Le Monocle de Mon Oncle

A monocle can do so many things for you. Provide focus. Magnify objects. Isolate an eye. Make the other eye feel left out. Flex your brow muscles. Make the monocled eye feel inferior. Create an image of distinction. Frighten away the creditors. Convey thoughtfulness. Serve as a model space craft. Glimmer. Start a fire. Mirror the face. Excuse a squint. Aid the brow's furrowing. Skew the face.

First Circle

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.
-Emerson, "Circles"

Otters in the Ether, or: My Life as a Critical Paranoiac

If we're going to use the eye, we might as well misuse it:

...through a paranoiac and active process of thought, it will be possible (simultaneously with automatism and other passive states) to systemize confusion and to contribute to the total discrediting of the world of reality.
(Dalí, "Nouvelles Considérations Génénerales sur le Mécanisme du Phénomène Paranoïaque du Point du Vue Surréaliste," my translation)

The process is simple. One stares at something until one sees something new emerge. A formation of rocks becomes a soldier's head; a light-bulb becomes a glowing fist; or like the famous Michelangelo example, the cracks in the wall form the outline of a new continent.

As annoying as Dalí can be, the articulation of the paranoiac-critical method was a valuable contribution to surrealism. The act of seeing becomes an act of revision, a manipulation of sense data. Some say it is merely an extension of Ernst's frottage, nonetheless, Dalí's critical paranoia puts this new kind of seeing in the realm of everyday experience and banal imagery.

The paranoiac-critical method works in language, too: In the word scissors I find "the science of swords." In inquiry I hear "the choir requires ink." Irrigate "opens on an iris." Another can only be "otters in the ether."

Malady of the Visual

Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses

Or else the all-knowing floating camera, big-brother of my brain. Or else, this organ of expenditure:

The eye, at the summit of the skull, opening on the incandescent sun in order to contemplate it in a sinister solitude, is not a product of the understanding, but is instead an immediate existence; it opens and blinds itself like a conflagration, or like a fever that eats the being, or more exactly, the head. And thus it plays the role of a fire in a house; the head, instead of locking up life as money is locked in a safe, spends it without counting, for, at the end of this erotic metamorphosis, the head has received the electric power of points.
--Bataille, "The Pineal Eye" (trans. Stoekl)

Sounds painful. It's too much head. Let's get out of there:

Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with the belly....
--Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Massumi)

A nonprogram, a nonmethod, toward the "derangement of all the senses" via a "derangement of all the organs." An utterly delirious and fantastic mania Let's write poems with the spinal cord instead of the hands! Let me kiss you with these nerve-endings. Wait that's what I do already. I'm always drinking through fingernails, hobnobbing in the kneecap, funneling with the esophagus.