Thoughts @ 51

51 looks like a prime but isn’t, even as I look like a prime, but am not.

Cinema:

Tarkovsky as slow perfect beautiful as Tarr, without the omnipresent palpable despair.  Instead, omnipresent palpable emptiness.

Two of the great cinematic spiritual biographies:  Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates, Tarkovsky’s The Mirror.  Each shows a soul’s life visually, the facts—so omnipresent in modernity—subservient, almost absent.

Tarkovsky says that art requires imperfection.  But, there being no perfection, there is no imperfection and so no art.  Or else art does not require imperfection ... it feeds on its requirement for imperfection differently than it does its non-requirement.

On the Bain:

No individual loss, voice, is important, no one is missed for long because the one of the whole is palpably, authentically stronger than the inevitable eternal palpable authentic individual one.  The Bain confronts its members with the truth of the whole:  it forces a spiritual principle into incarnation, shoves god not into a named individual perfected body but a polynamed transnamed collective imperfect body—that which Jesus attempted but failed at.  It is thus not—it is thus no longer—a name above or edifice that is aimed at or arrived at, but a form below that is here.

The culture doesn’t need to be changed—the culture is here—it simply needs to be effectively and environmentally mined.  But the culture may be such as to be severely resistant to mining.

Feelings, Will, and Body:

Society is structured feeling.

The young require passion to express their feelings.  If one matures at all, the feelings become directly capable of expressing themselves without the presence of an intermediary—or, in other words, without one particular half of the emotional spectrum (passion, life) dominating.  That so many endure life devoted to passion—or its brother, bitterness—indicates a society given to the avoidance of death (that is, the body)—hence the ubiquity of the proclamation of the body inevitably a cultural indication of a desperate denial (also with freedom). Yet with death accepted, passion sits in balanced tension with it and the feelings are laid out on a level.  But the sentimental decadence of the age demands a spinning, without death to temper the passion of existence.  So one’s life becomes a fact in the way that that tree is a fact, or that love, that cat, that chair, that committee, that idea, that century, is a fact.  I am piled on the heap of time and regard myself in it.  What is it that regards me?  Death?  I say death regards me regarding it:  two mirrors—in some state of being polished—confronting each other in darkness (the confrontation being light).  The question shifts:  what does the polishing?  Could the answer be death also?  Death:  the active agent in life.

How can anyone reasonably defend the existence of the individual will?  Will, yes, but as anything but wholly and perpetually relational and collective?  Individuality will surely be looked upon by our descendants—should they exist—as blood-letting or slavery is by us.  Our modes, theories, structures, are all modelled on radically primitive notions of being.

My body is my spirit; i breathe—that is, i speak—my body.  My words are simply my particular body made articulate.  Who expects one’s body to be the same each day?  It is—that is, it feels—like a different body each day, each hour, so who expects one’s thoughts, theories, words, systems, motivations, attitudes, values to be the same?  Why would i use my mind to chain this energy?  Would i not rather use my mind simply as a tool in service of this energy?  To do so, however, requires an ongoing comfort with death—transience—for the mind, as it presents itself to the modern self, contains death as its core, but hidden.  The task of the modern mind is to dig through itself to death and so rediscover nature through the discovery of the body.  Society, however, avoids this primary task by erecting a simulacrum of the body and taking care of this simulacrum through prosthetic—technical—means, which is the only effective way to deal with simulacra if one would not have them disappear.

Art:

The artist, of course, has lost its relevance.  Art hasn’t and can never; the confusion between artist and art, between creator and creature, between spirit and flesh, has lead to the conclusion that art has lost its relevance.

Art is not the spirit of commerce, of transaction, of the particular relation between things, but of the relation of all things, the code that circumscribes transactions, that which gave birth to and subverted commerce by its very existence.  This is why art overwhelms and must overwhelm, why art is like god and is in a sense god’s replacement.  Not the art of names and labels, the art of volition and cocktails, the art of pedigree and list, but the art of the sum of all relational monads, the art of nature before it was named, the art of joyful madness and chaos and doom.  Art is spirit and we have entered the age of the holy spirit, of secularized sacred art—when art is no longer something separate and apart but the very molecular structure of existence.  Art is life, life is art, art annihilates itself in life, life in art, and in this annihilation is the authentic rebirth of the apocalypse:   no destruction of the earth, of flesh, and its beauty, but the complete eradication of all structures of the soul and its bastard child, mind, so that soul appears—or reappears—in its original and transformed state:  empty, free, glorious, transfigured.  In such a way art laughs at money, fame, career, and stares at itself as itself:  a series of infinite polished mirrors of unparalleled flawed beauty and perfection:  reflection of reflections and end of origins.  Only in this way is art released from itself to be itself, does it enter into the birth of its fate.

Art is, simply, the inversion of the spirit of nature, whereby nature overcomes itself through its excess.  This larger framework is what the moralists perpetually overlook.  Art was never meant to be what it has become, but only what it is becoming and will never be except in its becoming.  Art is reflection, without an end—which is to say with no goal, finality, definition (beyond the space of the moment) and—truly—no reflection in its reflection.  Reflections reflecting not themselves in themselves but the totality of all reflections reflecting not themselves in themselves and themselves.  It is the “and themselves” that creates the requirement for ethics and the present circumscriptions of art. The role of the “and themselves” is perhaps the critical evolutionary question of the next few millennia.