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diff --git a/age_of_oil.otx b/age_of_oil.otx index 43dbca1..c388a6d 100644 --- a/age_of_oil.otx +++ b/age_of_oil.otx @@ -359,8 +359,6 @@ A wilderness TV show edified me as to the peculiarities of Australian wildlife, Australia's geological age has often been asserted to me. Since its hills are more weathered and its flora and fauna reflect millenia of evolution, rather than the recent evolution of species in Asia and North America, everyone points out these as indicia of great antiquity. Antediluvian it is, and the 1770--1980 span is such a tiny fraction in time. This notion of Western time is what in Australia, at least in its aboriginal horizon, cannot be tenable. Aborigines have a term, \dq{the Dreamtime,} for the interval when no man had consciousness on this land. The transformation of an ancient landscape into rectangular grids and a \e{chronos} that begins from a Mediterranean idol's birth seems ridiculous and arbitrary here. \dq{Yahweh} was not uttered in Melbourne, but abroad. Australia revives Europe on a soil no one can trace back to a self-present orgin, nor can Europe do so in its Mediterranean postponement. The age and alterity of this continent\slash island haunts the computer card facades of modern skyscrapers. The \e{ratio} of the West shudders before the nonhistorical sedimentation of a country that has now been given a \dq{proper} name. Marble foundations dig into a mother's flesh, a mother whose name they have borrowed from another rock, England, with its \dq{Victoria.} The birth of culture in Australia has begun over the past two centuries, although those sensitive to that contemporaneity know that \dq{Australia} has never had its perfect beginning, its first youth. Europe began exhausting its culture at the moment it underwent imperial expansion. In so doing, Europe could not assert a universal intelligence up against cultures far more eccentric to its claims of absolute sovereignty. At the time of Australia's colonization, Europe was violently repudiating its loss of a full speech, of a culture self-affectionately moving toward its origin, its youth, its alphabet. And \dq{Australia} had to be named, vocalized in Roman letters, all for another origin to reign when no origin had ever taken place. -\bye - \chap On the Current Symbolic Status of Oil Oil, a highly treasured possession in industrialized countries, resonates vast and intricate meanings. This presentation will deal with oil and its attenuations in our daily lives. Bear in mind that these meanings are not in access to consciousness, but say that which is not being said: the same thing, here oil, is then shown in its (auto)difference. @@ -1003,75 +1001,34 @@ Photographs are also connected to a highly nostalgic impulse since they are reco \chap Tell Me Why -... clest comme si dans l'onde j'innovais -1 N . A -Mille sépulcres pour y vierge disparaftre. +{\typosize[8/] +{\parindent=0pt\leftskip=1in\it + +\ld c'est comme si dans l'onde j'innovais\nl +Mille sépulcres pour y vierge dispara\^itre.\par} + +{\leftskip=0pt plus1fil\parindent=0pt Stéphane Mallarmé, -Le Pitre Chati¢ - -When the time comes to leave those places where we hope -to meet a person who might be able to bring joy into our -lives, when we renounce ourselves to rest and solitude -from loud music and fervent stares, we begin to ask ourselves why did I go out? why did I stay up so late? why -was I so foolish? Indeed if there comes a time when we -meet someone who just might answer the question "why?", -the jubilant ride home and the ensuing embraces appear to -compensate for all our past sorrows of rejection and desolation. This stranger is the reason why I have been so foolish because he might be the one who will answer all my -questions. - -Yet when no one can answer our questions, when the -hope for a reply seems infinitely deferred into the future, -we only have recourse to our consciousness, the private -stream of our thoughts. Now and then this interior monologue is broken and our questions can be asked, but only -to vanish into the night from where they had sprung. We -asked our questions and they were answered with a "No." - -Perhaps we were rejected because we failed to embody - -155 -THE AGE OF OIL - -the other's illusion of love. We lonely wanderers soon realize, after repeated rejection, that our appearance is not -adequate to the other's fantasy of what is becoming. So, -with the help of cosmetics, exercise, an article of clothing, -even plastic surgery, we hopefully emerge as an embodiment of the other's illusion. Our entrance onto the dance -floor now assumes proportions as mythic as man's mastery -over the accidents of nature. Soon, however, time leaves its -traces behind, and reality which had coerced our fantasies -to modify their sovereignty brings all this supposed emancipation to naught. Still, things become postponed, death -is deferred, we can dance and rest assured that that ultimate disfiguration is not yet at hand. - -In face of this postponement fantasy asserts an endless, -illusory victory. The very prospect of its disfiguration -turns into the fervently beating heart of its eternity. Even -though time intercedes and interrupts fantasy's operation, -it nonetheless enters into the continuum of our unconscious' -presentations. Time thus becomes a "figure," a constitutive moment within our unconscious life. For fantasy to be -realized, it must do so within a specific period of time, and -that period of time, for love-starved gay men, occurs between the hours of 1 and 5 a.m. on a Saturday night. - -11 - -Between the hours of one and five the gay man dons -his pair of 501 Levi's shrink-to-fit jeans in order to find a -sexual partner. The 501-wearing man just might enter a -New York discotheque called "The Saint" at 105 Second -Avenue for this very purpose. If he is a member of the -Saint, he probably has paid the special annual membership - -156 -Tell Me Why - -rate of $150, further permuting the series of cyphers in -501. Any discussion of homosexual desire must take the -phenomenon of the 501 into account. Why do so many -gay men from the hour of 1:00 a.m. onward wear these -good-luck charms? Why? +Le Pitre Ch\^ati\'e\par}} + +\sec + +When the time comes to leave those places where we hope to meet a person who might be able to bring joy into our lives, when we renounce ourselves to rest and solitude from loud music and fervent stares, we begin to ask ourselves why did I go out? why did I stay up so late? why was I so foolish? Indeed if there comes a time when we meet someone who just might answer the question "why?", the jubilant ride home and the ensuing embraces appear to compensate for all our past sorrows of rejection and desolation. This stranger is the reason why I have been so foolish because he might be the one who will answer all my questions. + +Yet when no one can answer our questions, when the hope for a reply seems infinitely deferred into the future, we only have recourse to our consciousness, the private stream of our thoughts. Now and then this interior monologue is broken and our questions can be asked, but only to vanish into the night from where they had sprung. We asked our questions and they were answered with a "No." + +Perhaps we were rejected because we failed to embody the other's illusion of love. We lonely wanderers soon realize, after repeated rejection, that our appearance is not adequate to the other's fantasy of what is becoming. So, with the help of cosmetics, exercise, an article of clothing, even plastic surgery, we hopefully emerge as an embodiment of the other's illusion. Our entrance onto the dance floor now assumes proportions as mythic as man's mastery over the accidents of nature. Soon, however, time leaves its traces behind, and reality which had coerced our fantasies to modify their sovereignty brings all this supposed emancipation to naught. Still, things become postponed, death is deferred, we can dance and rest assured that that ultimate disfiguration is not yet at hand. + +In face of this postponement fantasy asserts an endless, illusory victory. The very prospect of its disfiguration turns into the fervently beating heart of its eternity. Even though time intercedes and interrupts fantasy's operation, it nonetheless enters into the continuum of our unconscious' presentations. Time thus becomes a "figure," a constitutive moment within our unconscious life. For fantasy to be realized, it must do so within a specific period of time, and that period of time, for love-starved gay men, occurs between the hours of 1 and 5 a.m. on a Saturday night. + +\sec + +Between the hours of one and five the gay man dons his pair of 501 Levi's shrink-to-fit jeans in order to find a sexual partner. The 501-wearing man just might enter a New York discotheque called "The Saint" at 105 Second Avenue for this very purpose. If he is a member of the Saint, he probably has paid the special annual membership rate of \$150, further permuting the series of cyphers in 501. Any discussion of homosexual desire must take the phenomenon of the 501 into account. Why do so many gay men from the hour of 1:00 a.m. onward wear these good-luck charms? Why? The letter Y is the answer why. Every crotch of a pair of Levi's forms the shape to the letter V, the same symbol -for five in its Romanized variant: VOI. Granted that the V +for five in its Romanized variant: \e{V}OI. Granted that the V also symbolizes female genitalia, what other genitalia are mimed by the VOI? The O again could imitate the recesses of female pudenda or the circular rim of the anus while the @@ -1079,549 +1036,95 @@ of female pudenda or the circular rim of the anus while the symbols. The fetishism of this cloth is in part explained by its contiguity to the sexual organs that its letters represent. For the male homosexual, the VOI represents his childhood wish that his sister or mother will eventually grow -what he has. Here the V or vagina in VOI or LeVi will +what he has. Here the V or vagina in \e{V}OI or Le\e{V}i will grow the I or phallus and thereby form the crucial letter Y. The five buttons that seal this fly ask whether this fantasized phallus is about five inches long. The fetishism of the 501 among male homosexuals stems from his belief that V's will transform into Is, a fantasy that is emblematized in 501 Levi's jeans. The 501 is the foundation upon which male homosexuals erect the cypher of their desyre. Ask -any homosexual what he wants: Che V(u)OI? - -1 - -"Find a friend at the Y"' so says a slogan for the Young -Men's Christian Association scattered throughout American - -157 -THE AGE OF OIL - -cities. Five o'clock strikes and the emblem of the 501 unfurls its mystic banner: I have my friend at the Y, the cock -that dangles from his Levi's fly, the cock of the gay guy. -From the depth of the 501 emerges a Y once five buttons -are undone. Rather than form just a letter Y, a mimicry of -a dangling, limp penis, one's ecstatic, erect organ reverses -the Y into the lambda (), the Greek alphabetical symbol -which gay liberationists have made into the ensign of their -resistance. Exuberant with the companionship of a newlyfound friend, he raises both arms to the sky and only briefly does immortality yell its "'yea." - -Yet to find a friend at the Y one must first look like -the letter Y. The gay must develop his body so that his -chest is wider than his waist, forming the same configuration of a Y's V-shaped top and slender lower half. Here, at -a bench press, he spreads out his arms and so evokes the Y -all over again. Some men exercise with a freeweight belt -buckled around their waists. Besides preventing muscle -spasms in the back, this belt tends to narrow the waist and -consequently gives the illusion one's chest is much wider, -as wide as the upper part of a Y. Even the name of many -freeweights also features a Y imprinted there: "York," -"Olympic." And all of this takes place in a gym. - -v - -Gay clubs usually feature loud disco music played to a -clientele that invariably wears 501 Levi's and/or possesses -bodies in the shape of a Y. No less significantly, the music -that is played there requires a diamond stylus to sound out -the grooves of records. These V-, or more accurately Y-, -shaped bodies assume the same general configuration of a - -158 -Tell Me Why - -V-shaped stylus. Now that gay men desire to enlarge their -chests and narrow their waists into a V-shape, they also -desire to look like the stylus that they dance to. This mimicry of a diamond stylus stems from identifying so strongly -with the music to the point where one becomes the very -instrument that produces such enjoyable sound in the -sloping contours of a developed physique. Having a hard, -adamantine body that resembles a sound-producing -diamond gives the sound-saturated dancer a visual representation for what can only be heard. The invocatory drive -(hearing) is inevitably accompanied by the scopic drive -(seeing), otherwise one undergoes a diffuse anxiety, like -when sound from a television falls momentarily silent. - -This intimacy between sound listened to and the shape -of bodies that mime the sound-creating diamond takes -place whenever gay men lift 45 Ibs. freeweights. While lifting 45 lbs. weights, they are probably listening to visually -similar 45 LPs played over their gym's sound system. 45 -LPs are round, usually black discs just as 45 Ibs. freeweights are round, usually black, but much larger, discs as -well. Even Ips equate with Ibs since the letter p is a flipflop reflection of a b. One lifts 45s to resemble the diamond that plays 45s. - -v - -The Latin adjective levis, leve means, according to Cassell's Latin Dictionary, "light, not heavy" in its literal -sense and in its altered or metaphorical senses "light, trifling, unimportant; mild, gentle: fickle, light-hcaded, capricious." After 5:00 p.m. one puts on the 501 to pursue -light and unimportant matters such as dancing at the - -159 -THE AGE OF OIL - -Saint's raised dance floor. It is a raised, circular platform -over which stands a vast curved ceiling. Here one feels as if -floating in the air. Leves Levi's make the bodies of the -Saint's Levi's wearers lighter by raising them up to this elevated, nearly levitating dance floor. The fading of these -leves Levi's also makes them lighter or leviores so as to ascend into the sky. Oddly, heavy men, heavy from building -their bodies, wear light Levi's and they too become leviores. But then they are gay, "gentle," and perhaps "fickle, -light-headed," leves. By renouncing the propagation of the -species, gay people are trifling, non-serious, leves. - -Many Levi's-wearing, body-building men who go to -discotheques drink Miller Light or Budweiser Lite so as not -to bulge at the waist and so ruin their Y-shape. They might -also smoke light tar cigarettes, such as Marlboro Lights -whose advertisements often feature men wearing jeans that -have become lighter, faded. Indeed many of these people -frequent tanning salons to render their bodies tanner, -darker. While they wear their jeans to make them lighter or -leviores, they also make their bodies tanner, darker, less -leves. Conceivably the man who wears the lightest jeans is -also the one who can lift the heaviest weights. As one lifts -weights that are becoming lighter and lighter, one is concurrently persuaded to become darker and darker. Weights -that are no longer "heavy™ are "light" and thereby convey -another antonym for "light"': "dark." - -A Saint '84-85 membership card features a bolt of -lightning against a dark blue sky. This motif was derived -from the club's brochure illustration of a naked man holding the bolt in an empty landscape under a gradually darkening, starry sky, an allusion to the stellar projections of -its dance floor light shows. Unconscious to its artist, the - -160 -Tell Me Why - -man who holds a bolt of lightning is ultimately the Saint -member who will hold with his five fingers the One of his -dreams, a Levi's-wearing lover or handsome stranger. The -Saint member cannot hold lightning but simply a pair of -lightening blue jeans. This member will, by wearing such -light or levitating Levi's, ascend into the blue sky, he will -fly into the Saint's starry heaven. But this starry heaven is -only its upstairs lounge, the place in the blue sky where -men were wont to unfasten each others' blue Levi's fly. -Here they used to fly to the fly and used to hold that levin -bolt bursting from the lightened Levi's fly. (As of the -'85-86 season, the establishment forbids backroom sex in -light of the recent health crisis.) This flight-idea embedded -in light Levi's might be further explained by the name of a -New York jeans store, "Wings™ at 666 Broadway. Even the -Saint's T-shirts feature its name in large letters painted like -a blue sky and interspersed with white clouds. - -Vi - -Wearing lightened jeans, lighting cigarettes, drinking -light beer, dancing until it is light outside, all constitute a -highly pleasureable series of activities indigenous to gay or -"light™ life. This phenomenon of becoming lighter also -relates to gay culture's habit of listening and dancing to -disco music. Originally the vinyl records that play the hits -gays dance to were made of dark, crude oil. By refinement, -the oil became "lighter," viz. turned into vinyl so as to become imprinted with the grooves that diamond styluses -would eventually play upon. Generally the lightening of -the 501 reflects our petrochemical society's perpetual -transubstantiation of crude oil as do diet soft drinks, low - -161 -THE AGE OF OIL - -calorie cheeses, reduced cholesterol cooking oils and -bleached white bread. Nearly every American food product has a "light," calorie-reduced or industrially processed -variant. Nothing in our society escapes the vicissitudes of -the Other of oil. - -Apropos of the anal drive and its relation to male homosexuality, this refinement from dirty oil into clean -vinyl, from shit into hits, undergoes a reversal when clean -new jeans, though dark, become dirty or faded from wear. -The faded, stained Levi's resolve this lack of refinement by -being newly washed, "refined" again. Perhaps their fetishism can be explained by being on the one hand "refined," -"lighter," hence "clean," and on the other hand "stained," -"faded," "worn." Just like the anagrammatic juxtapostion -of Saint for Stain, faded 501s are both "clean" and "dirty" -at the same time. Unusually, this cleaning and dirtying of -Levi's finds its cryptic echo in the Latin verb lavo, lavare, -lavi, lautum, "to wash." Here the second person singular -present indicative active lavis (you wash) is nearly identical -to levis, save for one vowel. - -vil - -The drive or the dance through the night is a long one. -Coffee or speed are what truck drivers ingest in their long -marathons across the continental United States. Chemically refined or "lightened" substances (cocaine, MDA, Ecstasy, methadrine, LSD, ethyl chloride, Special K) are what -some gay men (not all) take if they wish to stay up until -the light of day. Cars require oil to drive and nightclubbers -require drugs to dance. Cars shield one's body and jeans -shield one's legs. (Getting into a car is an allegory of - -162 -Tell Me Why - -getting into a pair of jeans.) Now that gays have put on -their car-contiguous jeans, they also feel compelled to ingest drugs, substitutes for chemically refined crude oil. -Drugs give one energy, they help one to "'go" and intensify -one's ego. They give one a feeling of omnipotence, confidence, strength. They make one feel as impregnable as the -car one ends up imitating in these late night situations. Incidentally, even the word Levi's cryptically contributes to -this feeling of strength once its letters are transformed, -through anagrammatization and substituting its / for an r -(justifiable since they are both liquids), into vires, the -Latin word for "strength" in the plural nominative. In the -singular accusative this word becomes vim or "force." This -coincidence simply demonstrates how much Levi's contribute to the invincible state of queer viri (men) high on -drugs. (Surprisingly there is a business in New York called -V.LM. Jeans Stores, Inc. on 16 West 14th Street.) - -The incorporation of the automobile that happens all -the time in our culture finds its strange consummation in -the taking of drugs. Although society disapproves, and -rightly so when it is a question of driving while high, it -cannot control the inevitable metaphoric transfer between -inorganic, mind-altering substances and the synthetically -produced hydrocarbons that propel automobiles. Given -gay culture's addiction to adamantine physiques and carlike jeans, how willing are its members to renounce substances with the ones that propel cars? - -VI - -Straight people are trapped into always aiming at the -"right"" or "'orthodox" path while gay people are trapped - -163 -THE AGE OF OIL - -into always aiming at the "light" or "trivial" path. At its -most oppressive, straight culture disapproves of anything -that deflects from its vision of the Holy Family. At its -most oppressive, gay culture can do nothing but repeat the -paths of its metonymic flights. Gay culture perpetually -ritualizes its displacement of coitus in the dance. Here gay -life's fetishes hold stage and perform their magic. - -"Do you want to dance?"" hopes for an affirmative reply, and if negatively answered, it will simply be posed -again in the hopes for a "Yes." If "Yes," then the entrance onto the dance floor begins an elaborate prestaging -of anticipated sex, its simulated performance. Many times -it is only dancing and never the exit into far more serious -dancing elsewhere. But since dancing is not quite sex, it always . performs the impossibility of ever being sex. One -keeps on dancing because one keeps on deferring sex and -that deferral of sex is thus realized by dancing. Because of -this constant shifting of sex into dancing, dancing inevitably embodies the homosexual's turning of the crucial issue -of coitus onto lighter issues. - -Still in all seriousness dancing is often intended to seduce a "'trick," the stranger willing to perform unorthodox -coitus. Here dancing turns into the lovemaking that turns -from the straight and narrow. Such seductive dance turns -eventually reproduce the redundant turns of a record's -pickup needle. The picked-up trick was just one song -among many others and further turns just might very well -turn another on. As extolled by one of the characters in -The Boys in the Band who screams "Turning!," the gay -turns away from straight life so as to be free to turn, however tiresome this flight can be. The gay turns the Dance of -the Seven Levi's because the lives of gays always return to - -164 -Tell Me Why - -the turns of these letters. -IX - -Without end, the mystery of the 501 continues. Why -did the famous cultural anthropologist Levi-Strauss, when -discussing the gay resort Fire Island in Tristes Tropiques, -not discuss Levi Strauss & Co.? Why is a famous porn-star -named after a pair of jeans, Jack Wrangler? Further, why is -Fire Island called such in light of the near misspelling of -fire for five? The horny gay man wears the five because he -is on fire, because he is on Fire Island or at the Pines/Penis. -Norma Jean or Marilyn Monroe sang the line "Guadeloupe -105! in the song Heat Wave, the last and most intolerably -warm temperature in a long itinerary of Caribbean locales -and temperatures. The hundreds of other instances where -the word "fire" is mentioned in disco songs give uncon -scious, mutual reinforcement to the sexual passion of -"fire" and its contiguity to sexual organs as emblematized -in fire-O-ones. Even the name of a popular discjocky, -Michael Fierman (who plays at the Saint and on gay nights -at the Palladium), anagrammatizes into Fireman. As Norma Desmond utters in Sunset Boulevard regarding her dead -monkey, "He always liked fires and poking at them with a -stick." - -Add five and one, six results. The Latin word for six is -sex, identical to the English "'sex." Homosexuality always -already embeds $5+1$ within it, sex. Sex always seems to -happen at six anyway, since after five one is on fire. - -165 -THE AGE OF OIL -X - -The homonym of I or ego for eye or organ of sight -finds itself distributed both in homosexual ego libido as -well as its scopic drive. The libido that is invested in one's -body, one's I, finds just as intense a discharge through the -rim of the eye. Given that the I, for the gay male, inheres -within the letter Y, this cypher is also not far from the -eye, for it inheres within the very center of "eye."" (Incidentally, another hononym, gays gaze at gays, confirms -the abyssal nature of this drive of the eyes.*) Even the -lower case letter i, its dot, is really a human eye, a cartoonists' schematic representation of an iris. Always in Levi, -this dot levitates like the eye in Redon's famous lithograph, -"The Eye, A Strange Balloon, Moves Toward the Infinite." - -As one's Levi's fade into a lighter and lighter blue, -onc's ideally light blue eyes will rise into the sky, the same -starry sky projected on the walls of the Saint's dance floor -ceiling. Such a starry sky is lit with so many dots, the very -dots derived from all the i's in the many pairs of Levi's -worn there. Indeed all of this is happening in a hemisphere -like the vitrcous humor of a human eye or that lightest, -most airborne of all graphic touches, the flourish or pirouctte of the letter "i."" Here the homosexual's interminable -displacement into the lightest and most inconsequential - -entities is consummated in a dance floor's architecture, a -memorial to the "i" in Levi. Just as the mirrored disco -ball, when descending from the apex of the ceiling and - -*With all this discussion of homonyms and homosexuals, both -of which share the Greek adjective homos, how could a homosexual -who pursues partners of like or similar sexual organs not utter names -or words of like or similar sounds? - -166 -Tell Me Why - -saturating its recipients with a myriad of lights, eerily -mimes this letter, so does the dance floor's central, supporting column and crowning hemispherical ceiling as well. -s dot, -once scattered into galaxies of facets, foreshadows the dissemination of semen just about to take place when all -those buttons, "'dots™ again, in a Levi's fly are unfastened. -Yet when fastened, the uppermost and fifth button remains exposed and so the vertical stitching concealing the -other four conjures a vision of the i all over again. Here at -the Saint every Saturday night, a ritualized ecstasy with the -cosmos takes place by means of 501s whose digital, rightangled cyphers uncannily resemble the acrostic of Strategic -Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), SDI, 501. Russia may -want America's 501s but not its SDIs. America's armor is -the levitation of its genitalia, its 501, to the stars forever -scintillating from (Levi) Strauss (& C - -True to this letter's substitutability with a phallus - -XI - -Two eyes can resemble two headlights, as confirmed -by a Saint poster for a "Black Party" a few years ago. Here -an artistic rendition of a man featured his eyes with light -streaming from their sockets. Given the roundness of irises -as well as the spherical shape of eyeballs, a pair of eyes is -not too far from resembling a pair of tires. When two eyes -find, by means of a blatantly automotive metaphor, "cruising," another pair of eyes, they then have four eyes as -does a car four tires. The desire to be as perfect as a car -has found its consummation in finding another pair of eyes -or tires since one pair of eyes cannot run like the two pairs -of tires that they necessarily end up resembling. This is - -167 -THE AGE OF OIL - -related to parents who, with only one child, feel they -should have a second one since a three-member family of a -father, mother and child is at odds with an automobile -that drives with four tires. - -Tires also incise paths, they resemble the styluses that -play down the grooves of records. Eyes, whose substitutability with jewels is a commonplace, associate with the -styluses that write out the sound that is heard. Sight, once -utterly dissimilar to hearing, now emerges, in this unconscious sense, as the diamond of such inscription of sound. -The abyss of gazing at gays in a music-saturated discotheque -is an attempt to overcome the gap between the hearing of -diamond-written sound and seeing the diamond- or jewellike eyes. The gap between the five and the one in 501 -would then serve as a condensed emblem of this impossible identity between the diamond heard and the diamond -seen, the V as representative of the invocatory drive and -the 1 as representative of the scopic drive. Oddly here a -visual intuition accompanies the cypher for sound while an -acoustic intuition, the homonym of eye for I, accompanies -the cypher for sight. The noncorrespondence of hearing -with sight, of intense music with intense staring, has yielded its signal, a letter that has combined the cyphers of -these two drives. The homosexual's anxiety over castration -finds its tenuous resolution in a figure that synaesthetically -evokes nothing less than the very partition they wear -about their waists as did Perseus the Medusa's head. Once -the fantastically constructed Y encounters its spectator, -will he erect those cyphers of chest, head and limbs, the -VOI that ultimately has his body spellbound, as in a -mirror? - -168 -Tell Me Why -XI1 - -The recent AIDS epidemic has warned gay men to abstain from certain sexual practices. Just the wearing of 501 -Levi's nowadays is tantamount to inviting pollution. The -priestly tribe of the Levites were experts in matters of -cleanliness. Witness chapter 5, verse 3 of Leviticus: "Or if -he [a soul] touch the uncleanness of man, whatsoever uncleanness it be that a man shall be defiled withal, and it be -hid from him; when he knoweth of it, then he shall be -guilty."" In light of the warning of evils embedded in Levi's, -is this tribe now persuaded by its past and present pollutions to lead sexually temperate lives? - -169 -Afterthoughts - -Typing, my means of livelihood for these past twelve years, -has had a pivotal influence on my writing. Secretarial wage -slavery has forced me to be attentive to the appearance of -letters lest a random typographical error provoke the ire of -my employer. All of the essays heretofore presented in -The Age of Oil were composed under these circumstances -of selling my secretarial labor power from 1978 to 1986, -with the bulk of the writing composed from 1980-82. The -only essay that was written free from the exigencies of secretarial duties was "Calling All Cars," but that essay, like -all the others, reflects my attentiveness to the letter, both -forced upon myself by my livelihood and by the writings -of Freud, Lacan, Joyce, Mallarme' and Derrida. - -Perhaps what unifies The Age of Oil is this question of -the letter or, if I may be permitted a typo (now that I'm -writing free of supervision), the lettar, where tar has always already haunted letter. Letters are tar, they represent -the gross materiality of language that speech always seems -to transcend. Just as oil has usually been refined from -crude into gasoline, from dirty black crud into the cthereal -vocalizations of popular lyrics, so have letters always been -spoken, retranscribed into living speech. The "lightening' - -171 -THE AGE OF OIL - -of oil and its refined state reproduces the "lightening" of -letters into their spoken state. As secretary, I earn a wage -based on my ability to transform speech into letters. Occasionally the transcription is inaccurate, a "letter" is missing and so the entire missive, a "letter" again, must be -typed over. What does a secretary type, letters or letters? -When my boss says, "I wish to dictate a letter," the double -requirement entails both the rendition of a spoken interval -into a visual handwritten symbol (a letter) and the transcription of all such shorthand into a typewritten format -(a letter). My particular type of shorthand, Personal Shorthand, enforces this attentiveness since it deploys alphabetical symbols for such common words as "copy," -"and," "the," represented by "c," "q -tively, - -Given that oil is hidden and stored in tightly sealed -containers, the notion of a crypt appears to be entirely -transposable to that realm. As well, given the secret secret -to secretary, my obsession with its disclosure could have -been predetermined by the title of my occupation. Yet the -secrets that secretaries are occasionally privy to, the private lives of their bosses or the confidential nature of their -documents, were not as secret as the secrets I was writing - -enclose," - -," respec -KRN - -while typing. My secret was to write, not to type. Yet I appeared to be typing when I was actually writing, or rather I -was typing my writing, not dictated tapes, stenographed -letters or handwritten pages of my employers. As a man in -a labor pool composed mostly of women, I was refusing to -be the mere receptacle of one whose higher wage entitled -him to say, "I am who I am." - -Oil or letters are shitty but made respectively less so by -refinery experts when they process the crude into octane - -172 -Afterthoughts - -or when secretaries accurately transcribe the spoken words -into typo-free sequences. Secretaries in many ways are surrogate mothers who attend to the incunabula of their -bosses, where incunabula has the double sense of swaddling clothes in Latin or of books and manuscripts in English (though mostly before 1501). The swaddling clothes -could also be either the briefs of attorneys, their legal documents, or their underwear. One secretary I remember -complained of her boss: "He and his shitty briefs!" By fussing over nearly countless questions of wording, spacing, -grammatical and typographical errors, the usually female -secretary is in sum changing shitty incunabula or briefs into "clean" (as in "clean copies") or "presentable" ones. -Just as secret silently inhabits the phrase, "lam asecretary," -so does shit secretly inhabit my last name, Smith/(m)Shit. -And I've often thought that I ought to change it into something more "refined." - -The hands and fingers of the mostly white, upper class -males who extract surplus value from secretarial workers -become dirty after they have finished their subway ride -read of The New York Times. The grime from the Times -that covers their white hands is eventually washed off as is -also the graffiti crime that covers those surfaces of New -York subway trains. While the white struggles to erase the -train surfaces so as to resemble their light faces, the black -struggles to trace the train surfaces so as to resemble their -dark faces. Erasing the objective exteriority of writing for -the objective interiority of speech reproduces what the -white male capitalist does whenever he dictates a letter to -a black female wage slave. As long as the hierarchy of -speech over writing prevails, so will the hierarchy of white, -upper class males over racially diversified, impoverished - -173 -THE AGE OF OIL - -females. Women, because of their perpetually eccentric position to the paternal law and its linguistic aftereffects, often just "type." By merely transcribing the speech of -males, their relation to language becomes inessential, cosmetic, as it were. "Liquid Paper," a substance that paints -over typographical errors, now offers as nearly a variegated -prism as any line of nail polish, not to mention that both -feature a tiny brush and handle in common. Once a page -has been "eye-lined"" (proofread), ""polished" (ungrammaticalities expunged) and "'combed"" for any other infelicity, -the smooth, appealing surface can be signed, the white -maidenpaper invaginated. The unsightly blemishes and -wrinkles women worry over play their parts again when -etters fail to preserve the homogeneity between ideal, -spoken intention and written, visually attractive presentation. One brand of makeup I have had recourse to when -acne spelled its letters on my cheeks went by the name of -""Erase."" Correcting typos and correcting blemishes somehow ultimately confirms my conviction that letters are tar -since blemishes are oil. - -It was only when I read Marx's Capital that I understood capital letters. Capital perpetuates the letter's dictator to be emblazoned in capitals but the transcriber in - -lowercase whenever the initials of boss and secretary settle -on the page's lower left corner. Men who usually regulate -the dispersal of capital require the capital whereas a prominent socialist I once knew initialed his acrostic in lowercase. Corporate logos are nearly always capitalized, a virtual tautology of their accumulation of capital. The one who -types initials in capitals is the one whose wage capital -keeps lower. Capital sentences lower cases to type sentences always with an initial capital. (In the dictionary, - -174 -Afterthoughts - -"lowercase" immediately precedes "lower class"; lower -cases represent lower classes.) An initial capital investment -will always safeguard the capital initials of those who have -invested. Capital letters are the supporting columns of an -entablature of a social division of labor between those who -capitalize surplus value and those who capitalize letters. -The correctly capitalized letter is the source of the capitalist's surplus. - -Because consciousness so swiftly intends its mental -presentations, computers endeavor to attain those speeds -by which mental activity runs its course. Secretaries, chroniclers of the consciousnesses of their employers, attempt to -bridge this gap between consciousness and its object by increasing their typing and shorthand skills. From 55 wpm -to 75 wpm to 120 wpm to 200 wpm, the speeds asymptotically converge toward that phenomenological gap between noesis and noema, thinking and its cognate accusative. "Word processing" is a virtual synonym for consciousness. The circuit from speech to its written equivalent -must shrink its distance to that of the milliseconds between thinking and its thought. Even the DOT, a now defunct computer, cannot eliminate the abyss between -thought and its dot. - -Still it is hard to believe that for every printed letter a -human finger hammered it into place. Seeing a letter transports us into the idea without further inquiry into all the -moments that led up to that imprint's existence. The -typo consequently reminds us of the intractability of the -signifier in relation to the signified and of labor in relation -to management. The laboring fingers of secretaries are the -hammers that strike their "nails" into the -per. That drone of hammering nails often drowns the voices - -'wood" of pa -175 -THE AGE OF OIL - -of those who are dictating, an oddity since the typewriter's -loud, distracting strokes are only facilitating the voice's return to itself. - -Hammering daylong and nightlong are those subterranean textual chains most adequately represented by New -York's subway textual trains. The letter's perpetual effacement by speech in secretarial work here finds solace in the -letter's triumphant muteness and iconicity. For those who -are enslaved by the speech of white men, the colorfully -festooned sides of trains, "pieces" as they are called, now -relinquish any purposeful relation to speech. They resist -the phonetic appropriation that every above-ground letter -must be shackled to. These illuminated manuscripts have -been rumbling beneath New York's streets, an antidote to -the manuscripts whose capitals still have yet to be emblazoned. May The Age of Oil be worthy of all the lower -cases who have illuminated capital by means of their illuminated capitals. -\end{document} +any homosexual what he wants: \e{Che V(u)OI}? + +\sec + +"Find a friend at the Y" so says a slogan for the Young Men's Christian Association scattered throughout American cities. Five o'clock strikes and the emblem of the 501 unfurls its mystic banner: I have my friend at the Y, the cock that dangles from his Levi's fl\e{y}, the cock of the ga\e{y} gu\e{y}. From the depth of the 501 emerges a Y once five buttons are undone. Rather than form just a letter Y, a mimicry of a dangling, limp penis, one's ecstatic, erect organ reverses the Y into the lambda ($\lambda$), the Greek alphabetical symbol which gay liberationists have made into the ensign of their resistance. Exuberant with the companionship of a newlyfound friend, he raises both arms to the sky and only briefly does immortality yell its "'yea." + +Yet to find a friend at the Y one must first look like the letter Y. The gay must develop his body so that his chest is wider than his waist, forming the same configuration of a Y's V-shaped top and slender lower half. Here, at a bench press, he spreads out his arms and so evokes the Y all over again. Some men exercise with a freeweight belt buckled around their waists. Besides preventing muscle spasms in the back, this belt tends to narrow the waist and consequently gives the illusion one's chest is much wider, as wide as the upper part of a Y. Even the name of many freeweights also features a Y imprinted there: "\e{Y}ork," "Ol\e{y}mpic." And all of this takes place in a g\e{y}m. + +\sec + +Gay clubs usually feature loud disco music played to a clientele that invariably wears 501 Levi's and/or possesses bodies in the shape of a Y. No less significantly, the music that is played there requires a diamond stylus to sound out the grooves of records. These V-, or more accurately Y-, shaped bodies assume the same general configuration of a V-shaped stylus. Now that gay men desire to enlarge their chests and narrow their waists into a V-shape, they also desire to look like the stylus that they dance to. This mimicry of a diamond stylus stems from identifying so strongly with the music to the point where one becomes the very instrument that produces such enjoyable sound in the sloping contours of a developed physique. Having a hard, adamantine body that resembles a sound-producing diamond gives the sound-saturated dancer a visual representation for what can only be heard. The invocatory drive (hearing) is inevitably accompanied by the scopic drive (seeing), otherwise one undergoes a diffuse anxiety, like when sound from a television falls momentarily silent. + +This intimacy between sound listened to and the shape of bodies that mime the sound-creating diamond takes place whenever gay men lift 45 Ibs. freeweights. While lifting 45 lbs. weights, they are probably listening to visually similar 45 LPs played over their gym's sound system. 45 LPs are round, usually black discs just as 45 Ibs. freeweights are round, usually black, but much larger, discs as well. Even \e{lps} equate with \e{lbs} since the letter \e{p} is a flip-flop reflection of a \e{b}. One lifts 45s to resemble the diamond that plays 45s. + +\sec + +The Latin adjective \e{levis}, \e{leve} means, according to Cassell's Latin Dictionary, "light, not heavy" in its literal sense and in its altered or metaphorical senses "light, trifling, unimportant; mild, gentle: fickle, light-hcaded, capricious." After 5:00 p.m. one puts on the 501 to pursue light and unimportant matters such as dancing at the Saint's raised dance floor. It is a raised, circular platform over which stands a vast curved ceiling. Here one feels as if floating in the air. \e{Leves} Levi's make the bodies of the Saint's Levi's wearers lighter by raising them up to this elevated, nearly levitating dance floor. The fading of these \e{leves} Levi's also makes them lighter or \e{leviores} so as to ascend into the sky. Oddly, heavy men, heavy from building their bodies, wear light Levi's and they too become \e{leviores}. But then they are gay, "gentle," and perhaps "fickle, light-headed," \e{leves}. By renouncing the propagation of the species, gay people are trifling, non-serious, \e{leves}. + +Many Levi's-wearing, body-building men who go to discotheques drink Miller Light or Budweiser Lite so as not to bulge at the waist and so ruin their Y-shape. They might also smoke light tar cigarettes, such as Marlboro Lights whose advertisements often feature men wearing jeans that have become lighter, faded. Indeed many of these people frequent tanning salons to render their bodies tanner, \e{darker}. While they wear their jeans to make them lighter or \e{leviores}, they also make their bodies tanner, darker, less \e{leves}. Conceivably the man who wears the lightest jeans is also the one who can lift the heaviest weights. As one lifts weights that are becoming lighter and lighter, one is concurrently persuaded to become darker and darker. Weights that are no longer "heavy" are "light" and thereby convey another antonym for "light": "dark." + +A Saint '84--85 membership card features a bolt of lightning against a dark blue sky. This motif was derived from the club's brochure illustration of a naked man holding the bolt in an empty landscape under a gradually darkening, starry sky, an allusion to the stellar projections of its dance floor light shows. Unconscious to its artist, the man who holds a bolt of lightning is ultimately the Saint member who will hold with his five fingers the One of his dreams, a Levi's-wearing lover or handsome stranger. The Saint member cannot hold lightning but simply a pair of lightening blue jeans. This member will, by wearing such light or levitating Levi's, ascend into the blue sky, he will fly into the Saint's starry heaven. But this starry heaven is only its upstairs lounge, the place in the blue sky where men were wont to unfasten each others' blue Levi's fly. Here they used to fly to the fly and used to hold that levin bolt bursting from the lightened Levi's fly. (As of the '85--86 season, the establishment forbids backroom sex in light of the recent health crisis.) This \e{flight}-idea embedded in \e{light} Levi's might be further explained by the name of a New York jeans store, "Wings™ at 666 Broadway. Even the Saint's T-shirts feature its name in large letters painted like a blue sky and interspersed with white clouds. + +\sec + +Wearing lightened jeans, lighting cigarettes, drinking light beer, dancing until it is light outside, all constitute a highly pleasureable series of activities indigenous to gay or "light" life. This phenomenon of becoming lighter also relates to gay culture's habit of listening and dancing to disco music. Originally the vinyl records that play the hits gays dance to were made of dark, crude oil. By refinement, the oil became "lighter," viz. turned into vinyl so as to become imprinted with the grooves that diamond styluses would eventually play upon. Generally the lightening of the 501 reflects our petrochemical society's perpetual transubstantiation of crude oil as do diet soft drinks, low calorie cheeses, reduced cholesterol cooking oils and bleached white bread. Nearly every American food product has a "light," calorie-reduced or industrially processed variant. Nothing in our society escapes the vicissitudes of the Other of oil. + +Apropos of the anal drive and its relation to male homosexuality, this refinement from dirty oil into clean vinyl, from \e{shit} into \e{hits}, undergoes a reversal when clean new jeans, though dark, become dirty or faded from wear. The faded, stained Levi's resolve this lack of refinement by being newly washed, "refined" again. Perhaps their fetishism can be explained by being \e{on the one hand} "refined," "lighter," hence "clean," \e{and on the other hand} "stained," "faded," "worn." Just like the anagrammatic juxtapostion of \e{Saint} for \e{Stain}, faded 501s are both "clean" and "dirty" at the same time. Unusually, this cleaning and dirtying of Levi's finds its cryptic echo in the Latin verb \e{lavo}, \e{lavare}, \e{lavi}, \e{lautum}, "to wash." Here the second person singular present indicative active \e{lavis} (you wash) is nearly identical to \e{levis}, save for one vowel. + +\sec + +The drive or the dance through the night is a long one. Coffee or speed are what truck drivers ingest in their long marathons across the continental United States. Chemically refined or "lightened" substances (cocaine, MDA, Ecstasy, methadrine, LSD, ethyl chloride, Special K) are what some gay men (not all) take if they wish to stay up until the light of day. Cars require oil to drive and nightclubbers require drugs to dance. Cars shield one's body and jeans shield one's legs. (Getting into a car is an allegory of getting into a pair of jeans.) Now that gays have put on their car-contiguous jeans, they also feel compelled to ingest drugs, substitutes for chemically refined crude oil. Drugs give one energy, they help one to "go" and intensify one's ego. They give one a feeling of omnipotence, confidence, strength. They make one feel as impregnable as the car one ends up imitating in these late night situations. Incidentally, even the word \e{Levi's} cryptically contributes to this feeling of strength once its letters are transformed, through anagrammatization and substituting its \e{l} for an \e{r} (justifiable since they are both liquids), into \e{vires}, the Latin word for "strength" in the plural nominative. In the singular accusative this word becomes \e{vim} or "force." This coincidence simply demonstrates how much Levi's contribute to the invincible state of queer \e{viri} (men) high on drugs. (Surprisingly there is a business in New York called V.I.M. Jeans Stores, Inc. on 16 West 14th Street.) + +The incorporation of the automobile that happens all the time in our culture finds its strange consummation in the taking of drugs. Although society disapproves, and rightly so when it is a question of driving while high, it cannot control the inevitable metaphoric transfer between inorganic, mind-altering substances and the synthetically produced hydrocarbons that propel automobiles. Given gay culture's addiction to adamantine physiques and carlike jeans, how willing are its members to renounce substances with the ones that propel cars? + +\sec + +Straight people are trapped into always aiming at the "right" or "orthodox" path while gay people are trapped into always aiming at the "light" or "trivial" path. At its most oppressive, straight culture disapproves of anything that deflects from its vision of the Holy Family. At its most oppressive, gay culture can do nothing but repeat the paths of its metonymic flights. Gay culture perpetually ritualizes its displacement of coitus in the dance. Here gay life's fetishes hold stage and perform their magic. + +"Do you want to dance?" hopes for an affirmative reply, and if negatively answered, it will simply be posed again in the hopes for a "Yes." If "Yes," then the entrance onto the dance floor begins an elaborate prestaging of anticipated sex, its simulated performance. Many times it is only dancing and never the exit into far more serious dancing elsewhere. But since dancing is not quite sex, it always performs the impossibility of ever being sex. One keeps on dancing because one keeps on deferring sex and that deferral of sex is thus realized by dancing. Because of this constant shifting of sex into dancing, dancing inevitably embodies the homosexual's turning of the crucial issue of coitus onto lighter issues. + +Still in all seriousness dancing is often intended to seduce a "trick," the stranger willing to perform unorthodox coitus. Here dancing turns into the lovemaking that turns from the straight and narrow. Such seductive dance turns eventually reproduce the redundant turns of a record's pickup needle. The picked-up trick was just one song among many others and further turns just might very well turn another on. As extolled by one of the characters in \ft{The Boys in the Band} who screams "Turning!," the gay turns away from straight life so as to be free to turn, however tiresome this flight can be. The gay turns the Dance of the Seven \e{Levi's} because the \e{lives} of gays always return to the turns of these letters. + +\sec + +Without end, the mystery of the 501 continues. Why did the famous cultural anthropologist Levi-Strauss, when discussing the gay resort Fire Island in \bt{Tristes Tropiques}, not discuss Levi Strauss & Co.? Why is a famous porn-star named after a pair of jeans, Jack \e{Wrangler}? Further, why is Fire Island called such in light of the near misspelling of fire for five? The horny gay man wears the five because he is on fire, because he is on Fire Island or at the \e{Pines}/\e{Penis}. Norma Jean or Marilyn Monroe sang the line "Guadeloupe 105! in the song \songtitle{Heat Wave}, the last and most intolerably warm temperature in a long itinerary of Caribbean locales and temperatures. The hundreds of other instances where the word "fire" is mentioned in disco songs give unconscious, mutual reinforcement to the sexual passion of "fire" and its contiguity to sexual organs as emblematized in \e{fire}-O-ones. Even the name of a popular discjocky, Michael \e{Fier}man (who plays at the Saint and on gay nights at the Palladium), anagrammatizes into \e{Fire}man. As Norma Desmond utters in \ft{Sunset Boulevard} regarding her dead monkey, "He always liked fires and poking at them with a stick." + +Add five and one, six results. The Latin word for six is \e{sex}, identical to the English "sex." Homo\e{sex}uality always already embeds $5+1$ within it, \e{sex}. \e{Sex} always seems to happen at \e{six} anyway, since after \e{five} one is on \e{fire}. + +\sec + +The homonym of \e{I} or ego for \e{eye} or organ of sight finds itself distributed both in homosexual ego libido as well as its scopic drive. The libido that is invested in one's body, one's I, finds just as intense a discharge through the rim of the eye. Given that the I, for the gay male, inheres within the letter Y, this cypher is also not far from the eye, for it inheres within the very center of "eye." (Incidentally, another hononym, gays gaze at gays, confirms the abyssal nature of this drive of the eyes.\fnote{With all this discussion of homonyms and homosexuals, both of which share the Greek adjective \e{homos}, how could a homosexual who pursues partners of like or similar sexual organs not utter names or words of like or similar sounds?}) Even the lower case letter \e{i}, its dot, is really a human eye, a cartoonists' schematic representation of an iris. Always in Lev\e{i}, this dot levitates like the eye in Redon's famous lithograph, "The Eye, A Strange Balloon, Moves Toward the Infinite." + +As one's Levi's fade into a lighter and lighter blue, onc's ideally light blue eyes will rise into the sky, the same starry sky projected on the walls of the Saint's dance floor ceiling. Such a starry sky is lit with so many dots, the very dots derived from all the i's in the many pairs of Levi's worn there. Indeed all of this is happening in a hemisphere like the vitrcous humor of a human eye or that lightest, most airborne of all graphic touches, the flourish or pirouctte of the letter "i."" Here the homosexual's interminable displacement into the lightest and most inconsequential entities is consummated in a dance floor's architecture, a memorial to the "i" in Lev\e{i}. Just as the mirrored disco ball, when descending from the apex of the ceiling and saturating its recipients with a myriad of lights, eerily mimes this letter, so does the dance floor's central, supporting column and crowning hemispherical ceiling as well. True to this letter's substitutability with a phallus, its dot, once scattered into galaxies of facets, foreshadows the dissemination of semen just about to take place when all those buttons, "'dots™ again, in a Levi's fly are unfastened. Yet when fastened, the uppermost and fifth button remains exposed and so the vertical stitching concealing the other four conjures a vision of the i all over again. Here at the Saint every Saturday night, a ritualized ecstasy with the cosmos takes place by means of 501s whose digital, rightangled cyphers uncannily resemble the acrostic of \e{S}trategic \e{D}efense \e{I}nitiative ("Star Wars"), SDI, 501. Russia may want America's 501s but not its SDIs. America's armor is the levitation of its genitalia, its 501, to the \e{stars} forever scintillating from (Levi) \e{Stra}u\e{s}s (\& Co.). + +\sec + +Two eyes can resemble two headlights, as confirmed by a Saint poster for a "Black Party" a few years ago. Here an artistic rendition of a man featured his eyes with light streaming from their sockets. Given the roundness of irises as well as the spherical shape of eyeballs, a pair of eyes is not too far from resembling a pair of tires. When two eyes find, by means of a blatantly automotive metaphor, "cruising," another pair of eyes, they then have four eyes as does a car four tires. The desire to be as perfect as a car has found its consummation in finding another pair of eyes or tires since one pair of eyes cannot run like the two pairs of tires that they necessarily end up resembling. This is related to parents who, with only one child, feel they should have a second one since a three-member family of a father, mother and child is at odds with an automobile that drives with four tires. + +Tires also incise paths, they resemble the styluses that play down the grooves of records. Eyes, whose substitutability with jewels is a commonplace, associate with the styluses that write out the sound that is heard. Sight, once utterly dissimilar to hearing, now emerges, in this unconscious sense, as the diamond of such inscription of sound. The abyss of gazing at gays in a music-saturated discotheque is an attempt to overcome the gap between the hearing of diamond-written sound and seeing the diamond- or jewel-like eyes. The gap between the five and the one in 501 would then serve as a condensed emblem of this impossible identity between the diamond heard and the diamond seen, the V as representative of the invocatory drive and the 1 as representative of the scopic drive. Oddly here a visual intuition accompanies the cypher for sound while an acoustic intuition, the homonym of eye for I, accompanies the cypher for sight. The noncorrespondence of hearing with sight, of intense music with intense staring, has yielded its signal, a letter that has combined the cyphers of these two drives. The homosexual's anxiety over castration finds its tenuous resolution in a figure that synaesthetically evokes nothing less than the very partition they wear about their waists as did Perseus the Medusa's head. Once the fantastically constructed Y encounters its spectator, will he erect those cyphers of chest, head and limbs, the VOI that ultimately has his body spellbound, as in a mirror? + +\sec + +The recent AIDS epidemic has warned gay men to abstain from certain sexual practices. Just the wearing of 501 Levi's nowadays is tantamount to inviting pollution. The priestly tribe of the Levites were experts in matters of cleanliness. Witness chapter 5, verse 3 of Leviticus: "Or if he [a soul] touch the uncleanness of man, whatsoever uncleanness it be that a man shall be defiled withal, and it be hid from him; when he knoweth of it, then he shall be guilty." In light of the warning of \e{evils} embedded in \e{Levi's}, is this tribe now persuaded by its past and present pollutions to lead sexually temperate lives? + +\chap Afterthoughts + +Typing, my means of livelihood for these past twelve years, has had a pivotal influence on my writing. Secretarial wage slavery has forced me to be attentive to the appearance of letters lest a random typographical error provoke the ire of my employer. All of the essays heretofore presented in \bt{The Age of Oil} were composed under these circumstances of selling my secretarial labor power from 1978 to 1986, with the bulk of the writing composed from 1980--82. The only essay that was written free from the exigencies of secretarial duties was \essaytitle{Calling All Cars,} but that essay, like all the others, reflects my attentiveness to the letter, both forced upon myself by my livelihood and by the writings of Freud, Lacan, Joyce, Mallarme' and Derrida. + +Perhaps what unifies The Age of Oil is this question of the letter or, if I may be permitted a typo (now that I'm writing free of supervision), the let\e{tar}, where \e{tar} has always already haunted let\e{ter}. Letters are tar, they represent the gross materiality of language that speech always seems to transcend. Just as oil has usually been refined from crude into gasoline, from dirty black crud into the cthereal vocalizations of popular lyrics, so have letters always been spoken, retranscribed into living speech. The "lightening" of oil and its refined state reproduces the "lightening" of letters into their spoken state. As secretary, I earn a wage based on my ability to transform speech into letters. Occasionally the transcription is inaccurate, a "letter" is missing and so the entire missive, a "letter" again, must be typed over. What does a secretary type, letters or letters? When my boss says, "I wish to dictate a letter," the double requirement entails both the rendition of a spoken interval into a visual handwritten symbol (a letter) and the transcription of all such shorthand into a typewritten format (a letter). My particular type of shorthand, Personal Shorthand, enforces this attentiveness since it deploys alphabetical symbols for such common words as "copy,"enclose," "and," "the," represented by "c," "q," "a," "e," respectively, + +Given that oil is hidden and stored in tightly sealed containers, the notion of a crypt appears to be entirely transposable to that realm. As well, given the \e{secret} secret to \e{secret}ary, my obsession with its disclosure could have been predetermined by the title of my occupation. Yet the secrets that secretaries are occasionally privy to, the private lives of their bosses or the confidential nature of their documents, were not as secret as the secrets I was writing while typing. My secret was to write, not to type. Yet I appeared to be typing when I was actually writing, or rather I was typing my writing, not dictated tapes, stenographed letters or handwritten pages of my employers. As a man in a labor pool composed mostly of women, I was refusing to be the mere receptacle of one whose higher wage entitled him to say, "I am who I am." + +Oil or letters are shitty but made respectively less so by refinery experts when they process the crude into octane or when secretaries accurately transcribe the spoken words into typo-free sequences. Secretaries in many ways are surrogate mothers who attend to the incunabula of their bosses, where incunabula has the double sense of swaddling clothes in Latin or of books and manuscripts in English (though mostly before 1501). The swaddling clothes could also be either the briefs of attorneys, their legal documents, or their underwear. One secretary I remember complained of her boss: "He and his shitty briefs!" By fussing over nearly countless questions of wording, spacing, grammatical and typographical errors, the usually female secretary is in sum changing shitty incunabula or briefs into "clean" (as in "clean copies") or "presentable" ones. Just as \e{secret} silently inhabits the phrase, "I am a \e{secret}ary," so does \e{shit} secretly inhabit my last name, \e{S}m\e{ith}/(m)\e{Shit}. And I've often thought that I ought to change it into something more "refined." + +The hands and fingers of the mostly white, upper class males who extract surplus value from secretarial workers become dirty after they have finished their subway ride read of \journaltitle{The New York Times}. The \e{grime} from the \e{Times} that covers their white hands is eventually washed off as is also the graffiti \e{crime} that covers those surfaces of New York subway trains. While the white struggles to erase the train surfaces so as to resemble their light faces, the black struggles to trace the train surfaces so as to resemble their dark faces. Erasing the objective exteriority of writing for the objective interiority of speech reproduces what the white male capitalist does whenever he dictates a letter to a black female wage slave. As long as the hierarchy of speech over writing prevails, so will the hierarchy of white, upper class males over racially diversified, impoverished females. Women, because of their perpetually eccentric position to the paternal law and its linguistic aftereffects, often just "type." By merely transcribing the speech of males, their relation to language becomes inessential, cosmetic, as it were. "Liquid Paper," a substance that paints over typographical errors, now offers as nearly a variegated prism as any line of nail polish, not to mention that both feature a tiny brush and handle in common. Once a page has been "eye-lined" (proofread), "polished" (ungrammaticalities expunged) and "combed" for any other infelicity, the smooth, appealing surface can be signed, the white maidenpaper invaginated. The unsightly blemishes and wrinkles women worry over play their parts again when etters fail to preserve the homogeneity between ideal, spoken intention and written, visually attractive presentation. One brand of makeup I have had recourse to when acne spelled its letters on my cheeks went by the name of "Erase." Correcting typos and correcting blemishes somehow ultimately confirms my conviction that letters are tar since blemishes are oil. + +It was only when I read Marx's \bt{Capital} that I understood capital letters. Capital perpetuates the letter's dictator to be emblazoned in capitals but the transcriber in lowercase whenever the initials of boss and secretary settle on the page's lower left corner. Men who usually regulate the dispersal of capital require the capital whereas a prominent socialist I once knew initialed his acrostic in lowercase. Corporate logos are nearly always capitalized, a virtual tautology of their accumulation of capital. The one who types initials in capitals is the one whose wage capital keeps lower. Capital sentences lower cases to type sentences always with an initial capital. (In the dictionary, "lowercase" immediately precedes "lower class"; lower cases represent lower classes.) An initial capital investment will always safeguard the capital initials of those who have invested. Capital letters are the supporting columns of an entablature of a social division of labor between those who capitalize surplus value and those who capitalize letters. The correctly capitalized letter is the source of the capitalist's surplus. + +Because consciousness so swiftly intends its mental presentations, computers endeavor to attain those speeds by which mental activity runs its course. Secretaries, chroniclers of the consciousnesses of their employers, attempt to bridge this gap between consciousness and its object by increasing their typing and shorthand skills. From 55 wpm to 75 wpm to 120 wpm to 200 wpm, the speeds asymptotically converge toward that phenomenological gap between noesis and noema, thinking and its cognate accusative. "Word processing" is a virtual synonym for consciousness. The circuit from speech to its written equivalent must shrink its distance to that of the milliseconds between thinking and its thought. Even the DOT, a now defunct computer, cannot eliminate the abyss between thought and its dot. + +Still it is hard to believe that for every printed letter a human finger hammered it into place. Seeing a letter transports us into the idea without further inquiry into all the moments that led up to that imprint's existence. The typo consequently reminds us of the intractability of the signifier in relation to the signified and of labor in relation to management. The laboring fingers of secretaries are the hammers that strike their "nails" into the "wood" of paper. That drone of hammering nails often drowns the voices of those who are dictating, an oddity since the typewriter's loud, distracting strokes are only facilitating the voice's return to itself. + +Hammering daylong and nightlong are those subterranean textual chains most adequately represented by New York's subway textual trains. The letter's perpetual effacement by speech in secretarial work here finds solace in the letter's triumphant muteness and iconicity. For those who are enslaved by the speech of white men, the colorfully festooned sides of trains, "pieces" as they are called, now relinquish any purposeful relation to speech. They resist the phonetic appropriation that every above-ground letter must be shackled to. These illuminated manuscripts have been rumbling beneath New York's streets, an antidote to the manuscripts whose capitals still have yet to be emblazoned. May \bt{The Age of Oil} be worthy of all the lower cases who have illuminated capital by means of their illuminated capitals. + +\bye
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