The Stygian Wholesto

Swamp – Wetlands

Medicine – Medication

Theatre – Performing Arts Center

Riot – Civil Disorder

The Dump – The Landfill

Constipation – Occasional Irregularity

Those are only a few of our euphemisms that the late great George Carlin brought to our rarely buoyant attention. George didn’t have heart attack, he had heart complications that resulted in his passing. One headline wrote it that way, so for George, his proof is in the proverbial pudding.

Our restructuring of images is inescapable, which makes George right—we are all diseased. Our linguistic sickness is not analogical despite our growing psychoanalytic and historical curiosity. The proper end of reification encompasses ancient rabbis and church fathers as well as electro-ignitions on the sweeping god-of-media’s frontier. Carlin said, “By and large, language is a tool for concealing truth.” The concealment thickens the more we try to thin. When we approach a text as a locus of fruitful inquiry, we like to primarily dethrone critics, scrutinize the images of women, respond to sexual stereotypes, scoff at fictional characters, and shit, the best we can, all over acts of literary mimesis, mainly, to make someone else smell it, and when that doesn’t work, rub the cultured guano right into the eyes. And this is what we often do, us bibliophiles, us language lovers. My colleagues and I have resisted our concerns with contemporary pedagogy and positioned ourselves within endangered rhetorics of exaggeration, omissions, oblique insertions and unreal orthodoxy. Somewhere in there, we identify with Carlin’s repulsion and antagonism toward the euphemism. The euphemism is not only dead language, but it is the basis for all dehumanized, antiphilosopy of art hostile toward objectivity, realism, truth (both the big T, and little t), politics and the remnants of an industrial society. The euphemism serves as a key moderator between conflations and linguistic corruption, folding the two in on themselves to yield a wolf-in-wolf’s-clothing technique, teeming with propaganda, and covertly ushered into our daily dialects. The euphemism is euthanasia of structural perfection, and lacks any human inclination toward the concrete other. When George said, “Tits always look better in a pink sweater,” he showed us that if we work hard, if we pay close attention to our imaginary activities and comprehensive judgment, we can move beyond our anemic referential and say something clearly. Thank you, George. Talk to you later.

In a Universe where nothing travels at light speed, the world suffers from infinite boredom. I have uncovered this Universal Truth while doing field research in Montana, the confirmed epicenter of boredom in our world. What does that make it Universally? I'd hate to consider it.

I'd like to thank Gnothin, my colleague and friend, for reviving me from an existence non sequitor. His recent e-mail and forward progress with the blog gave me the blast I needed. I was so immersed in work that I failed to see myself turning into the very substance from which language exists--the quantum foam of words if you will. From my pit of despair, I recognized the death of communication in a plastic bottle. It was none other than the saddest moment of my life, realizing that our hypermediated language has become so overworked that letters themselves have grown weary of operation. One day, staring at a Coca-Cola bottle nestled in prairie moss, I recognized the phrase CA CASH REFUND for the truth therein. The modern day presents such turmoil that words need not be stuttered by operators. Words are stuttering for themselves--evidence of linguistic slippage. I am a finger snap away from abandoning quasi-mitochondriasm as a viable means of literary study. All my research has come crashing down. Do I pick up the pieces?

Don't answer that. I don't know. I can't know. It would be too painful, and my existence of late has been dense with pain. It is tough returning to civilization with my good friend Gibson missing from academic action. Where has he gone? Where have all the good words gone? I am truly sorry. I will pull myself together soon enough... sooner rather than later if the words will let me.

During the Stygian hiatus the upsurge in criticisms of the project reached a critical mass, a massification really, many of outright dismissal. The best was a pseudo-glorification, one that celebrated the Stygian for its unintentional exposure of the purpose of academic writing: inflate fragile ideas, obscure the dialectic or any attempt at reason, and ultimately inhibit any perceptible clarity. So it goes…

But before I work to refortify the trajectory of the Stygian, I feel an update on the status of some of the members will provide apologies for the long hiatus for such a provisional beginning. My colleague Gibson was inducted into the coterie of European philosophical phenomenologists, a camp branched from Husserl in many ways. While Gibson’s work in existentialism and the consequent expansion of capitalism remained latent, his surveys of constituted knowledge gain against direct intuition, and the mutually implicated throes within modern language (his forthcoming book) was deeply applauded by the camp. Because of this Gibson has relocated to Malaysia to work closely with some editors and dictates. The workshop is somewhat experimental, and no electronics are allowed, including electricity itself. In short, we have lost contact until further notice.

Stallius, profound in his exploration on the impact of exterior substances (i.e. drugs) on language throughout history, notified me of his want to work independent (in Montana) to dabble with a series of visual arts committed to themes of boredom, death, despair, hate, disillusion, nonbeing and void. I expect an intersection at some point in the future, which I’ve found to be a possible, intriguing chimerical with my present work of post-theory and structuralism after language, its exemplary means, its vehicles, and how to predict our future linguistic fissures.

To rewind, the criticisms sequester some truths into academia and writing, but only as all things sequester some truths. We can remember how deconstruction was described as “new new criticism,” and we can remember the same antagonism and the same late 60s professors calling them philistines on sidewalks. To remain close to the heart of the Stygian project, I will definitely restrain from the abrasive rebuttals from those reminiscent frontier critics, the haters of antimimeticism and anti-intentionalism. But there is no denial that the Stygian, at times, impedes clarity and cohesiveness. “Inflating fragile ideas”…that is ridiculous. Most of our work is an extension of applied linguistic theory on the disjunctive techniques of modern poetry and fiction, or modern language, to broaden. Of course our language may separate from common human experience, from those of undecidability not invested in critical overproduction. Of course we run against the grain to a belief that language is devoid of obscure referentially, of unexplored renunciations, of the foul contagions of prefixes and suffixes. But we still believe language is our hope, our endeavoring, mundane acts which are most memorable, that we have independent readers and listeners, that our system renders infinite possible combinations—and somewhere—within the striated symbologies—everyone can speak, and read, and write, ad infinitum.