Mechanical Stigmata

There is a passage, page 20 in the American print edition, where Broch's ruminations on the military uniform reasonably anticipate Foucault's pertinent observations about imposed controls on the body, toward a greater efficiency, in Discipline and Punish. Sheridan's translation is accessible, but understanding Foucault is a difficult task, though for me a necessary one, if my only weapon against state control is my intellect, or what remains of it. I am studied enough, however, to see in Michel a near brilliant thinker, who, like Nietzsche, succumbed to sexual death, presumably through sodomy, which, if you were Foucault, was the way to stick it to the bourgeois: be one of the first AIDS cases on French soil. Angry faggots not only make good fascists. They excel at the deconstruction of authoritarian regimes, implemented by state imposition or social pressure. I put the treatise aside for the time being, hoping The Foucault Reader would pave my way into a more accessible grasp of the man and the methodology, as if I could then take it and shove it up Debra Horne's ass. (She would be duly noting my belligerence here, but she cannot see herself that what she gets paid to do is assault  human dignity. I am not the only one with undercurrents.)

My considerable antagonism toward this woman is not personal in the sense that her humanity means anything to me, one way or another. She is a homily black woman with just enough pique about containment to infuriate. Since we have been adversaries, Debra, my wheels have been turning too lady.

I've heard, on the vine, that she once volunteered for Liberty. Fitting, given how much she has harassed me at Riverside, and harassed, and harassed, an archetype more or less, of the compliant patrician who sees that the mortuary receives its toe tagged corpse. Eventually we all give way before it. This inextricable combat going on twenty eight years of my life, the dog shit glistened in the early dark of my late food shopping dash yesterday, and I thought of how inspirational it was of my repugnance, how much I view her as a lard of screeching diarrhea. If I had the power to do so I would destroy Presby. Make no mistake relating to the depth, breadth, of my hatred for what in the Presbyterian sensibility constitutes good works. My country deserves to be hated for its contractual forms of repression. No longer do we fill out applications for Paratransit. A rehabilitation hospital bids on a contract to evaluate impaired or disabled public transit riders, and the ACLU and the sanctimonious progressives are worried about the sacred state of clit lickers and the rights of all of us to sicken and infect from the STD of our choice. More than anything else, the pretense of homosexual virtue makes me livid, because it is really a false issue, and not progress. Only a distraction, while we topple under the weight of our social structures, the complexity of our systems beginning to overwhelm, not simply indolent and linear minorities like Debra, but everyone, even the professional class, of which John, whom I am pondering now only as a wasted excess of dubious merit, is a rather dry example. He and I both came from working class families with some generational emigration, though I know very little of his actual history, I am assuming it is similar to the near lightning transformation between my Roman grandmother and myself. Meritocracy, presumably, has rewarded him, his partner and his support structures presumably better than mine. I was more of a victim of the life he led as a young man than a participant in it, and his dialogue is about nuances of teaching without being a dictator, and this is mine, getting banned from online communities, my crimes sometimes unknown, quite honestly. I do not know if Dana still moderates the Speakeasy, but she once told me my posts were powerful, and I understood what she meant, on one level; if they were that powerful, however, I would have had more control over my own autonomy. I have not made it to the DMV yet, and it will more than likely not be today, but after I get that finished I will start eating rust to hunt out the best contacts I have for that position that ignited that small spark toward remaining a human animal. It will not include this fading deity.

What drives my internal fury is what drives the continued currency of the legendary Dantes. I have seen, but not quite processed, Patricia Arquette in Stigmata. What we seem to demand of female actors when we contest them against the supernatural is interesting. What Polanski wanted of Farrow was to be out of her depth? Arquette is the troubled face of the rational believer, suffering in the pathway of tensile forces.