Pensées

HOUELLEBECQ

In France, there are two classic authors for children, Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas. I always preferred Jules Verne. With Dumas, the whole historical thing bored me. Jules Verne had this exhaustive vision of the world that I liked. Everything in the world seemed to interest him. I was also very struck by the tales of Hans Christian Andersen. They upset me. And then there was Pif le chien, a comic book published by Editions Vaillant and sponsored by the Communist Party. I realize now when I reread it that there was a Communist bent to many of Pif’s adventures. For example, a prehistoric man would bring down the local sorcerer in single combat and explain to the tribe that they didn’t need a sorcerer and that there was no need to fear thunder. The series was very innovative and of exceptional quality. I read Baudelaire oddly early, when I was about thirteen, but Pascal was the shock of my life. I was fifteen. I was on a class trip to Germany, my first trip abroad, and strangely I had brought the Pensées of Pascal. I was terrified by this passage: “Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.” I think it affected me so deeply because I was raised by my grandparents. Suddenly I realized that they were going to die and probably soon. That’s when I discovered death.

potential architectures

George Frederic Watts, 'The Minotaur', 1885 (with modification graph)

Rilke: Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,

burst like a star: for here there is no place

that does not see you. You must change your life.

augmented floating-together

The idiotic savior would be the one who did not lead his life as the main character in his own story, but had rather exchanged places with his afterbirth in order to make space for its being-in-the-world as itself....Perhaps the idiot's wisdom lies in the fact that he descends to his intimate waste, the placental sister, in her forlornness? Would he rather continue her life for her than betray their common origins in a state of augmented floating-together?

- Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I

taurus chop minotaur

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Tourus-Chop-Minotaur/2745791

a list of unfinished ideas

Rewrite:  An island of cannibals, presided over by Schilling.

A task for props.

Cynics encourage the devouring of the old by the young.

Seize!

Eat your young.

Eat your elders.

Certainty!  (inside a rhombus green - the pedagogical space, limits)

OUGHT

Monument to the irrelevance of sense.

I now but blind

NEVER   FEAR
ALWAYS FEAR

In Praise of Love II

In Praise of Love

Do not pursue the past.
Do not lose yourself in the future.
The past no longer is.
The future has not yet come.
Looking deeply at life as it is.
In the very here and now, the practitioner dwells in stability and freedom.
We must be diligent today.
To wait until tomorrow is too late.
Death comes unexpectedly.
How can we bargain with it?
The sage calls a person who knows how to dwell in mindfulness night and day,
'one who knows the better way to live alone.'

          Bhaddekaratta Sutta (trans. Thich Naht Hahn)



When I lean on the shoulder of the woman I love, and can see, let’s say, the peace of twilight over a mountain landscape, gold-green fields, the shadow of trees, black-nosed sheep motionless behind hedges and the sun about to disappear behind craggy peaks, and know - not from the expression on her face, but from within the world as it is - that the woman I love is seeing the same world, and that this convergence is part of the world and that love constitutes precisely, at that very moment, the paradox of an identical difference, then love exists, and promises to continue to exist. The fact is she and I are now incorporated into this unique Subject, the Subject of love that views the panorama of the world through the prism of our difference, so this world can be conceived, be born, and not simply represent what fills my own individual gaze. Love is always the possibility of being present at the birth of the world. The birth of a child, if born from within love, is yet another example of this possibility. (26)
          Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love

VICTIM OF DEATH HOAX

George Eastman

To my friends: My work is done. Why wait?