1.
Born 1937, presently living in Anchorage. Tardy, cause he was supposed to show on Jan
14, the old prick. Also doesn’t know how
to spell, the bastard.
2.
Samsara,
the movie, too playboy in form, too whitesprayed, airwashed; while trying to
depict samsāra content—and doing so in respectably attractive ways—its form (its
narrative, images and flows) is too pleasant, smooth, sanitized: this is how it fails: we’re left with the feeling of having leafed through
a polished coffee table art book—maybe the look of continuous flow, but hardly
the feeling. A film like Holy Motors produces the feeling. (Beware of that which claims the ancient
religious names, which claims to show them.)
3.
Poor people panic when they get money, so they
spend it as soon as possible before it disappears.
4.
The judgements over men are more precious than
the men themselves (Schroeter, Death of Maria Malibran).
5.
Der Tod ist die dass es das ist Nichts sondern
hier.
6.
Alice: the
world and its structures as houses of cards, the i-eye as Alice, who, having visited
the various caves enshrining the houses of cards, subsequently (consequently?)
chooses to live not in the caves or the houses or the cards but the rabbit
holes, the holes, connecting the cards, the houses, the caves ... the hole
becomes the home. Alice in Wonderland as a mystical feminist treatise.
7.
Ei (pronounced
i or eye) in german—egg. A little zero. Plural eier
(pronounced aia, rhyming closely with
gaia). I-eye-zero-earth-egg. The synchronicities and expansions are almost
overwhelming. No wonder German produced
Heidegger.
8.
If you tell me what low is i’ll tell you if i’m
high.
9.
Those who call to us, who break through the
thick voids of society, have one thing to offer: our need to learn to not name what they have
to offer.
10. The
Bain as a cultural amalgam of a first nations community and the court of versailles: a tragicomic impossibility, a flawlessly
beautiful hamlet of suffering ribald absurdity.
11. Cleavage
is the new modesty.
12. The
aesthetic tweet has replaced the aphorism, apocalypse has replaced creation,
the repetition of novelty has replaced the novelty of repetition, movement has
replaced time ... our addiction to replacement is replacing our replacement of
addiction ...
13. The
film The End of Time exemplifies typical
Canadian intellectual mediocrity in documentary form. Like Samsara, like later Tarantino—all image,
show, the content, the ideas, mired in intellectual kindergarten (though Tarantino
redeems himself partially by avoiding ideas altogether; in this he is smarter
than Fricke and Mettler). Haphazard narrative,
forgettable text, vapid ideas, analogous to the New Yorker, those Pulitzer-prize winning creative nonfiction works:
for those who need to consume a kind of
diluted, powdered intelligence ... or workshop poems and novels: for those who need to consume diluted,
powdered art. Aside from a few vaguely
memorable images, the film offered me two marshy mellow benefits: it created a diffused somewhat banal far-near
(and thus tepidly mystical) mood and, as the mediocre often does, it stimulated
a compensatory response. I was going to
force The End of Time to give me
something to munch on, as during it i was primarily craving the end of The End
of Time.
a.
One dissipates time to the extent one dissipates
striving (an orientation to the future, accomplishment in the external world,
causation [which is the manufacture of artificial comfort strings designed to produce
and market time as a product]). Let go
of causation, striving—time changes its key to doubt. (Death, however, does not, for death is
different than time. Death is the
product of flesh, time of mind, making death more real. [The sage orients herself to death; the
academic the merchant, to time.])
b.
What walks through the dimension of space called
time? It’s less my body walking through
that dimension than my body seeing itself.
Vision and time are coupled as firmly as space and time; space exists
without eyes, but time requires eyes.
c.
I immerse myself in language to erase time, to
drown it. Language created time,
language can destroy it, even as it created and destroyed god.
d.
Love is frequently experienced—and so
behaviourally defined—as another eye watching me as i watch it. But i experience love as an eye—in my case,
inevitably, this i—seeing the world. In
both senses, though, love is time (or, rather, love is time redeeming itself).
e.
Technique:
immerse oneself sufficiently in the three dimensions of space, without
trajectory, without intent, without explanation, without analysis, such that
time is crowded out or, rather, it is no longer required—becomes bereft of
animation—even as the city obviated the need for an animate god ... or, rather,
assumed the animation of the prior god.
So space can assume time’s animation, as our new orality assumes
literacy. We have absorbed (traversed, traced)
god, literacy, time (which had become entwined, now disentangling, the fracture
of modernity), digested them, scat them back to the void and are free, if we
choose (or are chosen), to return to their ancestral roots, and dance, without atom
or meter.
f.
We talk (glibly, profoundly, obscurely, mockingly,
melancholically) about our culture’s shifting from past to future, elders to
youth. This shift, perhaps the fulcrum
of time on history’s teeter-totter, contains implications to which humans have
barely begun to adjust, this inchoate awareness perhaps in part responsible for
our apocalyptic obsessions, a mass-collective mortality crisis. As adults pass through middle age, their
obligation to be abdicating structural power to the future will inevitably be
in severe tension with our increasing predilection to longevity. To deal with this severity, to prevent
snapping, adults should be shutting
up—or at least finding new forms of language that are more suited to
their emerging habitat in history. Youth
should be dressing up in power’s rags—not through usurpation or revolution
(both are puerile), but through forms they invent, or are invented for them by
new forms of time. The power, the
wisdom, and the glory are now soundly with youth. Youth must consciously exploit its position
to the maximum possible extent. Of
course, it has begun doing this, but in the way that some women have done while
still subjugated by men (cunningly, histrionically, antithetically,
schizophrenically)—a technique too tied to its oppressors to be of much use, a weary
tedious patriarchal dance.
I wish only to be water—to flow around the young rocks of
power. Adults, once they reach 40 or
50ish, once their children reach 20 or 30ish, should do as some Indians do in
following the sadhu path—give up their possessions, diminish desire, wander the
earth by foot, consume only what is necessary (as much as possible what is
grown and made by oneself or those around), speak little, be unobtrusively available
to assist the world as necessary and able, make arts and crafts which simulate
their experiences of the world, respectfully and quietly disappear when called
upon to do so ... instead of the ridiculous and desperate hyperdrive to futilely
perpetuate and provide the appearance of a return to youth through speed,
pharmaceuticals, prosthetics of all types, expansion of reputation and
artifacts, power and language ossification.
Time is softly calling us through the noise of ourselves;
we plug our ears to our collective and rapid demise.
Aside from building, operating, maintaining, and destroying
the mechanisms of the modern world (bridges, stethoscopes, tutti-frutti jawbreakers),
the function of the academy is to show in numbers and graphs what almost any
child knows in its flesh. The academy,
despite its talk (text production) about flesh (bodies, body) and its presumed orientation
to youth—like the other edifices and structures of society (law, religion,
business, technology), though their particular methods distinguish them—is instead
oriented toward the destruction of flesh and youth by means of untethered mind. For the species to evolve, flesh and youth
must use time against that which produced it—mind. They must tether it back to themselves. How? By
reaching into language? by drowning in it? by seeking below? Technology as a means to do this—through the
horror and ecstasy of its necessary sibling, Communication—is a dominant shadow
of legitimacy, as orcs in Tolkien’s fantasy were broken and twisted elves.
But there are light and music still in the dawn of decaying
hearts, and to these one can return.
g.
I am an atavistic cosmologist—i search the roots
of the cosmos to adumbrate the genetic composition of future flowers. This is my contribution to time.
h.
I give up, acceptingly, naturally, almost
joyfully, the need to convince society of anything, rather growing into the ambient
comfort of myself. This is time’s
contribution to me.
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