intellectual properties

endearment

happy birthday to my (little) sister, jenelle!

here is an adorable photo of us from 1980:

I start to salivate when I think about the juicy conversations we’ll have when we’re back together again.

the amazing letters of Italo Calvino. (New Yorker)

“What is modern art but the attempt to pinpoint vague, incorporeal, inexpressible sensations? What is modern art, I would add, but the most solemn pile of nonsense that ever appeared on earth?”

…

“All the ideas currently in my head are subject to a strange phenomenon: while I work on them and perfect them continuously from the philosophical point of view, they stay rudimentary and barely sketched on the dramatic and artistic side. In my creativity thought has the upper hand over imagination.”

…

“I, on the other hand, am sending you a sample of my new experiments in fiction. (It’s not stuff forN. O. but maybe for R. F. and the like.) It’s a vision of humanity sunk to the lowest level of its downward curve, humanity as an ant-hill, for whom only a latent and confused memory remains of its ancient individuality. It’s also rubbish. If you don’t like it or don’t want to do anything with it, send it back to me.”

…

“What is all this nonsense you’re giving me about pure and impure art? As though we didn’t know each other well enough and had never discussed the subject. As though you didn’t know who Italo-calvino is, what he wants, what he has to say. Forget any remorse: my art has been and always will be social while trying to remain art as far as possible, just as in Ungaretti’s poetry there is always an immanent ethic even when at his most lyrical: “tonda quel tanto che mi dà tormento” (just round enough to torment me). The funny thing is that just about a year ago you were writing me passionate letters on the necessity of a social nature in art and I was replying with even more heated letters on God knows what. We really have to burn this correspondence.”

.::.

+ listen to Liev Schreiber read a Calvino story from Cosmicomics here: radiolab: the distance of the moon

echolalic.2 / the center cannot hold

{3am. today’s notes. more words. incomplete. }

.::.

utter:  1. complete, absolute.  2. to make a sound with one’s voice.

semantic satiation with every single word:
i’m afraid i’ve lost all meaning.
or: the only words uttered are those that mean nothing.

complete, absolute.  which nothing is.

it’s not apathy.
but maybe i’ve lost all affect
an inability to earnestly put any sign on things without feeling like a liar.
but then also a liar in silence.

(if) there is no thought without language
(if) there is no language without meaning
why can’t we know what we know?
can there be nothing inside a thought?

how is it that one can stand looking down a path of destruction
and say “well goddamn, this sure is crazy”
and keep living?
perhaps what we have now is a constant state of shock.
stumbling. speechless.

people search for meaning everywhere.
they go to conferences, universities, tabloids, newspapers, twitter feeds, comment sections, television, movies, music, baseball games, bars, museums, forests, mountains, the ocean, poetry, literature, pornography, sex, drugs, dance, meditation, yoga, church  -

in the falsification of what it means to know
the search is endless and now at a continuously increasing velocity.
perhaps the same velocity at which the world is washing away.

click. click. click. click.

how many words have you read, just today?
just now, even?
and how many of them, really, had meaning?
there is so little meaning to be found
despite that it’s all right there.
quod petit hic est.

the problem with the truth is that you have to have the strength for it.

has it ever been taken seriously how those people in the Allegory of the Cave remain in their seats?

“Nobody believed us when we told them what was happening in Treblinka.”

in the democratic unwillingness to admit inequality, we have grown weak under a guise of strength.
a refutation of authority
that forgets that the word is .(AUTHOR)ity.
the strength of conviction of one’s word.
weakness in that we are no longer authors of our own lives in our own words.
“our” “own” “words”
simplified in a democratic language.
we repeat.
and we repeat what is repeatable.

the terror of actually having to say something that means something will render most of us mute.

.::.

affect:
in the rank natural growth
of the civilizing process,
the weather of our thoughts and feelings has borders, and they are political.

.::.

“the humble are they who go about the world with the lure of the real in their hearts”,
he paraphrased.

and that the protagonist in every novel is a roofless man: a homeless person, a wanderer, untied.

.::.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

–Yeats

echolalic

and yet history does intrude on every word:
those with no memory, no history, no spirit, speak in mechanical tongues
old words like bridges, burned
the future story
a repeated
mimetic
image
an infinite echo
of barbarism: a return to the magic bison on the walls of the cave

.::.

links/ refs:

1 adorno: the jargon of authenticity

2 radiolab: words + radiolab: why the sky isn’t blue

3 TED: a stroke of insight

4 verb: “to GIF”

5 barbarism_(linguistics)

6 rimbaud: the alchemy of the word:

“My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints; old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, silly old songs, the nave rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents: I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels! – A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. – I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still…”

a soft religion

i don’t tumbl, so i just have to repost:

http://anneboyer.tumblr.com/post/49357708624/nyc-2

“He said that in his soft religion, if you have saved one life, you have saved the entire world, and if you have killed one person, you have murdered an entire community,

and when he spoke to me about his soft religion which sounded very soft I was tired after a long weekend at a conference in which I kept wanting to use my friends as pillows and all I wanted, then, was a soft pillow. I wanted a pillow that contained a soft philosophy which like his soft philosophy was a thing which was soft and easy to rest my head on and accounted for weakness, infirmity, youth, and age, men and women, the real reality of all of stakes of interrelation and space of care, a soft way of being in the world in which the weak were not the first to die, in which no one would never use humans instrumentally, in which we would never grab after glittering and impermanent objects, a soft philosophy of the world in which it could be guaranteed that we never look at our hands and find, with horror, that those hands which had always been grabbing were now empty, or worse, they were covered in blood.”

(see: my dream)

brooklyn ladders, violent dreams

in the backyard of a block of railroad apartments in bushwick
we had to climb through a precarious window to reach
there stood in a line between the trees
a series of tall metal ladders
reaching up into the branches
overgrown by years
artifacts of a time
when cotton was scrubbed in tubs
and the wet sheets and linens
and pantaloons were hung out to dry
stretched on long lines from windows
3 ,4, 5 stories tall
crosscrossing the interior courtyard on mechanical pulleys
stiff in the summer sun
and winter wind

i looked at the ladders against the night sky for a while,
wondering if anyone else had been since the moment of arrival
wanting to climb,
or if this was something only a non-native new yorker would do.
then over the ledge and into the unkempt garden,
-”hey, those probably aren’t safe” -
the solid steel frame barely moved under my weight
and confident, up i went
a few stories into the night
-”hey, watch out for those power lines”-
-”hey, be careful, it’s starting to really shake” -
-”hey, maybe someone should stabilize the bottom”-
i perched near the top, momentarily
the rest still wondering aloud
-”what is she doing?”-
until i climbed down, rejoined the party,
satisfied.

.::.

last night i had the most violent dream i can remember. i awoke surprised and a little scared at who i’d been in my subconscious – a demon throwing plates, breaking furniture, screaming wildly and stabbing the life out of someone, a knife in my bloody hands.

for these leaves and me you will not understand

confession: i have been reading Leaves of Grass again.

(For in any roof’d room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,
And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)

(Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand: Walt Whitman)

i assume because most of the past week i was in the woods, upstate.

.::.

it is impossible to go unnoticed in the woods,
unlike urban creation
where the bone structure is naked and overpowering
such that one can move through invisibly
among the noise,
hiding in plain sight,
no one, no thing taking notice
of your small life
inside the ritualized superstructure of modernity -
atomized, dissolved, unparticular, indiscrete:
the sacrifice to civilization of the nonidentical to identity.

the trees are singular,
autonomous
in their stand,
unmoved rarely even by wind and fire
though they will eventually fall -
the trees live among their own dead,
a state in our unnatural lives and deaths we only experience as tragic:
sailboats of immigrants across the atlantic filled with hope and dying,
30% mortality, bodies lifted into the sea every day,
the numbers dwindling as freedom approached,
the rest wondering whether their lives would end
unfinished, incomplete -
without the hand of man a tree never suffers such a fate.

a tree stands from its first tender root in its own graveyard,
once the promise of the acorn is fulfilled
the fallen ones are reincorporated with the rain.
complete.
walking between them you are present, another creature,
your footsteps on the soft path
cracking twigs
your breathing a birdsong
your heartbeat a waterfall
your scent leaving a trail
all along the leaves:
there is no hiding there.
in the eyes of the forest,
you will be clearly seen,
your life, your death
illuminated in the dappled sun and moonlight -
even on the darkest, starless night
the forest will find you there.

.::.
This is to reach the highest thing,
that Heaven perhaps will grant us:
not admiration or victory
but simply to be accepted
as part of an undeniable Reality,
like stones and trees.
(borges, again).

.::.

(i am aware that i am just repeating myself, year after year).

qotd: jagged pill

Because he’s right. If there’s anything I’ve learned about being single, it’s that this world wasn’t meant to be experienced alone. We were created for the purpose of fucking, of loving, of mating, and every day you spend failing to do just that, the universe ignores you a little bit more.

–ryan o’connell in vice

from the sky down

(in the woods somewhere near woodstock, ny)

Consider how quickly all things are dissolved and resolved:

IX.

Consider how quickly all things are dissolved and resolved:
the bodies and substances themselves,
into the matter and substance of the world:
and their memories into the general age and time of the world.
Consider the nature of all worldly sensible things; of those especially,
which either ensnare by pleasure,
or for their irksomeness are dreadful,
or for their outward lustre and show are in great esteem and request,
how vile and contemptible,
how base and corruptible,
how destitute of all true life and being they are.

–Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book II

(~via)