Selection from Jonkil Dies
Kane X. Faucher

     

Bodily Justice of the Academic State

There are no judicial ethics…There is only a space on the pulpit in Mozambique where a bible has been pilfered. I observe the false freedom of the sky, feel the inveterate ridicule of time in my bones…these bones that hum as trapped bees trapped between two filthy panes of glass. We, institutionalized academics, almost monarchical though as numerous as broken clams littered by gulls, do we truly exact a revenge against the populace with our hatred of wisdom, our empty-handed clutching desires for power? The judge squares his ass on every inch of the bench--he is a slow twitch fibre in the arm of the state. They dress for power whereas we, the cloistered in the cloisters, clothed of the cloth-capp'd, cannot decide whether our firmly grounded academic hierarchy is archaic or traditional. We can barely come to a decision on lunch.

          Lawyers and philosophers argue. The lawyer knows finality and its false yet practical power of ends…uses deception and spin…The lawyer is media without the far-reaching audience, but with the reverence all the same. The philosopher argues interminably about the lawyer's use of rhetoric. The lawyer loses inevitably, but his pockets jingle with the danae of victory; the philosopher returns to preach to dust and warm his bones in the open air.
          Everyone has a philosophy. These are not philosophies. On TV: "my philosophy for buying a car is…my philosophy for baking a cake…"--this is not a philosophy, never was, always thinly veiled. It is a method or a preference. Professor Princip and Professor Gavrilo are both disaffected.
          In Professor Princip's course on time…
          "Only the Greeks knew fidelity to the event…The rest of us just wear the event like a hat and an ugly brooch on trembling fat bodies."
          He pulls at his entire mental encyclopaedia, points to a memorized fragment; it is dusty, worn, ink faded and blurred where the paper and ink met in a too-fast encounter. He tempers aesthetic error with polemic. All aesthetics is bottom-line power, he says. I am inclined to agree if only because he had spent the better part of two hours arranging (perhaps torturing) the constellations of his textual examples and arguments to alter my view of the heavens themselves. I have no choice but to trace the points on Orion's belt the way he has directed, to project an elaborate image upon a kludge of seemingly disconnected dots. It is all zodiacal time. He frowns, a clownish Cappodocian. Events register across the sky as bugs splatter against the windshield of a moving car…just the colourful residue remains, a tableau firework, the guts of an event without a body.
          Where is the body?
          It is missing.
          Where is (the spirit of) 1968?
          It is missing; never mind that…Nietzsche tells us not to mourn the retrograde reaction of post-'68…He tells us to mind the light arc of what we are bringing (we will return to this later, as return is Friedrich's leitmotif for being borne as such). Nietzsche says, he says, we are cruising toward a future that is meeting us--a fatal collision between relics and the crushing tide of a people to come. Two cars begin 100km apart and head toward their destination…The difference, says Princip, shuttering the analogy in a ringleader's flair for creating demand, ending all mathematical inquiry of the lowest stripe in favour of pure freaks on display, is "that there is, in Nietzsche, no destinations."

Morbidders

The tunnels are populated with our bodies, mineshafts that are a-jud with ideas--perhaps vain, magnanimous, even ridiculous. We few subterraneans…rustling or quick-snapping tendon-cable under earth flesh, social body. We, the sole mole, the ones who return, recur, re-emerge from entire zoned regions of forgetting--we shall get our share, what we deserve…We will find that the world will bend its knee and cock its ear in our direction…the direction of those who have a strong stomach for a world so fixated to its causes.
          I have come again, and unlike Christ or Socrates or Einstein, I do not come humbly to the table of arrogant others to ask subtle questions that only will bring a private burgeoning wisdom to the inquisitor (usually in the groin of soiled pants, as the minds of my colleagues are so arrayed). I say that I have left and disappeared like a phantom by the corridors of exile, and come back a delinquent malefactor with triumphant voice-- or what the Greeks would call the Hero. But it is not the matter of tedious labours abroad that have indelibly marked me with the black tumescence of a robust ego that seeks to vanquish old tenders of the tombs of value--No, what directs me is what I see through, that I find the obstacles transparent and the future glowing on the periphery…I move toward the horizon according to the will of my own great magnet. Time drives, space is just the passenger.
          How is this not just infra-verbal play?
          Because mouths are in motion and sound lurks only in behind, I guess. I have my own types of bibles and my own sliding degrees of conscience. Bela Lugosi is, after all, dead-dead-undead. So is Artaud and Burroughs, other junkies. Who, I wonder, is in charge of their estates, and do they find spare darts of heroin blue to be sentenced to the auctioning block like slim hens? Ah, morphine junkies are always in their own way asking for just a little more time. Painless and purposeless, the numbing anaesthetical life is always a bargaining with/against time itself. Just one more pain-free day…Just one more liminal epoch where I cheat the Christian view that life = suffering. Why else would any government criminalize it? A social problem presupposes the good, value, and existence of the social, don't it?
          The government goes so far as to criminalize death and yet sponsor our way to get there, unmolested, as first class passengers on a smooth train. Dinged at the grave, one last financial hurrah, puff of capital steam rising off the corpse's wallet, for we morbidders to spend lavishly on a casket. Pick the right casket--gold, silver or lead (because the Lord doth judge ye on your style of delivery, method and such). You'll win the hand of death's daughter, a fair Portia, and walk conjoined to a beyond in eternal connubial procession. Drugs, death, and the living--we could work all day to the buzzing lateral networks that excite our thoughts, bringing us to the abortive orgasm of an idea.
          I am inclined to believe that there are no ideas, only inclinations…And I say this while I recline in this world of ideas I share with others so selfishly, a carton of milk gone bad, pass it around, around, a cyclone of spoiled teet buzzing around the now crinkled aureole of dead mama. I avoid work of a different kind.
          I have found something eldritch in the foundation, something worthy of my--yes--philotheoparoptessism…or at least my excoriation by the lapping blades of flame (I am a digger and an archaeologist working the night shift in the laboratories and beneath the monolithic spires of knowledge, with the Morlocks and the heat of the earth's heart). To your dismay, no doubt, I have returned safely from my discovery, yet the foundation from which I toiled has just led me into a new series of tunnels. Tunnel further, young man, for the West is no more (we have no choice but to go down; space itself has become such a yawn). The West is all just shit and cloaca and detritus piled higher (deeper), moss and weeds hanging from old men's sleeves. Dig a tunnel of the twelve stations of the cross, of the, of the…

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