square white world

you would spit out a venom but you would spew something out which you had first eaten or had drunk. And you would spit something out of your mouth before you had eaten or had drunk it. But you would try to spew something out which had been or had grown inside you, like a disease or a parasite.

Revelation 3:16 allows for a compromise by having ἐκ τοῦ στόματός μου – literally “out of the mouth of me” – out of my mouth. Also, ἐμέσαι is preceded by μέλλω σε – the latter in English: “I am about to” – I am about to spit/spew you out of my mouth. However, ἐμέσαι contains the root for emetic, so the phrase τινα ἐκ τοῦ στόματος could be translated as “reject with extreme disgust” – Thus because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold I’m going to reject you with extreme disgust.

Choosing among rejecting with extreme disgust, spewing or spitting may be less important than the elision or inclusion of the word indicating my present intention: I am going to – present indicative, first person singular – μέλλω. I haven’t yet, but I am going to, I’m going to try to spew you out, to reject you with all the force of my disaffection: You are abject.

And so because you are lukewarm and neither warm nor cool I’m going to vomit you out of my mouth.

trans. evfokas

Left behind are miserable small-time parties,
bashful girls, timid grebos,
Olympians¹ and Doors along with vermouth on the rocks;
you know all this

I’ve seen you too like the other so called college students,
fart rebels relying on daddy’s doe;
all miserable and skimpy, this is why I’m telling you:

There’s a good reason I was a lukewarm youth
unfortunately I’ve been through that but fortunately I’m not hiding it
and here’s a good reason I am cool

Left behind are miserable schools,
truancies and porn, exclusions for haircut,
cheeks and politics, get-togethers at the square;
you know all this

I don’t recall junta, but neither freedom,
poor generation of the polity²,
all colourless and skimpy, this is why I’m telling you:

There’s a good reason I was a lukewarm youth
unfortunately I’ve been through that but fortunately I’m not hiding it
and here’s a good reason I am cool

Now our songs fall short to them,
the elders are laughing up their sleeves,
you see they have the glamour of the sixties,
they pulled a gallstone

If history gave to us only nothing,
expressing this nothing and expressing oneself
is the only chance we got you and me,
this is why I’m telling you:

There’s a good reason I was a lukewarm youth
unfortunately I’ve been through that but fortunately I’m not hiding it
and here’s a good reason I am cool

χλιαρός

It is remarkable that the Greek adjectives are in the masculine, agreeing with the angel, not feminine, agreeing with the Church.

– Revelation 3:16

What is consciousness but language? asks Gilles Deleuze, in a work concerned with another question, What is language?

Language is a sign-signal system, according to Deleuze, which wouldn’t mean very much until we remember that signs are assemblages. They are independent networks of disparate entities, which work under the sign of being and being elements. Signs are constructed. The work that they do is signalling.

Signs signal in series. But does language have this sense of continuity and flow, of ceaseless series, sign-signal to sign-signal, because the passage from sign to signal occurs within time, in the present, or is it language which precedes this sense of time?

The problem I am adducing to is the following:

The mephistophelian character, Andreas Corelli, in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s very enjoyable book, The Angel’s Game, has this to say about what fables teach us:

They teach us that human beings learn and absorb ideas and concepts through narrative, through stories, not through lessons or theoretical speeches. This is what any of the great religious texts teach us. They’re all tales about characters who must confront life and overcome obstacles, figures setting off on a journey of spiritual enrichment through exploits and revelations. All holy books are, above all, great stories whose plots deal with the basic aspects of human nature, setting them within a particular moral context and a particular framework of supernatural dogmas.

– Zafón, Carlos Ruiz, The Angel’s Game, trans. Lucia Graves, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2009, p. 192

Stories give the natural impression of passing from one thing to the next. They make it appear natural for God to have created mud and from mud formed Eve and her sister. Narration naturalises what fables do, which is fabulate. But isn’t the most fabulous idea that human beings have absorbed through stories the concept on which narrative and language itself relies, rests and lies: time? And isn’t consciousness part of the fabric of this story, this history?

What happens if the link is broken between sign and signal? What happens where there is no next or and then? where the link, the nature of which was always a fabrication, is denaturalised?