The Beats are dead; long live Dead Beats.

I, as I know myself, am a relic of pens which inked in the discord of my ‘self’ in order to liberate me with the knowledge that ‘me’ does not matter if I were to commit my thoughts to ‘writing’. It seems we have gone past the words, dealt honestly with the subject and surmised that ‘I’ am instances and moments coloured not by the intent of my own articulation but by the interpretive eye who solely wields the faculties and the authority necessary to descry my self’s image.

I am an author of potentialities and hold a subsidiary claim to truth. For these reasons, the authored articulation of experience turns to obscurantism; the ideal of coherency is alien unto the author figure one thing stated being a series of inflections. An attempt at authoring meaning gives rise to a plurality of others. An attempt at assembling a meaning from the various possibilities limits and leaves a loss of all others. The sum of my parts is no one thing, the parts of my sum; an unlimited void of possibility.

My end is to make these fragments cohere and give sentience to a ‘self’.  In piecing together the jigsaw of ipseity I recognise two amorphous fragments which resist association.  I have come to terms, but no agreement, with my ‘self’ in division. Half of ‘me’ is Desire — what I constrain within — the other, culture, is what percolates in and suffuses me with a civil disposition. Whatever semblance of unity expressed in the raiment of this ‘self’ I maintain incongruently, is a function of dual, yet unequal, parts; internal expression set against the externally enforced ruptures of character.  Undoubtedly, the ‘I’ is not viable because there is no one shade of colour in pieces, no collective definition when all discourse within performs as if under the shadow of Babel’s Tower.

The knowledge of your ‘self’ dawns like the day of the Laodiceans on which that “wretched” intimacy with your own inconsistency breeds a cognitive ignorance which bids you shudder onwards despite yourself. Deconstruction split me into oil and water; I am fuelled to resolve dissolution; I am in pursuit of coherence to reify existence. There is a poverty of individualism meted out as a consequence of the deconstruction of the self. In terms of ipseity, we are broke as well as broken and we are desirous to mediate this dereliction with the expression of a distinctive self.

Desire is a naked, black-soled beggar native to each of us and repressed within us. Desire dreams to reconcile a sense of difference with the purchase of a dynamic ‘self’; embellishing a character sui generis. She traipses about with all caution, fully aware of the ‘self’s’ state of undress, seeking to make fractured ends meet through the collection of moments, the chronicling of instances and the fashioning of platonic conceptions in order to make sense and garb from the products of the cozening industry of humanity. She entreats earnestly her contemporaries for these, and is entreated in earnest also.  Each and every individual Desire begs to be heard, to be shared, to be sentient and expressed. Her hands are outstretched on the corners and thoroughfares of Collective Consciousness, dense and dirty like Chadni Chowk, begging though each and all other around her is bereft. Civil disposition intimidates any attempt to relent and assent to Desire’s supplication for expression. This context and its anxiety is populated by Desire and Culture, and it is governed by the nefarious Moloch dubbed raison d’être.

In light of this, none can bask elated in the glory of each other’s light, left instead, the aridity and the distance of longing to be and fearing to be. Fear or apathy: which reigns greatest within us?

Thus, having been found wanting, how do you judge the truth of someone in earnest, knowing yourself as fractured and wilfully persisting, despite being aware, with this ersatz performance of selfhood? For lack of a perfect way to convey, this guarded Styx of our souls does not flow enough to glaze the pastures of kinship though, still, there is a mourning due of one life’s blessing.

Thus the author is dead, has always been dead, but nonetheless he haunts the inspired and inspiring pen like a disembodied inflection of the souls intent; what Breton calls the “finite representation of a torment that may be eternal”. There is some sentience in the phantasmagoric figure who perambulates our dreams, carrying with him an armoury of images, the splint of form and the salve of meaning. If only I were to address my self’s wounds. I have spliced myself with degenerative limbs, breasts, eyes and all from pits of aspiration, poverty, cult-fixation, and celebrity. I distil my distinction of character from the flood of images; the vaporous macrocosm condensates in the cloud, gushes out over me, dilutes me of original blood, leaves a saturated hollow…

The present is alien unto its inhabitants, all things familial being borrowed.

I, through my Tumblr, cohere because I chose.  I tessellated an ethereal figure from the wares of luminaries who are made in name and not in nature.  Being thus naked, I transubstantiated taste into the apparel that is my ‘self’. I derive ipseity from external suggestion in order to concur with the famous stars and the bright lights dimmed even by the grace of the cooling twilight of imagined articulation. Such stars shine a sweet and so preternatural a light so as to make artless Desire reflect their artifice. To feign any pilgrimage towards the vacuous stars is to lose one’s ‘self’ in the act of idolatry; a kind of cosmetics of character in which I am thieving my ‘self’.

There is a Trojan horse in the pointed finger of self-awareness. It wants to intersect the core and the periphery of my ipseity, to leave a note within doors which says “I’ve been, surveyed, found nothing to want. I know, having mined, your heart - kisses”.

With spite, feeling intensely that I am deaf, blind and dumb in a mire of conflict with my ‘self’ and conceding my ‘self’ to these refractions of culture I choose to vicariously live through, and yet, despite all this, rightly assuming all accuracy and becoming wistfully conscious of the economy of my self’s détournement , all I really truly know, I realise, is the stench of Western Bank Library’s vestibule, and that, in relation to the B-string, the G-string tunes on the fourth not the fifth fret, and that the King of Beat said truth “is when consciousness really digs everything that happens”, but what can you really dig when the Styx of our souls is so absolutely still?

The answer to that question can be found in writing, but, what is writing itself? Perhaps the differences it evokes are parenthetic arms for souls who subsist off the still currents of this Styx. Perhaps instead, a muse in nature for lack of good nurture… Or maybe there is a sin in my pen that I must draw out? I must author my own intent though the content may betray my meaning, the meaning invested in ink being so fluid. I must relent and assent to my Desire… There is a point I wanted to reach; what is the point?

The author is dead; long live the author.

Dead Beats.