51 looks like
a prime but isn’t, even as I look like a prime, but am not.
Cinema:
Tarkovsky as slow perfect beautiful as
Tarr, without the omnipresent palpable despair.
Instead, omnipresent palpable emptiness.
Two of the great cinematic spiritual
biographies: Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates, Tarkovsky’s The Mirror. Each shows a soul’s life visually, the facts—so
omnipresent in modernity—subservient, almost absent.
Tarkovsky says that art requires
imperfection. But, there being no
perfection, there is no imperfection and so no art. Or else art does not require imperfection ...
it feeds on its requirement for imperfection differently than it does its
non-requirement.
On the Bain:
No individual loss, voice, is
important, no one is missed for long because the one of the whole is palpably,
authentically stronger than the inevitable eternal palpable authentic
individual one. The Bain confronts its
members with the truth of the whole: it
forces a spiritual principle into incarnation, shoves god not into a named
individual perfected body but a polynamed transnamed collective imperfect
body—that which Jesus attempted but failed at.
It is thus not—it is thus no longer—a name above or edifice that is
aimed at or arrived at, but a form below that is here.
The culture doesn’t need to be
changed—the culture is here—it simply needs to be effectively and
environmentally mined. But the culture
may be such as to be severely resistant to mining.
Feelings, Will, and Body:
Society is structured feeling.
The young require passion to express
their feelings. If one matures at all,
the feelings become directly capable of expressing themselves without the
presence of an intermediary—or, in other words, without one particular half of
the emotional spectrum (passion, life) dominating. That so many endure life devoted to
passion—or its brother, bitterness—indicates a society given to the avoidance
of death (that is, the body)—hence the ubiquity of the proclamation of the body
inevitably a cultural indication of a desperate denial (also with freedom). Yet
with death accepted, passion sits in balanced tension with it and the feelings
are laid out on a level. But the
sentimental decadence of the age demands a spinning, without death to temper
the passion of existence. So one’s life
becomes a fact in the way that that tree is a fact, or that love, that cat,
that chair, that committee, that idea, that century, is a fact. I am piled on the heap of time and regard myself
in it. What is it that regards me? Death?
I say death regards me regarding it:
two mirrors—in some state of being polished—confronting each other in
darkness (the confrontation being light).
The question shifts: what does
the polishing? Could the answer be death
also? Death: the active agent in life.
How can anyone reasonably defend the
existence of the individual will? Will,
yes, but as anything but wholly and perpetually relational and collective? Individuality will surely be looked upon by
our descendants—should they exist—as blood-letting or slavery is by us. Our modes, theories, structures, are all
modelled on radically primitive notions of being.
My body is my spirit; i breathe—that
is, i speak—my body. My words are simply
my particular body made articulate. Who expects
one’s body to be the same each day? It is—that
is, it feels—like a different body each day, each hour, so who expects one’s
thoughts, theories, words, systems, motivations, attitudes, values to be the
same? Why would i use my mind to chain
this energy? Would i not rather use my
mind simply as a tool in service of this energy? To do so, however, requires an ongoing
comfort with death—transience—for the mind, as it presents itself to the modern
self, contains death as its core, but hidden.
The task of the modern mind is to dig through itself to death and so
rediscover nature through the discovery of the body. Society, however, avoids this primary task by
erecting a simulacrum of the body and taking care of this simulacrum through
prosthetic—technical—means, which is the only effective way to deal with
simulacra if one would not have them disappear.
Art:
The artist, of course, has lost its
relevance. Art hasn’t and can never; the
confusion between artist and art, between creator and creature, between spirit
and flesh, has lead to the conclusion that art has lost its relevance.
Art is not the spirit of commerce, of
transaction, of the particular relation between things, but of the relation of
all things, the code that circumscribes transactions, that which gave birth to
and subverted commerce by its very existence.
This is why art overwhelms and must overwhelm, why art is like god and
is in a sense god’s replacement. Not the
art of names and labels, the art of volition and cocktails, the art of pedigree
and list, but the art of the sum of all relational monads, the art of nature
before it was named, the art of joyful madness and chaos and doom. Art is spirit and we have entered the age of
the holy spirit, of secularized sacred art—when art is no longer something
separate and apart but the very molecular structure of existence. Art is life, life is art, art annihilates
itself in life, life in art, and in this annihilation is the authentic rebirth
of the apocalypse: no destruction of
the earth, of flesh, and its beauty, but the complete eradication of all
structures of the soul and its bastard child, mind, so that soul appears—or
reappears—in its original and transformed state: empty, free, glorious, transfigured. In such a way art laughs at money, fame,
career, and stares at itself as itself:
a series of infinite polished mirrors of unparalleled flawed beauty and
perfection: reflection of reflections
and end of origins. Only in this way is
art released from itself to be itself, does it enter into the birth of its
fate.
Art is, simply, the inversion of the
spirit of nature, whereby nature overcomes itself through its excess. This larger framework is what the moralists
perpetually overlook. Art was never
meant to be what it has become, but only what it is becoming and will never be
except in its becoming. Art is reflection,
without an end—which is to say with no goal, finality, definition (beyond the
space of the moment) and—truly—no reflection in its reflection. Reflections reflecting not themselves in
themselves but the totality of all reflections reflecting not themselves in
themselves and themselves. It is the “and
themselves” that creates the requirement for ethics and the present
circumscriptions of art. The role of the “and themselves” is perhaps the
critical evolutionary question of the next few millennia.
