Bent Sun

Frantz Jean-Baptiste Talya Petrillo Trey Ross "Digressions are undoubtedly the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading… take them out of this text, for instance, you might as well burn it." —Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (c. 1704 AD). Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert Two Horns: 11 blades or grass or pedestals parsing teeth to stop the mouth from falling. Who lines up in the sequence of their cavities? (horns, grass, eleven) Hieroglyphs ground into a fine powder to remove their parallels fired into beams breaking vertical blinds, iron curtains —the opposite of rain sounding like a tin roof, turned listening to the sky being ground into bent sun the first incline (“Hey Sunshine”) "Observe what happens when sunbeams are admitted into a building and shed light on its shadowy places. You will see a multitude of tiny particles mingling in a multitude of ways... their dancing is an actual indication of underlying movements of matter that are hidden from our sight... It originates with the atoms which move of themselves spontaneously. Then those small compound bodies that are least removed from the impetus of the atoms are set in motion by the impact of their invisible blows and in turn cannon against slightly larger bodies. So the movement mounts up from the atoms and gradually emerges to the level of our senses so that those bodies are in motion that we see in sunbeams, moved by blows that remain invisible." —Lucretius, De Rerum Natura [On the Nature of Things], c. 60 BC. The ancient atomists observed a universe where matter falls through the void in parallel lines, each trajectory determined by weight and necessity. Nothing ever meets, starts, or ends. No shores, no waves. No collisions, no compounds, no formations—only an endless, orderly descent. It is along this monotonous void of parallels that the hedonist Epicurus finds the need for a deviation, later named by Lucretius as the clinamen: a minimal swerve, occurring at no fixed place or time, without prior cause. The deviation is so slight as to be nearly imperceptible, but still eventful. Atoms “swerve a little from their course, at no fixed time or place,” and without this deviation, “no collision would occur.” It interrupts the parallel fall of matter just enough for atoms to encounter one another. From this interruption and errancy, a freedom or agency finds its start. The clinamen is introduced as a generative condition and structure more than a force or a cause. Without it, motion remains continuous but uneventful and entirely determined; with it, continuity admits interruption, and interruption permits relation. So the concept serves a dual or double function. Physically, it explains how matter can (re-)organize itself. And it breaks the chain of deterministic necessity, allowing for the possibility that action might originate rather than merely follow. This signals an important and distinctive shift in the idea of ‘free will’ starting from a physics (rather than a psychology or ethics). It finds a kind of physical logic of non-deterministic behavior. As Lucretius makes explicit, without deviation “there is no freedom of the will,” and it is this swerve that “breaks the bonds of fate.” In this sense, the clinamen locates a threshold between isolation and interaction, determinism and agency—between a world that proceeds and a world that fits and starts. A world circling a bent sun where the axis of orientation is always altered. Scaling-up from atoms to stars, the clinamen emerges within a cosmology that also distinguished between what remains fixed and what wanders. Ancient observers separated the stars into two orders: those that held their positions in stable constellations, and those that moved irregularly across the sky. The latter—planets, from the Greek planētai, “wanderers”—traced paths that resisted simple alignment. Against the fixed background, their motion appeared as a deviation: not a break in order, but a displacement within it, a drift that complicated any assumption of uniformity. This swerve becomes the populating affect of the stars: that to live on a planet is to eternally return to somewhere else, in the same place (again). But, I digress…. (After all, it’s not the physics of the clinamen that we are re-finding here. We need to go the source, the intrinsic structure: the swerve, the incline, the bend. Something that doesn’t need to happen, but it has to happen. This is a paradox, a de-doubled bind, that we need to wield, rather than observe or endure: infinitely swerving, seeking, and breaking-free of limits from within those very limits: disrupting and overtaking any system or containment—while also being the engine of that system, the (en)core. It’s the kind of paradox that can actually be practiced and (freely) put-into-action. It’s a paradox between bodies. And since ‘these days’ we are constantly dealing with a pseudo-clinamenatic attempt at determinism that’s made to seem like free will according to the vertical flow algorithmic feeds, commercial manipulations, and political misinformations or redundancies, it seems necessary and important to work-through this problem as a current and contemporary context of ‘taking action’: making, producing, creating. In other words, free will has been replaced by a manufactured pleasure principle —free will is made to seem like an originary cause rather than a primordial, physical, generatively structural (and unavoidable) system constraint or limit [a threshold]. That is to say, where we imagine free will to be guiding our decisions or desires, there’s actually a hole plucked from the start that is constantly stuffed-full with what were fed (as if we were always seeking-it-out, or as if we already found it ‘ourselves.’)) the last decline—or, A Digression Concerning the Original, the Use and Improvement of Madness in a Commonwealth (by Jonathan Swift) Nor shall It any ways detract from the just reputation of this famous sect, that its rise and institution are owing to such an author, as I have described [Z]ack to be; a person whose intellectuals were overturned, and his brain shaken out of its natural position; which we commonly suppose to be a distemper, and call by the name of madness or phrensy. For, if we take a survey of the greatest actions, that have been performed in the world, under the influence of single men; which are, the establishment of new empires by conquest; the advance and progress of new schemes in philosophy; and the contriving, as well as the propagating of new religions; we shall find the authors of them all, to have been persons, whose natural reason had admitted great revolutions from their diet, their education, the prevalency of some certain temper, together with the particular influence of air and climate. Besides, there is something individual in human minds, that easily kindles, at the accidental approach and collision of certain circumstances, which, though of paltry and mean appearance, do often flame out into the greatest emergencies of life. For, great turns are not always given by strong hands, but by lucky adaption, and at proper seasons; and it is of no import, where the fire was kindled, if the vapour has once got up into the brain. For, the upper region of man, is furnished like the middle region of the air; the materials are formed from causes of the widest difference, yet produce at last the same substance and effect. Mists arise from the earth, steams from dunghills, exhalations from the sea, and smoke from fire; yet all clouds are the same in composition, as well as consequences; and the fumes issuing from a jakes, will furnish as comely and useful a vapour, as incense from an altar. Thus far, I suppose, will easily be granted me; and then it will follow, that as the face of nature never produces rain, but when it is overcast and disturbed; so human understanding, seated in the brain, must be troubled and overspread by vapours, ascending from the lower faculties to water the invention, and render it fruitful. Now, although these vapours, (as it has been already said) are of as various original, as those of the skies; yet the crops they produce, differ both in kind and degree, merely according to the soil. sunbeams are never bent like me I was always told that money doesn’t have a smell, but if you sniff a single coin you’ll find a burn bent-over the parallels of both sides since the sun doesn’t know the difference between the stars and the stares. Hold it up to sky on the ground and you’ll see a flat earth rounded to the nearest common denominator, something worth something like a swerve (that’s not saying much besides me bending the value of myself against the currency up-on the Sun). I’m inclined to say that’s why I “Never think it, but always say it,” so I’m split into curves like I’m looking at a constellation. Steeped in loops. But horizontal enough to stop the rain from falling up there. All the albedo of the whitest world couldn’t save them from this saturnation, ringed by these side ways internally ousted. Externally interred. That’s the only reason why it would be possible to take the longest rest without stopping. I only needed to bury something where it doesn’t belong. (With a lot of digging.) That’s why I divided myself between the fiction and the friction of my occupation: arms, or else I’ll never get dug-up. Or else the last cut on my first arm betrays its inlay along a new surface otherwise than this one writing. Then the last surface where this cut first appears is bent by a burn, radiated. So this last cut is first written over and under the burning plain so we hear them say “the plain’s in flames.” Which in all uncertainty becomes a bog warping its woof with its baroque barbaric weave. The last cut thinks savagely as soon as it enters in relation with another form of attack, establishes the duality of the fall earlier prevented with a cut that laterally fragments the vertical rain of the arm’s vertigo. Chance like dice, determined by a throw. What’s the number on the top? I can’t count with the curvature acting as a cover for the surface doubled by the photograph that you’re looking at while you haul its haunches into view. Or, the last cut plus the first burn is still reminding me that I’m rehearsing a body like a wandering star like a shore without a beach: bent but not out of line. At this point, line and light look the same so that’s why I say that the way I did. (Because I couldn’t possibly think it.) Because by now I’m closer to the sun, farther from the light. Or maybe that’s just the eclipse on this side of the pleasure principle: where I was, I won’t be. No, sunbeams are never bent like me. Lucretius, De rerum natura, II. 216–224. Ibid, II. 225–230. Ibid, II. 251–258. Ibid, II. 259–262. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. Angus Ross and David Woolley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), Section IX. Originally published in 1704. Original Latin phrase: “pecunia non olet” (‘money does not smell’). See Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, “Vespasian” 23, in Lives of the Caesars, trans. J. C. Rolfe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). Also, Juvenal, Satires, I. 3.50–51. Inversion of a Viennese saying that came to be associated with those who were publicly moderate but privately fascist and antisemitic: „Das darf man nicht sagen, aber man muss es denken.“ (“One must not say it, but one must think it.”) Lumpérica by Diamela Elite (1983). El Llano en llamas by Juan Rulfo (1953). Jesus don’t want me for a sunbeam by Nirvana. (“Sunbeams are never made like me.”)

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