Cayo Hueso
No one knows ahead of time the affects one is capable of; it is a long affair of
experimentation, requiring a lasting prudence.
Gilles Deleuze.
Oblio report on Key West chora. Occasional: two families, hinged by my son and daughter-in-law, spending the week before hurricane season, B&B. On Duval, looking in a shop window with large photographs of famous people (young Elvis, JFK with Frank). Who is that man, the full-length portrait, wearing the Hawaiian shirt? We are speculating. A local passing by says Jimmy Buffett. On the map mark his tone of voice. Pity? Contempt? Then we noticed we were next door to Margaritaville.
The daimon's way (Parmenides). The daimonion at least. A force addressing me. This is the dimension for thinking now, which is not the same in every epoch. Reason? That was yesterday. The ground before was Heaven. You know the history. The Commodity today, but that is not it. A figure-ground reversal, for this choragraphy. The touristing families are important, but background -- the circum-stance (love, for short). Il solito tran-tran di tutti i giorni except to whom it may concern. Everything.
I have to show you the map, not unlike the one in the Mel Fisher Museum, tracking Nuestra Senora de Atocha where it sank. What is an insight worth? It could be a pedagogical metaphor, like the rhizome of bees and flowers, nectar into honey in the hive, used by the Medieval apprentices to guide the making of commonplace books. But those were topical, not choral. Here is the dimension electracy picks up, although it will always have been t/here. Passing the cemetery on Windsor Lane, in the middle of the street, a small pink teddy-bear. Leave it be.
In Seven Fish for dinner, best food on the island? Worst setting. Small, dark. The ambiance is the people packed in all talking at once. Notice not the conversation with your partner, but the roar all around you, the noise, the parasite. Only for a momentito. The plane of immanence. Life, Deleuze says simply. Conatus (striving prior to any subject or identity). Outside. That is, without concept (not thinkable, or only duly noted, within literacy).
Where is the measure of this dimension? It is singular, specific,
momentary. A weak ontology, then (undsoweiter). In Cayo Hueso the
measure (this reading) nonetheless is another rhizome: a
white-crowned
pigeon,
which came (not
alone) to the courtyard trees of the B&B, between
six and seven in the evening, to feed on the seedpods abundantly offered
by the China Palm. When he visited Key West in the 1830s John James
Audubon found 18 birds he had not seen elsewhere, including the
white-crowned pigeon. Endangered now, our host explained (I have a print
rolled in a tube).
More is the experience given by this dimension. Every epoch takes it up in turn. Polis. God. Reason. Wealth. What we are given is the vehicle, and the tenor is more, something other, the invisible, a form for this matter, even if we call it a plane of immanence. Pure more, which is us. Life. Who speaks for the late J. J. Audubon? White-crowned pigeon in a China Palm.
That's about the size of it. The plane of immanence marked in an emblem (pigeon-palm). A choral measure. Today is the day (Mel Fisher t-shirt) for motto. That is the logic to be invented, to bring to the table the daimonion (your genius, to speak Latin). And this glass of wine. (You felt it in Gainesville). Ingenium.
Richard Smyth, tell me, if you know, why, when the (pigeon feeding) ended and we turned toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, the lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, as the night descended, tilting in the air, mastered the night and portioned out the sea, fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, arranging, deepening, enchanting night (the idea of order at Key West).