Michael Bolerjack Preface to the Apocalypse
will have been a book, filled with many signatures, at least three or four, or seven or twelve, but never simply two or one, for then there will be no signature and no end to the signatures, for the cuts and the wounds to heal, not in schizophrenic fashion, as the symptom that produces its own fore-healing, out of the play of forces that exert us within and without, making us both hyper sexual and hyper textual in the same instant of madness, overloaded with desire, overly attentive in our reading, trying to discern the indecipherable, circles of selves to fit the square hole of the abyss on the page and the stage, that framework of tech city, that un natural un shaped form less form beyond the simplicity of the curve of life that distorts our being into the one multi-task of living and dying in the same interrupted, as I met my age and did shoulder I knew not what, but God knew, when I knew Him not, and in the seeming interregnum of the vacant dethroned disfigured decapitated deconstructed I sought the absolute, and held that we should go from nothing to everything, and against the grain, and despite the triumph of the will and the eclipse of reason and the ebbing of faith and trust, I was a seeker, but I was found, and though it seemed I was struck by genius and by magic and by the muse, yet I did strike a blow, not against all that, but at the giant Goliath in the way, and what my rock was you should know, and what the sword, that too you shall know, for there was a behemoth, call it what you will, a thing I sum post-modern, that can in principle, of its own terms, never be summed, no summa yet possible, yet summation required, and that theological, and a synthesis, to appropriate and not to be appropriated, and to give and not to count
moment, like the supposed, like the word itself, which gives itself away in speech yet retains itself in the graphic shadow of a drawn and quartered neo-nor, the syn- despised, the thesis suspended, the trace of something that escapes both wisdom and foolishness, a kind of hilarity that is the death of serious work and building, dwelling and thinking, for a wandering polysemy, polylogia, a bare hymen of meaning between ourselves, our frail consciousness and the abyss of nonentity, that ISBN said is sacred yet tainted with vice, and in the taintedness, dreams of our yet un written pages flowing with no restriction to the falls of hymeneal aggravations and abusive abysses, the assault of the letter A on all we are, an aggregation of insubstantial structures, the cost, and to shoulder like Atlas, and not to merely shrug, and to stand under God when all around me the world was falling, not searching, but despising, and rushing, in economy, to spend all the capital of our inheritance, to waste the rich deposit of faith and reason so carefully built up by work and sweat of men and women over 4000 years, the great remainder of all dwindling to almost nothing, and then on bare credit to live, the future consumed as well, with nothing left for children, not even a generation to come, all it seems we have destroyed, even the possibility of action itself, the void invaded, the abyss and the gravity of it, the black star our hearts wed, the river she ran into no sea, and bells did ring always from morning till night, at dawn, at dusk, matins and vespers, weddings and funerals and a few more baptisms, but always in the church in the world, and in a tower that did not babble, though it did seem about to fall, and some supporting it, as
unlike 1, 2, 3, 4: but more like Nietzsche on the square, overcome overman, over a flogged and dying beast that was no thing but the wretched point at which his mind collapsed under the weight he could not support of a lifetime of the power of the open, but in order to arrive, in another way, without madness, yet still to find love, and this not in profits of extremity, but in the prophecy of catholic economy, when all will be not the glory globalizing but de-capitalizing, when the church of the new after the apocalypse, the time from 1945-2010, will emerge, a pure white nothing, a reconstructed theory and a reestablished practice, a Virgin, married to both God and Man, union of fecundity and yet with no actual relations with the world, a gift, a prayer that is apart, a part of the world that I and what we knew symbolically as 1000 points of light, as Francis did hold the church from falling, in his time, to make firm what was tottering and to do as has been said, we were all re-sponsible, though I was more responsible than the rest, as the priest told me that I was that man, as God called me, I lie not, and told me that I was doing it for the church because they were confused and did not understand His mercy, and that my vocation was true, and He does love me, and said so, and another priest said work on and risk and do not be discouraged, and as the King said, though 10,000 fall yet I will trust in you Lord, and there was no inter-regnum at the throne though the see may have been vacant, I do not know, but that the corruption of the time did reach even into the Church and did fell the world, and all, but at the same time in symbols, in signs, the real dialectic did prove that every action is every other action, as every other is holy other, despite the will to
transcends the world at the same time it absolutely transforms it, from both the inside and the outside, without force, yet traversing by a “work� the fantasy and the necessity of the lack of production for a reality promised but undelivered by the fasces, by the face of the veiled and the unveiled, by Jews and Moslems and the still Christian, by atheists and athletes of wealth, by a realm of morals that is being but transubstantiated to mysticisms without reserve, and finding in this the word of St. Sartre for the building up and tearing down by the anti sculptor Giacometti, who would with unceasing labor create and destroy the synthesis of art and religion and philosophy in the dialectic of the search for what another called the SA: as savoir absolute, in you, yes, therefore dissipation, and the will to deceive, and many there are who have been, we did still love and believe, and hope for the coming of the great day of our liberation from wealth and poverty, and all that goes with that economy, for an economy of grace and mercy that has always been and will always be, let it be done on earth as it is in heaven, dear Lord, I pray, that those who laugh will cease and those who mourn who will have a ceasing of their cause for mourning, and that in the age of analysis, we made something of our world, against it and for it at the same time, as was the Church, which despite the lack of holy attention still was mindful in missions and in charity and said so much right and did so much right and did so feed the millions with words and sacraments and breaking even in their daily bread, so done for that Church, a work stood, not torn down, though not one stone will be left atop another, as the Savior said, we may at last find the paradise throne, a temple interpreted as thee