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Post-Symbolic Philosophy

Poiesis and Canonical Terrorism

bethany  reivich

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My research and writing explore what I call the post-symbolic: not a theory, but a lived perceptual condition that arises when the symbolic order—the system of signs, norms, and representations that structures meaning in language and culture—collapses or becomes uninhabitable.

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Cosmogenic Poiesis

Canonical Terrorism

A fugal literary study of my life as a writer, wanderer, escort and hallucinatory projection screen. It moves between intimacy and analysis, playing with what remains of a person when visibility, desire, and symbolic coherence scramble.

My doctoral and philosophical project-- the flip side of  the literary memoir—an inquiry into what happens after the collapse of the symbolic order. It proposes rhythm, relation, and field-pressure as coherence beyond narrative and representation.

contact me at ouwagat@gmail.com

copyright october 2025 bethany reivich

*****

 

 

He entered the Salty Dog in a suit. It was just a coffee shop, but it had to have name like that, the edgy Tom Waits carnival-voyeur ethos of the time, to survive Marin County’s restless complacency. I was grumbling something to myself, with a book of verse in my hand.  

    What are you reading, he asked, bumping into me at a low point mid-grumble. I had just gotten up to leave.  

    “Some book of sonnets I picked up next door. I can’t understand anything anymore unless it rhymes.” 

    The nonjudgemental Northern Californian voice agreed.  The juxtaposition of that with his well-styled roughness intrigued me and triggered me as it had when we first met.  But whatever held him together was rapidly leaving my own soft body, any armour was decorative. Besides Tom Waits, who was his neighbour, he loved real art brut.  It was appearing regularly in magazines like The Believer —he had a stack of those in Santa Fe.

 

    I followed him out into his dad’s Mercedes, which he lent him after his birthday dinner. He was a few months younger than me — an older woman, he joked, right before we first kissed.  “I prefer driving manual,” he said, but his embarrassment faded once he turned the key— his elegance was unaffected.  For the first time I was inside the world he always hid, the one of comfort and wealth. The car his dad bought him — the one he normally drove, in Santa Fe — was a cool beige semi-dilapidated wagon.  

    He drove me to a field where the double decker bus was parked.  Painted white, with a spiral staircase to the upper level, it was the vehicle David Best drove with his crew to Burning Man. The poor folks who never know catastrophe well enough to risk their equilibrium. The poor desert that can only absorb and reflect the yearnings of its urban conquistadors. It was about a month before when I hitchhiked there from New Mexico, just after returning from Russia. I arrived JFK not knowing where to go, got a loan from a guilty uncle, and made my way back to NM, staying at a friend’s shared house in the less enchanting suburban area of Santa Fe, around Camino Carlos Rey, working odd jobs for Roth. I didn’t have a ticket — I guess they were about $500 at the time and sold out — but I wanted to see him; I didn’t give a damn about the festival. 

    The last ride — a guy in a truck who had a ticket to the festival himself — dropped me off once the line to the gate started to form, and I took my army surplus backpack and hopped over the string fence among the colourful-haired fairies wheeling unicycles around the outer limits of no-man’s-land.  I had always been a confident thief. If only I had wanted more. Not knowing anyone among the 60,000 people attending, feeling out of place in its palpable, paradoxical cliquishness, I wandered into what I took to be the centre, the only spot where money was exchanged — for coffee, the only product available.  I stood in line and bought two large cups — the 24 oz filter coffee you only get in America, without cream or sugar — turned around, and saw him standing a couple feet away with his friend, scrutinising my figure with a drishti.  His eyes lit up when they met my face. I handed him one of the cups, as if I planned it.  

    He introduced me, pronouncing my last name to Kris, a metal sculptor, with relish.  He looked at my wrists, bracelet-less. “How did you get in?” 

    “I hitchhiked and jumped over the fence.” 

    “Really?” He looked at Kris.  “There are lasers and cameras and guards set up to prevent people from sneaking in.  It’s very high tech. I’m impressed”

    “Oh yeah? I had no idea, he just dropped me off before the gate.  It was easy.”  He led me to his camp and fed me, asking more than once if I had enough— I was too thin, though he didn’t say it —and offered to share his tent — I had nothing prepared. I changed into a soft white sleeveless cotton dress, slightly transparent, with a silkscreen pastel bird theme I bought in a typically odd-named thrift shop— Ponedelnik, or was it Sreda? inside the great Lomonosov. Whether he liked the dress or that I wanted to impress him, he smiled with satisfaction and led me around, showing me the Temple he helped build, which they would burn in a couple days.  He was apprenticing in woodworking with Best.  I lay down stretching on the ledge of the temple, with a big drop below, and he lingered in the sun, squinting at me and the clear desert sky.  He took off his blue and white striped railroad hat and placed it in the over my pubic bone, hovered, then turned around. I got up and followed him, placing it back on his head, stroking the cloth and his black hair almost imperceptibly. He stayed around watching, but we spoke little. Kris took a liking to me and invited me to ride around with him in a fleet of rocket cars. I didn’t have much stomach for drinking — bringing back a couple bottles of Russian vodka was a fashionable decoy — but today I gulped down everything anyone gave me. Clarke was a recovering alcoholic, the only sober one among us.

     I woke up in his tent the next morning and he was gone, he never arrived. The wind was howling all night and I was freezing, but it was better than being battered in the sandstorm. I found Kris in the bus. What happened, I asked him, distressed.  Kris was on the couch, sitting up with his legs sprawled out, a girl between them.  He stopped between phrases for a deep kiss.  “He took mushrooms last night and I guess it was a bad trip, he freaked out — he left, got a ride out.”  My spirit left me, I looked around without bearing and started for the door.  “You should stay,” Kris said, “at least for the burn.  It can be healing to watch.” Another woman on the bus chimed in to agree.  I imagined staying along with Kris, who I liked, and watching the man burn, calling it a ritual. I waited to see if the screaming emptiness would hush, hesitated for twenty minutes or so imagining the effigy, listening to their words —cathartic, closure. Clarke left because of me. I packed my things, hitchhiked to the airport in Reno and bought a ticket to Albuquerque. Hitchhiking would take two days, and it was urgent, even though no one knew where he went. The next day, in Santa Fe, I woke up at dawn and walked from the suburbs to the centre, sitting in the sunny plaza for three or four hours, immobile.  I recognised his gait out of the corner of my eye — without even seeing him, he was unmistakable— walking from Water Street straight to me.

 

 

***

 

 

 

Now in Petaluma, we sat outside the bus on the ground.  

    “There’s a lot of trash between us” he said with searching solemnity. 

I recalled how, when I got drunk and rode around the desert in the rocket car, I took the trouble to climb back inside the art bus to throw up. “Next time, if you need to vomit, you can do it in the sand. There’s plenty of space.” Clarke had said gently, with a little smirk, projecting his voice toward the dunes, pouring sand on the vomit to make it easier to sweep.

 

“Space trash” I looked up into the starry night and he turned to me with calm concern, now beside me on a grassy mound. 

 

    I suppose he was thinking of Roth.  I mistook Roth for the guy who showed me around as a prospective student. I have trouble recognising faces unless they have an identifier like a mole or a hat, special hair. They both had long brown hair and beady eyes. 

“You’re the dude!” I said as Roth stared at me.  “I’ve met the character of my novel” he told Tim later that night. I had a crush on Tim. I had a crush on Clarke, anyone but Roth.  Clarke ceded his interest because Roth was possessive.  The trash was Roth?  The vomit in the bus?  The trash was the woman Clarke slept with the night he invited me to stay in his home — the trash was the poetry Clarke and I wrote one another — 

    

“You’re taking Bethany on a date to the Anasazi?  Christy yes, Molly sure. But Bethany…? She has no class,” Clarke tested his own disgusted desire—it got back to me through Roth. The Anasazi was the nicest restaurant in town, as far as I knew.  Roth took pleasure watching me distort the scene in my fuzzy yellow thrifted coat and green high heeled riding boots. “Yes, she wrote me, with the same florid intensity. I admit, I enjoy our correspondence” Clarke responded to Roth when pressed. Roth keeps a file of all documents by, for and about me. I found the subsection for Clarke when I stayed with him in New York, after Russia. 

 

As a prospective student Roth’s doppelganger gave me the key to a room for the night and I flitted around the alien landscape, the sparkling sand and dry, crisp, geometric adobe felt like a containing magic for the next years. The style I always mistook for substance, or perhaps it was the most immediate substance. The sparkly sand.  Clarke and I dropped out around the same time.

 

    Writing is never without the audience in mind; a person with object relations can forget that. 

I write in order to think, they say - in my case I think well enough without it. Rarely, writing may convince me for a moment that I believe one thing over the other, but never upon a reread.  It’s always been a last resort for me — but I use the last resort. I will write the ill-advised letter and send it to the ill-advised person. I avoid writing because I dislike it and I’m lazy, but also, do we really need more?  Is that what Clarke was talking about?  The trash between us — the body of knowledge, a funeral pyre . . . the body of literature . . . the great canon, cannon fodder.

 

    “Write” Clarke called to me in the California night, as I headed to sleep in the art bus.

 

    “I will” I called back, thinking he meant to him. My skin flushed, feeling his thread of connection despite all the clutter.  As I tucked myself in a few minutes later, I realised he meant: write to no one in particular, as a hobby or a vocation 

 

to keep yourself sane, because you’re talented, I suppose. But I couldn’t even keep a diary—there was no meaningful interaction between my psyche and the page. If I enjoyed writing, if it was any good, it was only in order to reach him.

*****

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Copyright Bethany Reivich 2025

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