Towards a Schizomythology of Ritual

An ichnology of antipathy, with bibliography and citations

Supposing truth is a woman, this tautology (and not—contra any falsifying conclusions your conditional curl of lip, your lapidary laugh or lift of brow, your dorsodominant shrug—dramatically dolorous—of collar may claim as full philoscoffical act of logical contradiction—and not, I say, a whining, nagging ghost—half liminal inclination, half limbic inhibition—of womanly intuition) posits morality as, at bottom, a shy child’s way of hiding from particularly unhappy facts of adult sociophysiological morphology (I forbid no curious scholar from scanning what Strickland has said (and still has to say) on this topic, but simply wish to maintain for now an upright lack of obtruding citations (which will follow with a bibliography)) and such dim or glum or glaucous notions as may accompany this willful shutting off of sight, of sound, of touch, and that, in addition, this automatic act of obnubilatory autocontradiction (substituting or adding –str– for –trad– or –a¸– (null sign as in symbolic logic, not o with a slash through it as in Finnish orthography) for –di– may aid in clarifying any confusions (I thank Dr. Ava­lano Bimkov for this insight)) impacts into maturational pathways conducting, from infancy to womaninity, that child I was into this truth I am. Nothing antinomian about any of this, so far, you might fairly quip, drawing supporting quotations from Bimkov, Patrolius, Spinoza, Spitmarkx, Strickland, Foucault, Darkbloom, Darwin, Raymond, Kidjaki, or Lamarck. But hold on (and hold in your yawns (as I hold you in my arms))—for soon a twist will hook you in typical stylish fashion, and a popular form of snag will turn this murky summa’s subplot into a sunny (sub)littoral story in which thanatos digs at (and into) vital bodily functions. All right now, Victor? You go, girl!

A Litany, with Invocation and Supplications
by O. W. Johnson

Invocation: Gray chalk cliff slips down to pool
Supplication: Gray chalk Cambrian in origin

I: Gray chalk cliff slips down to pool
S: Forming quarry’s lips and mouth and throat

I: Gray chalk cliff slips down to pool
S: Full GI tract right down to black pool

I: Gray chalk cliff slips down to pool
S: Of stagnant aqua impura in

I: Gray chalk cliff slips down to pool
S: Quarry’s acid stomach so thick

I: Gray chalk cliff slips down to pool
S: With tannins only fools and orphans

I: Gray chalk cliff slips down to pool
S: And sacrificial virgins would jump

I jump. I hit bottom. I drown. Hours pass. Black gas bloats my pallid stomach and I float. And days pass. And I rot. And my body shorn of soul and skin and limbs and organs inhabits myth. A story told in a foolish old song found in an idiot’s study of it (that old foolish song) in a long-lost library book (alphadigital assignation invalid) in which a blind bookworm furiously crawls through a scrawny knot in an insignificant thing (a tun, a cask, a coffin) built of wood which rots in a tomb (on which a hungry fool is scrawling graffiti) containing this most holy sprinkling of cosmic dust I would call my body now (if larynx I had, and lungs) in this schizomythological limbo I inhabit on a soulful balcony (chock full of lost souls similar to this that scrawls and stops and sucks on chalk in a simulacrum of thought and scrawls again), (comma fills lacuna, nipping a rampant shoot (possibly rambling) in its bud) a back row of a grand old stadium’s bathroom stall (shadows and lights and stairs and rails and sinks and drains mix and match in a mingling sort of way in a shifting involutional show cast on a tumbling, crumbling, windblown scrap of dirty gray rag torn from a scrawny savior’s last liturgical loincloth) built by Strickland long ago (that man’s anomalous foamy down) in a book I would fain publish at my own cost if his will and my ghostly vibration (shaking hands, fading vision, fuzzy logic, and all that) would allow it. I swallow. No. This is what dying is, I thought. I did not drown. I think. What’s quick flowing blood. What’s murky brown stagnancy. I ask. No. Fighting off faints and fits and shocks following (in all logical simplicity) from (in any world’s logic) non-random post-cranial contusions (what hit bottom hurts, and what didn’t hit hurts, too), I swim. I thrash and gasp and swallow lungsful of stagnation. What’s quick and flowing. In a kind of stylish fashion, I float and chop arms front, kick scrap of foot back. In a word, I swim. A kind bush casts out a buoy of thorny lianas. It snags my wrists and palms and draws my body in. It drags my body onto a musty bank of roots and humus. No. Fighting off faints and fits and shocks, I thrash and gasp and lay my body down. Sunlight and hours and loss of blood. I crawl into a shadow of dry and crumbling rock. Paw prints of an unknown mammal in association with fur and scat. Flint chips and sharp shards of a big clay pot with zigzag incisions. Long ago and far away in a far off land a quaking virgin lay among fossils and ash laid down by diluvial inhabitants. Skull, tibia, scapula, ulna, rib, jaw and, finally, tooth: a gawky front molar shrugging off its long lost mouth. I claw clay and find its grimacing companions: back molars, incisors, fangs. Straight out of a horror film, or a sort of Outward Bound initiation stunt thrown a tragic loop. History staging a(n) (un)happy campground just as a ritual maw swallows a foolish child’s fantasy. Into an infinity of falling I am born. Mom didn’t catch. Nor did Plato discuss a falling birth’s laws, nor did any Scholastic school’s diploma grant this bony bloody outgrowth of womb and ova and tauroral horns of Fallopius (circular ruins) an instinct to plug its husk’s cracks with frantic wads of fur and chalk and shit. I am caught. Into strong hands I am born, umbilicus trailing. To trim a trivial summa down to a common story’s cut: a virgin, a birth, a foundling, a savior. Dark stains of human occupation. Stratigraphy. I am floating. I coil my hot dark wings around him. I cup in my palm his warm and furry, his sinking, sagging, shrinking and lifting balls. A falling star winks out against horizon’s spasmic thigh. Scrotum draws in tight as I stick a pinky up his ass and swallow. Now that’s a blowjob! you sigh and say and fall pillowy back to scholary toil. Anonymous foamy down. Bimkov, Strickland, Patrolius, Spitmarkx, Darkbloom, Spinoza, Kidjaki, Foucault, Lamarck, Vighdan, Darwin, Udidi, Hamiltonian, Raymond. How many in all today? But who’s counting? What follows is a bibliography with citations.

A Bibliography with Citations

Bimkov, A. 1974. Pninalgia y plagiaritis. Tixpu: Tiliar. — An unsightly spark bursts into my brain. Flowing through all parts of my body was a ghostly frisson of non-intrinsicality. A particular modality of diffusion and dilation, a sort of cardiac arrhythmia, discomforting and disgusting. For many months I had sought it in all my books, in all my compatriots’ books. In vain. But now I had found it! And it stung my brain as a drug stings. I could not drink my fill of it! It was parasitizing all my moods, all my actions, I know, pullulating within all my works and words. A palpitating world of dislocation disrupting my scholarly tranquility, as if my body was mingling with that of a famous author: fading sunlight shining crimson on dusky bark, horrifyingly sad convulsions on a patch of auburn sand. In fits of manic insomnia that could last for days, I spun out my unwon words, winding my silkworm’s ink into magical books shot through with forbiddingly brilliant colors. Happily, though, I was caught. (Informant MSS, p. 199, O. W. Johnson trans.)

Bruno, G. (n.d.) Sigillus Sigillorum. London: John Charwood. — It is thus not in our tradition to worship an alligator, or a cock, or an onion, or a turnip for its own quality as a thing, but to worship that thing’s inhabiting god or divinity, which divinity is found in various things in so far as all things show signs of mortality at particular lights and locations, bit by bit and all at a falling swoop, that is to say, divinity according as it is proximal and familiar to a thing, not divinity as it is most high, airtight, and without affinity to a thing’s production. (Dial. Ital. 3, O. W. Johnson trans.)

Darkbloom, V. 1962. On location in artificial moonlight. Oxford, MS: Random Library. — Machinations at my window. A confrontation with calamity. In two swift, bow-stringing actions, I draw my curtain to and/or fro, sliding a tragically gaping crowd of criminals into my solitary mountain cabin. What do you want? Why do you laugh? A farcical prison play full of poultry, dogs, nuns, girls, boys, authors, critics, victims, assassins and sad, gray ghosts. I grab my razor and start my morning ritual. For alas, it is I who am solitary actor, and I who must, in this dusty mirror, watch. (p. 301)

Darwin, C. (n.d. mss) A study of foxy growth arising from mopsi mold (Mopsi spp.) invasion and worm trails in books in my library. — This World as Swimming and Floating (1859), by Doctor Spitmarkx of Ruhr-Lalnrar, Bavaria, is a book, in my library, of which I am almost childishly fond, having gaily found it, in a local bookstall, not far from my daily thinking path at Down Manor. (In King’s Cross or Marchmont, most usually, and with difficulty, do scholars habitually court, and obtain, this timorous author’s works.) A book, in my shy opinion, is only born, not as its author blots its concluding flourish; not as its manuscript is bound into goatskin bindings; but, as its acquisition by an inquiring mind, fills that mind with unfamiliar thought, and that thought grows into an original way of looking at man’s affinity, in both body and action, in both mood and motivation, with animals. Having occasion, thus, to lift a supporting citation, for my own work, from that of Doctor Spitmarkx, my chagrin, at finding it full of worm-casts, and foxy with mopsi mold, and this, months past its day of birth, was a blow I could ill afford. I could not avoid succumbing to a fit of vomiting. In its turn, though, this particular handicap has sown a happy habit; for from it, was born this study. (Introduction, p. xi)

Flawndol, S. 1987. Town city plain. Owlstain: Urdostoist Publishing Co. — Mr McLaughlin is awaiting his turn. A far door is closing, and closing again, wafting an insidious calm into this long, poorly lit hallway in which Mr McLaughlin is awaiting his turn. A far door is closing, and closing again, and out that far door is a parking lot of a stadium in which Mr McLaughlin, worn out from watching his son play ball, is awaiting his turn. A far door is closing, and closing again, plunging this long, poorly lit hallway into a radiant torpor that trails away softly from that far door closing, and closing again: black tarmac soft in hot sunlight; aluminum lamp posts and tall humming pylons; blindingly glossy cars with thigh-scorching vinyl cockpits; cicadas lazily chanting a sibilant cantata in a trash-rich picnic ground. Mr McLaughlin is awaiting his turn. (Book I, p. 23)

Foucault, M. 1968. Constrain and publish. Paris: Gallimard. — Appropriation of authorship functions importantly in social control in that constraints on publishing inflict cultural isolation through a branching or forking bipolar shift from positional posturing to author function, formulaic authorship to status valorization in which loss of anonymity short-circuits a thoroughgoing truth, group, body, or pathological proposition of writing. Discoursing critically constructs author function in ahistorical location, propagating authorial domination in a world publishing industry propagating such myths as “profundity,” “originality,” “stylistic obligation,” and “civilizing moral composition.” Psychology is historically ignorant of biological things; authorship is unlawful production unbound by copyright. (p. 34, O. W. Johnson trans.)

Hamiltonian, T. 1992. How’s it going, son? JSocPhys 1(5). — This autobiography’s augustinian supposition: notation as a natural history of humans; in particular, totality of a dad’s nurturing activity toward his son. I will thus chart not just my own days and nights, but my son’s also. An Owlstain high school drinking party; bad music is playing too loud; bumping and grinding passing as dancing. I approach a young girl slunk down sadly in a ratty couch. Tight saffron skirt with too high thigh slits. Approach; chat; sip my gin and tonic. Hi, I’m Tony Hamiltonian, instructor at ISOCPHYS, mind if I sit down, too? No? Good. You look uncommonly familiar. Do I know you from—no? Cigar annoy you? Glamporium? No? Possibly? Good. What I’m drinking? Gin and tonic—want a sip? Full soft dark crimson bow lips. Cigar? Just kidding. You would? Your band playing again soon? So you know my son, do you? And I should call you…? Ada. Ishtar’s Hand.

Kidjaki, C. (ongoing) R I F T. World. — Production and consumption of words as found in Babylonia or Assyria, in which a warrior-king’s grapholithic imposition of an unworldly philosophy props up a sprawling urban civilization with a muddy subpopulation toiling away (at sword-point) at farming and irrigation, vary drastically from situations found in Attica or Ionia, in which fishing and navigation is substantial support for small, tight-knit, autonomous affiliations of quasinomadic, toxophilic bards composing worldly songs and tribal myths. Troy was an agricultural community torn down by barbarians—barbarians who could punch with words. (Introduction, p.ix)

Lamarck. 1809. (1994) Zoological philosophy. Paris: Flammarion. — If physiology and morality spring from a common origin; if mind, thought, and imagination consist only as natural things, and, following from this, only, truly, as facts of organization; it is principally up to zoology, applying its logic to a thorough study of organic things, to find out what truly is mind, how is it spun out from a man’s brain and thrust, abiding, into light; in a word, how bodily history is born again, and again, into it, wound into it, transforming it so that it sings. (Third Part, Introduction, O. W. Johnson trans.)

Patrolius. (c. 1517) Ionis Astra. Kabul. — Cunning as a poaching fox is that girl who drinks down straight ktar/And, citing Rumi, can chant a loping, swinging translation,/Outdoing (with no pausing, no panting) six pan-piping bards/In this lupanar, oh holy star Io, virgin Ishtar! (Fourth Canto, O. W. Johnson trans.)

Potocki, J. 1813. Manuscript found at Saragossa. Warsaw: Sarprostium. — And so thus did Papa Potocki, living only on thought, passing back and forth from watchful optimism to mindful rumination, and having shut tight his laboratory’s blinds to succumb to his mind’s continual condition of inward psychological striving, only in this way could Papa diminish such distant lacrimal strains of that childhood inundation by dolorous divastigation which had laid low his rationality. (Day 19, p. 223, O. W. Johnson trans.)

Raymond, A. 1983. Tiliar High: A sociophysiology of graduation. Tixpu: Tiliar. — In a parking lot across Tixpu Hill Road, a brown plastic trash bag lifts in a gust of wind, taking wing as if, thorn-proof stand-in for a crow, it actually could fly on a calm, sunny day. Rain slants down in big bursting drops to soak moms and dads racing from car to auditorium. Principal Bimkov is practicing his parsimonious bailiwick with, as usual, a poignant, rambling introduction charting his own maturational path from Tiliar High School graduation, what is it now? about 30 suns ago. Coach Turbo is taking off his hat, showing an ocular bull’s calvity to Ismail I. Strickland, class clown, son of local luminary and illustrious columnist, Ms. Strickland, last, but not lost, in a graduating crowd of 44 girls and boys of all nations, all tribal origins, all anthrophonological vistas. (p. 52)

Spinoza, B. 1656. Tractatus logistico-philoscophicus. Paris: Diasporama. — From which it follows that, of animal moods said to lack rationality (for arguing that an animal cannot think is not at all a continuously valid assumption, now that it is known of that which mind’s origin consists), such moods vary from a man’s in such a way as an animal’s natural foundation is not a man’s. Stallion and man, it is truly said, both submit to a copulatory compulsion. But a stallion’s compulsion is a stallionish lubricity; a man’s, a mannish. So it also is with ant cravings and fish wants and bird satiation rituals; moods accordingly suit an animal’s natural foundation. (On mood, proposition LVII, scholium, O. W. Johnson trans.)

Spitmarkx, S. 1848. (1998) Airy arrowscript portraits. Ruhr-Lalnrar: Kafkaist Publishing Co. — If I know a thought, I know also visibly its humanity, its coming into a soft patch of sand on a trail in thick woods. Such humanity is an accommodating lay in thought’s promiscuous warp and woof. Tastily spacious, a found humanity, though sandy, cannot but submit to my will. ( §2.3, O. W. Johnson trans.)

Strickland, Ms. 1996. Thoughts on various and sundry topics. JSocPhys 4(9). — Faulty forms of thinking about communication, arising from a paradigm which maintains that a passing back and forth of information is adaptational foundation to sociality, to group dynamics, forbid clarity on this topic. Communication is parasitism; information is a by-product of that parasitism; and parasitism occurs throughout all biostructural organizations, from individual virus to swarming wasps, from shark schools to human nations.

Udidi, D. 1989. Sais pas, su jamais, saur’ jamais. Paris: CACA. — Giving birth without blood, without obscuring that world I am, amid a circumstantial nadir of shaky hot gravitational wind, without grabbing to doll hound, currying to a top lip fascination striving to kiss it, kiss it all and drink boiling fistulosity down a throat which burns in dry shadow. ( §1.1, O. W. Johnson trans.)

Vighdan, B. 1992. Globarsas : A ritual Tagma physiological philosophy. JSocPhys 1(3). — A Tagma woman, placing this black, oval rock in a shallow pit dug by hand in a patch of chalky sand, squats atop it and starts to rock hips back and forth rhythmically, crooning a ritual song through panting lips. This song sings of a Tagma woman, born into a harsh world, who, looking vainly for satisfaction among various living things (authors, poultry, onions), finds it finally in a black, oval rock in a shallow pit dug by hand in a patch of chalky sand.

Who’s Victor?