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authorphoebe jenkins <pjenkins@tula-health.com>2024-10-26 20:55:07 -0400
committerphoebe jenkins <pjenkins@tula-health.com>2024-10-26 20:55:07 -0400
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@@ -367,20 +367,11 @@ Oil, a highly treasured possession in industrialized countries, resonates vast a
What is different in our autos, our selves? What is now different to ourselves, our autos?
-To begin this discussion of oil, the idea of the car
-needs to be explored. The car, so important to America's
-image of itself, is its \e{autos}, the Greek word for self. The
-American self or ego bears its reflection within the image
-of its citizen and his\slash her car. The word \e{ego} here is crucial.
-Reverse the letters and you have \e{goe} or without the \e{e}, \e{go}.
-\e{Goes} and \e{egos} are then anagrams, perfect redistributions of
-the letters in those words. In a car one goes, drives, and in
-light of the above, the American ego has a car that lets
-him\slash her go(e). Indeed \e{I go} sounds like \e{ego}.
+To begin this discussion of oil, the idea of the car needs to be explored. The car, so important to America's image of itself, is its \e{autos}, the Greek word for self. The American self or ego bears its reflection within the image of its citizen and his\slash her car. The word \e{ego} here is crucial. Reverse the letters and you have \e{goe} or without the \e{e}, \e{go}. \e{Goes} and \e{egos} are then anagrams, perfect redistributions of the letters in those words. In a car one goes, drives, and in light of the above, the American ego has a car that lets him\slash her go(e). Indeed \e{I go} sounds like \e{ego}.
The ego holds onto an object, and the common image for that object is one's self-reflection. How many times have we seen commerecials for car wax where the end result of scrubbing a car begets a sheey surface, a mirror for the car's proud owner? The sheeny, mirror-like car is then the owner's pride, for his neighbor has a not-so-sheeny car. The not-so-sheeny car owner will then want his car to be as sheeny as his neighbor's, thus making the dull car mirrorlike as well, reflective of the second party's beaming face.
-Egos become aggressive when counterparts threaten the units of this \dq{I} or ego with its objects. Cars, often used in aggressive situations, form an indigenous part of America's mythologies of strength, endurance, risk, mastery. The game \dq{chicken} shows this aggression perfectly. Either party must liquidate the other, a fundamental condition of the ego when it witnesses a treatening counterpart. Car races affirm this facet of the ego, the car that gocs faster than other competing egos: \dq{I \e{goe} faster than that other \e{ego}.} Large car companies, such as General Motors and the Ford Motor Company, vie with each other for mastery over the car profit market, just as they compete in another specular battle against non-American car companies such as Toyota or Volkswagen. The car as ego will automatically take place in these struggles for specular mastery. Examples abound: showing off a new car by driving around the block, driving and passing another car on the highway, killing oneself or killing another ego/car goer, demonstrating that suicide or murder are conditions for both the ego and the car.
+Egos become aggressive when counterparts threaten the units of this \dq{I} or ego with its objects. Cars, often used in aggressive situations, form an indigenous part of America's mythologies of strength, endurance, risk, mastery. The game \dq{chicken} shows this aggression perfectly. Either party must liquidate the other, a fundamental condition of the ego when it witnesses a treatening counterpart. Car races affirm this facet of the ego, the car that gocs faster than other competing egos: \dq{I \e{goe} faster than that other \e{ego}.} Large car companies, such as General Motors and the Ford Motor Company, vie with each other for mastery over the car profit market, just as they compete in another specular battle against non-American car companies such as Toyota or Volkswagen. The car as ego will automatically take place in these struggles for specular mastery. Examples abound: showing off a new car by driving around the block, driving and passing another car on the highway, killing oneself or killing another ego\slash car goer, demonstrating that suicide or murder are conditions for both the ego and the car.
On another note the non-car driver compares himself to the car driver. Either too poor or proud to have a car, they resent the imposition of cars on their daily routines as car drivers resent the courtesies they must extend to the pedestrian. I goe in a car \e{vis-à-vis} I goe on foot.
@@ -390,7 +381,7 @@ Within the car there is a radio, and within the word car there is the anagram RC
Cars and radios are thus in intimate connection, rhetorically a metonymic one. What is interesing is that cars are powered by oil just as radios, in association, are powered by oil. Both are in conjunction with oil, cars burn oil while radios play oil, that is, records, made of oil or vinyl, are played over the apparatus of a radio. The car that burns oil reproduces the radio that plays oil, here records, an oil-derived product. Even the word \{ra}dio has two essential letters for c\e{ar}.
-Again without oil our cars or RCA could not goe. The loss of oil to power our cars is as threatening as the loss of oil\slash vinyl/records for our RCA, our popular music, played over the car radio, the \e{ra}dio cryptically echoing the c\e{ar} it is contained in. We hear the radio with our ears, noting another similarity between c\e{ar} and e\e{ar}. E\e{ar}s hear the c\e{ar} \e{ra}dio. Also, \e{ear} is within h\e{ear}. Since we have ended up identifying with our cars so much, we've also ended up identifying with the stars our ears hear, our popular musicians heard on music stations over the radio. Elvis Presley loved cars, which is inevitable since he was signed over to the record company RCA. America loves cars and loves to hear Elvis Presley. The lack of oil will then make loving cars and hearing rock stars an impossibility (since their voices are on an oil/vinyl record).
+Again without oil our cars or RCA could not goe. The loss of oil to power our cars is as threatening as the loss of oil\slash vinyl\slash records for our RCA, our popular music, played over the car radio, the \e{ra}dio cryptically echoing the c\e{ar} it is contained in. We hear the radio with our ears, noting another similarity between c\e{ar} and e\e{ar}. E\e{ar}s hear the c\e{ar} \e{ra}dio. Also, \e{ear} is within h\e{ear}. Since we have ended up identifying with our cars so much, we've also ended up identifying with the stars our ears hear, our popular musicians heard on music stations over the radio. Elvis Presley loved cars, which is inevitable since he was signed over to the record company RCA. America loves cars and loves to hear Elvis Presley. The lack of oil will then make loving cars and hearing rock stars an impossibility (since their voices are on an oil\slash vinyl record).
Ears have wax in them. Wax too is synonymous with oil, as demonstrated by the title for a hit record called \e{Hot Wax}, now transformable into \e{Hot Oil}. There is already oil in our ears, the wax, enforced by the idea that there is oil in our cars, in our radios. To be close to the music played over the radio seems to be a condition we have already met up with because the wax\slash oil makes the distantly playing record much more interior and proximate. Popular music resolves this distance by using words in songs that are exchangeable with its listeners. We then presume the sung material to be our very own, our \dq{feelings.} Singing the record to oneself is an introjection, an interiorization of the distant singer. The singer is brought closer to ourselves, just as the unconscious idea is one of already possessing that record inside our ears, but as ear wax or ear oil.
@@ -402,7 +393,7 @@ When cars goe or drive on tar, they drive over the asphalt on such roads. Withou
The stylus that plays the record is the car that drives along the road. A record's turning motion allows the stylus to move. The turntable is powered by electricity, often a transformation of energy from oil. A stylus, besides being a writing instrument, is also related to a ship's prow, the edge that cuts through water. Every car has a hood, a \dq{prow} of sorts. Ships travel as do cars, one on water, the other on land. Both are called \dq{she.} The car\slash ship has a stylus, podium, prow that cuts along a path, and thus its mark or trail is made. The wake of churned-up water is the ship's path as the drippings of oil is the car's path. The oil drippings of cars are the indicia of a car's path (not to mention its tire marks). The record's sound from an LP is the index of a stylus' path. Sound travels on tar\slash oil\slash vinyl records as cars travel on tar\slash oil\slash asphalt. Thus a stylus traveling down a record groove is an allegory of a car traveling down a road.
-In another vein, without oil there would be no art. In \e{art|, there's the word \e{tar}, an anagram. Tar is derived from oil. Painters, of course, use oil to make their art. There are many kinds of oil, or many tars: vinyl, records, acrylic, etc. Artists need tar. Artist-musicians need tar/oil, the same kind of tar that's involved in the manufacture of records. Painters and musicians employ different art forms or they use different tar forms. Some of them can become a star after becoming successful with their art made of tar, such tar allowing them to goe far. The anagrams arts/tars/star are crucial to the symbols that determine an identification in our culture.
+In another vein, without oil there would be no art. In \e{art|, there's the word \e{tar}, an anagram. Tar is derived from oil. Painters, of course, use oil to make their art. There are many kinds of oil, or many tars: vinyl, records, acrylic, etc. Artists need tar. Artist-musicians need tar\slash oil, the same kind of tar that's involved in the manufacture of records. Painters and musicians employ different art forms or they use different tar forms. Some of them can become a star after becoming successful with their art made of tar, such tar allowing them to goe far. The anagrams arts\slash tars\slash star are crucial to the symbols that determine an identification in our culture.
With stars on tars doing arts, the lack of oil threatens their activity too. No oil means no arts, not a single star because of the lack of tars. Again without art or tars or star(s), what will that do to star(ing), what will happen to our sight, since no arts\slash star(s) will be able to be looked at? What films will we see and what car windows will we look through? As well, no ear wax\slash oil\slash tars\slash arts\slash star(s) over the car's radio also means an imminent crisis for our hearing. No records played or burned, no RCA and no car, means no sound heard as it means no oil for cars to drive on. Not being able to see and hear, taken in their sense as drives, is also a lack of the energy or oil to keep those drives goeing. The other drives, the oral and anal, also derive from this collapse of culturally shared images, pleasurewords, mythologies and \e{lois}. Thus an ego will then not goe without being driven by the four-wheeled drives of the apertures of our bodies, our bodies that have energy or oil along with the rims or sources from which to discharge that energy: the ears, the eyes, the mouth and the anus. Egos go(es) to drive with oil and aim at oil. Oil drives us from one state of oil to another state\slash taste of oil.
@@ -432,7 +423,7 @@ The fad of jogging is a near mystical embrace of this idea of pure energy, but w
Other movement manias, the discomania and the roller skating mania, are close to the problem of the disappearance of oil. Dancing in discos and roller skating obey the general idea of movement and lots of it. Disco music is the music that is in our ears whose ear \e{wax} is also the \e{oil} that constitutes the records played over sound systems. Hearing oil is also moving to it and being driven by it. Dancing and its euphonic embrace, this mania for the ego in perfect self-presentation, is only about to mourn the loss of what makes the dancers goe so energetically, the oil record or the car\slash ear oil\slash wax under question. When we dance our ears are driven by oil and when we drive our cars are driven by oil.
-0il as instinct will probably find its greatest threat in the future when no oil makes impossible libidinal contact with others. The freedom for a young man and woman in a car, flaunting parental admonitions against sex, to have that pleasure (and the car/RCA/radio music that serves to express that impulse) is threatened by no more oil. Goeing elsewhere for sex is becoming an archaism, at least when fuel, energy, oil is involved. Granted there will always be libido, drives and instincts, it's just that oil has tyrannized ourselves, our \e{autos} to the point where its exclusion would result in the deprivation of key ideas governing so much human intercourse. No energy (oil) is no sex, a thought related to Ernest Jones's observation that what the subject fears most is the loss of libido, \e{aphanisis}, an idea more threatening than the irreducibility of castration. Will no oil castrate the Western/American subject so radically as to force libidinal contact into retreat? Will the lack of oil dismiss representation altogether? An impossibility, despite the intimate congruence between its manufacture and the significations surrounding it. No sex, no art, no stars, no records, along with the absence of their energetic foundations, shows the profound anxiety we're goeing through. Its resolution appears to be intractably elusive, considering oil's complex impregnation into our culture's discourse, our intramental and socially exterior selves, our autos. How can our auto/ego let goe of oil?
+0il as instinct will probably find its greatest threat in the future when no oil makes impossible libidinal contact with others. The freedom for a young man and woman in a car, flaunting parental admonitions against sex, to have that pleasure (and the car\slash RCA\slash radio music that serves to express that impulse) is threatened by no more oil. Goeing elsewhere for sex is becoming an archaism, at least when fuel, energy, oil is involved. Granted there will always be libido, drives and instincts, it's just that oil has tyrannized ourselves, our \e{autos} to the point where its exclusion would result in the deprivation of key ideas governing so much human intercourse. No energy (oil) is no sex, a thought related to Ernest Jones's observation that what the subject fears most is the loss of libido, \e{aphanisis}, an idea more threatening than the irreducibility of castration. Will no oil castrate the Western\slash American subject so radically as to force libidinal contact into retreat? Will the lack of oil dismiss representation altogether? An impossibility, despite the intimate congruence between its manufacture and the significations surrounding it. No sex, no art, no stars, no records, along with the absence of their energetic foundations, shows the profound anxiety we're goeing through. Its resolution appears to be intractably elusive, considering oil's complex impregnation into our culture's discourse, our intramental and socially exterior selves, our autos. How can our auto\slash ego let goe of oil?
Some further points.
@@ -440,21 +431,21 @@ Having used the phrase "our oil" throughout the text, it appears to be a cryptic
\e{Iran} anagrammatizes into \e{rain}. Rain is from the air, whereas oil is from the ground or \e{oils} are from the \e{soil}. But Iran is in a desert where there is little rain. Oil's difference to water is also implicated in the question whether the Persian Gulf has water, drinkable or nondrinkable, or oil within the waters of the gulf. Is the Persian Gulf made up of oil? Since, empirically, it's saltwater, our desire belives the Persian Gulf (as in the Gulf Oil Company) to be composed of oil, an immediate explanation for its oil-rich status. But Iran and its Persian Gulf neighbors are in an arid, desert-ridden land. They only have oil and saltwater, and none of them are drinkable. America, however, has water, fresh, drinkable water in great quantities but none of the great quantities of Persian Gulf oil, made into an even greater quantity because of the equation of the gulf's waters with the wealth of the oil near its shores. The rain or water in Iran is its oil that does not come from the air but from the ground, even in our delusion from the oil-rich Persian Gulf itself, the sea, the saltwater. Saltwater already has a mineral in it just as it could possess oil: oilwater for saltwater shows a mixture of mineral with water.
-I wrote this essay during the hostage crisis in Iran. Then, in 1980, nearly every American politician ran for office. "I ran" is a conceivable phrase to have been uttered by a presidential candidate in the '80s elections. "I ran against Iran" forms a neat cryptophor in the narration of a campaigning ego. And that ego will have to goe far on oil in a car to assert why Iran is something he (in specular opposition) is running against. "I go" becomes the same as "I ran" (aren't some candidates joggers, an "I ran"?), but with Iran being the aggressively counterposed party, the I go/ego/l ran of an American presidential candidate will have to outdistance Iranian policy, a difficulty since the politics of oil make that running, going and driving a tremendous problem.
+I wrote this essay during the hostage crisis in Iran. Then, in 1980, nearly every American politician ran for office. "I ran" is a conceivable phrase to have been uttered by a presidential candidate in the '80s elections. "I ran against Iran" forms a neat cryptophor in the narration of a campaigning ego. And that ego will have to goe far on oil in a car to assert why Iran is something he (in specular opposition) is running against. "I go" becomes the same as "I ran" (aren't some candidates joggers, an "I ran"?), but with Iran being the aggressively counterposed party, the I go\slash ego\slash I ran of an American presidential candidate will have to outdistance Iranian policy, a difficulty since the politics of oil make that running, going and driving a tremendous problem.
-\e{Iran's oil} anagrammatizes into the opposition \e{no Israil}. Either America gets Iran's oil at the expense of Israil/Israel or refuses Iran for the sake of Israel.
+\e{Iran's oil} anagrammatizes into the opposition \e{no Israil}. Either America gets Iran's oil at the expense of Israil\slash Israel or refuses Iran for the sake of Israel.
The Arab oil \e{cartel} is a cryptophor working against those cultures that have lots of cars but no oil. A \e{cartel} of oil rich countries makes Americans in particular angry over what will not \e{let car}(s) run on their needed fuel.
-America's president, (Jimmy) \e{Carter}, remixes into \e{car tar}, another cryptophor that would explain our current repetition of an oil-based economy. (His predecessor was car-related: Gerald \e{Ford}.) Carter/car tar cryptically advocates cars powered by tar, even though this man set up a Department of Energy. Its secretary, Mr. Schlesinger, is from the army; from the occupying forces to the question of "force" or energy in general, he is still in the same role. For force to be used against the cartel that will not let our cars goe needs someone intimate with force, energy, drives in general. If we were to "occupy" or to "\e{besetzen}" Iran, for example, it would be true to the Freudian idea of economy, the economic factor in his metapsychology. To occupy Iran is the very thing that determines occupation, \e{Besetzung}, mistranslated by James Strachey as "cathexis." The cathexis of oil in our daily lives shows how much oil is on our minds. Our occupation with oil will lead us to occupy oil, to occupy the countries that have oil. The occupation of Iran is only the intramental equivalent of an occupation, a hyper-occupation (\e{Überbesetzung}). the same kind of energy that makes joggers and disco dancers goe so fast. James Schlesinger's position in the Energy Department makes him the Defense Department's chairman all over again, simply because he will advocate "occupation," or oil, America's energy that is now about to loose occupations, to loose peace, to loose a machinery of signs, all to countries that America has to occupy for its occupation to continue. A beaten Iran will be occupied and the beat will run on and the occupation will continue its simultaneously pleasurable and unpleasurable drive.
+America's president, (Jimmy) \e{Carter}, remixes into \e{car tar}, another cryptophor that would explain our current repetition of an oil-based economy. (His predecessor was car-related: Gerald \e{Ford}.) Carter\slash car tar cryptically advocates cars powered by tar, even though this man set up a Department of Energy. Its secretary, Mr. Schlesinger, is from the army; from the occupying forces to the question of "force" or energy in general, he is still in the same role. For force to be used against the cartel that will not let our cars goe needs someone intimate with force, energy, drives in general. If we were to "occupy" or to "\e{besetzen}" Iran, for example, it would be true to the Freudian idea of economy, the economic factor in his metapsychology. To occupy Iran is the very thing that determines occupation, \e{Besetzung}, mistranslated by James Strachey as "cathexis." The cathexis of oil in our daily lives shows how much oil is on our minds. Our occupation with oil will lead us to occupy oil, to occupy the countries that have oil. The occupation of Iran is only the intramental equivalent of an occupation, a hyper-occupation (\e{Überbesetzung}). the same kind of energy that makes joggers and disco dancers goe so fast. James Schlesinger's position in the Energy Department makes him the Defense Department's chairman all over again, simply because he will advocate "occupation," or oil, America's energy that is now about to loose occupations, to loose peace, to loose a machinery of signs, all to countries that America has to occupy for its occupation to continue. A beaten Iran will be occupied and the beat will run on and the occupation will continue its simultaneously pleasurable and unpleasurable drive.
\dinkus
-Rock music is on vinyl records. Rock music/records enforce their oil-based status even further by the key word \e{rock}. Oil, because it is a liquid, is not a hard, nearly unbreakable substance like other rocks, such as granite, basalt, etc. But oil is from the ground, it is a mineral, a rock, though liquid. Rock music or rock records are really oil music or oil records or even just oily oil. The same goes for disco music with \e{disco} now a \e{disco}/disc and equivalent to vinyl/oil. Music is also equivalent to the record/\e{disco}/disc that contains such sound. Disco music really means \e{disco disco}, or disc disc or record record, even in the case with rock music, oily oil. Rock and disco's asserted difference in style is refuted by their mutual equatability with oil.
+Rock music is on vinyl records. Rock music\slash records enforce their oil-based status even further by the key word \e{rock}. Oil, because it is a liquid, is not a hard, nearly unbreakable substance like other rocks, such as granite, basalt, etc. But oil is from the ground, it is a mineral, a rock, though liquid. Rock music or rock records are really oil music or oil records or even just oily oil. The same goes for disco music with \e{disco} now a \e{disco}\slash disc and equivalent to vinyl\slash oil. Music is also equivalent to the record\slash \e{disco}\slash disc that contains such sound. Disco music really means \e{disco disco}, or disc disc or record record, even in the case with rock music, oily oil. Rock and disco's asserted difference in style is refuted by their mutual equatability with oil.
The \e{roll} in "rock and \e{roll}" sounds similar to oil. Translated, rock and roll says "oil and oil." Sometimes the \e{and} in the phrase is abbreviated to just an \e{'n}. Cryptically the \e{'n} connotes \e{n}egation, the \e{n}o or \e{n}ot. Retranslated, "rock 'n roll" equals "oil no oil," a truism since the record's materiality, its oil-relatedness, is not just its essence, its intrinsic ideality as opposed to its extrinsic excrement.
-New York rests on a rock, the firm bedrock of Manhattan that will probably not be beset by carthquakes. \e{New Rock} is an understandable transformation for \e{New York}, the \e{york} really \e{royk}, a closer approximation of \e{rock}. \e{New (R)ock} is also \e{new rock 'n roll} but as \e{new rock 'n roll in New York}. \e{York} can become \e{work} noting a near rhyme for \e{York} and \e{work}. New work and new rock all goe on in New York. Rock musicians come to New York to do new work on new rock 'n roll. With \e{new} it can become the anagram \e{wen}, similar to the verb \e{to win}. To \e{win new} work on \e{new} rock in \e{New} York is what the aspiring rock musician aims at, particularly a \e{new} record, a \e{new} oil/rock. \e{New} York manufactures the new rock, the new oil/record. The aim is then the record, a word within \e{York}, \e{ryko}(rd), \e{reco}rd. To win new work on new rock in New York ends up being a new record that wins more new work.
+New York rests on a rock, the firm bedrock of Manhattan that will probably not be beset by carthquakes. \e{New Rock} is an understandable transformation for \e{New York}, the \e{york} really \e{royk}, a closer approximation of \e{rock}. \e{New (R)ock} is also \e{new rock 'n roll} but as \e{new rock 'n roll in New York}. \e{York} can become \e{work} noting a near rhyme for \e{York} and \e{work}. New work and new rock all goe on in New York. Rock musicians come to New York to do new work on new rock 'n roll. With \e{new} it can become the anagram \e{wen}, similar to the verb \e{to win}. To \e{win new} work on \e{new} rock in \e{New} York is what the aspiring rock musician aims at, particularly a \e{new} record, a \e{new} oil\slash rock. \e{New} York manufactures the new rock, the new oil\slash record. The aim is then the record, a word within \e{York}, \e{ryko}(rd), \e{reco}rd. To win new work on new rock in New York ends up being a new record that wins more new work.
A \e{guitar} immediately associates with oil. The \e{tar} in gui\e{tar} separates itself from the other letters to produce a series of novel (but always already known) phrases. \e{Gui tar} becomes \e{I gu tar} or \e{I ug tar} or just \e{gui tar}. The \e{gui} resembles the French \e{je}, an echo of \e{I}, with the \e{I} already in gu\e{i}. (This \e{je}-idea is still present in our memories of that language that constitutes sixty percent of our English language.) \e{Je} tar for \e{gui} tar is not far from the truth since a rock musician is really a tar musician. The guitar is a prized possession of a rock musician, a part of his body, his cgo. Guitar\slash \e{je} tar\slash I tar make possible the identification with tar, and intense as it is, the \e{I tar} fits quite neatly into \e{I star}, \e{I artist} on the tar\slash oil\slash vinyl record that wins or is won by a new rock\slash work record in New York, maybe on a \dq{New Wave} idea.
@@ -471,7 +462,7 @@ story, \booktitle{The Fall of the House of Usher}. The narrator describes the an
There is much that applies to our discussion of oil in this little quote.
-To begin with, cars are like homes. They have walls, doors, windows. People can live in them or they can die in them, as did Roderick and his twin sister. This is confirmed by the example of mobile homes or vans, where the car/house equation becomes clearer. With car an anagram for RCA we cannot forget that Roderick Usher was a musician, and in our current situation, a potential RCA artist. (He played the guitar.) Change the story's title and you get, \booktitle{The Fall of the Car of Usher} or with the car/RCA anagram, \booktitle{The Fall of the RCA of Usher}. Nearly every house has a car in association with it. Also the radio is inside the car just as the RCA music plays inside the house. The strange name "Usher" evokes immediately those movie hall ushers that guide you to your seat to watch or stare at the film, to stare at the stars, at art, the tar of visual impressions. The word \e{Usher} can be transformed into \e{Rush} with the \e{e} omitted. Change the story's title again and you have \booktitle{The Fall of the Rushing Car} or \booktitle{The Fall of the Car that Rushes}. And the word rush is in the quote, "the mighty walls rushing asunder." Both the word \e{go(e)} as near-anagram for \e{ego}, and the verb, to drive, can be substituted for these verbs of movement (rushing, rushes): \booktitle{The Fall of the Car that Goes} or \booktitle{The Fall of the Car that Drives}.
+To begin with, cars are like homes. They have walls, doors, windows. People can live in them or they can die in them, as did Roderick and his twin sister. This is confirmed by the example of mobile homes or vans, where the car\slash house equation becomes clearer. With car an anagram for RCA we cannot forget that Roderick Usher was a musician, and in our current situation, a potential RCA artist. (He played the guitar.) Change the story's title and you get, \booktitle{The Fall of the Car of Usher} or with the car\slash RCA anagram, \booktitle{The Fall of the RCA of Usher}. Nearly every house has a car in association with it. Also the radio is inside the car just as the RCA music plays inside the house. The strange name "Usher" evokes immediately those movie hall ushers that guide you to your seat to watch or stare at the film, to stare at the stars, at art, the tar of visual impressions. The word \e{Usher} can be transformed into \e{Rush} with the \e{e} omitted. Change the story's title again and you have \booktitle{The Fall of the Rushing Car} or \booktitle{The Fall of the Car that Rushes}. And the word rush is in the quote, "the mighty walls rushing asunder." Both the word \e{go(e)} as near-anagram for \e{ego}, and the verb, to drive, can be substituted for these verbs of movement (rushing, rushes): \booktitle{The Fall of the Car that Goes} or \booktitle{The Fall of the Car that Drives}.
What is also pertinent is the quote "and the deep and dark tarn," knowing that "tarn" is similar to "tar," a word central to our discussion of oil. A tarn is a lake in a mountain in its denotative, dictionary meaning. But why tarn and net a lake for the fragments of \booktitle{House of Usher} to close over? \e{Tar}n conjures up an image of a black pool, a pool filled with, and let's be playful, \e{tar} or oil.
@@ -479,762 +470,133 @@ The rushing car or house closes over the tarn\slash tar. From one state of oil f
\chap Why Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
-Why are diamonds a girl's best friend? Diamonds, the most
-popular gemstone, are also the symbol for steadfast love. A
-girl's best friend finds symbolic expression in the idea of
-the diamond. However, a diamond is not a friend, nor a
-lover, and then it is in very odd ways.
-
-"A diamond is forever,
-for diamonds, the female being quietly embraced by the
-man she is either engaged or married to. Her ring indicates
-lifelong friendship with the companion. The ring can be
-worn until she dies and thus she may pass it on as an heirloom, a testament to her brief stay in the world of the liv
-so say those advertisements
-
-ing, a monument of her former life. Or she may discard it
-as soon as that love has corrupted into divorce, a broken
-engagement, her partner's death and so forth. Even off
-one's finger, diamonds are still around, they still "ring"
-and are not necessarily on one's finger.
-
-When we hear a record being played, we know that a
-record player's pickup and its needle are composed of a
-perfectly hard substance, a diamond. Rubies and sapphires,
-the next hardest gems, are not as strong as the diamond.
-
-This is because of the diamond's four-carbon molecular
-structure, a structure that pervades the entirety of the
-
-75
-THE AGE OF OIL
+Why are diamonds a girl's best friend? Diamonds, the most popular gemstone, are also the symbol for steadfast love. A girl's best friend finds symbolic expression in the idea of the diamond. However, a diamond is not a friend, nor a lover, and then it is in very odd ways.
-diamond and makes it the hardest, most "invincible" of all
-matter. Adamas is the Latin word for diamond, a corruption from the adjective for invincible, adamantinus. Steadfast, invincible love has the diamond as its metaphor. But
-the music or song heard by those two lovers is facilitated
-by the very substance they wear on their fingers.
-
-Hearing a song off of a record has the diamond as its
-medium. The sound of the record is transmitted by a diamond and heard by the lovers who are fondly staring at
-their diamond. The diamond "rings" in front of their ring.
-
-When the lovers say, "Darling, this is our song," they
-may or may not be aware that "their song" is rung into
-their ears by a diamond. A song that memorializes love is
-also the diamond ring or "ringing" diamond stylus memorializing their love.
-
-A diamond stylus is only heard, not seen. The brilliance
-of a diamond ring is also met by the brilliance of sound
-waves meeting the air, the sound waves reverberating by
-means of the faculty of a diamond stylus' perfect contact
-with two sides of a record's groove. The jewel that is scen
-is also the jewel that is heard.
-
-A diamond in contact with one's eye, the diamond ring,
-is also the diamond in contact with one's ear. The heart,
-the place where love builds its figurative home, has ear
-within the heart of the word heart. And hard is a near
-rhyme with heart, just as heard is also euphonious with
-those two words. A hard diamond is placed in conjunction
-with the hearts of lovers and with their ears. The sound of
-the diamond falls into the hearts of lovers, into the ear
-which is in the heart of heart or heard. Pearls, too, have ear
-within their heart, pearl. Steadfast, invincible, hard love
-builds its home around the hard diamond seen or around
-
-76
-Why Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
-
-the hard diamond heard in the ear over a record player.
-The immortal "song in my heart™ has been heard and seen,
-since deep within our hearts lives a diamond, a four-cornered, fourchambered object, just as our heart is. (There
-are heart-shaped diamonds.)
-
-The strength of the diamond, its uniform, crystalline
-structure, has no air within it, no air for sound to reverberate within it. The heart, however, is quite loud, for even in
-the greatest of silences, we can always hear our hearts.
-Remember when Raquel Welch had to close her ears in the
-film Fantastic Voyage? The microscopically shrunken vehicle ventured into the comparatively gigantic chambers of
-the man's heart, and the sound of the muscle beating was
-unbearably loud for the voyagers. There is no sound within
-
-a diamond, no pockets of air, at least in flawless diamonds.
-
-When the diamond performs its function as stylus, the
-sound has the diamond as its point of origin, albeit the perfectly faceted and angled sides of the diamond that can
-register all the variations felt along the record's groove.
-Never, never can the diamond have sound pass through it
-for the diamond's symmetry and the ensuing vibrations
-only issue upon contact with the diamond's outside, while
-this jewel's inside, its heart, its airtight interior cannot
-carry sound within it.
-
-On a religious note, this diamond-idea is related to the
-idea of the Holy Trinity, particularly the Holy Spirit or
-Holy Ghost. The correspondences of the Mystical Kabbala
-have the diamond represent the idea of the one in three,
-God in the three persons, Father, Son, Holy Ghost. The
-Holy Ghost/Spirit represents the love between father and
-son, between the unbegotten Father and the begotten Son,
-
-Christ. The Virgin Mary was infused with the spirit of the
-
-77
-THE AGE OF OIL
+"A diamond is forever," so say those advertisements for diamonds, the female being quietly embraced by the man she is either engaged or married to. Her ring indicates lifelong friendship with the companion. The ring can be worn until she dies and thus she may pass it on as an heirloom, a testament to her brief stay in the world of the living, a monument of her former life. Or she may discard it as soon as that love has corrupted into divorce, a broken engagement, her partner's death and so forth. Even off one's finger, diamonds are still around, they still "ring" and are not necessarily on one's finger.
-Holy Ghost at Annunciation. The Holy Ghost also made its
-divine presence felt at Christ's Baptism and the Pentecost.
-
-The angel Gabriel at Mary's Annunciation was never
-really seen, for according to the Catholic Encyclopedia,
-careful inspection of the New Testament reveals that the
-angel imparted some kind of inner voice within the "silence of Mary's soul."" God spoke to Mary via the angel at
-the moment where the Holy Ghost, represented then by
-the form of a dove, was present as well. A dove, with its
-wings outspread, forms a diamond shape, four diagonals
-join its tail, two wings and beak. The spirit or breath of
-God, his "'sound," in its broadest figurative sense, is effectuated by the dove, the Holy Spirit in its diamond shape.
-
-At Pentecost, when Christ promised the Holy Spirit
-would' visit Mary and his disciples, the Holy Ghost was described as "a roar like that of mighty winds |which] filled
-the house and tongues like tongues of fire rested in everyone present."" Old Testament meanings concerning spirit
-are often concerned with breath, the breath from God's
-mouth that gave life to Christ, that breath being the Holy
-Spirit with its "mighty winds" and "tongues like tongues
-of fire."
-
-Back to diamonds. If diamonds facilitate the transmission of sound to our ears, conceivably we arc in the position of duplicating the Trinity. Singer-musicians breathe
-into our ears when we hear the record. Singer-God has a
-diamond-Holy Ghost for us Christs on ecarth. This voice
-from afar, God, enters our ears, as the Virgin was inseminated with Christ's embryo through her ears. (St. Augustine
-thought that Mary was fertilized in such a fashion.) We, as
-listeners to music, to the diamond ring, receive the spirit,
-the voice, the breath.
-
-78
-Why Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
-
-The cternal love of the Holy Spirit for the Father and
-the Son congrues with the diamond, this symbol of steadfast love. The Holy Ghost, as a four-cornered dove, or diamond stylus, is eternal, despite the relative duration of a
-diamond stylus being only 100-500 hours of playing time.
-The record's grooves wear down the stylus into unplayability, an argument against its steadfastness in playing or
-ringing out those songs of love.
-
-Synthetic diamonds are made from graphite when extremely high temperatures and pressures are exerted on the
-same substance that allows us to write with pencils. A diamond stylus relates to another stylus, the pencil, but has
-anyone written with a diamond-tipped pencil? In order for
-oil to be mined, synthetic diamonds bore into the earth's
-crust so as to unearth the crude. This is odd since oil is
-what makes up record discs, both played by diamonds and
-mined by diamonds.
-
-Is a platinum record playable or not? Can I play a platinum record with a diamond stylus? Then it will really be
-a "diamond ring," since diamond rings are set in platinum
-and since a platinum record played by a diamond needle is
-also a diamond ring, a diamond supported by platinum.
-
-The next transition: from gold records to platinum records to diamond records. A diamond record played by a
-diamond stylus. An invincible record and its invincible
-pen. The love between those two diamonds will be invincible. The non-vinyl, non-oil record would never warp, yet
-its diamond stylus would still write or cut the grooves of
-the diamond record since it takes a diamond to cut a diamond. Now laser beams are being used as styluses on
-videodiscs. Their invincibility surpasses the diamond for
-they are capable of boring holes through diamonds.
-
-79
-THE AGE OF OIL
+When we hear a record being played, we know that a record player's pickup and its needle are composed of a perfectly hard substance, a diamond. Rubies and sapphires, the next hardest gems, are not as strong as the diamond. This is because of the diamond's four-carbon molecular structure, a structure that pervades the entirety of the diamond and makes it the hardest, most "invincible" of all matter. \e{Adamas} is the Latin word for diamond, a corruption from the adjective for invincible, \e{adamantinus}. Steadfast, invincible love has the diamond as its metaphor. But the music or song heard by those two lovers is facilitated by the very substance they wear on their fingers.
-One question has plagued me during this discussion:
-What other jewels could be used for a stylus? Besides the
-diamond what could be substituted, what would allow the
-divine breath to vibrate perfectly throughout the air? A
-ruby stylus, an emerald stylus, a pearl stylus, a sapphire
-stylus, a topaz stylus, lapis lazuli, amethyst? Rubies might
-be appropriate since they are the next hardest gem and are
-indispensible for the formation of laser beams. Emeralds
-are much too precious, rare and expensive to be used,
-besides, we would be straining ourselves terribly to see
-such an exquisite though tiny stone once made into a
-nearly invisible writing point. Sapphires were originally
-used as styluses, and like the emerald, we would be despondent not to be able to see the pale, cross-shaped star
-draped over these magnificent gems. I will discuss pearl
-
-styluses further on.
-
-Certainly the listener is not at a loss when the music
-compensates for the absence of the visual brilliance of the
-diamond or any of its equivalents. Listening to the compositions of musical geniuses must face the inevitable loss of
-those prismatic gleams when light strikes these jewels under question. The tininess of the diamond stylus cannot
-shed the treasured refraction. Placing one's finger under
-the pickup needle asserts the diamond's presence, albeit by
-mere touching---and if the stereo's "power" button has
-been pressed---a finger's pores and rippling array of lines,
-swirls, "grooves" again, facilitates the diamond to register
-the sound of such a fingertip's landscape. We can then
-"hear" the finger that only feels hot or cold, rough or soft
-
-and another argument for the diamond's perfection ---
-sound for the touch, sound for the short interval of pain at
-the stylus' sharpness, and while under such a delicious
-
-80
-Why Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
-
-sensation, we beg our cars to receive the equivalent. Oddly
-enough, it all started since the prism was never seen.
-
-Pearls, however, would not hurt whatsoever if they
-were made into styluses. Their roundness and smoothness
-would be a welcome sensation to the finger dismayed by
-the surgical potential of the other gem. Inside a cultivated
-pearl is a sharp object, a chip off of the oyster's exterior.
-The oyster's outside, composed of calcium, grows layers
-and layers of shell. These encrustations are what pearl divers chip off and insert into the oyster's lip. Once inside
-the oyster, this formerly "outside™ chip irritates the soft
-fleshy interior, thus propelling the oyster to cover the hard
-edge of the chip with what will eventually become the
-ideally smooth surface of the pearl. From the outside of
-the oyster to its inside, and once inside, the chip is then a
-forcign body (although it is part of the oyster, hence not
-so foreign) about to become reconciled with the interior.
-Whenever the oyster is happy with the very thing that
-caused so much discomfort, the pearl-diver may remove
-the former chip. The pearl is thus a prophylactic to the
-pain of the oyster's inside. Eventually the pearl consecrates
-the oyster's relative ugliness, the oyster's exterior layers of
-unsightly calcium growth, when that ugly exterior was the
-very origin of the pearl before it evolved into its hemispheric perfection. A pearl, like a diamond, is really a chip,
-a hard, knife-like surface. (If you have ever dived for oysters to eat on the half-shell, your fingers get sliced up terribly.) But only in the heart of the pearl does that chip ex
-ist. To touch a pearl stylus is a comfort in comparison to a
-diamond stylus. Indeed, if such a stylus existed, the pearl
-just might (a hypothesis) wear down and become the chip
-it began building itself upon. Then that chip would be
-
-81
-THE AGE OF OIL
+Hearing a song off of a record has the diamond as its medium. The sound of the record is transmitted by a diamond and heard by the lovers who are fondly staring at their diamond. The diamond "rings" in front of their ring.
-diamantine. The heart of a pearl has a diamond, however
-odd that may strike your ears.
-
-All record grooves are now suited for the purposes of a
-diamond's point to travel along. What would a record's
-grooves evolve into if a pearl, a round pearl, were to be
-used? Instead of V-shaped valleys we would have U-shaped
-ones. The pearl would have to touch on grooves that were
-essentially curved, not angled, as with a diamond. And what
-would that sound like? Would the music become softer,
-fuzzier, slower, what? To hear a gem "clearly" has always
-had a diamond as its standard. Could there be a pearl sound
-standard where the category of "clarity" and "sharpness"
-no longer applied, but the predicates of "subtlety" or
-"softness" did? Conjecturing a pearl stylus, even the shape
-of a.record's grooves, seems at best a fantasm. Its only
-truth is that diamonds and pearls are gems, hence interchangeable. If not, the imagination leaves the pearl to a future of silence, whereas the diamond maintains both visual
-and acoustic brilliance. All those pearl divers have to do
-then is to drop diamond chips into the oyster and see
-whether calcium by-products will make the nacreous shell
-of a pearl. A diamond is now in the heart of a pearl. That
-double gem will elicit delicious sound, eventually after
-pearl dust has scattered itself over the record disc. As the
-pearl wears down, casting the sheeny black surface into
-one that is more opalescent, this hybrid stylus then advances the sound's quality and clarity once the strange stylus
-is fully a diamond. .
-
-This hypothetical situation with a pearl-diamond stylus,
-this pulverization of the pearl as it transforms itself into a
-diamond in the process could happen with a diamond as
-well. The 500th playing time of the diamond stylus signals
-
-82
-Why Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
-
-the diamond stylus' vulnerability, its breakage. Could the
-diamond stylus be shedding itself along the way?
-
-Let us suppose that a diamond does just that, that by
-wearing down, it chips off, it crumbles through strain
-towards its 500th playing time. And where do these diamond morsels go, where do these even tinier fragments of
-a diamond stylus go? A transformation of the diamond
-takes place and, conceivably, diamond dust results. This is
-quite possible with the fabulation of a diamond record and
-its diamond stylus, since the cutting of a diamond has to
-take place with a diamond, the diamond record's grooves
-now doing the pulverizing, the cutting. Powder then fills
-the air and enters into ourselves in the strangest of ways.
-
-Since my entire argument is replete with hypotheses, I
-shall make another. After the diamond's fictive wearing
-down into diamond dust since it played so many times on
-the record, the dust becomes transformed, alchemized if
-you will, into the pharmacological habits of a record's listeners, the drugs cocaine and heroin.
-
-With all this dust traveling through the air, this precious dust from the diamond playing on record grooves
-and its being pulverized by such grooves, the dust enters
-our bodies. If the similarity between cocaine or heroin or
-any other dustike drug with diamond dust is justified,
-then this dust enters, as is common practise, though the
-nose. Of course rock musicians will snort "'rocks," the
-rocks in question being more precious than gold but not as
-expensive as the rocks that are diamonds. A bird of paradise flying up my nose could mean the four-cornered dove
-of the Holy Ghost flying up my nose and into my lungs,
-the very site of breath or spirit again. *'Angel dust" resonates with the idea of the angel Gabriel accompanied by the
-
-83
-THE AGE OF OIL
+When the lovers say, "Darling, this is our song," they may or may not be aware that "their song" is rung into their ears by a diamond. A song that memorializes love is also the diamond ring \e{or} "ringing" diamond stylus memorializing their love.
-Holy Ghost at Mary's Annunciation when she is about to
-hear God. The head that is suffused with diamond dust, or
-sound for that matter, cannot ingest diamonds per se, only
-their closest equivalents: substances that are crystalline, expensive and in association with the nonrepresentational,
-nonwordly commonplaces of music. "Getting high" on
-music or drugs finds the diamond-standard always within
-the two categories. Besides, the music industry attempts to
-saturate its viewers with a scopic or visual spectacle as well
-as an aural spectacle. Here the thing that is missing is the
-drive of the heaving of the lungs, satiated by near diamond
-dust, an illegality and the envy of those hungry spectators
-who think that rock musicians get all the "rocks" they
-want.
-
-Heroin users may have what are called "'works," the
-usual needle, syringe and cooking spoon. Heroin and its
-necessary needle also entail the necessary *"pickup needle"
-with its diamond stylus. This association finds its truth in
-the myths of junk taken by musicians. They may have
-made albums or not and for what albums they play a pickup needle is needed, or if their need for junk is great, they
-use a needle full of prepared heroin to pick them up. A
-diamond stylus, if pressed hard enough, could puncture
-your skin, while a needle and syringe will accomplish the
-act. Even with "glass works" the sharp diamond stylus
-finds its companion in something else crystalline, a glassy
-needle. These associations should be placed next to the
-mythology of drug-taking musicians or music lovers, reinforced by the stylus that lets them hear their own music. It
-is an alignment to an object that resonates a primary masochism, crystalline drugs the interiorized object that magnifies the external world's cruelty on its recipients. The
-
-84
-Why Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
-
-heroin and cocaine addict demonstrates, though not completely, that such consumption is an allegory of a pulverized diamond stylus.
-
-This habit, of course, is not simply restricted to just
-musicians. Commonplaces of filmmakers and painters and
-their expensive injection of usually cocaine are rife. Filmmakers work with cameras whose glassy lenses at one point
-had to be polished. Using cocaine appears to be arepetition
-of the lenses' corruptibility and pulverization. Painters,
-like their filmmaker counterparts, require precise visual
-judgements, their eyes are indispensible for their work.
-The Russian word for eye, glaz, is a near homonym of the
-English "glass."" Besides haven't we heard of those with a
-glass eye, the eye being the glassiest part of our bodies?
-Cocaine cryptically embeds the eye-related stems, ocul/ocuIus within it: cocaine/coke. Occhio, Italian for eye, fits
-neatly here with the following mispelling: cocchio. Even
-the letter ¢, cocaine's first letter, is a homonym with the
-verb for sight, see. (Also cocaine's i reasserts this repetition
-of sight since i homonymically relates to eye.) Visual artists addicted to cocaine are simply reinteriorizing the
-very thing that promotes their art, their seeing, their eyes,
-now metaphorized into a glassy, eye-like powder. When a
-filmmaker or painter snorts cocaine, it figuratively returns
-to the eye it was chopped up from. The resultant lack of
-sleep keeps one's eyes open, for now they've had their
-strange nourishment.
-
-The ritual of cocaine or heroin ingestion through the
-nose remains within this general crystallization that the
-diamond idea secretly originates. The crystal powder is cut
-into lines over a pane of glass or mirror. A razor is often used,
-
-a highly sharp tool whose cutting power metaphorically
-
-85
-THE AGE OF OIL
+A diamond stylus is only heard, not seen. The brilliance of a diamond ring is also met by the brilliance of sound waves meeting the air, the sound waves reverberating by means of the faculty of a diamond stylus' perfect contact with two sides of a record's groove. The jewel that is seen is also the jewel that is heard.
-resides with the cutting power of the diamond. (Addicts desite power from the powder.) If glass or a mirror is used
-for the razor to cut the dust up on, we then encounter a
-crystal cut by a near crystal on a crystal. Crystals are cut
-by crystals on crystals. Diamonds are cut by diamonds on
-a diamond. Diamond styluses are cut by diamonds on diamond records, enabling more pulverization, the pulverization of the diamond stylus that fictively becomes the precious powder we put into our bodies. And all of this is accompanied by a loud rapping of the razor on the mirror as
-it divides up the powder. A diamond stylus elicits sound
-just as the razor, another sharp implement, clicits peals into the air.
-
-One procedure in coke- or heroin-taking consists of using a pen empty of its ink-filled cartridge. The hollow
-tube allows easy suction of whatever drug under question.
-Again another writing implement enters into a ritual of
-drug taking.
-
-A few words on the nose. The nose is a prosthetic extension of the body, it is an appendage of the body, specifically the face. The nose "sticks out," it juts into the air.
-One's profile has the nose as its distinguishing mark, a kind
-of "prow" or "stylus" or more cryptically, a permanent
-""dais" of the body that writes itself through the empty air.
-Figuratively, the diamond resembles the nose for the nose
-forms a small "V* reproducing the diamond's point that is
-either placed in platinum or on record grooves. The nose is
-a diamond also in terms of a topography of the ego. Every
-ego is a bubble of sorts, an envelope of skin, whereas the
-nose, this raised platform, this ""dais' is a bump on the
-ego-bubble. The diamond, since it is attached to the
-body, a "hump" of sorts on the body, resembles the nose
-
-86
-Why Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
-
-in the objects' interruption of the body's relatively smooth
-homogeneity. They are, in a broad system of substitutive
-terms, lumps, outgrowths, cysts, pockets, lobes and so
-forth. Indeed earlobes can bear diamonds in the form of
-earrings, as do fingers, another bodily appurtenance, in the
-form of diamond rings. Even the head, the body's biggest
-"bump," can bear a necklace at its base.
-
-The cocaine or heroin that goes back into the nose
-goes back into the diamondhood these drugs are metaphorically derived from. From the pulverized diamond stylus
-(or lens) to the drugs on a diamantine surface to the diamond in the nose-diamond. The song played by a diamond
-corrupts into dust which returns to the most diamond-like
-part of the body, the nose. Similarly, too much dust inhaled collapses the diamond-nose (its septum) just as the
-diamond stylus had collapsed from too much playing.
-People who snort too much diamond dust also lose their
-diamond, their nose, since the ample diamond dust was
-derived from playing the diamond too frequently, the ambiguity here residing in either snorting too much dust or,
-because they are saturated with music, diamond-written
-sound.
-
-Yet have we answered the question "Why are diamonds
-a girl's best friend?"" Perhaps the discussion should explore
-the role of Norma Jean as the quasi-authoress of this invincible demand.
-
-Norma Jean starred in a film All About Eve, a film
-that appeared in conjunction with Sunset Boulevard with
-its Norma Desmond. Both films were up for the 1950
-Academy Awards and are often billed with each other in
-movie houses not to mention the instance of seeing Sunset
-Boulevard on television when All About Eve was playing
-
-87
-THE AGE OF OIL
+A diamond in contact with one's eye, the diamond ring, is also the diamond in contact with one's ear. The heart, the place where love builds its figurative home, has \e{ear} within the heart of the word h\e{ear}t. And \e{har}d is a near rhyme with \e{heart}, just as \e{heard} is also euphonious with those two words. A hard diamond is placed in conjunction with the hearts of lovers and with their \e{ears}. The sound of the diamond falls into the hearts of lovers, into the \e{ear} which is in the heart of h\e{ear}t or h\e{ear}d. Pearls, too, have \e{ear} within their heart, p\e{ear}l. Steadfast, invincible, hard love builds its home around the hard diamond seen or around the hard diamond heard in the ear over a record player. The immortal "song in my heart™ has been heard and seen, since deep within our hearts lives a diamond, a four-cornered, fourchambered object, just as our heart is. (There are heart-shaped diamonds.)
-on another channel, the two films having begun at the exact same time.
-
-Norma Jean appeared outside of Sunset Boulevard, but
-she was inside it, inside that film by virtue of the one name
-that was "inside" of her, the "Norma Jean" inside Marilyn
-Monroe. Norma Jean is, however far-fetched this sounds,
-the Norma Desmond played by Gloria Swanson. Norma
-Jean-Desmond is the star who can cross either place, either
-film, her only ticket being "Norma," Marilyn's original
-name, a strange entrance to the All About Eve/Sunset Boulevard sepulcher buried within ourselves.
-
-Norma Desmond can flip into Norma Diamond, "one
-diamond" the first words Norma Desmond called out in
-the bridge game sequence in Sunset Boulevard. Diamond
-and Desmond both have an initial d to their sequences of
-identically numbered letters as well as the final -mond.
-Now that Norma Desmond is Norma Diamond, Norma
-Jean is Norma Diamond as well.
-
-Norma refracts into the French word for love, amour.
-With Norma Diamond or Norma Jean we can obtain the
-transformations of love diamonds or love jeans, since
-amour or love lies buried in Norma. I have already shown
-how love and diamonds symbolize each other, the diamond ring that is already a diamond stylus that rings out
-songs of love, where love's v mimics the shape of a diamond
-stylus. Such a diamond reverberates with Neil Diamond
-singing "Forever in Blue Jeans." (His first name is an
-anagram for line, the lines or grooves his voice sings from?
-He is also the one who sings the Jazz Singer lyrics "Love
-on the rocks. . .."") "Forever in Blue Jeans" translates into
-"Forever Listening to Blue Diamonds"; there are blue
-diamonds (blue diamond styluses?), like the Hope Diamond,
-
-88
-Why Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
-
-as there are blue jeans. Neil Diamond sings the "blues."
-
-Jeans are made of denim. Denim, as anagram, is mined.
-The mining of oil needs diamond drills, the playing of vinyl records diamond styluses. Our dancing to this sound is
-fulfilled when we wear jeans or denim, such sound derived
-from the vinyl oil that has been mined.
-
-Jean, the word jean, cryptically advocates identity
-since jean angulates into I am, the I am a translation of
-jean, the picce of cloth or the Jean in Norma Jean. Gene, a
-homonym for jean, is the repository of the DNA molecule,
-a 20th century positivist's pleasure-word. (DNA, a pleasureword too, has at least two letters common with jean. Besides are not jeans also called denim jeans? Respelled,
-d(-)n(--) (- -)a(- -) echoes DNA, a significant idea when one
-confronts genetic scientists who like to wear denim jeans.)
-The Je in jean is identical to the French I, made possible
-by our memories of that language as well as j's proximity
-to i in the alphabet. (A study of American culture and its
-origin in the thinking of Jean-Jacques Rousseau would be
-interesting. Davy Crockett with his raccoon hat and blue
-jeans is echoed by Rousseau's similar headpiece, but did he
-wear the cloth of/de Nimes as all those 1950s youngsters
-did?) Furthermore denim's anagram, mined, congrues with
-the I am idca within jean, my jeans, the jeans of mine.
-(Homosexuals usually wore a pair of denim to the Mine[d |shaft.)
-
-Even in diamond there is this I am moment. The letters
-after its initial d are i, a, and m exhibiting the I am that is a
-refraction from jean, or the proper name Jean. Diamonds
-can then be respelled into djeamonds. Furthermore in
-America one finds the I am: [ am erca, or I am ¢ car. The
-latter phrase could translate into Jean a car or Jean, a car,
-
-89
-THE AGE OF OIL
+The strength of the diamond, its uniform, crystalline structure, has no air within it, no air for sound to reverberate within it. The heart, however, is quite loud, for even in the greatest of silences, we can always hear our hearts. Remember when Raquel Welch had to close her ears in the film\filmtitle{Fantastic Voyage}? The microscopically shrunken vehicle ventured into the comparatively gigantic chambers of the man's heart, and the sound of the muscle beating was unbearably loud for the voyagers. There is no sound within a diamond, no pockets of air, at least in flawless diamonds. When the diamond performs its function as stylus, the sound has the diamond as its point of origin, albeit the perfectly faceted and angled sides of the diamond that can register all the variations felt along the record's groove. Never, never can the diamond have sound pass through it for the diamond's symmetry and the ensuing vibrations only issue upon contact with the diamond's outside, while this jewel's inside, its heart, its airtight interior cannot carry sound within it.
-a truism for stars (Norma Desmond/Jean) are supposed to
-be cars. Getting into a pair of jeans is an allegory of getting into a car. Jeans that cover legs for walking are met by
-cars that somewhat dispense with legs for driving. Besides
-every American has a particular brand of jeans as they have
-a particular model of a car, a Levi's or a Ford. And every
-American takes care of their jeans or car, the phrase I am
-erca from America now splintering into jean care, care embedding car and ear as well. (America also anagrammatizes
-into [ camera.)
-
-The car's affinity with the diamond stylus is proved by
-styluses played on vinyl grooves while cars drive over asphalt roads. A car is a stylus (related to the prows of ships,
-ships substitutive with cars), thereby displaying that a car
-in transit is an allegory of a diamond stylus in transit,
-grooves and roads the paths on which the respective objects travel along. The tire of a car is a stylus too, styluses
-write as do tires write, tire always already an anagram for
-rite, a homonym with write.
-
-Of course Marilyn Monroe would think *"Diamonds
-Are a Girl's Best Friend" since within diamonds lies buried the Jean she kept buried. Marilyn Monroe's best
-friend is her name Jean long after she had left that name
-for the one that is new, rewritten and nonoriginal. Marilyn
-will always be the friend of Jean since that name was bestowed to her at birth, but Jean never issues from her lips
-in her films, whereas diamonds will, djeanmonds/djeamonds/diamonds being the place of her secret name. Yet
-she wears jeans in The Misfits and was married to Joe
-DiMaggio, Joe, an O, je, this je buried in jean. Meanwhile
-Norma in Sunset Boulevard falls for Joe (Gillis). Diamonds
-
-are Marilyn Monroe's friend (Monroe's sounding like
-
-90
-Why Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
-
-Mon-rose) because she has lost the buried name Jean
-(buried in diamonds/Desmond), once stardom demanded a
-pseudonym.
-
-As well, diamonds are going to be Marilyn's "best
-friend" since the dia in this word can be easily transformed
-into die or its homonym, dye (as in hairdye). She sung of
-diamonds and she died, killed herself or was murdered,
-along with her dyed blonde hair of the hue called platinum, echoing the platinum that diamond rings are set in.
-Norma Djeanmond will die young and she will dye her
-hair. Americans will love (amour) jeans forever or they will
-love Norma Jean forever. They will listen to diamonds
-forever while wearing their blue jeans, the jeans whose
-"blue™ color is always already in conjunction with "blue"
-diamonds or Neil Diamond's "blues."
-
-The diamond that is worn is also a part of the Norma
-in the Desmond/Jean constellation, worn a distorted anagram of Norma as Morn(a)/Wom(a), the M always reversible into a I in this mythological hieroglyph. Worn diamonds are a translation of Norma Desmond/Jean. To wear
-jeans occurs when we wear diamonds, those diamonds usually styluses, the wear having ear within it for wearing
-jeans occurs when our ears hear diamonds as we dance in
-nightclubs in our jeans.
-
-Maybe the ultimate mystery in jean is its refraction into jear, r a truncated n. The ear and the meanings that
-issue from this aperture are always the most unconscious,
-jearli ear/l hear/I here/l am accounting for the unconscious
-in jean. (Jear is close to year, we wear our jeans for years,
-our diamonds styluses last for years, the fading of our
-jeans took years, etc.)
-
-The above is an anasemic interpretation of the word
-
-91
-THE AGE OF OIL
+On a religious note, this diamond-idea is related to the idea of the Holy Trinity, particularly the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. The correspondences of the Mystical Kabbala have the diamond represent the idea of the one in three, God in the three persons, Father, Son, Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost\slash Spirit represents the love between father and son, between the unbegotten Father and the begotten Son, Christ. The Virgin Mary was infused with the spirit of the Holy Ghost at Annunciation. The Holy Ghost also made its divine presence felt at Christ's Baptism and the Pentecost.
-jean, the sccret surname of one of America's legends, Marilyn Monroe. The word is thus in intimate conjunction
-with the word diamond, but what are the other facets of
-the diamond, this jewel whose letters can gleam like jewels?
-
-With so many facets that have shedded from the dia in
-this word, what about those that shed from the -monds in
-diamonds? Neither monde, French for world nor Mond,
-German for moon confirm a motivation of sound buried or
-"muffled" within diamonds. As is the case with Desmond,
--monds is simply a refraction thrown off by sound. (Yes,
-sound can sound different.) With -monds we can obtain
-sownd (as anagram and the m reversed). Sound sounds like
-sownd, thereby letting diamonds gleam like the diamond
-into dia-sound or dais sound, a dais, podium, or stylus like
-the diamond.
-
-Dia, respelled die, now associates with sound, producing die sound. In "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" the
-advent of a girl's death has diamonds to prevent its approach. The die sound/diamonds speaks of death at the
-very moment it assures the girl of life, security, attractiveness. She may begin to look old, but diamonds prevent
-that aging, this symbol for steadfast love ignores flesh's decay (diamonds, like love, are forever) while reminding ourselves that its ringing and singing is death, diamonds a
-die sound. (The author's name will ring throughout his lifetime Duncan Smith, or D. S., a die sound.)
-
-When Norma Jean/Marilyn Monroe sings "Diamonds
-Are a Girl's Best Friend" we do not notice that are remixes
-into ear. Of course the diamond is in our ear, particularly
-when we hear, "Diamonds Ear a Girl's Best Friend." But
-what probably happens is that girls get earrings, diamond
-earrings, a demand they place on the partner who has
-
-92
-Why Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend
-
-assimilated their "cry" for diamonds. But the demand resounds with diamond, here the diamond demand a paronomastic tautology. Girls demand diamonds, they cry for
-diamonds. Their demand is adamant.
-
-Diamonds, too, are a girl's best friend only when we
-bear in mind that a gift is implied, the demand for a gift
-fulfilled, the diamond for a gift, here diamonds, fulfilled.
-(T.G.LF., an anagram for gift, is an abbreviation for
-"Thank God It's Friday," the Friday evening when people
-go to dance halls to listen to music played by diamonds.)
-But what returns? Surely not diamonds in the form of
-rings, earrings, magical powders or money, but the paltry
-substance of just the music, the ring of a diamond stylus,
-the ring in the ear, the "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best
-Friend" played over the film sound track, record player or
-radio. Without diamonds, girls settle on diamond styluses,
-the invisible ear ring. The song "Diamonds Are a Girl's
-Best Friend" thus confirms that the mere hearing of the
-song is the fulfillment of the diamond demand, the only
-demand obtained being the ring in the air or in the ear in
-light of the absence of a ring on one's finger. At the moment Marilyn Monroe strikes one's ear, a diamond hovers,
-compelling the deprived listener to believe that their
-friend, whoever it may be, is nearby.
-
-93
-Further Remarks on Diamonds
-
-Hidden in the heart of sound is a diamond. The diamond
-plays the sound on the record, but does it capture any
-light? Does the diamond stylus reflect any light off of its
-tiny surface? Could we sec any prismatic gleams off of the
-diamond that plays the records we are so fond of?
-
-The opposition between hearing and staring finds its
-strange union with the diamond stylus, a diamond above
-all that writes out sound as well as reflects light. If the diamond stylus is too small to reflect light, then what serves
-as the diamond, what replaces the diamond's capacity to
-reflect light even though its association with producing
-sound tends to make the diamond (stylus) invisible?
-
-On cards, a diamond is a four-corncred design rendered
-in the color red. Square, rectangular, rhomboid, the essential shape is that of four points and four lines joining those
-points, each opposing line parallel. A diamond, in its broadest figurative, geometrical sense is a square-like object, at
-least in the schemata of diamonds on playing cards. This is
-also confirmed by the molecular structure of diamonds
-composed of four tightly interlocking carbon molecules.
-
-If the diamond in its most generalized shape isa square,
-what else is a square, a square that echoes the diamond and
-
-95
-THE AGE OF OIL
+The angel Gabriel at Mary's Annunciation was never really seen, for according to the \booktitle{Catholic Encyclopedia}, careful inspection of the New Testament reveals that the angel imparted some kind of inner voice within the "silence of Mary's soul." God spoke to Mary \e{via} the angel at the moment where the Holy Ghost, represented then by the form of a dove, was present as well. A dove, with its wings outspread, forms a diamond shape, four diagonals join its tail, two wings and beak. The spirit or breath of God, his "sound," in its broadest figurative sense, is effectuated by the dove, the Holy Spirit in its diamond shape.
-supplants its shape onto new objects, when those very objects are linked with a diamond, here a diamond stylus?
-
-Before the record is played by a diamond stylus, it is
-contained in an album cover, a square-shaped album cover,
-a diamond of sorts, although composed of cardboard. The
-album's cover with its photograph of the recording star reproduces the squarelike configuration of the diamond.
-Thus the album cover is a diamond, it is a four-cornered reflective surface just like diamonds.
-
-When we look at such an album cover we see the star
-we will eventually be able to hear over our sterco systems
-with their diamond styluses. Hearing the star needs the
-diamond stylus just as staring at the star needs the diamond photograph. Even while hearing the star we will
-sumnion up the absent record cover's picture in our minds.
-While hearing the diamond we envision that record cover
-diamond.
-
-All photographs can be tipped on one of their corners
-and thereby form the diamond schemata of playing cards.
-If the imagination of the listener thought that the diamond
-photograph were the stylus playing the record now being
-listened to, his supposition would not be far from the
-truth. The origin of such sound is a diamond, a diamond
-that captures light as perfectly as it captures sounds imprinted on record grooves.
-
-To move from ear to air to loudspeaker to sterco with
-its pickup needle is not a far-fetched progression, despite
-the usual ignorance that accompanies our perception of
-the music-saturated air. The star that is heard is now, and
-always has been, the star that is scen, both hearing and seeing mediated by the diamond-idea.
-
-The star (in a photograph) is framed by a diamond.
-
-96
-Further Remarks on Diamonds
-
-That diamond then becomes the diamond that plays the
-words and music of the star. As well, to stare across such
-vast distances of a music hall, to its record player, to its
-needle, to the time and place of the record's taping, even
-to the bedroom of the star, simply shows the incredible
-curiosity on the part of the listener to see into what he/she
-is hearing. The tininess of the diamond stylus is contradicted by the desire to see such a stone reflect its gleams, and
-its gleams are seen, at least in the hallucination of the record's cover, photographs of the star, movies of the star,
-etc. Within the diamond stylus or diamond photograph,
-the two being interchangeable, lives the star, the star we
-want to stare at. Hearing will not suffice, thus our tremendous curiosity to see up to that point, that diamond stylus
-point, that diamond stylus-photograph point, all the way
-to the bedroom of the star.
-
-The paths of the stars in the sky are recreated every
-moment a song or film is played over the radio or television. Stars are in the sky, and we can see these distant
-stellar objects, but not the stars that are human beings who
-course through the heavens until we eventually sce them
-on our television sets or hear them over our radios. The
-distance of the stars (in the sky) and the distance of the
-stars (on TV, on radios) is quite far, the former more so
-than the latter. Both distances are insurmountable, a condition that propells us to be closer to the very thing so far
-away. Looking into the sky, in order to traverse such great
-distances, will always be the most extreme or sublime effort taken by the scopic drive. Even within the word *sky"
-there is already "eye,"" much like "star" that always has
-"stare" issuing from it. Sky rhymes with eye. Since k and ¢
-are similar consonants, we can obtain from sky, sgy, its
-
-97
-THE AGE OF OIL
+At Pentecost, when Christ promised the Holy Spirit would' visit Mary and his disciples, the Holy Ghost was described as "a roar like that of mighty winds [which] filled the house and tongues like tongues of fire rested in everyone present." Old Testament meanings concerning spirit are often concerned with breath, the breath from God's mouth that gave life to Christ, that breath being the Holy Spirit with its "mighty winds" and "tongues like tongues of fire."
-anagram gys or gaze. We gaze into the skies or skeyes. The
-sky will draw our eye into it or the skies our gaze or eyes.
-
-The gleaming and faceted nature of a diamond is no
-doubt similar to the stars in the sky. And while visual and
-auditory messages are invisibly coursing though the starry
-sky, an invisible diamond-mediated image or sound conveys human stars. These human stars too gleam and throw
-facets like diamonds when their voices are played by diamond styluses and when their images are caught in the
-frames of television sets that are as square-shaped as diamonds. When televised stars are caught within a diamond,
-does not their sound appear to be caught by something
-else? It is hard to say whether sound over TV or TV-transmitted movies are facilitated by a diamond stylus or not:
-shows that play popular songs, for instance, are those
-songs on a record played by a diamond stylus or something
-else?
-
-Since our cars and cyes are two entirely different
-sources for the invocatory and scopic drives, they, however, can become identical as in the Sony ads that confuse
-"sound" and "color." By obliterating the differences between separate media, the TV screen, for example, is made
-into the place where the sound comes from, not its inchesaway speaker. It is never an actual identity, merely a desired or delusionary one. The schematic isomorphisms of
-the (square) diamond image and the (square) diamond
-sound enforces this desired identity of sound and image.
-Diamonds fulfill both sound and image, the two events
-mutually reasserting each other despite the possible nonpresence of an actual diamond.
-
-We see sound by seeing the diamond photo or we hear
-sight by hearing the diamond stylus. What serves as the
-
-98
-Further Remarks on Diamonds
-
-most impregnable writing instrument, the diamond, writes
-out sound just as it frames (a spacing, an irreducible component of any writing) visibility. Without the diamond,
-there would be no "unity™ between these two apparently
-exclusive activities, seeing and hearing.
-
-99
-On Wit
+Back to diamonds. If diamonds facilitate the transmission of sound to our ears, conceivably we arc in the position of duplicating the Trinity. Singer-musicians breathe into our ears when we hear the record. Singer-God has a diamond-Holy Ghost for us Christs on ecarth. This voice from afar, God, enters our ears, as the Virgin was inseminated with Christ's embryo through her ears. (St. Augustine thought that Mary was fertilized in such a fashion.) We, as listeners to music, to the diamond ring, receive the spirit, the voice, the breath.
+
+The eternal love of the Holy Spirit for the Father and the Son congrues with the diamond, this symbol of steadfast love. The Holy Ghost, as a four-cornered dove, or diamond stylus, is eternal, despite the relative duration of a diamond stylus being only 100--500 hours of playing time. The record's grooves wear down the stylus into unplayability, an argument against its steadfastness in playing or ringing out those songs of love.
+
+Synthetic diamonds are made from graphite when extremely high temperatures and pressures are exerted on the same substance that allows us to write with pencils. A diamond stylus relates to another stylus, the pencil, but has anyone written with a diamond-tipped pencil? In order for oil to be mined, synthetic diamonds bore into the earth's crust so as to unearth the crude. This is odd since oil is what makes up record discs, both played by diamonds and mined by diamonds.
+
+Is a platinum record playable or not? Can I play a platinum record with a diamond stylus? Then it will really be a "diamond ring," since diamond rings are set in platinum and since a platinum record played by a diamond needle is also a diamond ring, a diamond supported by platinum.
+
+The next transition: from gold records to platinum records to diamond records. A diamond record played by a diamond stylus. An invincible record and its invincible pen. The love between those two diamonds will be invincible. The non-vinyl, non-oil record would never warp, yet its diamond stylus would still write or cut the grooves of the diamond record since it takes a diamond to cut a diamond. Now laser beams are being used as styluses on videodiscs. Their invincibility surpasses the diamond for they are capable of boring holes through diamonds.
+
+One question has plagued me during this discussion: What other jewels could be used for a stylus? Besides the diamond what could be substituted, what would allow the divine breath to vibrate perfectly throughout the air? A ruby stylus, an emerald stylus, a pearl stylus, a sapphire stylus, a topaz stylus, lapis lazuli, amethyst? Rubies might be appropriate since they are the next hardest gem and are indispensible for the formation of laser beams. Emeralds are much too precious, rare and expensive to be used, besides, we would be straining ourselves terribly to see such an exquisite though tiny stone once made into a nearly invisible writing point. Sapphires were originally used as styluses, and like the emerald, we would be despondent not to be able to see the pale, cross-shaped star draped over these magnificent gems. I will discuss pearl styluses further on.
+
+Certainly the listener is not at a loss when the music compensates for the absence of the visual brilliance of the diamond or any of its equivalents. Listening to the compositions of musical geniuses must face the inevitable loss of those prismatic gleams when light strikes these jewels under question. The tininess of the diamond stylus cannot shed the treasured refraction. Placing one's finger under the pickup needle asserts the diamond's presence, albeit by mere touching---and if the stereo's "power" button has been pressed---a finger's pores and rippling array of lines, swirls, "grooves" again, facilitates the diamond to register the sound of such a fingertip's landscape. We can then "hear" the finger that only feels hot or cold, rough or soft and another argument for the diamond's perfection --- sound for the touch, sound for the short interval of pain at the stylus' sharpness, and while under such a delicious sensation, we beg our cars to receive the equivalent. Oddly enough, it all started since the prism was never seen.
+
+Pearls, however, would not hurt whatsoever if they were made into styluses. Their roundness and smoothness would be a welcome sensation to the finger dismayed by the surgical potential of the other gem. Inside a cultivated pearl is a sharp object, a chip off of the oyster's exterior. The oyster's outside, composed of calcium, grows layers and layers of shell. These encrustations are what pearl divers chip off and insert into the oyster's lip. Once inside the oyster, this formerly "outside™ chip irritates the soft fleshy interior, thus propelling the oyster to cover the hard edge of the chip with what will eventually become the ideally smooth surface of the pearl. From the outside of the oyster to its inside, and once inside, the chip is then a forcign body (although it is part of the oyster, hence not so foreign) about to become reconciled with the interior. Whenever the oyster is happy with the very thing that caused so much discomfort, the pearl-diver may remove the former chip. The pearl is thus a prophylactic to the pain of the oyster's inside. Eventually the pearl consecrates the oyster's relative ugliness, the oyster's exterior layers of unsightly calcium growth, when that ugly exterior was the very origin of the pearl before it evolved into its hemispheric perfection. A pearl, like a diamond, is really a chip, a hard, knife-like surface. (If you have ever dived for oysters to eat on the half-shell, your fingers get sliced up terribly.) But only in the heart of the pearl does that chip ex ist. To touch a pearl stylus is a comfort in comparison to a diamond stylus. Indeed, if such a stylus existed, the pearl just might (a hypothesis) wear down and become the chip it began building itself upon. Then that chip would be diamantine. The heart of a pearl has a diamond, however odd that may strike your ears.
+
+All record grooves are now suited for the purposes of a diamond's point to travel along. What would a record's grooves evolve into if a pearl, a round pearl, were to be used? Instead of V-shaped valleys we would have U-shaped ones. The pearl would have to touch on grooves that were essentially curved, not angled, as with a diamond. And what would that sound like? Would the music become softer, fuzzier, slower, what? To hear a gem "clearly" has always had a diamond as its standard. Could there be a pearl sound standard where the category of "clarity" and "sharpness" no longer applied, but the predicates of "subtlety" or "softness" did? Conjecturing a pearl stylus, even the shape of a.record's grooves, seems at best a fantasm. Its only truth is that diamonds and pearls are gems, hence interchangeable. If not, the imagination leaves the pearl to a future of silence, whereas the diamond maintains both visual and acoustic brilliance. All those pearl divers have to do then is to drop diamond chips into the oyster and see whether calcium by-products will make the nacreous shell of a pearl. A diamond is now in the heart of a pearl. That double gem will elicit delicious sound, eventually after pearl dust has scattered itself over the record disc. As the pearl wears down, casting the sheeny black surface into one that is more opalescent, this hybrid stylus then advances the sound's quality and clarity once the strange stylus is fully a diamond.
+
+This hypothetical situation with a pearl-diamond stylus, this pulverization of the pearl as it transforms itself into a diamond in the process could happen with a diamond as well. The 500\textsuperscript{th} playing time of the diamond stylus signals the diamond stylus' vulnerability, its breakage. Could the diamond stylus be shedding itself along the way?
+
+Let us suppose that a diamond does just that, that by wearing down, it chips off, it crumbles through strain towards its 500\textsuperscript{th} playing time. And where do these diamond morsels go, where do these even tinier fragments of a diamond stylus go? A transformation of the diamond takes place and, conceivably, diamond dust results. This is quite possible with the fabulation of a diamond record and its diamond stylus, since the cutting of a diamond has to take place with a diamond, the diamond record's grooves now doing the pulverizing, the cutting. Powder then fills the air and enters into ourselves in the strangest of ways.
+
+Since my entire argument is replete with hypotheses, I shall make another. After the diamond's fictive wearing down into diamond dust since it played so many times on the record, the dust becomes transformed, alchemized if you will, into the pharmacological habits of a record's listeners, the drugs cocaine and heroin.
+
+With all this dust traveling through the air, this precious dust from the diamond playing on record grooves and its being pulverized by such grooves, the dust enters our bodies. If the similarity between cocaine or heroin or any other dustike drug with diamond dust is justified, then this dust enters, as is common practise, though the nose. Of course rock musicians will snort "rocks," the rocks in question being more precious than gold but not as expensive as the rocks that are diamonds. A bird of paradise flying up my nose could mean the four-cornered dove of the Holy Ghost flying up my nose and into my lungs, the very site of breath or spirit again. "Angel dust" resonates with the idea of the angel Gabriel accompanied by the
+
+Holy Ghost at Mary's Annunciation when she is about to hear God. The head that is suffused with diamond dust, or sound for that matter, cannot ingest diamonds per se, only their closest equivalents: substances that are crystalline, expensive and in association with the nonrepresentational, nonwordly commonplaces of music. "Getting high" on music or drugs finds the diamond-standard always within the two categories. Besides, the music industry attempts to saturate its viewers with a scopic or visual spectacle as well as an aural spectacle. Here the thing that is missing is the drive of the heaving of the lungs, satiated by near diamond dust, an illegality and the envy of those hungry spectators who think that rock musicians get all the "rocks" they want.
+
+Heroin users may have what are called "works," the usual needle, syringe and cooking spoon. Heroin and its necessary needle also entail the necessary "pickup needle" with its diamond stylus. This association finds its truth in the myths of junk taken by musicians. They may have made albums or not and for what albums they play a pickup needle is needed, or if their need for junk is great, they use a needle full of prepared heroin to pick them up. A diamond stylus, if pressed hard enough, could puncture your skin, while a needle and syringe will accomplish the act. Even with "glass works" the sharp diamond stylus finds its companion in something else crystalline, a glassy needle. These associations should be placed next to the mythology of drug-taking musicians or music lovers, reinforced by the stylus that lets them hear their own music. It is an alignment to an object that resonates a primary masochism, crystalline drugs the interiorized object that magnifies the external world's cruelty on its recipients. The heroin and cocaine addict demonstrates, though not completely, that such consumption is an allegory of a pulverized diamond stylus.
+
+This habit, of course, is not simply restricted to just musicians. Commonplaces of filmmakers and painters and their expensive injection of usually cocaine are rife. Filmmakers work with cameras whose glassy lenses at one point had to be polished. Using cocaine appears to be arepetition of the lenses' corruptibility and pulverization. Painters, like their filmmaker counterparts, require precise visual judgements, their eyes are indispensible for their work. The Russian word for eye, \e{glaz}, is a near homonym of the English "glass." Besides haven't we heard of those with a glass eye, the eye being the glassiest part of our bodies? Cocaine cryptically embeds the eye-related stems, \e{ocul}\slash \{oculus} within it: \e{coc}aine\slash \e{cok}e. \e{Occhio}, Italian for eye, fits neatly here with the following mispelling: \e{cocchio}. Even the letter \e{c}, \e{c}ocaine's first letter, is a homonym with the verb for sight, \e{see}. (Also coca\e{i}ne's \e{i} reasserts this repetition of sight since \e{i} homonymically relates to \e{eye}.) Visual artists addicted to cocaine are simply reinteriorizing the very thing that promotes their art, their seeing, their eyes, now metaphorized into a glassy, eye-like powder. When a filmmaker or painter snorts cocaine, it figuratively returns to the eye it was chopped up from. The resultant lack of sleep keeps one's eyes open, for now they've had their strange nourishment.
+
+The ritual of cocaine or heroin ingestion through the nose remains within this general crystallization that the diamond idea secretly originates. The crystal powder is cut into lines over a pane of glass or mirror. A razor is often used, a highly sharp tool whose cutting power metaphorically resides with the cutting power of the diamond. (Addicts desire \e{power} from the \e{powder}.) If glass or a mirror is used for the razor to cut the dust up on, we then encounter a crystal cut by a near crystal on a crystal. Crystals are cut by crystals on crystals. Diamonds are cut by diamonds on a diamond. Diamond styluses are cut by diamonds on diamond records, enabling more pulverization, the pulverization of the diamond stylus that fictively becomes the precious powder we put into our bodies. And all of this is accompanied by a loud rapping of the razor on the mirror as it divides up the powder. A diamond stylus elicits sound just as the razor, another sharp implement, elicits peals into the air.
+
+One procedure in coke- or heroin-taking consists of using a pen empty of its ink-filled cartridge. The hollow tube allows easy suction of whatever drug under question. Again another writing implement enters into a ritual of drug taking.
+
+A few words on the nose. The nose is a prosthetic extension of the body, it is an appendage of the body, specifically the face. The nose "sticks out," it juts into the air. One's profile has the nose as its distinguishing mark, a kind of "prow" or "stylus" or more cryptically, a permanent "dais" of the body that writes itself through the empty air. Figuratively, the diamond resembles the nose for the nose forms a small "V" reproducing the diamond's point that is either placed in platinum or on record grooves. The nose is a diamond also in terms of a topography of the ego. Every ego is a bubble of sorts, an envelope of skin, whereas the nose, this raised platform, this "dais" is a bump on the ego-bubble. The diamond, since it is attached to the body, a "hump" of sorts on the body, resembles the nose in the objects' interruption of the body's relatively smooth homogeneity. They are, in a broad system of substitutive terms, lumps, outgrowths, cysts, pockets, lobes and so forth. Indeed earlobes can bear diamonds in the form of earrings, as do fingers, another bodily appurtenance, in the form of diamond rings. Even the head, the body's biggest "bump," can bear a necklace at its base.
+
+The cocaine or heroin that goes back into the nose goes back into the diamondhood these drugs are metaphorically derived from. From the pulverized diamond stylus (or lens) to the drugs on a diamantine surface to the diamond in the nose-diamond. The song played by a diamond corrupts into dust which returns to the most diamond-like part of the body, the nose. Similarly, too much dust inhaled collapses the diamond-nose (its septum) just as the diamond stylus had collapsed from too much playing. People who snort too much diamond dust also lose their diamond, their nose, since the ample diamond dust was derived from playing the diamond too frequently, the ambiguity here residing in either snorting too much dust or, because they are saturated with music, diamond-written sound.
+
+Yet have we answered the question "Why are diamonds a girl's best friend?" Perhaps the discussion should explore the role of Norma Jean as the quasi-authoress of this invincible demand.
+
+Norma Jean starred in a film \filmtitle{All About Eve}, a film that appeared in conjunction with \filmtitle{Sunset Boulevard} with its Norma Desmond. Both films were up for the 1950 Academy Awards and are often billed with each other in movie houses not to mention the instance of seeing \filmtitle{Sunset Boulevard} on television when \filmtitle{All About Eve} was playing on another channel, the two films having begun at the exact same time.
+
+Norma Jean appeared outside of \filmtitle{Sunset Boulevard}, but she was inside it, inside that film by virtue of the one name that was "inside" of her, the "Norma Jean" inside Marilyn Monroe. Norma Jean is, however far-fetched this sounds, the Norma Desmond played by Gloria Swanson. Norma Jean-Desmond is the star who can cross either place, either film, her only ticket being "Norma," Marilyn's original name, a strange entrance to the \filmtitle{All About Eve}\slash \filmtitle{Sunset Boulevard} sepulcher buried within ourselves.
+
+Norma Desmond can flip into Norma Diamond, "one diamond" the first words Norma Desmond called out in the bridge game sequence in \filmtitle{Sunset Boulevard}. \e{D}iamond and \e{D}esmond both have an initial \e{d} to their sequences of identically numbered letters as well as the final \e{-mond}. Now that Norma \e{D}e\e{smond} is Norma \e{D}ia\e{mond}, Norma Jean is Norma Diamond as well.
+
+\e{Norma} refracts into the French word for love, \e{amour}. With Norma Diamond or Norma Jean we can obtain the transformations of \e{love diamonds} or \e{love jeans}, since \e{amour} or love lies buried in Norma. I have already shown how love and diamonds symbolize each other, the diamond \e{ring} that is already a diamond stylus that \e{rings} out songs of love, where lo\e{v}e's \e{v} mimics the shape of a diamond stylus. Such a diamond reverberates with Neil Diamond singing \songtitle{Forever in Blue Jeans.} (His first name is an anagram for \e{line}, the lines or grooves his voice sings from? He is also the one who sings the \filmtitle{Jazz Singer} lyrics "Love on the rocks\ld") \songtitle{Forever in Blue Jeans} translates into "Forever Listening to Blue Diamonds"; there are blue diamonds (blue diamond styluses?), like the Hope Diamond, as there are blue jeans. Neil Diamond sings the "blues."
+
+Jeans are made of denim. \e{Denim}, as anagram, is \e{mined}. The mining of oil needs diamond drills, the playing of vinyl records diamond styluses. Our dancing to this sound is fulfilled when we wear jeans or \e{denim}, such sound derived from the vinyl oil that has been \e{mined}.
+
+Jean, the word jean, cryptically advocates identity since \e{jean} angulates into \e{I am}, the \e{I am} a translation of \e{jean}, the piece of cloth or the \e{Jean} in Norma \e{Jean}. \e{Gene}, a homonym for \e{jean}, is the repository of the DNA molecule, a 20\textsuperscript{th} century positivist's pleasure-word. (DNA, a pleasureword too, has at least two letters common with je\e{an}. Besides are not jeans also called \e{denim jeans}? Respelled, d(-)n(-{-}) (-{-})a({-}-) echoes DNA, a significant idea when one confronts genetic scientists who like to wear \e{d}e\e{n}im je\e{a}ns.) The \e{Je} in \e{je}an is identical to the French \e{I}, made possible by our memories of that language as well as \e{j}'s proximity to \e{i} in the alphabet. (A study of American culture and its origin in the thinking of \e{Jean}-Jacques Rousseau would be interesting. Davy Crockett with his raccoon hat and blue jeans is echoed by Rousseau's similar headpiece, but did he wear the cloth of\slash \e{de Nimes} as all those 1950s youngsters did?) Furthermore \e{denim}'s anagram, \e{mined}, congrues with the \e{I am} idea within \e{jean, my} jeans, the jeans of \e{mine}. (Homosexuals usually wore a pair of \e{denim} to the \e{Mine[d]}shaft.)
+
+Even in d\e{iam}ond there is this \e{I am} moment. The letters after its initial \e{d} are \e{i}, \e{a}, and \e{m} exhibiting the \e{I am} that is a refraction from \e{jean}, or the proper name \e{Jean}. Diamonds can then be respelled into \e{djeamonds}. Furthermore in \e{America} one finds the \e{I am}: \e{I am erca}, or \e{I am e car}. The latter phrase could translate into \e{Jean a car} or \e{Jean, a car}, a truism for stars (Norma Desmond\slash Jean) are supposed to be cars. Getting into a pair of jeans is an allegory of getting into a car. Jeans that cover legs for walking are met by cars that somewhat dispense with legs for driving. Besides every American has a particular brand of jeans as they have a particular model of a car, a Levi's or a Ford. And every American takes care of their jeans or car, the phrase \e{I am erca} from \e{America} now splintering into \e{jean care}, \e{care} embedding \e{car} and \e{ear} as well. (\e{America} also anagrammatizes into \e{I camera}.)
+
+The car's affinity with the diamond stylus is proved by styluses played on vinyl grooves while cars drive over asphalt roads. A car is a stylus (related to the prows of ships, ships substitutive with cars), thereby displaying that a car in transit is an allegory of a diamond stylus in transit, grooves and roads the paths on which the respective objects travel along. The tire of a car is a stylus too, styluses write as do tires write, \e{tire} always already an anagram for \e{rite}, a homonym with \e{write}.
+
+Of course Marilyn Monroe would think "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend" since within d\e{iam}onds lies buried the \e{Jean} she kept buried. Marilyn Monroe's best friend is her name \e{Jean} long after she had left that name for the one that is new, rewritten and nonoriginal. Marilyn will always be the friend of \e{Jean} since that name was bestowed to her at birth, but \e{Jean} never issues from her lips in her films, whereas diamonds will, d\e{jean}monds\slash d\e{jea}monds\slash d\e{iam}onds being the place of her secret name. Yet she wears jeans in \filmtitle{The Misfits} and was married to Joe DiMaggio, \e{Joe}, an \e{O}, \e{je}, this \e{je} buried in \e{je}an. Meanwhile Norma in \filmtitle{Sunset Boulevard} falls for Joe (Gillis). Diamonds are Marilyn Monroe's friend (Mon\e{roe's} sounding like Mon-\e{rose}) because she has lost the buried name Jean (buried in diamonds\slash Desmond), once stardom demanded a pseudonym.
+
+As well, \e{diamonds} are going to be Marilyn's "best friend" since the \e{dia} in this word can be easily transformed into \e{die} or its homonym, \e{dye} (as in hair\e{dye}). She sung of \e{diamonds} and she \e{died}, killed herself or was murdered, along with her \e{dyed} blonde hair of the hue called platinum, echoing the platinum that diamond rings are set in. Norma Djeanmond will \e{die} young and she will \e{dye} her hair. Americans will love (\e{amour}) jeans forever or they will love Norma Jean forever. They will listen to diamonds forever while wearing their blue jeans, the jeans whose "blue™ color is always already in conjunction with "blue" diamonds or Neil Diamond's "blues."
+
+The diamond that is worn is also a part of the \e{Norma} in the Desmond\slash Jean constellation, \e{worn} a distorted anagram of \e{Norma} as \e{Morn(a)}\slash \e{Worn(a)}, the \e{M} always reversible into a \e{W} in this mythological hieroglyph. Worn diamonds are a translation of Norma Desmond\slash Jean. To wear jeans occurs when we wear diamonds, those diamonds usually styluses, the wear having \e{ear} within it for w\e{ear}ing jeans occurs when our ears hear diamonds as we dance in nightclubs in our jeans.
+
+Maybe the ultimate mystery in \e{jean} is its refraction into \e{jear}, \e{r} a truncated \e{n}. The ear and the meanings that issue from this aperture are always the most unconscious, \e{jear}\slash \e{i ear}\slash \e{I hear}\slash \e{I here}\slash \e{I am} accounting for the unconscious in \e{jean}. (\e{Jear} is close to \e{year}, we wear our jeans for years, our diamonds\fnote{diamond?} styluses last for years, the fading of our jeans took years, etc.)
+
+The above is an anasemic interpretation of the word \e{jean}, the sccret surname of one of America's legends\fnote{legend?}, Marilyn Monroe. The word is thus in intimate conjunction with the word diamond, but what are the other facets of the diamond, this jewel whose letters can gleam like jewels?
+
+With so many facets that have shedded from the \e{dia} in this word, what about those that shed from the \e{-monds} in dia\e{monds}? Neither \e{monde}, French for world\fnote{add comma?} nor \e{Mond}, German for moon\fnote{add comma?} confirm a motivation of sound buried or "muffled" within diamonds. As is the case with Desmond, \e{-monds} is simply a refraction thrown off by \e{sound}. (Yes, \e{sound} can sound different.) With \e{-monds} we can obtain \e{sownd} (as anagram and the \e{m} reversed). \e{Sound} sounds like \e{sownd}, thereby letting \e{diamonds} gleam like the diamond into \e{dia-sound} or \e{dais sound}, a dais, podium, or stylus like the diamond.
+
+\e{Dia}, respelled \e{die}, now associates with \e{sound}, producing \e{die sound}. In \essaytitle{Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend} the advent of a girl's death has diamonds to prevent its approach. The die sound\slash diamonds speaks of death at the very moment it assures the girl of life, security, attractiveness. She may begin to look old, but diamonds prevent that aging, this symbol for steadfast love ignores flesh's decay (diamonds, like love, are forever) while reminding ourselves that its ringing and singing is death, diamonds a \e{die sound}. (The author's name will ring throughout his lifetime \e{Duncan Smith}, or \e{D. S.}, a \e{die} sound.)
+
+When Norma Jean\slash Marilyn Monroe sings \songitlte{Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend} we do not notice that \e{are} remixes into \e{ear}. Of course the diamond is in our ear, particularly when we hear, \songtitle{Diamonds Ear a Girl's Best Friend.} But what probably happens is that girls get earrings, diamond earrings, a demand they place on the partner who has assimilated their "cry" for diamonds. But the \e{demand} resounds with \e{diamond}, here the \e{diamond demand} a paronomastic tautology. Girls demand diamonds, they cry for diamonds. Their demand is adamant.
+
+Diamonds, too, are a girl's best friend only when we bear in mind that a gift is implied, the demand for a gift fulfilled, the diamond for a gift, here diamonds, fulfilled. (\e{T.G.I.F.}, an anagram for \e{gift}, is an abbreviation for "Thank God It's Friday," the Friday evening when people go to dance halls to listen to music played by diamonds.) But what returns? Surely not diamonds in the form of rings, earrings, magical powders or money, but the paltry substance of just the music, the \e{ring}of a diamond stylus, the \e{ring} in the ear, the \songtitle{Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend} played over the film sound track, record player or radio. Without diamonds, girls settle on diamond styluses, the invisible ear ring. The song \sontitle{Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend} thus confirms that the mere hearing of the song is the fulfillment of the diamond demand, the only demand obtained being the \e{ring} in the air or in the ear in light of the absence of a \e{ring} on one's finger. At the moment Marilyn Monroe strikes one's ear, a diamond hovers, compelling the deprived listener to believe that their friend, whoever it may be, is n\e{ear}by.
+
+\chap Further Remarks on Diamonds
+
+Hidden in the heart of sound is a diamond. The diamond plays the sound on the record, but does it capture any light? Does the diamond stylus reflect any light off of its tiny surface? Could we sec any prismatic gleams off of the diamond that plays the records we are so fond of?
+
+The opposition between hearing and staring finds its strange union with the diamond stylus, a diamond above all that writes out sound as well as reflects light. If the diamond stylus is too small to reflect light, then what serves as the diamond, what replaces the diamond's capacity to reflect light even though its association with producing sound tends to make the diamond (stylus) invisible?
+
+On cards, a diamond is a four-corncred design rendered in the color red. Square, rectangular, rhomboid, the essential shape is that of four points and four lines joining those points, each opposing line parallel. A diamond, in its broadest figurative, geometrical sense is a square-like object, at least in the schemata of diamonds on playing cards. This is also confirmed by the molecular structure of diamonds composed of four tightly interlocking carbon molecules.
+
+If the diamond in its most generalized shape isa square, what else is a square, a square that echoes the diamond and supplants its shape onto new objects, when those very objects are linked with a diamond, here a diamond stylus?
+
+Before the record is played by a diamond stylus, it is contained in an album cover, a square-shaped album cover, a diamond of sorts, although composed of cardboard. The album's cover with its photograph of the recording star reproduces the squarelike configuration of the diamond. Thus the album cover is a diamond, it is a four-cornered reflective surface just like diamonds.
+
+When we look at such an album cover we see the star we will eventually be able to hear over our sterco systems with their diamond styluses. Hearing the star needs the diamond stylus just as staring at the star needs the diamond photograph. Even while hearing the star we will sumnion up the absent record cover's picture in our minds. While hearing the diamond we envision that record cover diamond.
+
+All photographs can be tipped on one of their corners and thereby form the diamond schemata of playing cards. If the imagination of the listener thought that the diamond photograph were the stylus playing the record now being listened to, his supposition would not be far from the truth. The origin of such sound is a diamond, a diamond that captures light as perfectly as it captures sounds imprinted on record grooves.
+
+To move from ear to air to loudspeaker to sterco with its pickup needle is not a far-fetched progression, despite the usual ignorance that accompanies our perception of the music-saturated air. The star that is heard is now, and always has been, the star that is scen, both hearing and seeing mediated by the diamond-idea.
+
+The star (in a photograph) is framed by a diamond. That diamond then becomes the diamond that plays the words and music of the star. As well, to stare across such vast distances of a music hall, to its record player, to its needle, to the time and place of the record's taping, even to the bedroom of the star, simply shows the incredible curiosity on the part of the listener to see into what he/she is hearing. The tininess of the diamond stylus is contradicted by the desire to see such a stone reflect its gleams, and its gleams are seen, at least in the hallucination of the record's cover, photographs of the star, movies of the star, etc. Within the diamond stylus or diamond photograph, the two being interchangeable, lives the star, the star we want to stare at. Hearing will not suffice, thus our tremendous curiosity to see up to that point, that diamond stylus point, that diamond stylus-photograph point, all the way to the bedroom of the star.
+
+The paths of the stars in the sky are recreated every moment a song or film is played over the radio or television. Stars are in the sky, and we can see these distant stellar objects, but not the stars that are human beings who course through the heavens until we eventually sce them on our television sets or hear them over our radios. The distance of the stars (in the sky) and the distance of the stars (on TV, on radios) is quite far, the former more so than the latter. Both distances are insurmountable, a condition that propells us to be closer to the very thing so far away. Looking into the sky, in order to traverse such great distances, will always be the most extreme or sublime effort taken by the scopic drive. Even within the word *sky" there is already "eye," much like "star" that always has "stare" issuing from it. \e{Sky} rhymes with \e{eye}. Since \e{k} and \e{g} are similar consonants, we can obtain from \e{sky}, \e{sgy}, its anagram \e{gys} or \e{gaze}. We \e{gaze} into the \e{skies} or \e{skeyes}. The \e{sky} will draw our \e{eye} into it or the \e{skies} our \e{gaze} or \e{eyes}.
+
+The gleaming and faceted nature of a diamond is no doubt similar to the stars in the sky. And while visual and auditory messages are invisibly coursing though the starry sky, an invisible diamond-mediated image or sound conveys human stars. These human stars too gleam and throw facets like diamonds when their voices are played by diamond styluses and when their images are caught in the frames of television sets that are as square-shaped as diamonds. When televised stars are caught within a diamond, does not their sound appear to be caught by something else? It is hard to say whether sound over TV or TV-transmitted movies are facilitated by a diamond stylus or not: shows that play popular songs, for instance, are those songs on a record played by a diamond stylus or something else?
+
+Since our ears and eyes are two entirely different sources for the invocatory and scopic drives, they, however, can become identical as in the Sony ads that confuse "sound" and "color." By obliterating the differences between separate media, the TV screen, for example, is made into the place where the sound comes from, not its inchesaway speaker. It is never an actual identity, merely a desired or delusionary one. The schematic isomorphisms of the (square) diamond image and the (square) diamond sound enforces this desired identity of sound and image. Diamonds fulfill both sound and image, the two events mutually reasserting each other despite the possible nonpresence of an actual diamond.
+
+We see sound by seeing the diamond photo or we hear sight by hearing the diamond stylus. What serves as the most impregnable writing instrument, the diamond, writes out sound just as it frames (a spacing, an irreducible component of any writing) visibility. Without the diamond, there would be no "unity" between these two apparently exclusive activities, seeing and hearing.
+
+\chap On Wit
With every champagne bottle a cork is used to prevent the
froth from spilling over. The strength of the cork is attested by the ability to shake the bottle vigorously so that the