intellectual properties

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)

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)

the voluptuousness of one’s own hell

…there is a personal necessity for misfortune; that terror, want, impoverishment, midnight watches, adventures, hazards and mistakes are as necessary to me and to you as their opposites, yea, that, to speak mystically, the path to one’s own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one’s own hell…

…if you are unwilling to endure your own suffering even for an hour, and continually forestall all possible misfortune, if you regard suffering and pain generally as evil, as detestable, as deserving of annihilation, and as blots on existence, well, you have then, besides your religion of compassion, yet another religion in your heart – the religion of comfortableness. Ah, how little you know of the happiness of man, you comfortable and good-natured ones! – for happiness and misfortune are brother and sister, and twins, who grow tall together, or, as with you, remain small together!

–Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 338:The Will to Suffering and the Compassionate

you will not be saved by what was left

You will not be saved by what was left
written by the ones your fear implores;
you are not the others and now you find
yourself in the center of a labyrinth
your steps designed. The agony of Jesus
will not save you, nor of Socrates, nor
strong, golden Siddhartha who accepted death
in a garden as the sun was going down.

Every word you have written turns to dust,
as does every word your mouth has spoken.
In Hades there is no such thing as pity
and God’s night is endless and infinite.
You are made of time, which never ceases.
You are every solitary instant.

–Borges, The Speck

the romantic desire for chaos (you too?)

question the need for philosophy
but when the mind becomes aware of itself as an object
it cannot help but consider its own existence:
the world now merely raw material
and a pretext for talking about oneself,
adolescent and becoming.

this irresistable urge to introspection
and ostentatious subjectivism
is a maniacal tendency to self-observation
with the compulsion to consider oneself
over and over again as one unknown,
as an uncannily remote stranger.

the romantic rushes into this duality
as he rushes into everything dark, ambiguous, chaotic and ecstatic -
the bizarre and grotesque
the ghostlike and pathological
the macabre and perverse.
a demonic dystopian dionysian
flight into the unconscious
or the other side of utopia -
the fairy tale, the fantastic,
the uncanny, the mysterious
the indefinite iridescent atmospherical and musical
space of childhood of nature,
to dreams and madness:
a yearning for irresponsibility
and dignity in the unknown.

a belief that the more bewildering the chaos,
the more radiant the star that emerges:
a mad genius uncivilized mind.

but with this want to experience everything simultaneously
and no search for synthesis-
with all antitheses possible,
all determinate utterance is dead and false.
nothing is.

dark crowds stumbling out of cinemas
numbed and blinded
by the narcotics of sound and light
which hex and strengthen the spell -
no reality is desired inside a dark movie house-
only romantic dreams.

when we dance, it is bait for death.
to escape atomization and alienation,
in coming together, we desire to be dissolved.

.::.

romanticism:
a psychotic fear of the present:
an ideology for a new society
inside a necromantic cry for the unrealized past -
an expression of generations which no longer
believe in absolute values
or absolute anything,
this feeling of homelessness
and loneliness
and isolation
is the fundamental experience
of whole generations

romanticism is an overcompensation
typical of the emancipated and disillusioned individual
found wandering in the slipstream of every revolution.

yet no psychosis has ever been more fruitful:
there is no product of modern art -
the exuberance, anarchy and violence,
drunken stammering lyricism,
and unrestrained, unsparing exhibition -
that is not a shadow of the romantic
desire for illusion by the disillusioned.

.::.

{c.f. hauser, the social history of art: german and western romanticism, pp. 155-172}

it hurts to decide.

My dear,

I don’t know what to do today, help me decide.

Should I cut myself open and pour my heart on these pages? Or should I sit here and do nothing, nobody’s asking anything of me afterall.

Should I jump off the cliff that has my heart beating so and develop my wings on the way down? Or should I step back from the edge, and let the others deal with this thing called courage.

Should I stare back at the existential abyss that haunts me so and try desperately to grab from it a sense of self? Or should I keep walking half-asleep, only half-looking at it every now and then in times in which I can’t help doing anything but?

Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?

Falsely yours,

Albert Camus

Le langage est source de malentendus

did you know that in france, handwriting analysis (graphologie) was (is?) done as part of job interviews?

.::.

{style vs. type}

“If type is a lead letter striking down on paper, style is a cursive gesture winding its way over a sheet—or down the street. Style implies a sense of cultivation, of self-care, a flourish you come up with yourself. Style shows through when writing with a stylus, channeling the idiosyncrasies of the hand, as well as its grace and movements. Style has no place when the transition to type gets under way. Type is not fluid but cast, regulated and regular, repetitious—again and again and again. But perhaps only when type was cast did we notice how whole subjectivities are embodied in technologies of writing, and that we also inscribe ourselves while writing everything else down.

… Though structured, with the transition from hand-written manuscripts to movable type, language assumed more and more of a legislative logic. Spelling was standardized, and with it, rules and regulations became widespread. Marshall McLuhan referred to this new world as the Gutenberg Galaxy, a space of relations founded on order, visuality, and single-point perspective. For Michel Foucault, the letterset world was increasingly a space of recording and regulation as well. If language emerged from us, with letterset writing, it slowly began to turn back on us, creating classifications and files, systems of ordering and numbering….

They are letterpresses, after all: They press letters into place, but they also press letters onto people, press people into place.”

(Fully Automatic Writing — Alex Kitnick)

.::.

[ fully automatic writing vs. automatic writing ]