw an
organism to the hydral state from which it once emerged.
"Seems that human folks has got a kind o' relation to the
water beasts-- that everything alive came out o' the water
once an'only needs a little change to go back again." (SOI,
145)
Here is how it's done. Leave the hard crust which separates
us from our environment. Crack the shell which encloses the
body in its rigid form. Detopologise the body so the surface
are smooth and featureless, so that orientation becomes
impossible. Forget the landmarks of a body's surface, feel it
shiver and gyrate on its way. Kundalini leads. Beckoning from
the base of the spine, from the earth's dense matter. The
journey requires caution, tactile orientation and tantric
supplies.
Cut through
Frequency bands
Time-skin scales
Fossilised brain remains
kundalini's battle lines
to where the spaces and surfaces are of a cooler skin, of a
body which will read the temperature of an environment and
of the embryonic frequencies of an egg in experimentation.
The third eye opens, the organism's straight line time receives
another assault from the alien cycle.
The body is transported to the mouth of the river
Destination Zero.
The fifth embryonic week.
As Haeckel marked on the map:
the human embryo lying in the foetus
during the nine-month gestatin period
passes on in a general way through a recapitulation of
ancestral stages of man's evolution on this planet. The pinea
body appears about the fifth week in the embryo, indicating
how early this gland began to function in the actual history of
the human race. . .
Never forget the power in becoming serpent
The warrior never did.
Approaching from behind.
Sudden constriction
DAY OF THE OPENING
When you rewind the organism you multiply the sense.
Perception is not limited to isolated sensory sites but roams
across affective surfaces. These are the planes of the third
eye. "You have become sensitive to very, very small units of
time. To everything which is infinitesimal you have become
sensitive, to the tiny nothings which pass in their
multitudes."(IT, 9)
We have always know that bodies communicate on their own
sub-symbolic territories. Tantric tentacles.
Extra sensory perception requires no additional component. it
has always been latent in the body's static potential. Rapid
fire technological acceleration and the furious metallurgy of
cybernetic feedback systems meet the slow amphibious body
and rework the perceptual machine.
Hallucinations are screened. According to the doses of the
hallucinogenic substance 6-methoxyletrahydroharman (the
digital avatar of pineal adrenoglomerulotropine). Th pineal
gland provides the boyd with its own internal technology of
simulation: manufactured realities- though it is hopeless to
identify them as such. Beyond mirror vision, beyond the five
sense the body will respond to the path of light itself, to
formless and alien signal. In these environments, it finds
means to communicate with its own cellular pattern and win
the matrix of others.
As meatonin interacts with melancolytes pheromones are
produced. These exohormones, now attributed to the sixth
sense, prise the meat open to external messengers. Bodies
can receive signals from other bodies, sexual and otherwise,
and we can be none the wiser. As it has been suspected, the
pigment cell makes no important hormones that act on the
owners body. However its site on the surface of the skin
suggests that it could be making a hormone that acts on
someone else's body, an exohormone rather than an
endohormone.
the codes
frequencies
pulses
of luminescent screens build a body used by a sensory
system external to that of its own. A system which will forge
its own means to read and communicate, emerging on the
outside of our perceptual field in the non-optical territories of
sound, longwave light and xrays. ESP is not a remarkable
phenomenon. The third eye was never about the geometry of
the retina. it is the roaming of an organ into the extremities of
vibration, to the zones where "the unassignable material
Saboteur or human Deserter assumes the most diverse
forms."(ATP, 422)
These camouflaged forms write their own scenarios.
Credits roll.
(DAY 7) DAY OF THE UNIVERSE
Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: cut
open the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, and its
great velvety planes...(LE, 1)
Fold the body inside out.
Bring the third eye to the surface.
Listen to the war cry.
We still do not know what the body can do. The pineal gland
is no longer an organ but a set of coordinates. "Make human
anatomy dance at last." (WRS, 313).
When the surface has been successfully exposed, the
techniques of optical scanning must shed. To reveal a new
skin in place of the old which is slippery to the palm and
jarring to the retina. The scene no longer set. All that is known
is the truth of the body, that "What is here is elsewhere. What
is not here is nowhere" (Vivasara Tantra)
"Then you will teach her again to dance inside out. As in the
delirium of dance halls. And that inside out will be her true
side out." (WRS 307)
Feel inside the body and you will find the universe. A women's
body synchronizes with the solar system. It cannot be decided
which follows and which leads. For these lunar rhythms are
the same.
When the third eye opens, the cycle of time is devoured. The
third eye is the zero point of temporality. Female intensity kept
in reserve, providing the potential for the cycle to begin again.
~~~ 00--[[:10>>>
Ida and Pingala, the two tracts of the spinal column, ascend
and descend. Ida, the positive charge of the fiery red sun and
Pingala, the negative charge of the pale white moon together
making up the never ending cycle of Kala (time). As Kundalini
reaches the 6th chakra--the third eye-- these two tracts that
make time's cycle are engulfed by susumna, the main interior
tract. The third eye opens, the cranium melts, the body's rear
head pierces through and emerges outside time.
This sex which was never one is not an empty zero but a
cipher. A channel to the blank side, to the dark side, to the
other side of the cycle ......to doomsday
........................................
Here rhythm finds its pulse. Withdrawal.... her cyclic
discontinuity, her imperceptible activities, her extra sensory
perceptions, her warrriored foldings, her blocks and horrifying
flows, her blank zones of intrusion .
third eye.
will produce.
necessary foundations.
through touch.
we sense.
differential speeds.
to come.
24. Fu / Return (The Turning Point ) On the seventh day
comes return
Works Cited:
ATP: Gilles Deeluze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus,
(London: Athlone Press 1988)
IT: Henri Michaux, Infinite Turbulence, (London: Coldar and
Boyars 1975)
LE: Jean Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy. (London:
Athlone Press 1993)
ML: Luce Irigary, Marine Lover of Fredrich Nietzsche, (New
York: Columbia University Press 1991)
PAP: Principles of Anatomy and Physiology: Sixth Edition.
(New York: Harper Collins 1990)
S: Luce Irigaray. Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, New
York: Cornell Uni Press 1985)
SF: David Kinsley. The Sword and the Flute. (Berkeley:
University of California Press)
SOI: Lovecraft H.P. "Shadow Over Innsmouth." Omnibus 3:
The Haunter of the Dark. (London: Harper Collins, 1994)
SPP: Gilles Deleuze. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. (San
Fransisco: City Lights Books 1988)
TOOTHE: Douglas Baker. The Opening of the Third Eyes
(DM Baker 1993)
TS: Luce Irigaray. This Sex Which is Not One (Ithaca, New
York): Cornell University Press 1985)
WR: Antonin Artaud. Watchfiends and Rackscreams: Works
from the Final Period of Antonin Artaud. (Exact Change:
Boston 1995)