Revolving the sun,

I decide to lay it next to the …

left hand drive –

with a right-hand move,

where it can’t burn –

anyone, or …

at least not the china.

by Allen Ginsberg (1955-56)

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by 
madness, starving hysterical naked, 
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn 
looking for an angry fix, 
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly 
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, 
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat 
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of 
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities 
contemplating jazz, 
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and 
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, 
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes 
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy 
among the scholars of war, 
who were expelled from the academies for crazy & 
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, 
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening 
to the Terror through the wall, 
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through 
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, 
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in 
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their 
torsos night after night 
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls, 
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and 
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of Canada & Paterson,
illuminating all the motionless world of Time between, 
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery 
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, 
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon 
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree 
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brooklyn,
ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, 
who chained themselves to subways for the endless 
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine 
until the noise of wheels and children brought 
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and 
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance 
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's 
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack 
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox, 
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to 
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brooklyn Bridge, 
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping 
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills 
off Empire State out of the moon, 
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts 
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks 
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars, 
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days 
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the 
Synagogue cast on the pavement, 
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a 
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic City Hall, 
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-ings and 
migraines of China under junk-with-drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room, 
who wandered around and around at midnight in the 
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went, 
leaving no broken hearts, 
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing 
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-father night, 
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy 
and bop kabbalah because the cosmos instinctively 
vibrated at their feet in Kansas, 
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking visionary 
indian angels who were visionary indian angels, 
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore 
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy, 
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Oklahoma on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain, 
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston 
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the 
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America 
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship to Africa, 
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving 
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees 
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fireplace Chicago, 
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the 
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist 
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets, 
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting 
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism, 
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union 
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens 
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed 
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed, 
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked 
and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons, 
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight 
in policecars for committing no crime but their 
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication, 
who howled on their knees in the subway and were 
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, 
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly 
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy, 
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, 
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love, 
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and 
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to 
whomever come who may, 
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up 
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath 
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce 
them with a sword, 
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate 
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar 
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb 
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but 
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden 
threads of the craftsman's loom, 
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of 
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along 
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting 
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and 
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness, 
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling 
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning 
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake, 
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad 
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these 
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy 
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls 
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' 
 rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with 
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station 
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too, 
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in 
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and 
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third 
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices, 
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on 
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the 
East River to open to a room full of steamheat and opium, 
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment 
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime 
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall 
be crowned with laurel in oblivion, 
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested 
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery, 
who wept at the romance of the streets with their 
pushcarts full of onions and bad music, 
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the 
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, 
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned 
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded 
by orange crates of theology, 
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty 
incantations which in the yellow morning were 
stanzas of gibberish, 
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht 
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom, 
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg, 
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot 
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks 
fell on their heads every day for the next decade, 
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique 
stores where they thought they were growing 
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits 
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse 
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments 
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the 
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the 
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality, 
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten 
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer, 
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of 
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, 
cried all over the street, 
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed 
phonograph records of nostalgic European 
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and 
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans 
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam whistles, 
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying 
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude 
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation, 
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out 
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had 
a vision to find out Eternity, 
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who 
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who 
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in 
Denver and finally went away to find out the 
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying 
for each other's salvation and light and breasts, 
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second, 
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for 
impossible criminals with golden heads and the 
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet 
blues to Alcatraz, 
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky 
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys 
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or 
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the 
daisychain or grave, 
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their 
hands & a hung jury, 
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism 
and subsequently presented themselves on the 
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads 
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy, 
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin 
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational 
therapy pingpong & amnesia, 
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic 
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of 
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East, 
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid 
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, 
rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench 
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, 
bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon, 
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book 
flung out of the tenement window, and the last 
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone 
slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room 
emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, 
a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger in the closet, 
and even that imaginary, 
nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and 
now you're really in the total animal soup of time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed 
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use 
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space 
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the 
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images 
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun 
and dash of consciousness together jumping 
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus 
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human 
prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent 
and shaking with shame, 
rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm 
of thought in his naked and endless head, 
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, 
yet putting down here what might be left to say 
in time come after death, 
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in 
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the 
suffering of America's naked mind for love into 
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone 
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio 
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered 
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open 
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? 
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the 
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men 
weeping in the parks! 
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the 
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy 
judger of men! 
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the 
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of 
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! 
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! 
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose 
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers 
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! 
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! 
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! 
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long 
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories 
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose 
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch 
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch 
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch 
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! 
Moloch whose name is the Mind! 
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream 
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in 
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch! 
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom 
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch 
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! 
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! 
Light streaming out of the sky! 
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! 
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic 
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad 
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! 
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to 
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us! 
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! 
gone down the American river! 
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole 
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! 
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! 
Ten years' animal screams and suicides! 
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on 
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the 
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! 
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! 
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland 
where you're madder than I am 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you must feel very strange 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you imitate the shade of my mother 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you laugh at this invisible humor 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where your condition has become serious and 
is reported on the radio 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit 
the worms of the senses 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the 
spinsters of Utica 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the 
harpies of the Bronx 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're 
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul 
is innocent and immortal it should never die 
ungodly in an armed madhouse 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where fifty more shocks will never return your 
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a 
cross in the void 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and 
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the 
fascist national Golgotha 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where you will split the heavens of Long Island 
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the 
superhuman tomb 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of 
the Internationale 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where we hug and kiss the United States under 
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all 
night and won't let us sleep 
I'm with you in Rockland 
where we wake up electrified out of the coma 
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the 
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the 
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse 
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is 
here O victory forget your underwear we're free 
I'm with you in Rockland 
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears 
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

The preternatural pitch of a course of days,

and the wish of a soft bed of deep comfort,

and everlasting apricot light.

Breathing vicarious-life vapour,

over and across falling clouds.

Originally published at http://www.funambulist.net.

This piece is more reminiscent of a stream of consciousness than a discussion on entropy, analogising the intriguing applicability of thermodynamism in relation to understandings of law, lines, and extant resistances.

To speak of exerted energy, that which is wasted in the machinations of a seemingly closed system, is prescient in a time of disruption and apoplexia.  Beyond the aesthetic nerve that enticed the writing of this piece on entropy, there are legal and political analogies and extant anxieties, that cast an overwhelming familiarity to this encounter with thermodynamic processes.  Entropy is a measurement, a method of quantifying energy that is available for unuseful work within a thermodynamic process.  Without involving the reader entirely with the science or statistical mechanics of entropy (and within the bounds of what this non-scientific author knows of the phenomena herself), entropy is an accumulated inefficient resource that gathers as a machine or engine has reached its ‘theoretical maximum efficiency’, the energy thus having to be exorcised, or ‘dissipated’, as a form of waste heat.

Law, like a mechanical system that has a ceiling to its useful quantum of energy, has limits too.  Law operates as a system of frontiers, and has moments of change and transformation that are produced with the external or internal occurrence of events.  Whether these events come from within or outside its legal demarcations, it reaches a point where there are waste subjects that act as the collateral of precedents and landmark cases.  Cases offer a clean and detached way of dealing with subjects, a categorisation that allows the human(s) involved to be lobotomised by law’s pompous casuistry.

Entropy, is whereby at a given juncture in a manoeuvre of time, a limit of worthy energy is used, and from that point onwards, the forces are irreversibly non-utilitarian.  As soon as one hears the term utility and useless, depictions of heads downward-looking in hooded tops, abandoned youth clubs and unrequited dreams quarterised into bleeding fists cradling expensive stolen shoes.  Here is where the biopolitics of a planetary system in the grip of crises, tantalises the variables of resistance.  It is at this given juncture of coordinates, those who are forgotten, are obliged to force themselves in to the ether’s tranquilised conscience.  It is here where those who are excluded from legal and political advocacy, manifest polyps of societal entropy as they exert their ‘dropout’ souls to highlight the system’s inefficiency.

The word ‘chav’ must never be uttered again.

Their anger enacts a coagulation of the system reaching outside the ramparts of itself, and yet they remain within its categorical property at the same time, by revealing themselves as capitalism’s externalised waste product.  They, like entropy, are the quantifiers of disorder within our supposed structure of order, whereby the normativity of the system is measured by its very exception – that which is indeed, not the norm.

Without having to jump too far into one’s juridical imagination, this smacks of a Schmittean or Agambean ‘state of exception’, whereby the rule itself is governed by its moments of removal, such as the functioning of prerogative or reserve powers within a constitutional configuration.  The maximum efficiency, or limit of a system, is reminiscent of the threshold, where the legal decision or rule is based upon the existence of those who are excluded from the rights enshrined within law, those who may be killed but not sacrificed (bare life), and yet they are the very heart of the law at the same time.  It is where the project of the ‘proper’ and purity, unravels within law, and its entropic impurity is revealed.  ‘Proper’ is the ability to exclude others:  “Positive law itself is also conceptually based upon an originating exclusion, decision, or splitting which establishes a realm of law and a realm of that which is other to law.”[1]  Here are the lines, the liminality where entropy is produced, where it resides and flourishes.   Just like the architect’s medium as the reflection on the line, one trajectory becomes two through a divisive splice.  Entropy is the original funambulist, the tight-rope walker who within the act of walking on the line, encounters emancipation.

An efficient system produces less entropy than that of one which is inefficient.  If a system is in the grip of crisis, one can imagine mass polyps and plumes of force that are not work-consigned, operating as a reaction to the balance or imbalance of their surrounding environment.  Its manifestation is indicative of constraint, and a structure that is not functioning to its maximum potential, some parts benefiting more from its design than others.  Given the wanton fury that has surfaced in the United Kingdom, it is not difficult to see that here is a malfunctioning system, one whose subtlety of systemic violence, has been answered with the eruption physical violence in turn, an infernal exasperation and charge of mass retribution.  These are the polyps of entropic mistrust and disenchantment emanating from those who are secreted and stigmatised by the mechanics of a politics of gluttony exampled from above.  Here forms the entropy of the forgotten homo sacer of consumerism, those who the structures of society erase by determining them as the exception, and yet they are the very rule themselves – the expelled that facilitate the existence of the very few.

Entropic changes take place in heat, whether smouldering businesses or not.  Within a mechanical organism, entropy never decreases, and thus there is always an overlap, an ever-growing appendage of ‘waste’ burning, that grows in a parasitic dissatisfaction, irreversible discontent within a failing organism.  There will always be the unuseful, non-utilitarian product:  that which is either the machine itself, or what the machine seeks to create, and vicariously manifests as a consequence.  It is where limits are reached, boundaries created, and the quagmire within which those who risk their being, reside.  But what does this apocalyptic non-usefulness mean?  It summons the relevance of Ruskin or Morris and their belief in utility in art, and yet aren’t those redundant, ornate, unplanned entropies, the stuff of most beauty?  Aren’t we overlooking disorderly disruptions and their culprits and assuming their lack?

When in actual fact they are our ignored projection of now and the fundamental direction of our being.