two views past objects

from "The Forgetting of Air" by Luce Irigaray

But the breath of one who in singing mingles his inspiration with the divine breath that remains out of reach. Insituable. Faceless. Whoever senses it, starts under way. Obeys the draw. Runs counter to nothing -- only to what exceeds all that is.

the breath of one who is singing (virtual)

bowie / brecht / bucky / blueprint

Fundamental Structures

Fuller/Kepes

David Bowie in Bertolt Brecht's "Baal"

"Her Leg" by Diane Williams

“I would do anything for my son,” she said. “But how little we know of what he really wants.”

Meanwhile, her arm would release me. She told me what she serves for meals.

“It’s all going to all work out,” my husband said. “She will love you as much as she loves me.”

His mother had a way of being strong, but not nasty. It was so sensuous. She and I both are short, short-haired women without eyeglasses. My husband has big eyes and he is large and muscular. I am very shy. His mother put her arm plus her leg around me—just live with it for a while. I, myself, how gladly I do.

Before long legend has it that when a partnership works, it is no accident. More accurately, more importantly, this illustrates this: I learn more about the arts and skills.

via Brooklyn Rail.

dead minimalism

Architects: Pedro Dias

Location: Monte Frio, Arganil, Portugal

Client: Familia Duarte

QUEEN bootleg

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (1993)

it's an earthquake in my heart

Goat Island Performance, 2001.

love, hatred, indifference

In order to properly grasp the triangle of love, hatred and indifference, one has to rely on the logic of the universal and its constitutive exception which only introduces existence. The truth of the universal proposition "Man is mortal" does not imply the existence of even one man, while the "less strong" proposition "There is at least one man who exists (i.e., some men exist)" implies their existence. Lacan draws from this the conclusion that we pass from universal proposition (which defines the content of a notion) to existence only through a proposition stating the existence of - not the at least one element of the universal genus which exists, but - at least one which is an exception to the universality in question. What this means with regard to love is that the universal proposition "I love you all" acquires the level of actual existence only if "there is at least one whom I hate" - the thesis abundantly confirmed by the fact that universal love for humanity always led to the brutal hatred of the (actually existing) exception, of the enemies of humanity. This hatred of the exception is the "truth" of universal love, in contrast to true love which can only emerge aganst the background - NOT of universal hatred, but - of universal indifference: I am indifferent towards All, the totality of the universe, and as such, I actually love YOU, the unique individual who stands/sticks out of this indifferent background. Love and hatred are thus not symmetrical: love emerges out of the universal indifference, while hatred emerges out of universal love. In short, we are dealing here again with the formulas of sexuation: "I do not love you all" is the only foundation of "there is nobody that I do not love," while "I love you all" necessarily relies on "I really hate some of you." "But I love you all," defended himself Erich Mielke, the Secret Police boss of the DDR - his universal love was obviously grounded in its constitutive exception, the hatred of the enemies of socialism.

-Slavoj Zizek, from Smashing the Neighbor's Face

intersect potential

Vatican, by Superstudio.

Estoy siempre pensando en ti

"Still Life with Half-Turned Woman and Questions" by Nicky Beer

after Merwin & Hammershoi

Q. So, what are you working on these days?
     A metaphor machine.
Q. What did you paint first?
     A table that glints with the self-assurance of a rack.
Q. And next?
     A bowl with the pale, rotund mien of a bureaucrat—it’s the ideal receptacle for a severed head.
     Then bottles, side by side, like the hard parallels of a double-barreled shotgun.
Q. What’s that hanging on the wall, to the left of the table?
     A mirror.
     A window.
     A sliding panel cut in the door of a solitary confinement cell.
     A gray eye gone rectangular with its own blindness.
Q. No really—what’s that on the wall?
     Another picture.
Q. Why is she turned away?
     Because she chose to wear the hex on her forehead.
     Because she failed to gleam.
     Because she interrupted.
Q. Why can’t you sleep?
     Why can’t you sleep?
Q. Why can’t I sleep?
     Because of all these little unfacings.

skull variations

Early 20th Century Masonic skull carving.

triadic ballet

"Corona" by Paul Celan

Aus der Hand frißt der Herbst mir sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde.
Wir schälen die Zeit aus den Nüssen und lehren sie gehn:
die Zeit kehrt zurück in die Schale.

Im Spiegel ist Sonntag,
im Traum wird geschlafen,
der Mund redet wahr.

Mein Aug steigt hinab zum Geschlecht der Geliebten:
wir sehen uns an,
wir sagen uns Dunkles,
wir lieben einander wie Mohn und Gedächtnis,
wir schlafen wie Wein in den Muscheln,
wie das Meer im Blutstrahl des Mondes.

Wir stehen umschlungen im Fenster, sie sehen uns zu von der Straße:
es ist Zeit, daß man weiß!
Es ist Zeit, daß der Stein sich zu blühen bequemt,
daß der Unrast ein Herz schlägt.
Es ist Zeit, daß es Zeit wird.

Es ist Zeit.

Out of my hand autumn eats its leaf: we are friends.
We shell time from the nuts and teach it to walk;
time goes back into its shell.

In the mirror it is Sunday,
in the dream there is sleeping,
the mouth speaks the truth.

My eye descends to the sex of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we whisper darkness to each other,
we love each other like poppy and memory,
we sleep like wine in the sea shells,
like the sea in the ray of blood of the moon.

We stand entwined in the window, they watch us from the street:
it is time the people knew.
It is time that the stone condescended to bloom,
that unrest inspired a heart to beat.
It is time that it became time.

It is time.

trans. Vivian Smith

Raum (remote drawings)

L'Aubette before its destruction during WW II.

Alistair Crowley 'remote drawing' of Boleskine house.

Recreation of Mondrian's atelier.

in mid-August

"Sometimes I'd like nothing better than to get away and come to Paris, to feel you touch my hand, how you touch me completely with flowers and then not to know yet again where you come from and where you are going.  To me you come from India or from a more distant dark, brown land, to me you are the desert and the sea and everything secretive. I know nothing about about and that is why I am often so afraid for you, I cannot imagine that you are doing the same things the rest of us are doing here, I should have a castle for us and bring you to me, so that you can be my enchanted lord, we will have many tapestries in it and music and invent love. I have often thought that "Corona" is your most beautiful poem, it is the most perfect anticipation of a moment where everything becomes marble and exists forever. But here it is not my "time".  I hunger for something that I will not get, everything is flat and vapid. Tired and used-up even before it is used.  In mid-August I will be in Paris just for a few days. Don't ask me why, but be there for me, for one evening, or two or three. Take me to the Seine, we want to look down into it for a long time until we've become small fish and recognize each other again."

 - Ingeborg Bachmann in a letter to Paul Celan, June 24, 1949. Trans. David Vickrey. 

from "The Cure by Love" by Kaja Silverman

Appearance is a complex event, and one that exceeds our usual explanatory categories. It is neither strictly subjective, nor strictly objective; rather, it occurs only where there is a "meeting" of look and world.

This is because although we alone can look in the way that releases the world into its Being, we do not ever ourselves initiate this action. On the contrary, when we light up the world in this way we are always responding to its own appeal to be so illuminated. Creatures and things might be said to intend toward appearance: to solicit the performance of the action in which we engage when we speak our language of desire. The Being that we confer upon creatures and things is thus paradoxically their essence; we do not so much "create" it as "disclose" it.

It is not only that we cannot by ourselves release other beings into their Being. We are also powerless by ourselves actually to see. Looking can take place only where there are perceptual forms. This is because it is only within the infinitely variegated bodies of other worldly beings that our desire can take shape. Without those bodies we would literally see nothing, no matter how strong the force of our desire. Appearance is therefore not just a disclosure; it is a co-disclosure-an event requiring two participants.

...


Although Freud himself tells us that we must love or fall ill, we are not accustomed to conceptualizing love as a cure. We are generally less aware of its medicinal properties than of its powers of intoxication. This is because we are accustomed to thinking in narcissistic ways about love. Hiroshima, mon amour encourages us to approach this topic from the other direction: from the direction of what is loved. It asks us to conceptualize love not in the form either of the aggrandizement or rapture of the one who loves, but rather in the form of care for the world. It suggests that creatures and things are in need of this care because without it they cannot help but suffer from the most serious of all maladies: invisibility.

or/ primitive structures, or/ machinic sisters

Carl Andre, Yuca 68. 1972. Xeroxed typewritten text.

Sophie Tauber-Arp and her sister, dressed in costumes that Tauber-Arp designed for an interpretive dance to a poem by Hugo Ball. 1916.

Sophie Tauerber-Arp, L'Aubette Stransbourg, 1928.

Primary Force

from The Psychology of Occult Phenomenon by Carl Jung.

A Joke About The Past

I will go back in time for you, he said, and stepped into the machine.

When, she replied.

Left hand with two gloves

(alphabet)

from Zdenek Tmej’s The Alphabet of Spiritual Emptiness, 1946.

Errata (proof)

- I had a dream last night that everything...
- What?
- I had a dream that...
- You dream?
- What?
- You said you had a dream last night.
- Yes.
- Prove it.
- Proof? Uh ... because our death is...uh...certain...so, dreams...uh...
- How is that proof?
- Well, we have limited time in the world, awake or otherwise. So...
- So the world is dreamt? Drawn forward, whirled, carved? The world is a quantum dot? A trove of household stuff? A green lawn in front of a hunting lodge? A distant horn? Sodden bodies in tulip beds? A touch of gold?

intersect potential

from "Blow Up" by Michelangelo Antonioni.

Catalogue

A catalogue arrived in the mail, from a store that had not yet been built. The man opened this catalogue, and searched for his favorite items, but they were not yet on any page. A sharp wind from the prairie pressed the man's shirt against his chest; he silently hoped that future catalogues would include things he loved.

The Flea

Sprung lenticular grace
addressing the sun-surface of your skin
with precise pacings,
I abandon myself to the concept of fullness:

The solar lightness of blood,
the pocked holiness of the moment.

park

What is a Philosopher

"That is perhaps an anachronistic question. But I will give a modern response. In the past one might have said it is a man who stands in wonder; today I would say, borrowing words from Georges Bataille, it is someone who is afraid."

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 49.

Tide

There was a brief gasp between the walls, as the fumigator pressed proprietary liquids behind the stove. The roaches had staked their claim, the kitchened wounds would not close, she thought. Imagined limbs scratched a comforting rhythm as the poison flowed from foot to brain. Or what passed for brain, anyway, buzzing frantically now beneath a heavy carapace. He would never have had the courage to do what was needed. The walls swelled into a mass grave, the house at war with itself. Against the scrabbling masses driven mad by the oceanic certainty of death, she alone stood in the tide, her feet rocking backwards with each terrible surge.

There was a thing that sometimes was useful, but often was not useful

There was a thing that often was useful, but sometimes was not useful.

from Varieties of Disturbance by Lydia Davis

What was happening to them was that every bad time produced a bad feeling that in turn produced several more bad times and several more bad feelings, so that their life together became crowded with bad times and bad feelings, so crowded that almost nothing else could grow in that dark field. But then she had a feeling of peace one morning that lingered from the evening before spent sewing while he sat reading in the next room. And a day or two later, she had a feeling of contentment that lingered in the morning from the evening before when he kept her company in the kitchen while she washed the dinner dishes. If the good times increased, she thought, each good time might produce a good feeling that would in turn produce several more good times that would produce several more good feelings. What she meant was that the good times might multiply perhaps as rapidly as the square of the square, or perhaps more rapidly, like mice, or like mushrooms springing up overnight from the scattered spore of a parent mushroom which in turn had sprung up overnight with a crowd of others from the scattered spore of a parent, until her life with him would be so crowded with good times that the good times might crowd out the bad as the bad times had by now almost crowded out the good.

halves

The Difference Between Despair - Emily Dickinson

The difference between Despair And Fear --
is like the One Between the instant of a Wreck
And when the Wreck has been --
The Mind is smooth -- no Motion --
Contented as the Eye
Upon the Forehead of a Bust --
That knows -- it cannot see --