Essays and Outer-Works (Small Font)

Essays and Outer-Works.

by Justin Ayres PhD

I have realized that much of my graduate essays are about to be lost. In order to postpone the inevitable oblivion I have elected to publish as much as I can on the internet.

To be on the outside, always-already on the outside, is part of the turning thesis and projection of my work. I want to work on the issue of freedom, then I must necessarily be outside of regulation and order of work in the institution.

Yet I believe my essays to be well enough written and regimented (and this is the portion of "Essay" meaning in this work: Essay: the Indo-European root is ag-1, "to drive, draw or move," "Act... Agile... Allege... Assay... Essay... Exact... Redact... Squat..." ): at least this is my hope, acknowleding the institutional policing of the APA style to also allow my own words and work to shine through. I wanted to acknowledge the police enough to offer enough transparency to allow my readers to step in and read my suggestion. But my suggestion is the most wonderful and horrible thing: the content of my essays, the wine of my aphorisms, we are free, we are liberated. What does it mean to be "liberated?" It has something to do with the "fact," that we are always-already on the outside.

Here we should take a cue from psycho-poetic story telling, the description of David Whyte of the boy trapped outside of the hillside where the Pied Piper has played the town's children in. In this sense we are trapped outside: a cripple, just as the child Oedipus, with his feet pinned on a mountainside: outside. (This is not "Anti-Oedipus," in a Deleuzian sense. Rather it is more correctly, momentarily-- Anti-psychoanalytic. It is momentarily suspending the imperative to interpret. It is against the interpretation of Oedipus as "club-foot," the-man-being-corrected. Rather it takes on the "depressive position" (Melanie Klein) of remaining on the outside. To paraphrase David Whyte, "The universe is always just a step-ahead of us. It has to be ahead of us, because the universe is too kind. The universe is too kind not to be a step-ahead of us. We are outside "one-ness" with the universe: the truth, the suffering, the beat goes on. The universe is ahead of us: mercifully. This "mercy" is really intended in the Kabbalistic sense: Chesed: charity, kindness, charisma.

I have always liked the term "Outer-Works," and liken it to the essay "Driftworks" by Jean-Francois Lyotard: drifting always happens in an alternative vector than the immediate frame one expected. Drifting points to an exterior context-strata that is moving in and affecting the vector of discourse.

An outer-work delineates a meeting point with an exterior. In a sense, perhaps dull-mindedly I continue to affirm the possibility of an "exterior" even if it does not or cannot exist (In the terms of Jean-Luc Nancy's essay "The Unsacrificeable."

Two voices snarl, sneer and scream inside my head from the rock-n-roll period: Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison. These are not the best of their musical moments: in many ways still lacking enough richness of grief. But they have to be acknowledged, nevertheless, for the sake of saying, "soul-fully," anything meaningful about being on the "Outside."

Bob Dylan snarls and sneers with the outside. He does so many times, sometimes more forcefully than others. But in my conscience, the first thing he says is, "to live outside the law you must be honest..." He says this in "Absolutely Sweet Marie," which says a lot about the true meaning of the song: this is a mother-lover song, and it is a song about loving the sweetness of mother Mary. But the line is sung with a sting of absolutely painful cynicism, born of betrayal. Dylan is betrayed by Marie as well, that is why he sings so incredibly, painfully, "to live outside the law you must be honest."

Is "outside-the-law," some sort of "assumed-agreed discourse? " There is the immediate temptation to laugh: "Assumed-agreed discourse, preposterous!" In fact the phrase sounds Humean, or in any-sense based on the British idea of "common law" and "common sense," particularly when we think of David Hume taking refuge in playing billiards (or, for that matter, the Dude going bowling). But then I make a pause and reflect on myself, the "assumed-agreed" discourse is the form of many of the essay's I would like to publish. The meaning of the message is "outside" the essay form. But the form has to be "assumed-agreed discourse."

Perhaps Bob Dylan means to say, "living in anarchy," that is, living in the context of a "1960's counter-culture," from Easy Rider to Haight-Ashbury disrict, to Golden-Gate Park. But our culture wars over the stories of this period: do we send for the paramedics, or do we slip out to an amazing, abundant, and, yes, indeed, mystic garden? (with the threat of plunder and murder just "outside.") (There we would be in the dance, but then we would be dead, or else in the realm of the living mystics... Either we would be dead as consumers in consumer society, or we would be living in another paradigm of work and energy)

Jim Morrison screamed "Outside"

A feast of friends alive she cried

Waiting for me

Outside.

("When the Music's over")

The only error I can see is that someone was waiting for "me." One could call it an act of absolute grace that anyone waits for "me." This affirms the preservation of the internal, the interior, "me," if only until the moment of the meeting.

But that is a feast of friends. And the feast is always a moment of pronouncement, libation, and consumption. A friend is not a poison. In Morrison's vision there is only total and welcome consumption. There is the "Beautiful Day," spoken of in Agamben: "Bare Life:" "Alive she cried." Morrison's circuit was all that much shorter than Bob Dylan, who through the force of his sadness in "Absolutely Sweet Marie" is forced to wander. Morrison, dead in a bathtub, a Puer at 27 years of age. In a sense Morrison went in, as in "Is everybody in." He went in the gates of the kingdom of Hell or heaven, and now he dwells within, in the intimacy of the inner circle of the immortal images. Dylan, like we living mortals, remains weathering: wearing and weathering on the outside. To be alive thus means, to be alive on the outside.

Those within are in the know, the inner circle. (Be that the pronouncement of Heaven, "it is so!" Or the betrayal of Hell, "it is so!") But this gnosis or this knowing is a kind of death. Those of us on the outside are still living, still struggling with an uncertainty. Does that deprive the dead of uncertainty? Or is that share of uncertainty in fact the grace? It is the grace of what is truly "heaven sent:" the "now."

What is the work of my spirit, before or after death? Is it not to impart deeply of that uncertainty, to carry it as best as possible? Do not the spirits live insofar as they carry the suffering of the uncertain? I could live on, pretending to be dead, to be somehow detached, helpful in the slightest whiffs or gusts of spirit:"If not for my own life then for others..."

But then Her voice, like a gust of wind in me, rises: "That is all nonsense! Life is one! All life is one, and one are the living and the dead!" I am not separate from any other eco-system. My imagined spirit. in carrying the burden of worry, is participating in life.

All life is one, it is interwoven, and thus is why we are on the brink of unweaving our planet's life through our own species overpopulation.

Around our planet is space. It is a void through which travels light, unimpeded. Light travels through space. But life, dense, sticky life, cannot grow outside of this immensely complicated chemical envelope of our planet. Outside the planet is nothing and nowhere, asphyxiation in the ultimate.