house of disputes

^house  _o    f     ^{d i s p u t e s}

do we not spurn the common successes not from spite, some backdoor hope, misery or ignorance (those spiders!), daydreams of novelty, but to seek the fertile desolation of empty days, airy flowers, to tend to wounded words on urban avenues, to scrape dead ones from beneath tires, form them into oracles, trampled tongues of the dead, mutant ears of the future, and so those other things become like noisy monuments, sepulchres of time?

 

heresiarch bāāt-em

 

 

i shall call modern the art which devotes its "petit technique," as diderot used to say, to present the fact that the unpresentable exists.

to resist self-identifying with self:  is this act of resistance not the act of writing?

on a bus’s external ad:

some discoveries just can’t be made in a lab

to take refuge in language from life’s onslaughts is like hiding in a mirror to take refuge from mirrors.  It seems efficacious in the movement of taking refuge; and language, it is true, in its commodious indifference, its endless theatrics, can take on the appearance of welcoming.  And in all this movement and taking refuge and appearances of welcoming, the shadow of a dialogue appears—art, alone, talking to itself …

 

on toronto island’s carousel, a father is taking a picture of his son while the latter swoops up and down on his pink piggy.  The child’s name is miles.  smile miles, the father says.

in this photographic age, who would name a child such a thing?  Better to have named the kid smile, thus making its function as camera accessory and petit dieu in the family shrine explicit.

the condition for writing (exile, vacancy, absence; what has in various traditions been called god) yields equally religion, art, apocalypse.

            the inherent and repeating risk, however, of trying to create—or, more truly, recreate, in our atmosphere of creation’s impossibility—this condition is that the only yield will be the condition.

                        isn’t this risk humanity’s unspoken wager?

beauty and truth have outlived their evolutionary usefulness; this doesn’t mean, however, that the time has come for ugliness and falsehood, which would simply be to reinstate beauty and truth in new clothes.  The time has come, if it has come (if time ever comes) for their indistinguishability.

            yet philosophical daoism says that they have never been useful (or that they are only available for use which, for daoism, is saying the same thing).

if freedom is having nothing left to lose, condoland is transfreedom, anti-freedom:  it’s having nothing left to gain ...

            the banality of the comment at what surely must be my last dinner party:  freedom’s overrated.  Such glib inane comments obsess me for days.

                        the non-banality of the comment in sans soleil:  “I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.”

… youth are just the emerging old guard …

that psycho-, sociopaths, schizophrenics—the whole range of convenient labels and madnesses—are created as much by society as by the individuals so labelled is something of a progressive truism.  The not-so-labelled

individuals absolve themselves of responsibility of the creation of this range, this creation, while the individuals so labelled assume it.  Is it not this discrepancy in process—how creation is distributed across perceived singularities—that distinguishes?

the tedious hilarity of leos carax at the lightbox q&a after mauvais sang the other day:  what surprises me slightly is not that the interviewer and audience behave exactly as i expect them to but that carax does also.

as artist, the script is questioned; as human, it’s fulfilled.

(another reason to begin assuming that the creator doesn’t exist in art even as we have realized it doesn’t in nature:  only existing seems to be a moderately ineffable complex of complexes [bypassing while using names, surfaces, divisions] transforming itself [themselves] to another moderately ineffable complex of complexes.  That we call the first complex of complexes i [in the past, god], the second complex of complexes art [in the past, nature] and the process of migration from the first to the second creation [but could we not call it prayer or technology?] is a convenience, perhaps a necessity, but even more yet another complex.)

                        we attempt to transform ourselves into something better than ourselves using something worse than ourselves.

now, having been over three years since i have been saying a fairly consistent and initially volatile no to certain dominant routines of money, love, work, time etc., my desire for them hasn’t diminished but my rootedness in a different way of relating to them has grown, modifying the nature of the desire.

the road of knowledge is rounder than an apple …

that the apple took millennia to resymbolize (from garden to city, from eden to cupertino) …

the accumulation of symbols in our souls, like oil spills in the ocean …

the new yorker, the walrus, harper’s:  what are these but costco’s of the mind, walmarts of the soul?

^t_he ^a_c^t _of ^ki^llin_g

            yields no new knowledge of human barbarism, the hypocrisies of power, the timelessness of injustice, the misnomers of the law.  So why does it softly shock?  I could say by combining high camp with brutality.  True, but insufficient.  Central to the film—to the title (is it the act of killing or the art of killing?)—is the unity of three darknesses (or, if you will, a darkness that spawns three spheres, orbiting, juggled, perhaps, by some gravitational force between them):  of nature, of art, of compassion (in other terms, of the sinner, the creator, the saint [I want to also draw parallels with zarathustra's lion, child, camel]).  That the film successfully blends

them (the high camp element would suggest into a harsh smoothie), requiring the participation of the viewer to complete the trinity, is what shocks.  We cannot simply be voyeurs here, as in much of art’s vast gallery.

the triple simulation that reoccurs in the act of killing (we watching anwar watching his memories, even as we may be watching our own memories, our own greed and lack of empathy in our daily First World laundering of barbarism and blood [obama’s brief tv appearance is surely ironic] — for the film is a disturbed and disturbing reflection not just on the unity of light in darkness but on memory, limits, ego, guilt …).  The effort required to break th

rough all this simulation, an effort not only doomed but simultaneously regrettably and thankfully doomed (or at least delayed), disorients us even as we are disoriented by our random placement in time and space whenever the solidity of names begins to melt.

 

and this is the act of killing’s strength:  a forced reflection, a simulated shattering of simulation, a polished funhouse of reflected horror, a disorientation in an age of disorientation …

… our souls have become like soap opera actors 

            ^{coming         soon}

_quantum   |   ^spirituality

we are not mandated to produce art that bears any relation to the way we perceive the world at large …

… in any way that bears any relation to the way we perceive the ways of art at large …

                        to seek the subatomic particles of the psyche, a language of the psyche below and around the languages we speak; to then flesh out a psychic periodic table of elements—the only question, restated in so many ways since humanity crawled into language, is the relation between this table and the one of helium and zinc.

as we construct a society of eyes, a flesh of vision, doesn’t mind seep as a vapour into the mansion of the infinite, gradually abdicating its usurped throne and artifactual clutter, becoming the breathing of sight?

 

heresiarch ברידינג אויגן

 

i feel time pouring through my body, time’s funnel

i think summons what is not being thought

i am seeks its dissolution through the circulation of all statements

i seem seems the image that doesn’t seek my reflection

            i feel what i am what i seem what i think what i seem what i feel what i think what i am what i feel what i what what i i …

            i verb verbs lined with nouns’ shadowy wings …

 

heresiarch satchidananda

 

we are, quite naturally and almost inexplicably, the accumulation of our losses—we become spheres of vacancy, waiting for the natal to replenish, their losses still embryonic, nascent:  embryos and nascence the newly natal call hope.  to give the word despair to the transference of hope to vacancy is possible, easy, but not what we would do, who see rather that hope was misnamed and in its renaming despair also.  What then do we call hope now, from the standpoint of accumulation of empty spaces?  Has it not been seen as itself the first emptiness, and so holds every name?

 

heresiarch vermicular