The Indomitable Gaze of the Other

The Near-Far 

Sometimes when Deep calls to Deep, Ishmael heard it. At first it was an accident, but after that his desire to hear it again was insatiable. There were more and more opportunities to hear it as the neighborhood emptied out because there were more and more dark places where there had once been light. But Ishmael soon realized that it wasn’t only the dark places that were dark. The darkness’s self-obfuscating intensities were an enjoyable dissatisfaction with him that wanted to speak without the burden of meaning and to be seen without becoming visible. His inner dialog became like the impenetrable rants of a psychotic’s certainty, interrupted less and less by his familiar, neurotic doubt. He was beginning to doubt his doubt, which was a source of great consternation to him because it was his doubt that had kept him safe thus far from some of the beliefs the others, beliefs that had become internal to himself like parasitic worms, so that now he couldn’t tell which had come from him and which he had been infected with by his proximity to them. 

But there was a dark voice in him that he associated most with himself, and which seemed to resist outside infection. It was the tongue that had infected him the longest that he could remember, so that it seemed to be in himmore than himself. It spoke profoundly but in the superficial, manic banter of advertisements and influencers. It was deep but not very because it was just below the depth of his knowable intentions as their concealed adversary. He wondered if it was his “true self” forced to speak in the tones of the outside world because of its embedding in this time and place. There was a sort of strange, possibly sick, enjoyment to being undermined in this way. It felt like being opened to the sublime transcendence of indeterminacy itself, but it was an immanent transcendence of local vastness that he had heard called the “near-far” by the mystics, and that he and his fellow travelers into the near-far felt as the proximal hiddenness of queer affects. 

There were others who had been left behind, and who had also heard the Deep speak in the dark places. Most other folks had left because the bugs had become too much, but most of the small minority who remained had continued to dream the dreams of those who had left. This remainder kept those other dreams for fear of being without concepts before the drives now loosed within them. They didn’t know what the ambiguous yearnings were for that they sensed despite being fed, clothed, and sheltered. Whatever this lack was about, it wasn’t about anything directly necessary, but more about the furtive necessity of gratuity. The intention for what was counter to their given biological and social-biological intentions was somehow being replace in favor of a sort of crazed drive for what was unintentional, or for what wasn’t for anything, which wasn't for nothing exactly, but for what couldn’t be said, which wasn’t for silence exactly, but for what was invisible even when it appeared, like the visible darkness of John Milton’s Satan. Meister Ekhart, whose sermons they had read aloud in a circle on the moldy library floor, had called this desiring without intention, “Living-Without-a-Why.”   

At first, their little community kept falling for what they imagined their desires were for instead of for desire itself. There seemed to be no way to directly desire, which would be something like desire without its imaginary objects, or with its non-object. New techniques had to be developed to trick the intentions of their desires away from their satisfaction and towards the ambiguous excess of the unintentional. But how could they intend what was unintentional, or be unintentional about their intentions? It would have to be something like care without concern, or like the Daoist’s “Wu Wei,” usually translated as “purposeless action” or the “non-way.” But care has always exceeded its pregiven intentions. It has never been enough just to be, but to know what being is, “in-itself,” without our intentions for it, whatever that could possibly mean. Care breaks itself when it is no longer about what the world is for me, but what the world is for itself because this sort of excessive care is useless. It is the disease of philosophers and of mystics and is the self-undermining and useless fount of their babbling nonsense. This sickness was now within the small cartel that formed in the zone to worship whatever it was that was counter to their intentions. The cartel was “alone with the alone,” as the mystics said of the darkness within that connected them to each other through their mutual love of uselessness and its coincident excesses. 

The cartel had begun to study religious practices for what was in them more than the cliched societal uses of them for either identification of self or of the Other. They were looking for clues as to how to resist the overbearing determinations of those that had left the zone, determinations that had remained even after their exodus. They were listening for the ambiguous speech of the unintentional as their marching orders out of the traps that had been laid for them by “The They,” as Martin Heidegger had called the noise that one’s society makes about itself. The cartel had tried religious practices that were “for” something but always found that whatever they were “for” corrupted the practice with intention, but whenever their religious practices were without an intention, they devolved into sex magic of some kind, which was neither sexy nor magical, but just regular sex dressed up in religious signification. There must be some way to sneak up on desire, so that it might be kept unaware and unintentional without the typical twenty-something drive for mere copulation. The zone had been vacated, except for them and the other weirdos who hadn’t been able or willing to leave, but the desires of those who had left continued to play on repeat in the heads and bodies of the cartel 

Although their initial practices had been developed to spice up their sexual congress, they hadn’t realized that at the time. The most powerful intentions within them seemed to be truly beyond them because their libidos were always the “real reason” why they did whatever they did. At that age all intentions were for sex, but sex proved to be much more elusive than its mere biological operations. Freud had taught that all desire was structured like sex, orpossibly that all desire, however dressed up in sublimation, was for sex. But the cartel wanted to hide that from themselves because direct access to sex makes it impossible to perform, which more than anything suggested that human beings weren’t merely for the intentions of their biology. 

The public library had been left as it was the day that it had been abandoned. At first, it was guarded by some unhappy security guards who were quite discontented by the swarms of various sorts of vile insects, busying themselves with their short but consistent lives of fornication and murder. It was a mess, and it was easy to see why those who left had left. The endless repetitions of various suppression efforts against the insect invasion had ended in the bugs’ ultimate victory against the techne that had been arrayed against them. After the library was closed, there was some initial thought from someone somewhere to protect it from looters, or from squatters, and so the security guards were sent to watch over what had already been lost to the enigmatic curse of the zone. However, within a few months, any oversight of the neighborhood ended, and the locks were broken, and the wires were pulled out of the half-hearted alarms without a fuss. And the bugs didn't care one way or the other about any of that.  

Those who didn’t have other places to stay moved into the library, and the others who were staying in their increasingly unfamiliar homes, like Ismeal, had to visit the library each day because their utilities had been cut. Thelibrary’s water had not been shut off for some unknown reason, and even though the heat and the electricity were off, the library’s water became an essential community good that flowed continually, so the pipes did not freeze even in the dead of winter because the zone’s leftovers filled their buckets day and night with their daily needs.  

The library’s books entered active circulation again soon after the guards left, especially among the cartel of horny, twenty-something seekers of the near-far. They had stayed behind for the free sex but needed to find some intellectual diversions to get back the mojo that had been lost when whatever boundaries to it had been lost. Any clues that might be found in the wisdom of the ages about how to live now that the future had been cancelled wereenthusiastically sought. However, the seeking for transcendence through knowledge was to a markedly lesser degree than for more, attractive twenty-something members to have sex with, so that the ratio of “low value” to “high value” members might be improved for the sake the sex magic’s efficacy. Those that were still under the sway of the Alpha Male Influencers, who had become less and less a part of the general discourse since there was no longer much a signal for social media in the zone, focused on “high value” females, and how to properly distribute them amongst themselves. However, the women weren’t having it, and, although, that normally would have only increased the enjoyment of the Alpha Males for “acquiring” what they wanted against the females’ wills, a sort of miracle happened.  

They fell into fighting with each other over “rights” that they didn’t have, and somehow amid all the wrestling around, they found that they not only enjoyed the close, bodily wrestling, but also, the sexual congress to which their tussles inevitably lead. Now that they didn’t have to perform their masculinity on social media anymore, they could perform it with each other in acts that they used to consider abominations. They soon forgot about “high value” females altogether, and started wrestling about “high value” males, which always led to more sexual congress amongst themselves, which was what they had wanted in the first place, but didn’t know it because the Alpha Male Influencers on social media hadn’t been telling them about all of their options, perhaps, because the influencers wanted to keep all the “high value” males to themselves. 

Those seven remaining within the cartel preferred to disguise the antagonisms, as well as the agonies, of their sex acts with the blessed praxis of esoteric techne. Before they performed their sacralized fucking, they discussed its religious significances. Post colitis, they no longer cared about theory or meaning. They quickly wore out the library’s books of their sexual content, but they grew dissatisfied with their post coital satisfaction, which they learned had a proper French word, “ennui,”  so they began to experiment with new forms of transcendence, but whatever creative sublimation of the sex drive they came up with, they usually collapsed back into sex’s machinic, biological processes.Was there a way to enter the near-far without so much lingering ennui? Could you stay in the “before” of libidinal ecstasy without facing what came after? Was there such a thing as satisfying dissatisfaction? Could you live in-between completion and anticipation, which was the state that the mystics had called “already, but not yet?”  

Ishmael’s somewhat independent studies had brought him to the discovery that the vagina was the origin of ancient mystery cults. Mystery cults recreated the descent into their darkness, but to enter the inner chamber resulted in the dissatisfaction of satisfaction, which was the “little death” of the orgasm that the French called, “jouissance,” or excessive enjoyment, which Ismael thought of as the problem of illuminating what should be left dark. The mystics spoke of the invisible remaining hidden even when it was revealed. Was it possible to penetrate the inner sanctum without revealing its secrets? Meister Ekhart had said that when “God revealed itself, it hid more deeply within its Godhead.” There had to be a way to enter the subterranean chamber without obtaining satisfaction as to remain in the moment before, rather than the moment after completion.  

Ishmael revealed his findings to the cartel, which framed the problem of dissatisfaction to his satisfaction, but not to theirs. Their rejection of and abhorrence at the male orientation of his fantasy was swift and complete. They enthusiastically pointed out that penetration wasn’t necessary for feminine enjoyment. But nobody was really ready to expand on that. Gabriel in particular was troubled by Ishmael’s “findings” because her total rejection of themrevealed her general lack of theorizing about her own rejection of the masculine position that had been assigned to her at birth. Nobody seemed ready to give up penetration yet, but its problematization brought to the surface what had been repressed by the religious practices of the group. Religious indirection had sublimated direct sexual urges from a history of religions perspective, but the cartel had sacralized their sex not to cover over their base desires but the lack within desire itself, which was the dissatisfaction inherent to it that Aurthur Schopenhauer and so vociferously bemoaned. 

On December 27, 167 BC, when Antiochus Epiphanes entered the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem, he was shocked to find that there was nothing in there. And so, he placed a statue of the god of the Phallus, “Zeus,” in there and sacrificed some pork to it. And after he finished with the pork, he was dissatisfied with his satisfaction. The temple priests called it, “the Abomination of Desolation.” And maybe the Greek general would have agreed that it was just that if you had asked him afterwards. Antiochus Epiphanes had come into the temple looking for the satisfaction that the Jews were keeping to themselves but found only the presence of a profoundly dissatisfying absence of something that he couldn’t put his finger on. The ancient priests had had it right and Antiochus had had it wrong. Phallic enjoyment is empty desperation and feminine jouissance is an impenetrable mystery of endlessly deferredincompletion. 

The cartel agreed that vagina worship was where it was at, but they couldn't figure out if penetration without satisfaction or satisfaction without penetration was the way to go. For the time being, those that had penises looked for new ways to sacralize the former, but it was like entering the holy of holies without the satisfaction of desecration. And those with wombs did the same but in reverse and with more authority because they all imagined that they had the holy of holies within. But they all had anuses, why couldn’t they sanctify these dark places? They had of course, but there was some difference that they couldn’t figure out yet. Anuses could be vaginas in as much as they were structured similarly, and so they could be like the secret, dark rooms of the ancient mystery cults. Why should it matter if they weren’t openings to biological wombs? Since vaginas were the new phallus, penises had subordinatedthemselves to the religious as well as to the more practical considerations of vaginas. Penises earnestly attempted to approach vaginas with the proper reverence. 

However, both the penises and the vaginas of the cartel were partial objects that were continuous with persons. Persons may be imaginary projections into the void, but sometimes the void pushed back and resisted their symbolic intention. To avoid impregnating the persons with that pregnant possibility space within them, the members with penises practiced the desecration that the Church had called “Onanism” after some dude named “Onan” in the Bible who peeved the Lord by pulling out instead of impregnating his dead brother’s wife. Onan “spilled his seed in the dirt;” and in so doing disobeyed God. It was the imagined spite associated with the spilling of one’s seed in direct contradiction to the intention of the Big Other that gave it its satisfaction, but that enjoyment was wearing thin as the fantasy of the Big Other’s disapproval faded.  

It was beginning to seem like procreation was the most devious thing that one could do, especially since at the very least, the pregnant person would have to leave the zone for medical care, and the fantasy of the zone as some sort of autonomous realm in which Eden had been regained would finally be traversed to its “natural” end, which was the disavowed connection that the zone continued to have with the “phonies” of the outside world. Pregnancy had ineluctably been medicalized to the point of no return. None of them could seriously entertain the idea of a pregnancy without medical supervision. They remembered the lessons at school about the mortality rate of mothers and children without the assistance of the medical establishment. And none of them could imagine raising kids given their dependence on the outside for their basic resources, including the food that they scavenged and the water that flowed into certain pipes of the zone. This wasn’t a Randian, libertarian utopia in which libertarian delusions of the radical independence of the individual could prosper for long. 

They imagined themselves fashioning a new way of being that was at the same time a return to a lost originality, like some sort of naive, Existentialist “authenticity,” where they could be rescued from the artifice of whoever it was that Heidegger meant when he referred to “The They,” and of whoever it was that Lacan meant when he referred to “The Big Other.” Their return to religion was to what they imagined was a decadent form of religion because it was in direct contradistinction to what they perceived to be the Big Other’s religion, but they were finding out that contradiction implies what it distinguishes itself from more than they wanted to admit. As they had for all intents and purposes become a sex cult, they had little room to critique the “ideologies” of others, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t indulge in “ideology critique” whenever given the opportunity. 

 Whatever their thoughts were about how they had liberated sex from society’s controlling gaze, they had worked out certain procedures that might have been interpretated as reactionary by some other more suspicious observer. The persons with penises who engaged with the persons with vaginas in sexual congress fantasized about an emergent sort of deviation, which like all deviations was only devious, and therefore desirable, relative to a contingent norm. What had been deemed “natural” by the previous Big Other, in this case, sex for procreation, was only natural because of the position of what was thought of as grounded in the “basic” biology of its symbolic discourse. But the power of dichotomies like “natural” and “artificial,” however arbitrary, are great because all purposes are defined by the binary oppositions of the Symbolic, like “straight” and “devious,” so that even the members who never congressed with those persons who had wombs, as well as, those who never did with those persons with penises began to desire the deviation of sex for procreation. Sometimes, as Lacan had so wisely noticed, the life drive is a Freudian Death Drive, which is not a direct desire for death but for whatever it is that is beyond the “Pleasure Principle.”