contemplativethe rhetoric of use and abuse
as far as the psychoactive substance goes, abuse seems always to be about excess and a certain literal uselessness. excessive pleasure renders one useless and thus the excessive is an abuse of pleasure.
aristotle talks about the abuse of metaphor and freud talks about the perversion of libido. both are speaking of the errant gesture. interestingly aristotle warns against the abuse of metaphor as though metaphor were a fragile thing whereas freud is rarely concerned with propriety even though he employs the language of propriety in describing the improper.
heaven and hell
the fragility of metaphor reflects the fragility of the proper which reflects the great potential of the improper to disrupt. damnation attempts to ward off the improper but the devil in me can't be cast out without me also being cast out. or i am already cast out or i am already not proper to me.
life and death
i am sometimes overcome with the voices which compell order and propriety even to the point of violence. is it possible that order is worth death which is of course the greatest disorder? but is it possible that i am dead already but only insofar as i am unrecognizably proximal to all other that lives? and is there an order of the dead which is like the emptying out of this proximity while there is another order of the dead which is the proximity itself?
it occurs to me that life and death might not be the dichotomy they are represented as. i mean why not. all the other dichotomies are troubled these days.
