JAN FORTIN (BUT 2 DAYS TARDY)

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.