the poet and money

TH_E P^O_ET AND M^ON_EY

aka … th_e disciplin_e and practic_e ^of madn_ess

^or … a mystic’s q_uarr_el with th_e w^orld

(in elusive instalments)

jabes, applied

What is the book i wish to recreate, a book of origins without origin, a lost book, the siamese twin of the god i wish to recreate?

The attributes of this book, this god, are likewise lost; this is why i approach my task tentatively, on paths of murkiness, setting myself aside as one sets oneself aside when leaving a mirror.

The internet aids me in my groping, in my task, as the printing press aided others in their quest of the book.  They wished to make copies, to pass the task of the hand to the machine, to promulgate the Word.  I wish to return to the space before the hand, to when copying was an idea and remained an idea.  This wish i feel has something to do with the book i seek to recreate … or rather (or equally) the book that seeks to recreate me.

            My book is a record of my seeking for the book.  It takes place in the gloaming so i place it in the technology of the gloaming, its wholly ambivalent invention.  Whether dusk or dawn (of the book? humanity? me? machines?) i don’t know.

                        My book has no limits because my quest has none.  I must only seek the book without the book, in death but without affirming death, in life but without affirming life, without even affirming the book or the quest.

                                    The book is my body i cannot see yet cannot escape.

The internet, in its natural infancy, has been seen as an extension of (has been used to extend) the powers of the printing press—more copies; more rapidly disseminated; more swirl, dissent, reform—even as the computer was initially seen and used as a glorified adding machine.  But this is to ignore (through fear? ignorance? novelty? surprise, as by ambush?) the internet’s natural powers, as our attempted simulation of the mind of god, as the adimensional book (neither tower nor library) of babel:  nameless (because it assumes all names), attributeless (because it assumes all attributes), powerless (because it assumes all powers), limitless (because it assumes all limits), without knowing (for knowing has walked past the end of itself), spaceless (for it is everywhere), without extension (for extension is a function of time and the internet is the mystics’ technology in its bypassing of time).

            Humanity was not defeated at the stunted tower at the beginning, nor was it silenced by the library’s confined infinitude.  Babel, to fulfill itself, is to circumvent not only verticality but horizontality; it is to translate the random emptiness and plenitude of blind borges from the virtuality of a story to the story of virtuality, to explode it from the confines of eight pages to the infinitely reproducing electrons of empty freedom.

                        The internet is Babel, the consummation of communication; through it we have defeated god and in defeat have founded the visible asomatous quest for the book.

Conformity as Enculturation of Function

We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and so we try to make an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one. And if we are calm, or generous or loyal, we are anxious to have it known so that we can attach these virtues to our other existence; we prefer to detach them from our real self so as to unite them with the other. We would cheerfully be cowards if that would acquire us a reputation for bravery. How clear a sign of the nullity of our own being!

Pascal’s Pensées

Daodejing lxxii

When the people lack a proper sense of awe then some awful visitation will descend upon them.

Do not constrict their living space; do not press down on their means of livelihood.  It is because you do not press down on them that they will not weary of the burden.

Hence the sage knows himself but does not display himself,

Loves himself but does not exalt himself.

Therefore he discards the one and takes the other.

Awe in our world has mostly been diminished to technology (the new, the bright, the virtual, the fast) and humanity (its flesh and flexing:  the beautiful, the powerful, the fast).  Though we may watch Planet Earth, we may go on a whale-sighting tour, we may camp in Algonquin for a week, we may love our cats, a proper sense of awe is not primarily virtual, abstracted from our lives, requiring damage to other species and the planet, legitimizing one aspect of nature over another, dependent on indirect or cognitive knowledge, but directed to what christians call god, daoists call dao, philosophers call being — the diverse contextualized unity of all things.

The shift in the twentieth century from utopian to dystopian fantasies (in art, in individual and collective psyches) reflects our growing knowledge (a spiritual knowledge, deeper than that pumped out from our academies and medias, difficult for us to acknowledge—that is, push into our behaviors—other than through art, our dreams and nightmares, our unconscious) that we may be bringing an awful visitation upon ourselves through our inability to orient ourselves to a proper sense of awe, to a proper sense of our place (our insignificance and significance, equal to the insignificance and significance of all things) in an endlessly vibrating empty-full universe.

Dao favors laissez faire, low regulatory, minimal bureaucratic-litigious, individually (but not systemic) anarchic government—both within the external state of society and the internal state of the self … one in which the best leader is shadowy and indistinct:  the opposite of what our improperly-awed society favors (the imaged and conspicuous, the named and reproduced).

So the sage is not particularly impressed with humanity or herself, does not need to build visible permanent structures, external to herself, to prove to herself or anyone that she exists and is following, like all, the arc from womb to grave, from earth to earth.

So she throws out what most people keep and cherish—the accoutrements of society:  its hard and feeble proofs—and takes what most people discard:  the still and the heavy, the supple and weak.  These are the procedures of awe, the policies of freedom, and the way of a long, animate and ethical life.

the rite of pasta primavera

text city

We will have dragged the heaven of The Apocalypse onto earth, as the prophets foretold some two millennia ago, but the streets will be paved not with gold but text.

Texting i find disabling, like social media.  A shorthand, factual, tedious, transactional, of the mind, heart; a Pfizer pharmaceutical to cloud and numb the spirit.  Like so much of what is taken for intimacy.  Of course, like advertizing, every now and then there’s a soundbite that dazzles, a moment that seduces, a convenience that relieves, an artifact that rises, sparkling, above the rubble.  Even email i’ve found tedious, disembodied, unnatural, recently.  I begin to long to write letters, perhaps in hieroglyphics, elaborate customized postcards that jam the postal processing machines, with fragments flying, glimpsed; OOF in Orange B inspiring a fulltime operator, from Xi'an, to quit, return to China, and invent 11 new forms of ontology.

The legion that Jesus casts out of the madman into the pigs in the Gospels indicates the feminine, the plural, in man, that he denies, that the Judeo-Christian complex denies.  The origins of psychology recognize this, the necessary emerging validity of the feminine, the amorphous ground of muliebrity, but deal with it in classic male form:  by examining, analyzing, laboratory style, female plurality—male struggles of it in a male-dominated world—and having affairs with certain women who particularly embody that plurality.  But how does one embody this plurality oneself, in a male body, in the city (which is a kind of conglomerated phallus), without the classic primary dependencies on multiple female bodies (which is using plurality as a prosthetic, avoiding finding the way between inner and outer plurality, the abdication of the [inner] knowledge of plurality)?  How far into oneself can one take plurality, accept it as the primary legitimacy, without destroying oneself?  Is this the new death?  (Despite the superficial paganism, our culture remains deeply Christian.)  Is it simply redefining the possibility of what maleness means, in the midst of a radical sparseness of living examples?

Aesthetically, of course, Woolf brilliantly articulates the plurality and amorphousness of identity in The Waves.

Do men even exist anymore, in any meaningful sense, or are they simply extensions of some unspeakable primordial darkness, a category uncategorized in time’s categorical categories?

The challenge of maintaining the rhythms of nature in the body—and consequently, the mind—while living in an antithetical environment—the city.  The yoga-sex-workout regime seems inadequate, trite; a certified organic sticker on rotting pesticide-ridden meat, haute fashion covering postulated skin and AIDS-infected flesh; a frequent flyer, 5000⁺-square-foot homeowner, two⁺-car householder putting out his recycling bin, feeling good about his greenity.  Central seems the vision of seeing what is not seen:  not god, as in the past, but nature.  (Not the unreal as an object of faith, but the real!)  Yet god —the gods—has (have) been seen as easily as the trees, in an age and culture when the two were inseparable.  Seeing, then, the rivers of China in the 401, puca sapos in iPads.  A de-identification with one’s own species (a re-narrativing from the-uniqueness-of-humanity-as-being-more­-unique-than-any-other [and, consequently, my-uniqueness-being-more-unique-than-any-other] to a uniqueness as one-among-a-vast-plurality-of-uniquenesses), within an environment which—through the monolithic immensity of its structures—incessantly demands identification and supremacy.  To see earth and all it contains holographically in our actions and thoughts …

Is this not what is meant by the doors of perception?

One can see the (admittedly frequently puerile) increase of pet-love also (as with, although differently, our frequently puerile spiritual practices [yoga, eco-]) as indicating a gateway to the diminishment of assumed human supremacy.  (The puerility enters through factors such as the undue waste/attention on pets [packaging, preferring ‘cuteness’—i.e. we love {care for} our cats but not our worms and bees …].)

The train to and from Montreal:  whom would i rather have around me:  the phone-text-techno-babbling self-importance of the business grandmother on the way or the techno-talk of the children’s machines on the return?  Earplugs in both cases.

I watch the dark void of nature through the window, punctuated by the lights of occasional stark settlements, punctuated by the reflected lights of the videos, games and communication devices surrounding me, both punctuations real-unreal.

I check email in Montreal, then on the train back to Toronto.  Yet as i approach home and think about checking email again, the feeling is there (though the reason is not) that i will be collecting mail for three days—ever since i left Toronto.  The electronic in-tray still rooted emotionally in the physical mailbox, yet surely exacerbated by the present’s ethos of speed.

art&god

The insidious pervasive attempt of psychotherapy, culture, to reduce the body-psyche complex to one, to continue the monist regressions of Christianity.  The healthy plurality of the body-psyche complex routinely squeezed into the appearance of a singular social identity, this squeezing euphemistically named health by the monist regulators of culture and spirit.

An ex-girlfriend calls me Protestant for certain emotional configurations she experienced; an acquaintance insinuates a connection between my marrying young and my present moral orientations.  How trite, reductionistic:  connections not technically untrue or imaginatively vapid but which become untrue, vapid, by means of their radical insufficiency, their decontextualization, their decoupling and hierarchizing of subject and object.  The problem with these facile psychologizations (which present themselves as insight!) of life and art (just look at biography-of-artist as explanation and replacement of the artist’s art [and in the mediocre the life is preferable to the art]) is the inarticulated and presumably unacknowledged assumed etiology, a fact-value relation, behind … (typically event --> applauded or derided value, often linked to common and unquestioned notions of success, beauty, truth …).

The environment of writing shifts for me, causing confusion, despair, exasperation, fragmentation, loss.  I can’t find or recreate my historic faith in art any longer.  This doesn’t seem to me primarily a matter of my obvious insignificance in the human world of words and names (crises of faith are hardly absent from those in that world) or having exhausted the themes intrinsic to the relation-of-i-with-the-world (these seem infinite [dependent primarily on sufficient attention and care] for their configurations are constantly changing, spawning a perpetually shifting reflected image-collage of words), but rather the atmosphere in which writing takes place has been modified and my orientation, my practice, lags behind.  I have hit certain apparent emotional and linguistic walls; i extend words across the walls like vines, hoping to infiltrate and crumble them.

Yet:  instead of breathing in airs of faith and ecstasy, my spiritual lungs are learning to adapt to breathing in doubt and stillness.  (I thus am in a state of exhaustion and death in relation to my past atmosphere but a state of birth, a fumbling novice, in relation to these emerging unknown elements.  The confusion created by this:  working still in what seems to be the same medium (words) but in a different atmosphere on perhaps a different planet … all this genetically altering the medium.

So how to write?  The way i have been:  waiting, despair, impatience, exasperation, calm, focus, inspiration, doubt, anger, faith, caprice, vapidity, toilet-cleaning … describing the world through this i-eye, describing my mind through this eye-i, attempting to eliminate judgement of the world, my mind, other than as it implicitly must be in the contours of language which reflect the particular colourings and contractions of the iris of this eye, the irides of these i’s (which, without the apostrophe, is is:  a recreation of yhwh in its, in their, tobetobeness) …

            My exploration of god, use of god, the attempt to describe the irides, to look at that which looks (the origin and end of the mirror, the labyrinth as the path between those origins and ends [borges always, always borges) …

                        It has taken me 20 years to return to using the word god, to resurrect the name, to claim it in my own image while making my image an image of god, image on image, the gateway of the manifold secrets …

If i write for Time at all (and how i despise those who assume Time is the only or primary audience), it certainly isn’t for what is typically meant by the present face of that audience …

All systems of thought are systems of restricted desire, of the way a mind (a group of minds) want themselves (the world) to be or imagine it to already be.  But the world, the mind, Mind, defy articulated desire by encircling all desires and their denial.

            This is what Jabes beautifully, horribly, cleverly, labyrinthinely, midrashingly does in The Book of Questions:  i am left with nothing through his articulation, his seeming affirmation of all, his simultaneous dispute, his equal seeming negation of all …

                        He stretches his endlessly shifting passionate and contradictory feelings so far into words the mind shatters into itself … words constantly being sucked back into their voids, peering over their edges like scared and pretty children.

Student story #1.  I read an academic article on teaching ESL using the principles of “imaginative education.”  Wholly banal, conceptually risible, spiritually infantile:  what sort of competent teacher would not simply know, embody, actualize the advocated principles?  Yet, such is the bulky output of academia, a kind of factory spirituality, a mapping for robots of what any human—anyone reflectively embedded in experience—would know and (automatically, unthinkingly, daoistically) practice in the classroom.

Student story #2.  For a business ethics course we discuss a case study on Pfizer, talk about how the company could rebrand itself more ethically—part of this public relations campaign could be providing cheaper AIDS medication to Zambia, for example, in exchange for renaming Zambia Pfizer.  Many multinationals are now more fiscally and politically powerful than many nations; why not effectively actualize this in our geopolitics?

These discussions take place in the context of my increasing non-misanthropic indifference toward humanity as a species (vis-a-vis not only other species but other categories of natural things).  I view this change as an equalization program and as i slowly immerse myself in it, as it feels increasingly comfortable, right, for me, my legacy misanthropy mostly fades (which only works if i carefully limit the quality and quantity of my human interaction).  Even if i now respect worms and bees more than most humans, my schizoid response to humans lessens, as my initial confusion over the tension between my feelings of disrespect for the species to which i belong and most of its members (a disrespect extending to myself in my historic values and practices) and my inevitably greater fondness of some specific humans over any specific worms and bees evolves toward the emotional complexes becoming integrated into a larger vision of my-body-in-relation-to-earth, as i allow my values and practices to be modified by what-i-see-in-what-is-not-seen.

Don’t i enter words in doubt and leave them in faith … and in between there is neither doubt nor faith but only words, among which are doubt and faith?

And if all my writing were reduced to writing about not being able to write, would this be an expansion?

Everything increasingly seems like a spiritual prosthetic, other than food, touch, walking, and the void in words:  only flesh and language remain real, everything else a house of cards.

And yet, still, wispy friendship, fondness, affection, in splips and shplots—a thread through flesh and language even as they are threads through …

^co_mi_n^g s^oo_n (though coming and soon are as slippery as doubt and faith):

            ^{the poet and money}

            _oem’s (origins, ends, middles:  creation stories for those oriented toward renarrating)

            closing ^daodejing meditations:  lxxii – lxxxi (let’s wrap this up, baby; it’s been a long ride)

            daoism & _anarchy; ^anarchy & a neo aesthetics

Amour : a few notes

Amour’s protagonist is not ^death (nor any of its humans, impeccable acting though they perform), but ^silence.

Music (always solo piano, either live or on CD) is played on five occasions:  by the student-cum-performer at his Parisian concert, by him again in Anne’s and Georges’ apartment, by Georges briefly, and with CD recordings by the student and possibly Anne.  The final three renderings are brief, interrupted; ^silence is chosen over the music.  Opening and closing credits are done in ^silence—the ^silence of the opening broken by crashing doors to the reek of ^death, the ^silence of the closing preceded by Anne’s ghost speaking the prosaic, Aren’t you taking a coat?

The dialogue is almost mythic in its everyday sparseness, much of the film’s meaning conveyed by gesture, glances, aversions, absence.  There are no answers to or attempts to answer the primary questions of love, family, meaning, suffering, ^death.  They exist on their own; ^silence speaks their murky unspeakable truths.

The melancholic and common analogy between the dependent infant—diapered, babbling—waxing into life, and the dependent geriatric—diapered, babbling—waning from life, is secondary to the more deeply melancholic comparisons established.  While no children are present in the film, Amour highlights life’s arc through youth (Alexandre, the musician, busily and importantly successful; the second nurse, emotionally incompetent in her technical competence) and middle age (Eva, Anne’s and Georges’ daughter, obsessed with money, security, fidelity; the concierge and her husband, respectfully concerned).  A kind of helplessness is everywhere—youth’s inability to comprehend aging; middle age’s inability to construct sufficient defences to dam the lurking terror of decline; the inability of respectable concern, medicine, hired-help to do much of anything—underpinned by the nearly mute and choreographed dance of Georges and Anne.

An aspect of their dance is the ironies and parodies of a once-vital eros, altered through daily scrimmage and subtextual negotiation into a familiar companionship, not unpleasant, the good-enough marriage.  This parody begins with the sexual suggestiveness and rejection upon the couple’s return from the concert (he: shall we have a drink?  she: i’m tired.  he: i fancy another drink. she: do as you please [continues to talk].  he: did i tell you that i thought you looked very pretty tonight. she: what’s gotten into you?  he smiles with familiarity, resignation, goes into the kitchen.  she: the semiquavers in the presto were incredible. what subtlety!)

The wry smile turns to a cringe when they’re in the bathroom together and he pulls up her panties; later, when she touches his hand and the graze almost offends him in pretending to close a gap that has almost opened to infinity.

Then ,when Anne says, still with moments of lucidity, when looking through the photographs of her life, Life is beautiful, we can’t help but agree and object.  This ambivalence—life’s ambivalence—threads its way through the film.

One of its threads is the relationship between society’s chitchattiness and nothingness, highlighted almost to the point of laughter (were it not for its familiar pathos) in Anne’s and Georges’ domestic rituals and negotiations (the salt cellar exchange in the kitchen, the newspaper reading and interruptions in the parlour), spiralling outward toward the mute archaeologies of marriage and family, the emotional resonance of space (even we come to identify with the rooms, finally being shown the spare room at the end, when Georges is alone).

Language’s ambivalence is centrally shown during the comic-horrific exchange between Anne and Eva, as the daughter’s seemingly normal but obviously absurd concerns with money contrast with the mother’s fragmented response—seemingly absurd, but pointing to truth (not dissimilar to Lucky’s central speech in Godot).

(While so little of the film is shot in society—most of it intimate, private—the only public social shot, in the opening at the concert, begins with a view of the audience from stage [the detachment of ^death, ^silence], also nodding to The Crowd and strangely mirroring the opening of another very different ’12 film—Holy Motors.)

Perhaps less apparent is the ambivalence between nature and the city:  the faucet, the rain, as backdrops to moments of decline; the pigeon (innocent because without moral knowledge, speechless, rather awkward and stupid) haphazardly intruding into the apartment, captured by Georges in a kind of danse macabre (and we are tense, are we not? will he catch it? kill it? free it? the moment seems pivotal), contrasted with the weight of our knowledge.  Amour is stretched between the discontents of civilization and their dark haphazard unknowing roots (Paris is the perfect environment for this, though we hardly glimpse it, stuck as we are in a cosmic domesticity), and we along with it, elastics as we are, testing our substance on the finger of time, about to snap on the timeless edges of earth.

Sometimes seemingly at the center but orbiting around it is ^death—holy of holies, the door behind the door, Anne flowered and dried, like A Midsummer Night’s Dream (or is it Nightmare?—we can’t say).

Partially revealed (and isn’t everything in the film partially revealed?) is the West’s sophisticated but sterile treatment of ^death—its clinicization and denial.  Anne knows when she should die and says so to Georges.  She does not have the will to insist; he does not have the will to comply; both operate within societal confines that they have purchased and so limit their vision and action.   Near the end, as his frustration mounts, as he breaks his bond and threatens her with hospitalization (he: they can force-feed you there), an evident contrast between the lack of dignity inherent in our culture of prolonging life (of quantitative willful life over qualitative contextual life) and the dignity embedded in the elder monk’s self-immolation in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring.

Georges’ precise recounting of the standard absurdity, stupidity, and brutality in the funeral he attends amplifies modern society’s awkward, technological, schizophrenic and foundationally inhumane and immature relationship with ^death.

Even at Anne’s end, her body rejects its rejection.  Only Georges is calm; Georges, with his three dreams (of his own ^death, of Anne playing the piano, of her in ^death bringing him through a door—to ^death? to life for a time?).

Along with life, ^death, love, family, society, technology, and language, art doesn’t escape the ambivalent thread—the music that surrounds and bolsters the couple’s life together collapses into ^silence, redeeming nothing.

Amour speaks the darkness society avoids.  It speaks it primarily in ^silence, which binds the film and us together, like a ghost, like gravity, like worms and bees.

Here is a more comprehensive and philosophical take on the film—

http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/feature-articles/love-death-truth-amour/

Daodejing LXXI

To know yet to think that one does not know is best,

Not to know yet to think that one knows will lead to difficulty.

It is by being alive to difficulty that one can avoid it.  The sage meets with no difficulty.  It is because he is alive to it that he meets with no difficulty.

What is this game the Dao plays in its heavenly caprice?  What sort of deception does the sage play with knowledge and masks and is knowledge itself a mask and, if so, a mask for what?

Is being alive to difficulty difficult?  Or is it simply becoming alive to difficulty that's difficult?  Are these pieces of knowledge that if one might be acquainted with them one should think one isn’t?

If the sage is alive, she is alive to the relation between knowing and not-knowing, a relation which may be a kind of thinking, an orientation of mind, yet it seems as if the kind of thinking required to transmute not-knowing into knowing may be different than the kind of thinking required to transmute knowing into not-knowing and, if this seeming is so, is the difference in kind also a difference in difficulty and being or becoming alive?

And, in summary (if we can speak of summarizing when there is hardly anything to summarize), is the above questioning—its nature and function—itself, in part at least, a function of the sage saying—or at least the Dao saying or writing or it having been said in the Dao—she meets with no difficulty:  that the rooted speaking of the phrase permits the avoidance and the being and becoming and being alive?

Tao Te Ching LXX

My words are very easy to understand and very easy to put into practice.  Yet no one in the world can understand them or put them into practice.

Words have an ancestor and affairs have a sovereign.

It is because people are ignorant that they fail to understand me.

Those who understand me are few,

Those who harm me are honored.

Therefore the sage, while clad in homespun, conceals on his person a priceless piece of jade.

The language of the Dao understands language:  words, as deeds, are empty in their centers, the distance from the surface of a word to its core is infinite.  Each word spins outward until the memory of the word suffices for the word and we are right to say we know the word and have never known it and can never.

The ancestor of words, the sovereign of deeds, is no human, no god, no other word, no other deed, no recognizable thing; yet words have an ancestor and its blood is in the words, deeds have a sovereign and its policies and procedures circumscribe the deeds.  Only a fool sees words solid and isolated, deeds as independent and free.

Doesn’t the sage sound whiny here—she is not understood! she’s got an esoteric secret! others are dumb!

But this is not some juvenescent we are all eternally separate complaint against existence, not some i am special or especially special and everyone’s out to get me.

Rather, this is the sage’s reversal of societal expectations, not particularly to be subversive or rebellious or cantankerous or obnoxious or anarchist or to be anything really, but because the orders of society are naturally at odds with the orders of the sage, the latter seeming far more natural to the sage than the societal orders, which somehow erect the human above the worm, ideas about life and death above life and death.  Doesn’t Chuang Tzu say— Therefore, the sage sees his role as that of a wanderer, sees knowledge as a curse, convention as a glue, virtue as just a means, and effort as common trade.  The sage has no great plans, so what use has he for knowledge? He makes no divisions, so what use has he for glue? He has no problems, so what use has he for virtue? He has no career, so what need has he for common trade?

Most devote their lives to cladding themselves in jade, concealing homespun:  flaunting cars and homes and girlfriends and knowledge and boyfriends and children and convention and friends and publications and virtue and awards and efforts and nosejobs, concealing their desolation and solitude and haplessness.   But the sage wears her desolation and solitude and haplessness and conceals not cars and awards and plans and children and lovers and nosejobs, though she may, but that which empowers solitude and haplessness and desolation, that which cars and awards and children and lovers and knowledge and nosejobs are often designed to conceal.

So the sage lives in an order that seems disorderly to those who to the sage live in an order that seems disorderly.

From Montreal

A recent journalistic skirmish occurs between Chicago and Toronto as the latter has overtaken the former in population.  Chicago says--Yes, you now quantitatively beat us, but we qualitatively beat you:  no one sings about you, Toronto; the films shot in your city are set somewhere else.

True.  But the point misses the point; it speaks from the grave of an age.

Chicago, as a city-state in the world's last super-republic of modern civilization, thumps its proud and hairy chest according to established simian and republican laws.  Toronto, as a city-state in the world's first postmodern nation, a nation of text and indistinctions, fashions itself into the new civilization of numbers and disappearance.  Chicago produces yet another musical on the stage of spectacle, Toronto yields Gould, who walks away from the stage into the virtualized purity of the abstracted studio, who camouflages himself in the white bed of the north, the black bath of space.

If Toronto is what i imagine it to be, it will not compete with common American bombast, European ponderosity, or Asian production, but will enter the future with the future's trade, which by no means uses the materials to which we have become accustomed--volitional opinion, staked-out individuality, lit&networked reputation--to assert itself above or over, but uses these same materials (for they are inexorable) to non-assert alongsidedness, inness, throughness.  Toronto has the potential to be the first human settlement founded not on land and assertion, but text and disappearance.

(This is why a figure like R. Ford, who naturally belongs as a sheriff in the swamps of Louisiana, is a brilliant creation of Toronto and should not be dissed but celebrated, viewed in the manner one views television--as a parody of anything human--humoured as a babbling baby in a crib.  We cleverly erect him as a caricature of the Republic:  a post-man, a perfected corpulent blend of amusement and death, barely clinging to the corpse of the last man, an embodiment of our return to our ape-roots, aesthetic primitivism made flesh.  We should vote him as our eternal mayor, encase him in a glass hamburger above Nathan Phillips Square, and pretend to honour and respect him.)

Let Chicago sing its worn tunes. Toronto casts its digital discus past the tired orbits of time.  There is a new exchange.  America remains addicted to its stocks of garbage, patriotism, sentimentality, militarism, the bored game of unsullied virtue, the proud and hairy stage.  Toronto  should shrug at these maudlin qualities and quietly smile as it obliviously walks a new path of nonchalant virtuality, as it walks away from barbaric and republican chests into spaces without present circumference or definition.

laurie spiegel : an installation

Common now at galleries of any size are numerous looping films, of varying interest, aesthetic merit, typically deviating from traditional narrative.  I propose a larger and bolder project, of which here I only provide the most cursory notes and directions.  Others, more oriented to detail and with the capital means for execution, can fund and implement this installation, should they find it sufficiently worthy.

1.      laurie spiegel uses the five senses (expressed, for example, through film, music, incense, food, textures) and their varying absences, strategically choreographed for effective interplay and effect.

2.      While, ideally, the installation would shift in physical space—across the earth and beyond it—to accommodate its objective of simulated infinity, this may—with our present technology—be impractical, as it would entail the viewer being shifted in space without the aesthetic-sensuous experience being interrupted in any meaningful sense.  In the interim, this simulated infinity should itself be simulated through facades and sets (whether campy, ironic, lifelike, surreal, etc.) which partially or wholly are recreated in a permanent or shifting space, perhaps in a dedicated gallery, in a dedicated space within a larger gallery, or in a space not typically called a gallery.  In terms of existing galleries, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal would be suitable.  In terms of spaces not typically called a gallery, the Joint Defence Space Research Facility Pine Gap near Alice Springs would be suitable.  Regardless, if indoors, the dedicated space should be sufficiently large as to give the impression of boundlessness, whenever required, shifting its environmental effects as necessary, as input(s) to the spontaneously and choreographed aesthetic whole.

3.      I call this infinitely expanding work laurie spiegel, in honor and admiration.

4.      laurie spiegel is infinite.  While looping elements are present, elements shift in relation to one another such that (disregarding for the moment the reality of the viewer’s perpetual heraclitean shiftings) no combined sensuous experience repeats itself.  Thus, for example, Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates may play 39 times in a century (approximately 0.006% of the time or 1 in 50,000) and while there may be—or as likely not—a few overlaps with Land of Kush’s Monogamy, exact synchronicity between audio and video would be highly improbable and, even in the rare instance of occurrence, the other sensuous factors (smell, taste, touch), the shifting environment (whether ‘real’ or ‘simulated’ or a simulation of simulation), and the viewer’s own state will combine as to make the occurrence seem to be different, even as two July afternoons in different years, similar in meteorological effect and the same two humans picnicking in the same park, will be experienced as varied events, perhaps even more unlike than events more superficially disparate.  (The tunnels, or wormholes, in the narratives of our lives—what we more scientifically call time—appear and contract according to principles barely understood.)

5.      Precise synchronicity between or among elements intended by their designated creators to be synchronous (e.g. the soundtrack to The Holy Mountain advancing synchronously with the advancing video to The Holy Mountain) could be programmed into laurie spiegel so as to be more likely to occur, the likelihood being a parameter in the program.  Or the volume of material could be such that (along with an acceptance of randomness or possibly a facilitation of it through a parameter setting) intended synchronicity is highly unlikely to occur, like finding Hamlet in Borges’ Library of Babel.  A great discovery, to be sure, if it happens (whether one is familiar with the source or not might vary how one perceives the greatness) but not necessarily necessary to one’s enjoyment.  (One could suggest that laurie spiegel challenges, subverts [and even strangely fulfills, through the principle of mirrors] our assumptions of authorial intent and control, individuality, time and history, causality, and freedom.)

6.  The common prototype for "unintentional" video-audio synchronicity is, of course, Dark Side of the Rainbow, about which awed aficionadi point out at least 168 precise and shocking synchronicities.  But these aweful ones are obvious neophytes in AV synchronous experimentation.  Try Dark Side of the Moon with Svankmajer's Alice; The Expanding Universe with Santa Sangre; Ege Bamyasi with Planet Earth's Ocean Deep; F♯ A♯ ∞ with Cremaster I or IV; The Seer with Futurama's The Beast with a Billion Backs ... or, indeed, any particular kind of music with any particular kind of moving image.  Whether such experiments yield knowledge of pattern generation, whether they challenge or even crumble knowledge of the supposed integrity, containment and control of aesthetic vision, intent and individuality, whether they do other things in or to the realms of generation, annihilation, and identity, may be subservient,  in the moment of aesthetic experience, immersion, to the reconstituted and reconstituting reconstitutions.  laurie spiegel, then, is an experiment in the construction and decimation of reconstituting reconstitutions in the human, aided by a choreography of art and technology, strategy and chance, experimental research into whether all meaning is a form of apophenia.

7.      The infinity referred to in #4 above is achieved in our installation through a program not dissimilar from Spiegel’s mouse in intent.  Preset lists of movies (chosen primarily for their imagistic content:  perhaps 5,000 – 10,000 films and clips, allowing too for the absence of video), music (etc.) would be drawn on and combined, according to principles—including randomness—themselves built into the program.  laurie spiegel would have an adaptive aesthetics built into it, aiming for a constantly regenerative range of moods, effects, experiments, surprises, failures, ecstasies.  What is really distinctive about laurie spiegel is the compositional logic, the logic by which the various sensuous inputs and rhythms evolve and are constructed by the computer algorithms.

8.      One can imagine viewers dedicated to a lifetime immersed in this simulated world, who spend their lives at (or perhaps more accurately in) the installation, who are even placed there at birth by parents or the state and are taken to the grave from the installation (perhaps their corpses even being incorporated into its aesthetics).  This is no less experimental and perhaps contains more grounded hope than those who cryopreserve themselves; examined from a different context, it is little different than being immersed in a world of banking, law or domesticity—worlds into which some children are essentially placed at birth and which can easily be considered equally simulated.

9.      One can also imagine viewers being able to affect the programming, not simply in terms of how their inner states inevitably alter how they receive it, but in terms of active or passive voice- or other user- response/detection systems, whereby, for example, the synthetic cloud formations—colour, type, speed, quantity, etc.—on the “sky” are a concatenated reflection of the moods and emotional responses of those present at the installation at the time (which will include lifers, long-terms, short-termers, novices, repeaters).

10.      But we have omitted an important element!:  the courtiers, maids and servants, waiters and dancers, serving food, lighting incense, stroking attendees with feathers, throwing Play-Doh at them, poking them with paperclips, etc., perhaps on occasion committing (or appearing to commit) inappropriate, transgressive or even atrocious acts on the flesh, thus mirroring aspects of history and the soul, the vaudeville of excess in the flesh supporting and strangely mirroring the vaudeville of excess in art.

11.  The supporting fleshy cast—why not?—could (should? must?) exchange itself with the observers, such that the two casts (castes) become indistinguishable, a new effective democracy, whereby roles can be and are routinely exchanged so that they are primarily virtual and so never ossified.

12.  The entire enterprise itself should be filmed, subtly integrating itself into the simulated dramas, perhaps eventually overcoming it.  (Can we not imagine a series of future wars between laurie spiegel as defined by the compositional logic, the attributes of its program … and laurie spiegel as produced by the production of laurie spiegel, by that which is born of its attributes?)

13.  In this process, do play and replay, viewer and viewed, sense and nonsense, reality and simulation, life and art, become indistinguishable?  Isn’t this a question of the installation?  Isn’t this the question it seeks?

14.  Laurie Spiegel, the human and musician, is the patron saint of the transtechnological imagination and intercedes on behalf of artists everywhere in their quests to stay on the way of the imaginative spirit, not falling into the pit of product or the chasm of commerce.

15. 
An Example

Play Can’s Tago Mago with The Colour of Pomegranates and patchouli incense.

Tago Mago vinyl.  Film on a circular screen no less than 50 m high, using the 78’ Armenian version.

LP, film, & incense should begin simultaneously, a new stick of incense should be lit at the beginning of each of Tago Mago’s songs.  The final 4.5 minutes of the film will play in silence.

On the island of Tago Mago, outdoors, the audience seated around the island’s edge and the presumably inflatable screen at an appropriate distance on the water, circumscribing the island in its entirety.

The stage manager should be dressed as Donald Duck and the roaming technician as a 15^th c ashik, playing original compositions on the chonguri prior to and following the film.

This module should be performed and performed in this way and in this place and by these people and for this time to please the father of Sarai Milton, mother of Tlön.

The following foods should be served during the film/lp:dill pickles from Prague; Nova Scotian sour cherries tended and plucked by virgins; sustainably produced Ecuadorian burglar’s thighs blessed by a Kichwa shaman, Beninois fufu, and fried Chinese dog.

A troupe of topless ambient and general practitioners should roam among the observers, occasionally grazing nipples and toes against the observing heads, slapping those who respond.

16.  Preliminary Lists of Sense and Environmental Artifacts

16.1 Preliminary and Incomplete List of Films and Clips

Schroeter (Deux, Eika Kapatta), Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain, Fando y Lis), Barney (Cremaster Cycle), Kurosawa (Ran), Parajanov (The Colour of Pomegranates), Elfin Saddle (Wurld), Tarkovsky (Stalker, Andrei Rublev, Mirror, Solaris), Svankmajer (Alice, Little Otik, Conspirators of Pleasure, Shorts), Kubrick (A Clockwork Orange), Bunuel (Andalusian Dog), Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera), Teshigahara (Woman in the Dunes), Boorman (Zardoz), Ivory (Savages), Noé (Enter the Void), Bergman (Persona, The Seventh Seal), Kiarostami (Taste of Cherry), Tarr (Sátántangó, The Turin Horse), Gilliam (Brazil, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), Lipský (I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen), Herzog (Wrath of God), Scott (Blade Runner), Lynch (Eraserhead, Mulholland Drive), Maysles (Grey Gardens), Waters (Pink Flamingos), Carax (Holy Motors), Dreyer, (Passion of Joan of Arc), Franju (Eyes Without a Face), Friedkin (The Exorcist), Mitchell (Behind the Green Door), Episodes (from Futorama, Simpsons, Dr Who, X-Files, Twin Peaks, etc.), Various shorts etc., Certain commercials, etc. …

16.2 Preliminary and Incomplete List of Audio

Bach (Gould’s second recording of The Goldberg Variations; The Art of Fugue), Land of Kush (Monogamy), Evangelista (Hello, Voyager), Selections from Colin Stetson, Arvo Pārt, Laurie Spiegel, Daphne Oram, Can (Tago Mago, Soundtracks, Delay, Monster Movie, Ege Bamyasi), Velvet Underground, Swan (The Seer), Scott Walker (Bish Bosch), King Crimson, Shalabi Effect, Ali Akbar Khan, Aphex Twin, Beck, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Holger Czukay, Jimi Hendrix, John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Led Zeppelin, Matana Roberts, Matmos, Nine Inch Nails, Mira Calix, Omar Souleyman, Queens of the Stone Age, Raymond Scott, Sonic Youth, Sun City Girls, This Heat, Autechre, Zoviet France, Blonde Redhead, Silver Mt Zion, Godspeed!You Black Emperor, The Books, Exuma, Elizabeth Cotton, Fugazi, John Cage, Meredith Monk, Miles Davis, Morton Subotnick, Parliament, Stephan Micus, Steve Reich, Tangerine Dream, Terry Riley, Hanged Up, Janis Joplin, Nina Simone, Pink Floyd, Portishead …

16.3 Preliminary List of Scents

This and the following Preliminary Lists remain to be drafted.

16.4 Preliminary List of Tastes

16.5 Preliminary List of Textures

16.6 Preliminary List of Locations

16.7 Preliminary List of Lighting and Lasers

(Constantly adapted based on viewers, technological advance, evolution of consciousness)

16.8 Preliminary List of Props and Servants

16.9 Preliminary List of Other Devices, Artifacts, Methods and Interrelations

For example, other art forms (painting, architecture, dance, video games, liturgical rites, sculpture, photography, printmaking) should be included.