notes from a testtube desert

on ^films recently seen, ^film _thoughts recently _thought:

·         sans soleil, the first documentary i immediately want to see again, that thrills me as only the best features and shorts do, quietly advocates a lifestyle of aesthetic detachment, of a lens (more correctly, lenses) correcting (uncorrecting) vision(s):  (lenses replacing [being added to] masks in identity theory)

·         playtime, a film of futility, affirmation, and comedy:  a rare trio

·         andrei rublev:  i now view as tarkovsky’s best, a masterful meditation on art, god, time, love, politics, desire, modernity, through a non-linear story of a medieval painter-monk; one of the few films i want to call perfect

·         the pied piper of hamelin:  a ridiculously terrible film

·         alphaville:  where art, technology, society intersect in a comic dystopian scifi film noir

·         four notable romantic comedies:  annie hall, eternal sunshine, amelie, chungking express; but only one notable sexual comedy (if one ignores comic porn like deep throat) comes to mind:  conspirators of pleasure

a^p_hor_d^IT_tyacs—

the flowering of the internet:  humans rooted in the screen, the veil—now no impenetrable seduction of god or woman or man or even nature or consciousness (which also have now truly been usurped by the homogeneity of the human) but the impenetrable seduction of technology:  no birth or death, no love, but by means of the screen …

a new beatitude:  blessed are the witless, for they shall inherit.

… to continue refraining from yielding to two temptations, each aesthetic and political:   1) to reduce the plurality of narrative in content or form (other than that which my flesh inevitably bounds)—in other words, a continual regrounding in doubt (in doubt [is it not?] of the limits and whispers of flesh; 2) to raise theory, abstraction (the need to explain), to anything other than one-among-many narratives.  (The only temptation to iteratively yield to is the labyrinthine advance of flesh’s murky dictates—which roughly, opaquely circumscribe and advocate our doubt—which are our doubt, being death.)

we have bartered earth for fire, water, light.  The elements are imbalanced.

art is born of an ill-designed world …

knowledge distracts us from our main purpose in life …

… live between divine forgiveness and your own torment …

no authentic art permits the response, I don’t agree; it avoids the traps of mental segmentation, the call of the collapsed one … i have to extract, reduce it to the size of something smaller, within or of myself, to then dispute an extraction, amputation.  It becomes like a dachshund arguing with the severed leg of a horse.

envy needs to be restructured into fantasy for it to be socially productive, palatable.  (reconstituting, modernizing, our psychic factories; rewiring how we transform the raw inputs of social aggression, apathy, hostility … into aesthetic outputs)

if i believed in protests, i’d protest against them.

the only standard is aesthetic perfection—not a measure of moral goodness, not even a measure.  Like all standards, itself it is not visible.  Yet what else to believe in?

the internet is democratic only for those who have negotiated the root democracies of the transient; for the rest, it is commercial and exploitive, a commercialism and exploitation which society so frequently and masochistically aspires to as if emancipatory.  One rather has to use it as a transport to bypass the (official) structures of enculturation, incarceration; to suck from it its deep nutrients.  So with all technology.

… you can get lost in others’ illusions or your own, others’ language games, your own …

the historic poetic-religious-philosophic perception of solitude, silence, darkness as the bedrock of existence … as the negotiated encounter with these, without recourse to simian forms of vengeance, as noble; what happens when communication, noise, light become the foundation built on (certain optimists would say replacing) the bedrock?  How will the new ground be tested? How will it perform? What happens as it’s stressed, becomes cracked? How is nobility being redefined? (Yes, it’s being surfaced, as all things, and so is being reorganized into a subdivision of money, a star on its walk of fame.)

… when you live in darkness, the shadow you cast is made of light …

since no longer was there any authority that legitimates, it has become this no longer that legitimates …

the deck is large and who would not use the alice card as necessary—the card that trumps even trump … (isn’t society a competition to hold a hand composed entirely of alice cards? and don’t we all fail, this failure one form of an authentic [emotional] democracy?)

idiocy is like a hollywood movie—it requires a large production of people and money to make it happen.

if only the self burns in hell and the self is unlocatable, unidentifiable, indescribable, it may be that there still is a hell but there is no self and so nothing burns …

            (blood meridian’s cold currency, fire)

the coincidence of nietzsche (1889), modern physics (1896), aesthetic reconstruction (1913 – 22), the atomic bomb (1930 – 1945, flowing from physics) … the collective human spirit makes a giant collective stumble forward, (for humankind? for anything? [objectless stumbling, perhaps the only authentic stumbling—a kind of secularized gita]) …

social normalcy, respectability, is frequently achieved by bullying one’s way into a corner of the human cosmos and devoting one’s life to defending, buttressing, expanding that corner:  this process called civilization, its detached description an aspect of art.

some hundreds of years ago, man swallowed the clock, internalizing time; now humanity swallows the computer, internalizing eternity:  is it not this mixture of elements in our bellies that necessitates the present spiritual indigestion …

the artist is light and soft, like an oyster; it develops, slowly, a hard dark pearl to protect itself against the incessant irritation of the demands to kill itself—that is, to reduce its innate sense of teeming multiplicity (of world) to the stupid solidity and request of a single grain of sand … (but the masses’ lust for pearls, for pretty spheres …):  this abrasive dialogue in the substrata of desire …

 overhead conversations:

in a bar:

she:  people like birds

he:  i like birds a lot

she:  {unintelligible}

                  he:  i just don’t get them …

in a café:

look, we’ve got three maximums:  regular maximum, extra maximum, and maximum maximum

meta- is all that remains:  there is no metaphysics, only meta-; no metanarrative, only meta-; with the dissolution of substantives, only prefixes … (lyotard’s metanarrative collapse combined with baudrillard’s hyperreal:  the hypermeta, the metahyper, the posthyper, historiopost, uberhistorio, …)

the insecticidation of humanity:  the buzzing of endlessly competing and incompatible narratives, many of which are and must be largely incomprehensible, as little different than mosquitoes, wasps, fruit flies …

care is a form of harm minimalization, a reduction of damage … or at least its maintenance at present levels …

dogs have become handbags, or at least handbag accessories … animate&hairy birkins …

yoga:  your orgasmic guru airhead

most relationships:  alliances of tedium, carnages of possession, structures of veiled terrorism …

the toronto special:  a 39-storey tower, with no 13^th floor or floors with 4 in the unit space (thus 34-stories) …

… what do the people clap for when they clap?

everything you inhabit was whimsy once; today’s law and truth, our precious modes, committed patterns, are built from and on yesterday’s whimsy …

the soft strings of language, which we pluck to still the ragged scream of time …

everything is possible, possibility a function of vision:  even death is possibility, especially death—the furthest reaches of vision … hence our fascination with it, not in blood (for blood is as impossible for us to imagine as a macbook air was for citizens of the thirteenth century) but in our incarnated dreams—in film, television, video games, all forms of news and media, therapy and psychology, in the technourban soundscapes we inhabit—fascinating in concept, as we were once fascinated with God.

how can one be committed to any idea?  Ideas are hardly committed to you.

it’s quite reasonable to postulate in these hypermad days, overgrown with weeds of conformity in the name of freedom, with ubiquitous bombs of balm, that only those not pretending to be mad are mad …

society grants individuals as much slack as time:  with both accumulating, accelerating, the citizen counteracts the double increasing tension typically through money, pharmaceuticals, work, entertainment … the artist, to the extent it doesn’t use these, must find other means:  cracks in time’s edifices, peepholes in society’s walls, sinkholes in culture’s pavement …

an ode to a high digger:

         how time times

how time times, timing

how time times, timing, timed

to have a book which contains a table of contents which refers only to tables of contents:  a book of possible books … the referents not random and whole, as in the library of babel, but encyclopedically exhaustive in suggestibility:  so we would accept the parameters of possibility suggested by these taxonomies as we do our present society through its artifactual and conceptual summaries, with little ability or time to ever independently explore the evidence.

significant books from a rough onset of postmodernity—

blood meridian

(’86: the last authentic literature of unity, bookend of the iliad and the bible, of western civilization)

the book of questions

(’63 – ’72: the first authentic literature of fragmentation, born of the holocaust)

the waves – orlando

(of gender and identity)

waiting for godot – proust

(of a new spirituality of infinite waiting, of a subsistence of time and its subservience to memory, of a deconstruction of linearity, a subjugation of the line)

ulysses

(of the reconstitution of society and language)

the second sex

(of a new pandoran psychology)

kafka – borges – nietzsche

(of a new urban forest of symbols and dreams)

alice in wonderland

(of the union of mathematics and art, science and fancy)

straightup poetry excludes itself, for it by nature must be insignificant

but when we ask for a list of significant films, paintings, albums … ! … the list is significantly longer …

the age and weight of an art:  modern technology spreads open, cracks, all the arts except literature which, as the first art that was also a technology, seeks its proper revolution not in technology, that which opened its siblings, but in the dark forces that spawned it, an odd return to that point in its revolution when it was a point … a coupling of innocence and guilt on the present desert of language …

 

^{coming soon to a dream near you—}

^the pathologization ^of _di^ff_E^re_n^ce

                a          the projection of acceptance onto the visible

            b          the transference of christian dogma into the secularized psyche

            c          the roots of the fear of plurality

            d          the desperate competition for sanity

            e          our inability to find a proper home for death

            f           the technicization of aesthetics:  a matter of geometry

            principles of a quantum spirituality

                        thoughts on religion, science, time …

            world war iii and other stories

three traumas

advocating a psychic periodic table of elements

questions for the book …

I only had eyes for the infinite.  I tended to let the days pass by.  They punished me.

heresiarch alben

The writer alone decides his own death, pledged as he is to go through with the task he set himself:  to have us read the blank universe at the price of the instant.

heresiarch brudenhöffer

 

 

Is not every thought a prisoner?  Thought is set free by another thought, an accomplice.  All we do with the latter's help is change jails.

heresiarch nuck 

 

 

The body adjusts to death, the soul to life.

heresiarch woondaŧœƫǣ 

Daodejing lxxvi

A man is supple and weak when living but hard and stiff when dead.  Grass and trees are pliant and fragile when living but dried and shriveled when dead.  Thus the hard and the strong are the comrades of death, the supple and the weak are the comrades of life.

Therefore a weapon that is strong will not vanquish,

A tree that is strong will suffer the axe.

The hard and big take the lower position,

The supple and weak take the higher position.

Writing, like any vocation, if one sticks with it long enough to get past its ecstatic and lingering novelties, becomes supple and weak, an expression of the fragile project of humanity.  Yet, in order to eat and because we are indelibly social apes, we are compelled by elusive forces of no fixed address to move out from our caves and eyries, our burrows and wires, into the scrimmage of crowds and ladders, where, in comparison to a vocation’s dark freedoms, the lit courts and laws are hard and stiff.  So much of humanity, the city’s scream, the car’s orgasm, feels like the embodiment of death.  Is this the left and the right of Vignette xxxi?  The ruthlessness of Vignette v against the shadowy play of xv?

Perhaps.

But whatever the external environment may be, appear to be, or feel like, the sage, because she is not committed to any particular order of things, can slip into and out from any order, which may appear to others as disorder but to her is the only order—that of living.  Why assume she is equal to or greater than life, a graspable part equal to or greater than the ungraspable whole?  Only death could possibly make this claim (though it restrains itself).  So she refrains from definitive conclusions, causations, judgements, sustainable definitions, and adapts herself to the constantly shifting environments of life which greet her, escaping the myriad shriveled and dried fates of the dead.  She will be dried and hard some sunny day, and that is enough.

The sage, naturally, is severely limited in many areas, even as all things are limited.  A tree may be the most beautiful tree in the world but it cannot compose Mass in D Minor.  Which is greater—the tree or the composer?  Those who erect hierarchies do so for their aggrandizement, but their erections grow flaccid in the spherical Dao, in which everything is a waterdop that falls from heaven and merges with the sea.

So, like anyone, the sage can do many things or few things; what makes her a sage is not this doing or not-doing but her relationship to her doing and not-doing.  Whereas the people see a difference between doing and not-doing, the sage doesn’t.  Whereas the people say I am these doings and not-doings but not those doings and not-doings, the sage does not say but sees the Dao in everything.

Certainly one might look at the sage and say—She does not care about success, she is a child, she is useless and improper, she laughs when she should cry and cries when she should laugh, she is a hobo, no one understands her.  If she is not a sage, she will be bothered and modify her behavior and thinking; but if she is, the words will be like a tree rustling in the wind.

mister loungechair being coy

 cat and man play under-the-door eye games ...

Daodejing LXXV

The people are hungry.

It is because those in authority eat up too much in taxes that the people are hungry.

The people are difficult to govern.

It is because those in authority are too fond of action that the people are difficult to govern.

The people treat death lightly.

It is because the people set too much store by life that they treat death lightly.

It is just because one has no use for life that one is wiser than the man who values life.

What is this?  Having no use for life is wisdom?  Valuing life is foolishness?  Doesn’t this go against the West’s just and Christian heritage? Secular humanism? Common sense? The prevailing winds? The ego? Yoga? Shoppers Drug Mart’s Marketing Division? Everything we have fought for over these civilized millennia, these continents of blood?

Doesn’t such a warped and dysfunctional attitude lead to unabombers, psychopaths, depressed recluses, all forms of maladjusted lunatics, malcontents and anticitizens?

Isn’t it clearly, unmitigatedly wrong?

Having no use for life is only a destructive tendency, is only to be interpreted negatively, however, when set within an etiological environment we are typically enculturated to assume as a given.  Chuang Tzu shrugs his shoulders at life but laughs when he does so.  Lao Tse avoids harming himself and others because such activity arises from oppositions and hierarchies established between and among life and death—oppositions and hierarchies which are no more necessary than a hoary deity waiting for Judgment Day and the cosmic division of humans into good and evil.

Within Dao, the people view themselves as they are—transient aspects of the universe that rise and return, who have their natural beginnings and natural ends.  Who, then, needs to destroy life or prolong it?  The wisdom that is spoken of refers to a withdrawal from our infantile tendencies to cling.  We recoil at the words of this vignette because we have become addicted to an ossified life (to a life that doesn't properly know either life or death), and so are committed to a process of the appearance of prolonging life without regard for anything particularly resembling life.

So the sage bypasses our common dualities (of the governing and governed, activity and passivity, life and death) by sojourning on the way of nature, a way acknowledging all ways, an unlit way below the fluorescent and concrete labyrinths of our minds and hearts—labyrinths which have no minotaur at the center, as we might fear, but only nothing ... an abyss leading to the way.