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?
the act of killing
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.
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
