13.8.13

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?
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.
 


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

23.7.13

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


aphordITtyacs

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 13th 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 diffErence

                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