Morgan Meis

Morgan Meis is a smallish man who is almost constantly moving. A founding member of the Flux Factory he is the only original occupant who has lived and worked at Flux continually since its inception. This makes him happy. Morgan is currently finishing his Ph.D. in philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He teaches undergraduate philosophy courses at Eugene Lang College and at various other institutions at various times throughout the city, including Columbia University. At The New School, Morgan runs the Greek and Latin program, and conducts intensive reading groups in ancient texts. He is a scholar of ancient Skepticism and classical literature in general, having founded various study groups through the Flux Factory including a Fichte study seminar and a Greek/Latin Institute that seeks to further an understanding of the classics deeply rooted in the hic et nunc. Morgan is also the editor of the Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, a publication specializing in history of philosophy and continental philosophy, which has featured the work of such thinkers as Jurgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, Jaques Derrida, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. He is the founder, editor, and publisher of Little Room Press, which has recently published the much-acclaimed Desire and Affect: Spinoza as Psychologist, a collection of critical essays on Book III of Spinoza’s Ethics.
Morgan also uses his hands and brains to write. He is a playwright, having written, with Stefany Anne Golberg, the play Shonky, which saw its first performance on the stage of the Flux Factory. He has a novel, Angelus Novus, published by Soft Skull Press and is currently working on a collection of his poetry as well as a second novel that will be roughly the same length as the first novel. Morgan is no musician but he is deeply involved with the ongoing social and political activism that surrounds the Flux Factory. He is currently working on a project that would allow the various and talented people around the Flux Factory to work directly with the needs of the community through a collaboration with the Northside Community Development Council, Inc. Morgan feels that he is working pretty hard to embody the notion of artist/intellectual that the Flux Factory has as its model. His beady eyes and imperfect gait notwithstanding, he hopes to turn the Factory into a breeding ground for those who are deeply committed to their own artistic vision while feeling that this vision can only reach its fruition when it is linked to the grander struggle to improve and enrich the community at large.

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1: Oh Mademoiselle, did you drink
your hemlock? You emulate the wiggly squids,
you’re coming through all doors at
once. You’ve made piles of crap
in the back rooms, no?

(the scene is set in inner chambers,
vague intrigues, delightful circumstances,
a pleasantly farcical escapade amongst
humpy young servants)

M: I seduce you with pinpricks and morbid
hintings. You want to go under. I prepare you
a coffin, a death mask, some chocolate.

1: We sat on trees, we laughed at the country.
Come amongst me with a twirling. I equal
you in arithmetic, I have samplings of
bed pans.

(the sky darkens in divine distemper, distopia,
memories fade of the Halcyon days,
a subtle hint of violence, friends remember
earlier regrets)

M: This is unwanted. Where goes the dalliance?
Where the muddy suggestions, the
pauses, the filtration of reason? I’m
persnookered, the fashion’s outmoded.

1: Sweating, I consistently re-find you, I
break you down into lumpens, I fully
imbibe you. How sloppy the air is
without you!

M: (triumphant) Space out your talking.
Put space in your linings. You pity, you
shoe-shank, this never persisted, this was
beginning’s perpetual stopping.

(A break in the action, goat-herders waltz
with mechanical mad-men, the scene
is restored in the ford of a glen in twin
valleys perched €˜neath the feet of
Mt. Etna)

1: Purloined, this scurvy tongue has
leapt its crease. Out mungy tongue your
ruse shall spoil us no more! Fated, can we
plunge into nothing?

M: Again you are trumped by the lacking
of sharpness. Kephalatatos, I’ve been
watching the faces in the trees, they are
with me, they bare your witness.

1: Lepidos, you dissolve me. There are
only smatterings to uphold me. There’s a
back door and a gurney.

(the camera shifts awkwardly, there are scenes never captured)