altarpiece

Fragments II: Symbol

2012-01-26T10:13:00.012-07:00

blood flight by Jenny Hval

[The Parnassians] still treat their subjects as the old philosophers and orators did: that is, present things directly, whereas I think that they should be presented allusively. Poetry lies in the contemplation of tings, in the image emanating from the reveries which things arouse in us. They take something in its entirety and simply exhibit it; in so doing, they fall short of mystery; they fail to give our minds that exquisite joy which consists in believing that we are creating something. To name an object is largely to destroy poetic enjoyment, which comes from gradual divination. The ideal is to suggest the object. It is the perfect use of this mystery which constitutes symbol. An object must be gradually evoked in order to show a state of soul; or else, choose an object and from it elicit a state of soul by means of a series of decodings.

Attributed to Stéphane Mallarmé.

Iamblichus:

Granting, then, that ignorance and deception are faulty and impious, it does not follow that the offerings made to the gods and divine works are invalid, for it is not pure thought that unites theurgists to the gods. Indeed, what then would hinder those who are theoretical philosophers from enjoying a theurgic union with the gods? But the situation is not so: it is the accomplishment of acts not to be divulged and beyond all conception, and the power of unutterable symbols, understood solely by the gods that establishes theurgic union. For this reason, we do not bring about these things by thinking alone. If we did, their efficacy would be intellectual, and dependent on us. But neither assumption is true. For even when we are not engaged in thinking, the symbols themselves, by themselves, perform their appropriate work, and the ineffable power of the gods, to whom these symbols relate, itself recognizes the proper images of itself, not through being aroused by our thought.

New Mario Santiago Papasquiaro translations

2011-12-17T09:48:00.004-07:00

I have good news for fans of Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, Infrarealism, Roberto Bolaño, Mexican poetry, DIY publishing, book collecting, good poetry, and everything else under the sun:

La Ratona Cartonera, a small Mexican publishing group, has been working on several translations of poetry by Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. (See my translation of an interview with MSP here.) Their translation of the 538-line poem Advice from a disciple of Marx to a fan of Heidegger is available for $15, which includes shipping and a one-of-a-kind homemade cover:

The proceeds from these will help fund La Ratona's next MSP translation. If you want one, send me an e-mail () or comment here with your e-mail address. Then I will send you my friend Laura Darling's e-mail address, which you can use to contact her and pay for the book via PayPal.

Laura was kind enough to give me permission to post an excerpt from the translation:

Mario Santiago Papasquiaro

Advice from a disciple of Marx to a fan of Heidegger


To Roberto Bolano & Kyra Galvan comrades & poets

                                   for Claudia Kerik & my good fortune  at having known her

"...it's as well at times

To be reminded that nothing is lovely,

Not even in poetry, which is not the case."

W.H. Auden

The world comes to you in fragments / in splinters:

in a melancholy face you glimpse a brushstroke by Dürer

in someone happy the grimace of an amateur clown

in a tree: the tremble of birds sucking on its nape

in a flaming summer you catch pieces of the universe licking their faces

the moment in which an indescribable girl

                   tears her Oaxacan camisole

exactly next to the half-moon sweat of her armpits

& beyond the peel is the pulp / & like a strange gift of the eye

                                                                              the eyelash

Maybe not even carbon dating will be able to reconstruct

   the true facts

These are not the times in which a naturalist painter

ruminates on lunchtime excesses

between Swedish gymnastic movements

& without losing sight of the pinkish-blue hues of flowers he hadn't

    guessed at not even in his sweetest nightmares

We are actors of infinite acts

      & not precisely under the blue tongue

               of cinematographic lights

for instance today / you see how Antonioni passes by

                  with his customary camera

observed by those who prefer to bury their heads in the grass

to get drunk on smog or whatever / so they don't add

                                                               to the scandals

that already make public roads impassable

by those who've been born to be kissed at length by the sun

& its daily ambassadors

by those who speak of fabulous coitus /of females unbelievable

                                      in this geological age

of vibrations that would've made you a tenacious propagandist of Zen

                                                                                              Buddhism

by those who have once been saved

from the kind of accidents that the crime rags call substantial

& who by the way are not--for now--counted among the flowers of the

    Absurd

Sterility, mental and physical

2011-10-15T09:23:00.010-06:00

I apologize to the readers of altarpiece for its state of disrepair. I have begun a Ph.D. program in philosophy, so I spend most of my time thinking about things that are not suitable for presentation here. I'll try to keep posting as I can, but really altarpiece-style posts will probably become more rare (if that's possible).

Yesterday I went to Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum. Here is the only image I've been able to find online of my favorite piece there:

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Andy Warhol, 1984.

In reality it's about 8 feet tall. Each limb section has a different grain, a different texture. The color is reminiscent of x-ray images.

I was captivated by this, and stood looking at it for an embarrassingly long time, from different parts of the room. Basquiat's left arm in two positions gives the impression of a captured movement, is also reminiscent of da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. The pose is Michaelangelo's David.

The x-ray quality combined with the pasted together panels gives the impression of resurrection.

I asked myself whether I would have been so interested in the portrait if it hadn't been Basquiat. The head is the most awkwardly attached limb. The contrast is starker, the seam is more exact and thus more distracting. It's only the head the objects to its positioning. The tension between the head and the body reminds me of the tension between life and self. But it doesn't detract from the beauty of the human body, which doesn't seem to be the least bit disturbed by being cut up and put back together.

Interim diversion (Spinoza)

2011-08-30T19:51:00.003-06:00

Hogs is hogs

2011-07-28T14:32:00.011-06:00

Le Retour du Berger, Charles Jacque (1879-1959)

A scene of uncommon hilarity from Cormac McCarthy in Outer Dark:

On a good spring day he paused to rest at the side of the road. He had been walking for a long time and he had been hearing them for a long time before he knew what the sound was, a faint murmurous droning portending multitudes, locusts, the advent of primitive armies. He rose and went on until he reached the gap in the ridge and before long he could see the first of them coming along the road below him and then suddenly the entire valley was filled with hogs, a weltering sea of them that came smoking over the dusty plain and flowed undiminished into the narrows of the cut, fanning on the slopes in ragged shoals like the harried outer guard of schooled fish and here and there upright and cursing among them and laboring with poles the drovers, gaunt and fever-eyed with incredible rag costumes and wild hair.
     Holme left the road and clambered up the rocky slope to give them leeway. The first of the drovers was beating his way obliquely across the herd toward him, the hogs flaring and squealing and closing behind him again like syrup. When he gained the open ground he came along easily, smiling up to where Holme sat on a rock with his feet dangling and looking down with no little wonder at this spectacle.
     Howdy neighbor, called out the drover. Sweet day, ain't she?
     It is, he said. Whereabouts are ye headed with them hogs if you don't care for me astin?
     Crost the mountain to Charlestown.
     Holme shook his head reverently. That there is the damndest sight of hogs ever I seen, he said. How many ye got?
     The drover had come about the base of the rock and was now standing looking down with Holme at the passing hogs. God hisself don't know, he said solemnly.
     Well it's a bunch.
     They Lord, said the drover, they just now commencin to come in sight. He passed his stave from the crook of one arm to the other and cocked one foot on the ledge of rock, his sparse whiskers fluttering in the mountain wind, leaning forward and watching the howling polychrome tide of hogs that glutted the valley from wall to wall as might any chance traveler a thing of interest.
     They's more than one mulefoot in that lot, he said.
     What?
     Mulefoot. I calculate they's several hunnerd head of them alone and they ain't no common hog to come upon.
     What's a mulefoot? Holme said.
     The drover squinted professionally. Mountain hog from north of here. You ain't never seen one?
     No.
     Got a foot like a mule.
     You mean they ain't got a split hoof?
     Nary split to it.
     I ain't never seen no such hog as that, Holme said.
     I ain't surprised, the drover said. But ye can see one here if you've a mind to.
     I'd admire to, Holme said.
     The drover shifted his stave again. Seems like that don't agree with the bible, what would you say?
     About what?
     About them hogs. Bein unclean on account of they got a split foot.
     I ain't never heard that, Holme said.
     I heard it preached in a sermon one time. Feller knowed right smart about the subject. Said the devil had a foot like a hog's. He laid claim it was in the bible so I reckon it's so.
     I reckon.
     He said a jew wouldn't eat hogmeat on account of it.
     What's a jew?
     That's one of them old-timey people from in the bible. But that still don't say nothin about a mulefoot hog does it? What about him?
     I don't know, Holme said. What about him?
     Well is he a hog or ain't he? Accordin to the bible.
     I'd say a hog was a hog if he didn't have nary feet a-tall.
     I might do it myself, the drover said, because if he was to have feet you'd look for em to be hog's feet. Like if ye had a hog didn't have no head you'd know it for a hog anyways. But if ye seen one walkin around with a mule's head on him ye might be puzzled.
     That's true, Holme allowed.
     Yessir. Makes ye wonder some about the bible and about hogs too, don't it?
     Yes, Holme said.
     I've studied it a good deal and I cain't come to no conclusions about it one way or the other.
     No.
     The drover stroked his whiskers and nodded his head. Hogs is a mystery by theyselves, he said. What can a feller know about one? Not a whole lot. I've run with hogs since I was just a shirttail and I ain't never come to no real understandin of em. and I don't doubt but what other folks has had the same experience. A hog is a hog. Pure and simple. And that's about all ye can say about him. And smart, don't think they ain't. Smart as the devil. And don't be fooled by one that ain't got nary clove foot cause he's devilish too.
     I guess hogs is hogs, Holme said.
     The drover spat and nodded. That's what I've always maintained, he said.

“The last remaining herd of Mulefoot Hogs in the USA has been conserved by an individual farmer.” [source]

“Hog Drovers” as sung by Ollie Gilbert, Mountain View, Arkansas on October 28, 1969. [source] [see also]

Le Porcher, Charles Joshua Chaplin (1825-1891)

Part II: The Sea

2011-05-17T21:58:00.020-06:00

The following is the second part of a multi-part post. The post can stand alone, but if you would like to begin at the beginning, click here for Part I.

Socrates: The awe which I always feel, Protarchus, about the names of the gods is more than human--it exceeds all other fears.

IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
		      A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers.  As he rose and fell
He passes the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
		     Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl, 1963

(source)

Tiresias: If I did not know at least this, I would not be a priest. Take a boy who bathes in the Asopus. It is a summer morning. The boy comes out of the water, goes back in happily, dives and dives again, then he is taken ill and drowns. What do the gods have to do with this? Should he attribute his end to the gods or else the pleasure he enjoyed? Neither the one nor the other. Something happened––which is neither good nor evil, something which has no name––then the gods will give it a name.
Oedipus: And to give a name, to explain things, seems little to you, Tiresias?
Tiresias: You are young, Oedipus, and like the gods who are young you yourself clear up things and name them. You still don’t know that beneath the earth there is stone, and that the bluest sky is the emptiest. For him who like me does not see, all things are a blow, nothing else.

--From “The Blind,” a dialogue by Cesare Pavese

Jacob Isaakszoon van Ruisdael, Rough Sea at a Jetty, c. 1650

Black, white, gangrene

2011-04-17T19:44:00.018-06:00

Sara Hayward, "Two Figures I," 2011.

The following is excerpted from "Poetry Black, Poetry White", an essay by René Daumal. When you are done with this post, please read the whole thing: click here!

The black poet tastes every pleasure, adorns himself in every ornament, exercises every power - in his imagination. The white poet prefers reality, even paltry reality, to these rich lies. His work is an incessant struggle against pride, imagination and laziness. Accepting his gift, even if he suffers from it and suffers from suffering, he seeks to make it serve ends greater than his selfish desires: the as-yet-unknown cause of this gift.

...

Every poem is born of a seed, dark at first, which we must make luminous for it to produce fruits of light. ... To make it shine, one must create silence, for this seed is the Thing-to-be-said itself, the central emotion that seeks to express itself through my whole machine. ... Silence to word games, memorized lines, memories fortuitously assembled; silence to ambition, to the desire to shine - for only light shines by itself; silence to self-flattery and self-pity; silence to the rooster who thinks he makes the sun rise! ... It is very difficult, but each little effort receives a little glimmer of light in reward. The Thing-to-be-said then appears in its most intimate form, as an eternal certainty - a pinpoint of light containing the immensity of the desire for Being.

...

I have said what one must do to become a white poet. As if it were that easy! Even in prose, in ordinary speech and writing (as in all aspects of my daily life), all that I produce is grey, salt-and-pepper, soiled, a mixture of light and darkness. And so I take up the struggle after the fact. I re-read myself. In my sentences, I see words, expressions, interferences that do not serve the Thing-to-be-said: an image that meant to be strange, a pun that thought it was funny, the pedantry of a certain prig who would do better to stay seated at his desk instead of coming to play the fipple flute in my string quartet. And remarkably enough, it is simultaneously a mistake in taste, style, or even syntax. Language itself seems set up in such a way as to detect the intruders for me. Few mistakes are purely technical. Almost all of them are my mistakes. And I cross out, and I correct, with the joy one can have at cutting a gangrenous limb from one's body.

Jean Cocteau:

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses. What he does is to subject them to treatment which ensures their having the finest colour and the sweetest scent.

and

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

(The first quote is from, at least, Professional Secrets. I haven't been able to source the second one precisely, but it's mentioned in an interview Cocteau gave for the Paris Review, published in 1964, and Cocteau does not disagree that he said it. The interview can (and must!) be read in its entirety here. As with everything Cocteau touches, it's full of truth and magic.)

From Matthias Grünewald's "Isenheim Altarpiece", 1506-1515

Holy Sonnet IV.

O, my black soul, now thou art summoned
By sickness, Death's herald and champion ;
Thou'rt like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done
Treason, and durst not turn to whence he's fled ;
Or like a thief, which till death's doom be read,
Wisheth himself deliver'd from prison,
But damn'd and haled to execution,
Wisheth that still he might be imprisoned.
Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack ;
But who shall give thee that grace to begin ?
O, make thyself with holy mourning black,
And red with blushing, as thou art with sin ;
Or wash thee in Christ's blood, which hath this might,
That being red, it dyes red souls to white.

--John Donne

Detail from Isenheim Altarpiece. Click for enlarged version. Incidentally, the filename is failureisnotanoption.jpg. That's how I found it; I thought it was funny so I left it that way.

Interim diversion (Nude)

2011-03-21T12:59:00.005-06:00

Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Mario Santiago Papasquiaro interview, English

2011-01-27T14:20:00.017-07:00

The following is a translation of a 1995 interview with Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, co-founder of the Mexican Infrarealist poetry movement. The original can be found here, among other places.

The dash-underlined bits of text in the interview are not links, but hovering over them for a moment with the mouse will result in additional information appearing. I have chosen this method in lieu of footnotes, which can be difficult to deal with online.

With regard to punctuation, it has mostly been preserved as it was given in the original linked above, except in cases where clarity was seriously lacking. There are a few mysterious quotations and line breaks that appeared in the original which are preserved here.

By: Oscar Enrique Ornellas
Published in El Financiero, cultural section, 29 March 1995.

He wasn't born on Guerrillera Street in Colonia Aurora, nor on Ché Guevara Street in Benito Juárez. He assures me that he first saw light "in a clinic that doesn’t exist anymore, in Rafael Guillén Alley in Mixcoac." Mario Santiago Papasquiaro (Mexico, 1953) doesn't care that this alley is really called Guillain. Details. He is better than Bukowski, the true poet of Mixcoac, and will put anyone in his place, starting with Octavio Paz. "Víctor Roura is garbage (and Musacchio too)." Founder of Infrarealism, Santiago Papasquiaro is the author of "Advice from a disciple of Marx to a Heidegger fanatic" (in the volume Muchachos desnudos bajo el arcoíris de fuego [Boys Naked under the Rainbow of Fire], published by Editorial Extemporáneos). For Santiago, what's really important is friendship and, confirming this, he has now published Beso eterno [Eternal Kiss] (published by Al Este del Paraíso), a book of poems that will appear tonight at 7:30 at the Confederación de Educadores Americanos. In a strange pandemonium of words, Papasquiaro met with the cultural section in some place in Tlatelolco.

Why is your book called Beso eterno?
Read the book and then ask me questions.

But you wrote—
It's called Beso eterno in honor of my two year-old daughter, Nadja. That poem was written before she was born. I have three children… but, look, this isn't a psychiatry session… Nadja Clítoris was born years after I had decided to call it that. It's a prophetic poem. Back then I lived in Pensil. That was was when I started to work at El Financiero. There I met Marco [Lara Klahr], [Víctor] Roura, Mike... Then they fired me from this newspaper you work for.

Why did you take so long to publish again?
I'm 41. My first public reading was in 1973, when I was 19. I've been writing since I was a kid, but the first time I presented my writing publicly was after my grandmother died. I started in March of 1971 at the the poetry workshop at the University [Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México], which was coordinated by Juan Bañuelos on the tenth floor of the rectory, and in December of the same year, I don't know why, Oscar Olivia (who was then like director of literature in the School of Fine Arts) invited me to participate in the Manuel Acuña Centennial in the Fine Arts building. It was my first public reading... I've always lived outside the world and didn't understand why they invited me to do a reading in Fine Arts and on top of that paid me 300 pesos, which, for me, seemed absurd. I didn't get that they would pay someone to read a poem. And, besides, it was my first commissioned poem. Oscar Olivia told me: You have fifteen days, can you do it? And he was dangling the 300 pesos in front of only me and I told him hell yes, and I wrote a poem about 60 pages long. It was my first long-winded poem. My first solo reading was in the Museo de San Carlos on May 3rd of 1974. I wasn't born yesterday. And in 1975 I founded the Mexican Infrarealist movement. Around then they started to get sick of me, because I was confronting Pacheco, Monsiváis, everyone I know of. No one wants to give me a job. For four years I have no income. Sergio Mondragón has refused to give me a job because I'm an Infrarealist. They say I sabotage readings. They say the Infrarealists beat people up. And those idiots allege that I don't know how to write. Motherfuckers. I am l’ecrivain. But that's not important. Better if I read you some things...

What does Infrarealist mean.
Uh, no, you better find out yourself.

You are the founder...
Me and my friends. What happened is that I was a student leader, I founded the high school protest committee in San Ildefonso. I know all the history of guerrilla warfare and the Dirty War... I was Marxist-Leninist... At 19, I had the opportunity to meet José Revueltas and Efraín Huerta in their respective houses. I am their son. That's where I got my pseudonym, Santiago Papasquiaro, the village in Durango where the Revueltas brothers were born... For me, there are two fundamental clans, Revueltas and Flores Magón. I also have training in anarchy, a teacher in middle school told me to investigate the Flores Magón brothers and I liked it. I think they are the most illustrious families that have ever existed in Mexico. But all that doesn't mean shit...

So, would you like to talk about your work?
No, well, ask, ask... Do your job...

Last night this poem to Felipe was brought to my attention. Who was Felipe?
They killed Felipe Rojas 7 years ago. They put him on a farm for alcoholics in Puebla. Felipe is the best actor I have known in my life. And I didn't see it on stage or anything. Felipe is one of my dead, because I have many dead, I've written to some of them...
"In my 23 years of writing without stopping because I dedicated myself to it (putting up with all the bumps) I have published, at a guess, seventy-something poems, scattered all over the place... I lived in Barcelona, in Paris, in Vienna, and have published in Argentina, in Spain, in the United States, in Paris I gave readings. But with Beso eterno is the first time I decide the order of the poems. Often they've been published without my permission. I've never charged for publication, because they never made any money. Here, for example, you have an anthology Roberto [Bolaño] and I made in 1975, with a prologue by Efraín Huerta where he names me "Mario on the way to Santiago"... If anyone knows about Efraín Huerta it's me...

You haven't written poems against them like those that you did for Octavio Paz, Elenita Poniatowska, or Monsiváis and that nobody wanted to publish, right?
No, no, the poem for Efraín Huerta is a love poem. It's his biography. If we meet again someday I'll show it to you. It was published in El Financiero. It's a love poem. About what I know of his life because he told it to me. It's one of my most fantastic poems. Why haven't I published it in a book? Because I haven't had the chance. Why these ten poems in Beso eterno and no others, if I have these mountains of poems? Well, because that's how things went. I respected the idea that Marco Lara suggested to me. He's my amigo and everything else. And we're going to make some noise! I know how to respect a structure. And if you read the book carefully you'll notice that it's made up entirely of tributes to people. They're apparitions of beings...
"I have another, bigger book [Aullido de cisne (Swan's Howl)] that I've risked with CONACULTA. But I think they're going to reject me, because I'm on the black list. Although, also, the best thing is to publish these books underground..."

Getting back to your homages in the book, "Want to dance / baby?" is dedicated to "the nurturing memory of Miles Davis." What nourishment did the trumpeter contribute?
I heard about Miles Davis in Paris with my friend Elías Durán, a poet of the Hora Zero movement in Peru, which is another of my inspirations. In reality I am a Peruvian poet born in Mexico. Peru's Hora Zero is the most radical Latin American poetic movement of this century; and we founded the Infrarealist movement (as kids less than 20) immediately when we heard about those guys... In Paris I lived in poverty. When I returned to Mexico I weighed 40 kilos [80 lbs.]. But I wasn't weak, because I had always walked a lot, there and in this damn whore city... And Elías Durán was a friend, we stole tapes from Fnacs, these huge stores they have in Paris. We were a couple of badasses. We understood each other with one look. They never caught us, but what was the question?

Miles Davis.
Because of Elías Durán. In the tiny room where he lived I heard Miles Davis for the first time. I don't know shit about the club. It's the nurturing memory. It was the stealing and all that. Otherwise, you're not alive, you can fuck off.

Are you The Poet, as the painter Rodolfo Zanabria called you?
Zanabria's... But no, I'm not going to talk about Rodolfo's life because right now I'm writing the introduction to his catalog. He's going to have an exposition in the Carrillo Gil [Museum]... He's the one who gave me this title of Le poète. One day when I was in New York he sent me a postcard of the skyscrapers, and on the envelope, on the outside, instead of putting "señor" and all that shit, he put "to the poet," in French, because he's very Frenchy. My reply is in this poem... but, it didn't really come out well in Marco Lara's edition [of the poem book], did it? He's pissed that I didn't think he could become an editor, least of all an editor of underground poetry. Because that's what we are...

Your friends, your daughter... the punk rebel, the love of your life, who has the most distinguished place in your life?
My wife, Rebeca. We met on the 29th of August, 1987 at a reading that I gave in the cafeteria of the Fine Arts building. Lots of my friends have died because they didn't have anyone tying them down. I've been lucky enough to have some women who believed in me. Otherwise, I would have already been gone, too.

Mario Santiago Papasquiaro
Picture from here, a site with lots of other MSP pictures and some poems (in Spanish).

See also the First Infrarealist Manifesto.

My attention was drawn to this interview by this post at another blog, which contains some other links to things about Bolaño and Infrarealism.

REMAINDER

2011-01-23T22:19:00.005-07:00

3D model of Future London

I remembered that my windscreen washer reservoir was empty and I asked him for some fill-up. [...] Before I drove off I pushed the windscreen spurter button to make sure it worked. Liquid should have squired out onto the glass, but nothing happened. I pushed it some more. Still nothing. I got out, opened the bonnet again and checked the reservoir. It was empty.

"It's all gone!" I said.

The boys peered in. The oldest one got down on his knees and looked under the car.

"There's no patch," he said. "It hasn't leaked. It should be there." He turned to the middling boy and said: "Go get another bottle."

Another bottle was brought out and poured into the reservoir. Once more I climbed inside the car and pressed the spurter button. Once more nothing happened--and once more, when we looked inside the reservoir, we found it empty.

"Two litres!" I said. "Where has it all gone?"

They'd vaporized, evaporated. And do you know what? It felt wonderful. Don't ask me why: it just did. It was as though I'd just witnessed a miracle: matter--these two litres of liquid--becoming un-matter--not surplus matter, mess or clutter, but pure, bodiless blueness. Transubstantiated. I looked up at the sky: it was blue and endless. I looked back at the boy. His overalls and face were covered in smears. He'd taken on these smears so that the miracle could happen, like a Christian martyr being flagellated, crucified, scrawled over with stigmata. I felt elated--elated and inspired.

"If only..." I started, but paused.

"What?" he asked.

"If only everything could..."

I trailed off again. I knew what I meant. I stood there looking at his grubby face and told him:

"Thank you."

Then I got into the car and turned the ignition key in its slot. The engine caught--and as it did, a torrent of blue liquid burst out of the dashboard and cascaded down. It gushed from the radio, the heating panel, the hazard-lights switch and the speedometer and mileage counter. It gushed all over me: my shirt, my legs, my groin.

The brilliance of Tom McCarthy's Remainder lies not in the way it is written, but in the way it writes the reader. One must usually come upon books at the right time in life in order to get the most out of them. How this typically happens is a mysterious combination of instinct, guesswork, and rereading. Remainder, however, manages to create a perfect space for itself, and by the time one has finished reading it, one's life has become right for the book. Reality has become one with fiction, realizing the book's theme in a way that many of Tom McCarthy's predecessors did not, uncovering the sublime where once there was only gimmick.

They're like bunnies in headlights: frozen. You step in and move them gently away from the counters, get them to lie down. You use their shock to create a... bridge, a... a suspension in which you can operate. A little enclave, a defile.

One of the images that appeared in an image search for "scale model of London".

Appendix to Part I: Blind Prophets

2010-12-02T18:38:00.001-07:00

This is an appendix to the previous post. See also: Part II.

In research for the previous post, I came across this 1885 translation of Oedipus the King by E. D. A. Morshead. (As an aside, his Wikipedia entry is rather amusing.) The translation holds a strict meter, which I find infinitely preferable to the overly Americanized Fagles translation that is so common.

Walter Kaufmann's translation of the epigram (see image above) from Goethe:

Experience it deep in your mind,
As with a curse I now descend!
The human being is, his life long, blind;
Thus, Faustus, you shall meet your end.

Max Ernst, Oedipus Rex, 1922 (click for larger image).

Exhibit A:

Tiresias:
Alack, alack, how deadly to be wise
Where wisdom profits not!

Exhibit B:

Oedipus:
Thou, foster-child of timeless night, nor me
Nor any man who sees the sun canst harm.

(This in particular shows the inferiority of Fagles, who has: "Blind, / lost in the night, endless night that nursed you! / You can't hurt me or anyone else who sees the light-- / you can never touch me.")

Exhibit C:

Tiresias:
A gale of seeming fortune sped thee on
But to a hell for harbour.

Two images of Homer, another blind prophet:

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Homer and his Guide, 1874. Someone has paired this painting with a musical piece from The Thin Red Line: click here. (Also a larger version of the painting on that site.)

The idea that Homer was blind may have something to do with the similarity of the name to the word homeros, which meant "blind" in some ancient dialects.

Click for larger image. Photo source unknown.

Part I: Blindness

2010-11-22T15:04:00.013-07:00

This is part 1 of a multi-part post. See also: Appendix to Part I, Part II.

"Had it been the right eye," said he, "I could easily have cured it; but the wounds of the left eye are incurable."

The following is from a letter sent by Voltaire to the Marquise du Deffand, who had gone blind shortly before.

Colmar, March 3, 1754
Your letter, madam, touched me more deeply than you can imagine, and I assure you my eyes were wet when I read what had happened to yours. I had gathered, from M. de Formont's letter, that you were, so to speak, in the dusk but not in complete darkness...

Therefore, dear madam, I only regretted that your eyes had lost their beauty: and I was sure you were enough of a philosopher to console yourself for that: but, if you have lost your sight, I pity you very deeply...I agree with you that life is not worth much: we only endure it from an almost invincible instinct which nature has planted in us: to this instinct she has added the bottom of Pandora's box--hope.

Only when hope is absolutely lacking, or when an unbearable depression settles down upon us, do we triumph over the natural impulse to hug the chains that bind us to life: and gather courage to leave an ill-built house which we can never hope to repair. Two people in the country where I now am have elected to do this.

One of these two philosophers is a girl of eighteen, whose brain had been turned by the Jesuits, and who, to rid herself of them, set out for the next world. That is a thing I shall not do, or at any rate not yet, for I am in receipt of annuities from two potentates, and I should be inconsolable if by my death I enriched two crowned heads.

If you, madam, have a pension from the King, be exceedingly careful of yourself, eat little, go to bed early, and live to be a hundred.

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
Doth God exact day-labour, light denied,
I fondly ask; But patience to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts, who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best, his State
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o're Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.

-John Milton, "On His Blindness," 1655

Image: "Blindness" by Paul Strand, 1916

From Diderot's Letter on the Blind, 1749. Diderot describes an interview with a blind man from Puiseaux [emphasis added]:

He asked us if only persons who were called naturalists could see with the microscope, and if only astronomers could see with the telescope; if the instrument for enlarging objects were bigger than that for diminishing them; if that which brings them nearer were shorter than that for removing them farther off. But what puzzled him was that the other self, which according to him the mirror represents in relief, should not be tactile.

"So this little instrument," said he, "sets two senses to contradict one another; a more perfect instrument would perhaps reconcile these contradictions, without the object being ever more real for that, and perhaps a third instrument, still more perfect and less illusory, would cause these contradictions to disappear and show us our error."

Polish poster for Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, 1959

30,000 feet

2010-11-10T11:38:00.006-07:00

GOOSE, n. A bird that supplies quills for writing. These, by some occult process of nature, are penetrated and suffused with various degrees of the bird's intellectual energies and emotional character, so that when inked and drawn mechanically across paper by a person called an "author," there results a very fair and accurate transcript of the fowl's thought and feeling. The difference in geese, as discovered by this ingenious method, is considerable: many are found to have only trivial and insignificant powers, but some are seen to be very great geese indeed.
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Bar-Headed Geese

Nuestro Señor de La Mancha

2010-10-21T21:01:00.009-06:00

In honor of the Festival Internacional Cervantino, currently in its 38th year, and in honor of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, whose celebration needs no occasion, the following:

Detail of sculpture in Alcalá de Henares, Cervantes' birthplace. [Source]

If by chance these gentlemen should wish to know who is the valorous one that served them so, let your worship tell them that it is the famous Don Quixote of La Mancha, who is otherwise called the Knight of the Rueful Figure.

Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Alcalá de Henares

Madrid, 1979 [Source]

Detail of the above.

Don Quixote of Havana

Detail of above.

Don Quixote, relief by Anna Hyatt Huntington, Audubon Terrace, New York

Guanajuato, Mexico, home of Cervantino. (The full sculpture includes Sancho Panza, but there seems to exist no good photo of the entire thing online.)

On Scholarship

2010-09-28T15:50:00.009-06:00

Albrecht Dürer, Saint Jerome in his Study, 1514

A Graduate Record Examination (GRE) "Issue task" matching game. The test takers were to present their perspectives on the following issue:

It is unfortunate that today's educators place so much emphasis on finding out what students want to include in the curriculum and then giving it to them. It is the educator's duty to determine the curriculum and the students' duty to study what is presented to them.

Below, sample phrases come from essays that received scores of 5 and 6 (6 is the highest possible score). Five of the comments relate to those two essays, and one comment relates to a third essay, which received a score of 1 (the lowest).

Phrase from sample essay
Grader's comment
1. As an elementary educator, I believe this stance is extremist. Educators and the public must come to a middle road.
A. The discussion is generally confusing and barely addresses the central issue presented in the topic.
2. Hard work must be lauded, while freeloaders are punished.
B. This is an insightful, well-articulated discussion of curricular responsibility and the larger issue of academic responsibility.
3. Content and performance standards (i.e. curricula) need to be developed by the district's educators as a map for teachers. When educators provide students with choices WITHIN the map of curriculum, students relish in the freedom and take ownership for their learning.
C. Language use is generally precise and effective, and sentence structure is well controlled.
4. Of course, any school in which the students decide "what goes" is bound to have problems controlling students. Once the educators, be they administrators or teachers, are under the control of students, even a democratic situation would be like holding royalty acountable to the mob.
D. The examples are varied and used effectively to further support the writer's position.
5. Presently, students hear for hours that they should not forget to use a condom in the heat of the moment, and educators think the message gets through, while half the kids can't even remember to bring a pencil to class.
E. The careful choice of words and carefully structured paragraphs help unify the structure of the argument.
6. I do NOT think it is unfortunate that today's educators emphasize students' interests. It IS our duty, however, to provide the parameters for their education.
F. This response presents a well-developed analysis of the issue and displays strong control of the elements of writing.

Answers:
Essay 1 (scored 6): 2, 4, 5, & B, C, D
Essay 2 (scored 5): 1, 3, 6, & E, F
Essay 3 (scored 1): A

The young scholar was praised by friends and acquaintances as one of the clearest, most powerful, and most incisive writers living. It was inexplicable, therefore, that he continued to receive low scores on the writing sections of the Examination, and all the more so given that his scores on the verbal and quantitative multiple choice sections were among the highest achievable. Tragically, there was no way to circumvent the Examination, and the young scholar was barred from living the life he had imagined for himself. Settling for a life of intellectual isolation, he took up a manual craft, which provided a meager existence and afforded some time for private study. The scholar died, when, soon afterward, his lungs began to turn to glass. When he drew his last breath, the glass shattered, leaving no part of him intact for scrutiny.

Here am I shedding one of my life-skins, and all they will say is, 'Bernard is spending ten days in Rome.'

2010-09-07T11:36:00.004-06:00

"Now I sit on a stone seat in these gardens surveying the eternal city, and the little man who was shaving in London five days ago looks already like a heap of old clothes. [...] I sit here like a convalescent, like a very simple man who knows only words of one syllable. 'The sun is hot,' I say. 'The wind is cold.' I feel myself carried round like an insect on top of the earth and could swear that, sitting here, I feel its hardness, its turning movement. I have no desire to go the opposite way from the earth. Could I prolong this sense another six inches I have a foreboding that I should touch some queer territory. But I have a very limited proboscis. I never wish to prolong these states of detachment; I dislike them; I also despise them. I do not wish to be a man who sits for fifty years on the same spot thinking of his navel. I wish to be harnessed to a cart, a vegetable-cart that rattles over the cobbles."

- Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Image: "Virginia Woolf" by Vanessa Bell, c. 1912

I expose myself to that risk voluntarily.

2010-09-07T11:07:00.011-06:00

I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul. Let them dare, then, to bring me before a court of law and let the enquiry take place in broad daylight! I am waiting.

- Émile Zola, J'accuse!

"The Prisoner" by Nikolai Alexandrovich Yaroshenko, 1878 ^[1]

A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.

- Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

"Zola Insulted" by Henry de Groux, date unknown ^[2]

It appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. The judge who sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment recognizes all the emotions and potentialities of the murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer's voice as his own, is at the next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons.

- Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

"La Pendue" ("The Hanged") by Antonin Artaud, 1945 ^[3]

[1] Image taken from this page, where an oddly-phrased comment is good for a laugh: "[Yaroshenko's] genre paintings depict torture, struggles, fruit, bathing suits, and other hardships faced in Russia."

[2] From Dreyfus Rehabilitated: "painting by Henri Degroux depicting the hatred of the masses, a present to the writer from his admirers".

[3] Image taken from an excellent blog called A Journey Round My Skull; includes a link to a larger version of the image.

Thy Real Friend and Loving Neighbour

2010-07-13T09:51:00.018-06:00

Note: If you view this only in an RSS reader, you will miss the full effect. Please view the piece normally by clicking here.

There is nothing of which we are apt to be so lavish as Time, and about which we ought to be more solicitous; since without it we can do nothing in this World. Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst; and for which God will certainly most strictly reckon with us, when Time shall be no more.

- William Penn

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1855

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2009

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Schiele, Miller, Matisse

2010-06-19T18:42:00.008-06:00

Egon Schiele, Zurückgelehnte Frau, or Two Women, 1915

I have never seen a place like Paris for varieties of sexual provender. As soon as a woman loses a front tooth or an eye or a leg she goes on the loose. In America she'd starve to death if she had nothing to recommend her but a mutilation. Here it is different. A missing tooth or a nose eaten away or a fallen womb, any misfortune that aggravates the natural homeliness of the female, seems to be regarded as an added spice, a stimulant for the jaded appetites of the male.

I am speaking naturally of that world which is peculiar to the big cities, the world of men and women whose last drop of juice has been squeezed out by the machine--the martyrs of modern progress. It is this mass of bones and collar buttons which the painter finds so difficult to put flesh on.

Henri Matisse, La Bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life), 1906

It is only later, in the afternoon, when I find myself in an art gallery on the Rue de Sèze, surrounded by the men and women of Matisse, that I am drawn back again to the proper precincts of the human world. On the threshold of that big hall whose walls are now ablaze, I pause a moment to recover from the shock which one experiences when the habitual gray of the world is rent asunder and the color of life splashes forth in song and poem. I find myself in a world so natural, so complete, that I am lost.
[...]
In every poem by Matisse there is the history of a particle of human flesh which refused the consummation of death. The whole run of flesh, from hair to nails, expresses the miracle of breathing, as if the inner eye, in its thirst for a greater reality, had converted the pores of the flesh into hungry seeing mouths. [...] He is a bright sage, a dancing seer who, with a sweep of the brush, removes the ugly scaffold to which the body of man is chained by the incontrovertible facts of life. He it is, if any man today possesses the gift, who knows where to dissolve the human figure, who has the courage to sacrifice an harmonious line in order to detect the rhythm and murmur of the blood, who takes the light that has been refracted inside him and lets it flood the keyboard of color. Behind the minutiae, the chaos, the mockery of life, he detects the invisible pattern; he announces his discoveries in the metaphysical pigment of space.

Henri Matisse, La Leçon de Musique (The Music Lesson), 1917

Text: Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

The Storm & The Calm

2010-06-16T15:27:00.007-06:00

Gustave Courbet, The Calm Sea

After brief search, I was unable to find John Donne's The Storm and The Calm presented together anywhere online. The Calm appears to be more famous than The Storm, though the two form a sort of poetic diptych. In the versions presented below (in which the English has been modernized), I have taken the liberty of emboldening several of my favorite passages.

===

(To Mr. Christopher Brooke)

The Storm

Thou which art I, ('tis nothing to be so)
Thou which art still thyself, by these shalt know
Part of our passage; and, a hand, or eye
By Hilliard drawn, is worth an history,
By a worse painter made; and (without pride)
When by thy judgment they are dignified,
My lines are such: 'tis the preeminence
Of friendship only to impute excellence.
England to whom we owe, what we be, and have,
Sad that her sons did seek a foreign grave
(For, Fate's, or Fortune's drifts none can soothsay,
Honour and misery have one face and way)
From out her pregnant entrails signed a wind
Which at th' air's middle marble room did find
Such strong resistance, that itself it threw
Downard again; and so when it did view
How in the port, our fleet dear time did leese,
Withering like prisoners, which lie but for fees,
Mildly it kissed our sails, and, fresh and sweet,
As to a stomach starved, whose insides meet,
Meat comes, it came; and swole our sails, when we
So joyed, as Sara her swelling joyed to see.
But 'twas but so kind, as our countrymen,
Which bring friends one day's way, and leave them then.
Then like two mighty kings, which dwelling far
Asunder, meet against a third to war,
The south and west winds joined, and, as they blew,
Waves like a rolling trench before them threw.
Sooner than you read this line, did the gale,
Like a shot, not feared till felt, our sails assail;
And what at first was called a gust, the same
Hath now a storm's, anon a tempest's name.
Jonas, I pity thee, and curse those men,
Who when the storm raged most, did wake thee then;
Sleep is pain's easiest salve, and doth fulfil
All offices of death, except to kill.
But when I waked, I saw, that I saw not.
I, and the sun, which should teach me had forgot
East, west, day night, and I could only say,
If the world had lasted, now it had been day.
Thousands our noises were, yet we 'mongst all
Could none by his right name, but thunder all:
Lightning was all our light, and it rained more
Than if the sun had drunk the sea before.
Some coffined in their cabins lie, equally
Grieved that they are not dead, and yet must die.
And as sin-burdened souls from graves will creep,
At the last day, some forth their cabins peep:
And tremblingly ask what news, and do hear so,
Like jealous husbands, what they would not know.
Some sitting on the hatches, would seem there,
With hideous gazing to fear away fear.
Then note they the ship's sicknesses, the mast
Shaked with this ague, and the hold and waist
With a salt dropsy clogged, and all our tacklings
Snapping, like too high stretched treble strings.
And from our tottered sails, rags drop down so,
As from one hanged in chains, a year ago.
Even our ordnance placed for our defence,
Strive to break loose, and 'scape away from thence.
Pumping hath tired our men, and what's the gain?
Seas into seas thrown, we suck in again;
Hearing hath deafed our sailors; and if they
Knew how to hear, there's none knows what to say.
Compared to these storms, death is but a qualm,
Hell somewhat lightsome, and the Bermuda calm.
Darkness, light's elder brother, his birth-right
Claims o'er this world, and to heaven hath chased light.
All things are one, and that one none can be,
Since all forms, uniform deformity
Doth cover, so that we, except God say
Another Fiat, shall have no more day.
So violent, yet long these furies be,
That though thine absence starve me, I wish not thee.

***

The Calm

Our storm is past, and that storm's tyrannous rage,
A stupid calm, but nothing it, doth 'suage.
The fable is inverted, and far more
A Block afflicts, now, than a stork before.
Storms chafe, and soon wear out themselves, or us;
In calms, heaven laughs to see us languish thus.
As steady as I can wish, that my thoughts were,
Smooth as thy mistress' glass, or what shines there,
The sea is now. And, as those Isles which we
Seek, when we can move, our ships rooted be.
As water did in storms, now pitch runs out
As lead, when a fired church becomes one spout.
And all our beauty, and our trim, decays,
Like courts removing, or like ended plays.
The fighting place now seamen's rags supply;
And all the tackling is a frippery.
No use of lanthorns; and in one place lay
Feathers and dust, today and yesterday.
Earth's hollownesses, which the world's lungs are,
Have no more wind than the upper vault of air.
We can nor lost friends, nor sought foes recover,
But meteor-like, save that we move not, hover.
Only the calenture together draws
Dear friends, which meet dead in great fishes' maws
And on the hatches as on altars lies
Each one, his own priest, and own sacrifice.
Who live, that miracle do multiply
Where walkers in hot ovens, do not die.
If in despite of these, we swim, that hath
No more refreshing, than our brimstone bath,
But from the sea, into the ship we turn,
Like parboiled wretches, on the coals to burn.
Like Bajazet encaged, the shepherd's scoff,
Or like slack-sinewed Samson, his hair off,
Languish our ships. Now, as a myriad
Of ants, durst th' Emperor's loved snake invade,
The crawling galleys, sea-goals, finny chips,
Might brave our Venice's, now bed-rid ships.
Whether a rotten state, and hope of gain,
Or to disuse me from the queasy pain
Of being beloved, and loving, or the thirst
Of honour, or fair death, out pushed me first,
I lose my end: for here as well as I
A desperate may live, and a coward die.
Stag, dog, and all which from, or towards flies,
Is paid with life, or prey, or doing dies.
Fate grudges us all, and doth subtly lay
A scourge, 'gainst which we all forget to pray,
He that at sea prays for more wind, as well
Under the poles may beg cold, heat in hell.
What are we then? How little more alas
Is man now, than before he was! he was
Nothing; for us, we are for nothing fit;
Chance, or ourselves still disproportion it.
We have no power, no will, no sense; I lie,
I should not then thus feel this misery.

Musical Signatures

2010-05-13T12:27:00.024-06:00

Here are the signatures of several (though by no means an exhaustive list of) great classical composers, presented in reverse chronological order. Please comment with omissions and I will try to add any requests to this collection.

John Cage
George Gershwin
Sergei Prokofiev
Igor Stravinsky
Béla Bartók
Maurice Ravel
Gustav Holst
Arnold Schoenberg
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Erik Satie
Jean Sibelius
Richard Strauss
Claude Debussy
Gustav Mahler
Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Johannes Brahms
Richard Wagner

Franz Liszt
Robert Schumann
Frédéric Chopin
Hector Berlioz
Ludwig van Beethoven
Wolfgang Mozart
Joseph Haydn
George Handel
J. S. Bach
Antonio Vivaldi
Johann Pachelbel

Food

2009-12-18T19:17:00.007-07:00

The following is reposted from http://erinhooley.blogspot.com/.
Erin's remarkable portfolio is: heavyglow.com.

Why do people always donate food to homeless shelters that they themselves would never eat?

A Career

2009-09-02T23:37:00.005-06:00

(a: 1863)

Rodin working on the bust of Father Eymard, from http://www.musee-rodin.fr/sjeun-e.htm

(b)

Rodin in his studio at Medoun. © Harlingue-Viollet, Paris, from http://www.rodin-art.com/

Re: Becoming Nothing

2009-07-28T22:57:00.004-06:00

What follows is a letter I received from the author of the italicized text in the previous post, "Becoming Nothing". Reader responses posted here will be forwarded to the author.

Dear -------,

I wanted to submit a few remarks in response to the comments of mine that you included in the previous exhibit at Altarpiece. In conjunction with the ideas presented there, I have been plagued by another thought, and, more relevantly, I have been plagued by my own inability to express it. In this particular case it seems that I might benefit from trying to express it clearly to someone who has a hope of understanding. I trust you won’t mind me using you as a sort of test subject in this endeavor, but if you do, stop reading now and discard the letter! In any case, perhaps you will also get something out of my meandering here to include in a future exhibit.

The idea in question began as an intuition, which you posted, regarding the relationship between art and the “real world.” This was the intuition expressed in the phrase, “Politics is [or perhaps it should have been ‘are’] a lame substitute for art.” What I had in mind was the ability of art to transform the state of humanity, to create better worlds by virtue of its ability to awaken truths that lie dormant in our spirits. Art is direct democracy imbued with a sense of what is good and true. This, I thought, renders politics unnecessary as a form of representation of art, an unnecessary regulation of a world that man self-regulates through communicative and expressive tools given him at and before birth.

Of course, this all sounds more or less wonderful on paper, but it began to butt heads with reality when I was put upon recently to explain it in the language of “daily life” in conversation. My interlocutor insisted that any system of organization of the exigencies of daily life counts as a political system, for example the working out of how a society’s collective garbage will be dealt with. Art, he argued, simply could not take the place of such necessities.

This argument upset me considerably because, while I could see how it derived from my own remarks, it seemed to miss the point entirely. It seemed to miss the significance of what I was saying, to somehow render banal a point that had begun in my mind as a (subjectively) inspired moment. I couldn’t see how to reconcile this problem, and in fact it appeared to me as merely an instantiation of a general difficulty I had encountered before. Namely, so many of the ideas and principles that are the most important to me are seemingly incompatible with daily reality. The values implied by a commitment to the realms of art and ideas bear no relation to the world inhabited by people. At best they provide some guidelines by which those in positions of comfort can organize their thinking, but even the lives lived by these individuals are not freed of their ultimate constraints. It seems more likely that thought and art have developed into parasites that flourish in the fertile heat and moisture of the first-world intellect. At this point in history we feel deeply the need to reconnect with our own species and not to labor under the illusion that the idea is a creature that serves and depends upon us. We experience a keen drive toward action, which unites us with our immediate, physical realities and brings us back into existence, back into integration with a world we have almost destroyed.

This is a historical pressure that I feel in the same moment that I feel illuminated by the transcendent importance of art in the broadest sense. When I am confronted with the question of how my dream for the world—so full of expression and expressive forms of knowing that politics as we know it no longer fits—relates to the need to dispose of garbage, I am stricken with something like the pain of separation… the realization that my visions, about which I care deeply, do not relate to people, about whom I care deeply. The idea of communicating with and transforming people’s souls is irrelevant and indulgent when people are too abused and too hungry to have souls in the first place. So you can see the depths of confusion into which my friend’s well-meaning criticism plunged me.

I have, however, recently come to a possible solution, or a justification which I would like to submit to both your and my own scrutiny. After a brief chat with another friend about the degree to which the present systems of the world have doomed themselves, we agreed that the human species will probably outlive the impending implosion in some form. We couldn’t escape the inevitability of, at the very least, a sort of Malthusian collapse after the failure or refusal of human ingenuity and compassion to catch up to growing populations and dwindling resources and compromised ecologies and greed. (You and I have discussed this as well in connection with that National Geographic article.) Nevertheless, the total elimination of mankind seems unlikely. We will still be here, and this allowed me to realize that the questions of why and how we are here are becoming more rather than less relevant. Perhaps in order to undertake intellectual and artistic projects in the face of such contagion in the modern world, one has to resign oneself to an almost appalling level of hopelessness.

But even as I write I can sense the weakness in this point of view. Have I so little hope and love for people living now that I have to resort to the apologetics of art as a withered attempt at communication with people who do not yet live? And, you will point out, I have not even addressed the original problem of politics and art. I suppose the only response I can give is to admit with a mixture of pride and shame that, yes, my dream involves such a radical reorganization of life, such a reinvention of the real, that art will supplant even trash collection, that there will be no such thing as trash as we pull ourselves along the rope of existence toward the infinite and the truly meaningful. That almost no one now living can understand this. As for how it will come about I do not know, I guess there will have to be some kind of disaster, or perhaps people can claw their way there slowly through the mud (a process for which, surely, I am not needed).

Art in its broadest sense is not only writing and painting and film, but also every thought and action in which we chip away at the veil between us and everything. Maybe the straight-talk description of this involves all of us sitting in silent meditation from birth, or voluntarily extinguishing the species, or simply living in such a way that we create no excesses like garbage or profit or nations that can’t sustain all their individual voices.

Ultimately I think I would like to distinguish between politics and governance. The governance of things like the way water flows, how food is stored, where information can be found, etc…. these can be artistic acts insofar as they are externalized means of integration with the world—insofar, basically, as they are done selflessly and out of the same duty toward people that the artist-poet feels. This is how politics destroys art and inhabits the resulting void. Politics is the governance of people, the creation of mutes, the belief that we can be spoken-form, the hypnotized agreement of people to remain uninvolved in the creation and exposition of reality.

Becoming Nothing

2009-06-27T17:07:00.009-06:00

Art creates, alters, and reinforces certain aspects of human nature. This fact destroys the notion of art as apolitical. Politics is a lame substitution for art.

Susan Sontag

I have several times applied to the work of art the metaphor of a mode of nourishment. To become involved with a work of art entails, to be sure, the experience of detaching oneself from the world. But the work of art itself is also a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

We are working now to dissolve human nature through art. To achieve an aesthetic experience that does not remove us from ourselves but annuls the self, allowing us to become empty and to merge seamlessly with everything else so that we are everything else.

Robert Musil:

And so, whatever the relationship may be between objects and feeling in the civilized person's mature view of the world, everyone surely knows those ecstatic moments in which a split has not yet occurred, as though water and land had not yet been divided and the waves of feeling still shared the same horizon as the hills and valleys that form the shape of things.

Andrei Tarkovsky:

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

The pinnacle of human nature is Nature.

[1] [2] [3]

First Infrarealist Manifesto, English

2009-06-18T14:59:00.025-06:00

Inspired by Roberto Bolaño's novel The Savage Detectives, and disappointed that I couldn't find one pre-existing, I have attempted a translation of the First Infrarealist Manifesto into English. The original can be found here.

See also an interview with Mario Santiago Papasquiaro, co-founder of Infrarealism.

ABANDON EVERYTHING, AGAIN

first infrarealist manifesto

“It is four light-hours to the end of the solar system; to the nearest star, four light-years. A disproportionate ocean of void. But are we really sure that it is only a void? We only know that in this space there are no bright stars; if they existed, would they be visible? And if there existed bodies neither bright nor dark? Could it not happen on the celestial maps, just as on those of the earth, that the star-cities are indicated and the star-villages omitted?”

-Soviet science fiction writers scratched their faces at midnight.

-The infrasuns (Drummond would say the happy proletarian boys).

-Peguero and Boris alone in a lower class room predicting the miracle behind the door.

-Free Money

Who has traversed the city and for music has only had the whistles of his fellows, his own words of amazement and rage?

The handsome type who didn’t know

that a girl’s orgasm is clitoral

(Look, it’s not only in the museums that there’s shit) (A process of individual museification) (Certainly all that has been mentioned, revealed) (Fear of discovering) (Fear of the imbalances not foreseen).

Our next of kin:

the snipers, the lone plainsmen who devastate the Chinese cafes of Latin America, the butchers in supermarkets, in their tremendous individual-collective dilemma; the impotence of action and investigation (on the individual level or clouded in aesthetic contradictions) of the poetic act.

Tiny bright stars eternally winking at us from a place in the universe called The labyrinths.

-Dancing-Club of misery.

-Pepito Tequila sobbing his love for Lisa Underground.

-He sucks it, you suck it, we suck it. [In Spanish as in English, the verb can be used literally or informally in a derogatory sense.]

-And Horror

Curtains of water, cement, or tin separate a cultural mechanism, which itself serves as both conscience and as the ass of the ruling class, from a living cultural event, scrubbed clean, in constant death and birth, ignorant of most of history and the fine arts (quotidian creator of its own insane istory and its amazing fyne artz), body that suddenly tests new sensations on itself, product of an epoch in which we approach at 200 kmph the toilet or the revolution.

“New forms, rare forms”, as old Bertolt said, half curious and half smiling.

Sensations don’t arise out of nothing (obviousness of obviousnesses), but from a conditioned reality, in a thousand ways, as a constant flow.

-Complex reality makes us seasick!

So, it is possible that in part this is a birth and in part we are in the front row for the death throes. Forms of life and forms of death pass by the retina daily. Their collision constantly gives rise to infrarealist forms: THE EYE OF TRANSITION

Put the whole city in the insane asylum. Sweet sister, howling tanks, hermaphrodite songs, diamond deserts, we only live once and every day the visions are bulkier and more slippery. Sweet sister, lifts to Monte Albán. Tighten your belts because the corpses have been watered. A scene of subtraction.

And the good bourgeois culture? And academia and the incendiaries? And the vanguards and the rearguards? And certain conceptions of love, good scenery, the precise and multinational Colt?

Like I told Saint-Just in a dream I had once: Even the heads of aristocrats can’t use us as weapons.

-A good part of the world is being born and another good part dying, and we all know that we all have to live or we all have to die: in this there is no middle road.

Chirico says: thought must move away from all that which is called logic and good sense, must move away from all human problems, in such a way that things appear under a new aspect, as if illuminated by a constellation appearing for the first time. The infrarealists say: We are going to fill our heads with all human problems, such that things begin to move inside themselves, an extraordinary vision of man.

-The Constellation of the Beautiful Bird.

-The infrarealists propose indigenousness to the world: a crazy and timid Indian.

-A new lyricism, which is starting to rise Latin America, supports itself in ways that never fail to amaze us. The way in to matter is ultimately the way in to adventure: the poem is a journey and the poet is a hero revealing heroes. Tenderness like an exercise in speed. Breathing and heat. The shotgun experience, structures that are devouring themselves, crazy contradictions.

If the poet is mixed up, the reader will have to mix himself up.

“erotic books without spelling”

The THOUSAND DISMEMBERED VANGUARDS OF THE SIXTIES precede us

The 99 open flowers like a smashed-open head

The massacre, the new concentration camps

The White underground rivers, the violet winds

These are hard times for poetry, some say, drinking tea, listening to music in their apartments, talking (listening) to the old masters. These are difficult times for man, we say, turning to the barricades after a full day’s work of shit and tear gas, discovering / creating music even in our apartments, largely overlooking cemeteries-that-spread, where they [sic] despairingly drink a cup of tea or get drunk on pure rage or the inertia of old masters.

HORA ZERO precedes us

((Raise baboons and the hags will bite you)) [Sp: Cría zambos y te picarán los callos]

Still we are in the quaternary era. Are we still in the quaternary era?

Pepito Tequila kisses Lisa Underground’s phosphorescent nipples and watches her leave for a beach on which black pyramids sprout.

I repeat:

the poet is a hero revealing heroes, like the fallen red tree that announces the start of the forest.

-The attempts at a consistent ethic-aesthetic are paved with betrayals or pathetic survivals.

-And it is the individual who will be able to walk a thousand kilometers but eventually the road will eat him.

-Our ethic is Revolution, our aesthetic is Life: one-single-thing.

For the bourgeoisie and the petit bourgeoisie life is a party. Every weekend they have one. The proletariat doesn’t have parties. Only rhythmic funerals. That is going to change. The exploited will have a grand party. Memory and guillotines. Sensing it, acting it certain nights, inventing edges and humid corners, is like caressing the acidic eyes of the new spirit.

Journey of the poem through the seasons of rioting: poetry producing poets producing poems producing poetry. Not an electric alley / the poet with arms separate from the body / the poem slowly displacing his Vision of his Revolution. The alley is a complex point. “We are going to invent in order to discover its contradiction, its invisible forms of refusing, until it is explained”. Journey of the act of writing through zones not at all favorable to the act of writing.

Rimbaud, come home!

Subverting the everyday reality of modern poetry. The confinements that lead a circular reality to the poem. A good reference: the madman Kurt Schwitters. Lanke trr gll, o, upa kupa arggg, runs the official line, phonetic investigators codifying the howl. The bridges of Noba Express are anti-codification: let him shout, let him shout (please don’t take out pencil or paper, don’t record him, shout with him if you want to participate), so let him shout, in order to see what face he makes when he finishes, what other incredible things we experience.

Our bridges to ignored stations. The poem interrelating reality and unreality.

Convulsively

What can I demand of current Latin American painting? What can I demand of the theatre?

More revealing and expressive is stopping in a demolished park because of the smog and seeing people crossing the avenues in groups (which contract and expand), when so many motorists, like the pedestrians, urgently approach their hovels, and it’s the hour when the murderers come out and the victims follow them.

What stories do the painters really tell me?

Interesting void, fixed form and color, at best the parody of movement. Canvases that will only serve as bright posters in the rooms of engineers and doctors who collect.

The painter is made comfortable in a society that is every day more “painter” than he is himself, and that is where he is found unarmed and registered as a clown.

If a painting by X is encountered in some street by Mara, this painting acquires the standing of an amusing and informative thing; [in] a sitting room it’s as decorative as the iron armchairs of the bourgeois / a question of the retina? / yes and no / but it would be better to find ( and unfortunately to systematize for a time) the explosive factor, class-conscious, one hundred percent concerned with work, in juxtaposition to the value of “work” that precedes it and conditions it.

-The painter abandons the studio and ANY status quo and fills his head with wonders / or sets out to play chess like Duchamp / A painting that shows how to paint it again / And a painting of poverty, free or cheap enough, unfinished, of participation, of questioning the participation, of unlimited physical and spiritual extension.

Latin America’s best painting is the one that has even unconscious levels, the game, the party, the experiment that gives us a real vision of what we are and reveals to us what we can do will be Latin America’s best painting is the one that we paint with greens and reds and blues on our faces, to recognize ourselves in the incessant creation of the tribe.

Try to abandon everything every day.

Architects, abandon the construction of stages inside and extend your hands (or clench them, depending on the place) toward this space outside. A wall and a ceiling become useful when they are not only used for sleeping or avoiding rain but when they establish, starting, for example, at the everyday act of sleep, conscious bridges between man and his creations, or the momentary impossibility of them.

For architecture and sculpture the infrarealists start from two points: the barricade and the bed.

The true imagination is the one that dynamites, elucidates, injects emerald microbes into other imaginations. In poetry and in what is, the way in to matter still has to be the way in to adventure. Creating the tools for everyday subversion. The subjective seasons of being human, with their beautiful trees, giant and obscene, like laboratories of experimentation. Establishing, seeing signs of parallel situations and as harrowing as a great scratch on the chest, on the face. Unending analogy of the face. There are so many of them that when newcomers appear we don’t even count, although we are creating them / looking into a mirror. Nights of torment. Perception is opened up by means of an ethic-aesthetic taken to the extreme.

Galaxies of love appear in the palms of our hands.

-Poets, let down your hair (if you have any)

-Burn your garbage and start to love until you get down to the priceless poems

-We don’t want synthetic paintings, but enormous synthetic sunsets

-Horses running 500 kilometers per hour

-Squirrles of fire jumping through trees of fire

-A bet to see who blinks first, between the nerve and the sleeping pill

The risk is always somewhere else. The true poet is the one who is always letting go of himself. Never too much time in the same place, like guerrillas, like UFOs, like the white eyes of prisoners in perpetual chains.

Fusion and explosion of two shores: creation like audacious graffiti and opened by a crazy kid.

Nothing mechanical. The scales of of amazement. Someone, maybe Hieronymus Bosch, breaks the aquarium of love. Free money. Sweet sister. Libidinous visions like corpses. Little boys cutting the meat of kisses until December.

At two in the morning, after having been at Mara’s house, we listen (Mario Santiago and some of us) to laughter that came out of the penthouse of a 9 story building. They didn’t stop, they laughed and laughed while we slept below propped up in various phone booths. It was enough for the moment in that only Mario went on paying attention to to the laughter (the penthouse is a gay bar or something similar and Darío Galicia had told us that the police are always vigilant). We made telephone calls but the coins were made of water. The laughter continued. After we left that district Mario told me that really no one had been laughing, it was recorded laughter and upstairs there, in the penthouse, a small group, or perhaps a single homosexual, had been listening in silence to his records and had made us listen.

-The death of the swan, the last song of the swan, the last song of the black swan, ARE NOT in the Bolshoi but in the pain and the unbearable beauty of the streets.

-A rainbow that begins in a cinema of bad death and that ends in a factory on strike.

-That amnesia never kisses us on the mouth. That it never kisses us.

-We dreamt of utopia and we wake up screaming.

-A poor lonely cowherd who goes back home, that is the wonder.

Making new sensations appear –Subverting the everyday

O.K.

ABANDON EVERYTHING, AGAIN

HIT THE ROAD

Roberto Bolaño, México, 1976

Fragments

2009-06-10T14:42:00.007-06:00

I find myself in the midst of an unexpected hiatus from posting, due to extensive preparations for an upcoming series of posts and other more lamentable distractions. The normal, if already scanty, schedule will resume in a week or two. In the meantime, I encourage visitors to amuse and enrich themselves at the following excellent locations:

Feuilleton - The blog of John Coulthart is full of interesting things to discover and rediscover.
Les Délices de M. Ogre - For those who can read a little French, Monsieur Ogre has crafted a beautiful experience. Among other things, he is creating a breathtaking vision of the life of Arthur Rimbaud, providing images and sound along with the poet's writings and letters. Click here to view only those posts (in reverse order).
Looking With My Eyes at Sight-Things and Hearing With My Ears Sound-Things - Jon Cone's collection of YouTube treasures will keep anyone entertained for hours.
The Tarpeian Rock - A blog full of beautiful and rare items painstakingly displayed and discussed, along with an extensive list of links to explore.

Please enjoy the fruits of these remarkable individuals' labor, and, following the advice of the Good Soldier Švejk, "Take it easy!"

a bird which died advised me to / commit flight to memory.

2009-05-24T19:04:00.008-06:00

Forough Farrokhzad's short documentary The House is Black can be viewed at UbuWeb.

Leprosy is chronic and contagious. Leprosy is not hereditary. Leprosy can be anywhere or everywhere. Leprosy goes with poverty. Upon attacking the body it deepens and enlarges wrinkles, eats away the tissues, covers the nerves with a dry shield, dulls sensitivity to heat and touch, causes blindness, destroys the nasal septum, it finds its way to the liver and bone marrow, withers the fingers, it clears the way for other diseases.

Leprosy is not incurable. Taking care of lepers stops the disease from spreading. Wherever lepers have been adequately cared for, the disease has vanished. When the leper is cared for early, he can be treated completely. Leprosy is not incurable.

The filmmaker, Forough Farrokhzad, is considered one of the most accomplished modern Iranian poets. Though her mastery of poetic form in Persian is probably difficult to translate into English, free translations capture something of the spirit.

Two excerpts from "Another Brith" (click here to read the whole thing):

Life is perhaps
a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch
life is perhaps a child returning home from school.
...

I will plant my hands in the garden
I will grow I know I know I know and
swallows will lay eggs
in the hollow of my ink-stained hands.

"The Couple":

Night comes
and after night, darkness
and after darkness
eyes
hands
and breathing and more breathing
and the sound of water
which drips drips drips
from the faucet.

then two red points
from two lighted cigarettes
the clock's tick-tock
and two heads
and two lonelinesses.

Much more of Forough's poetry, occasionally with Persian audio of the poems available, can be read at http://www.forughfarrokhzad.org/.

"I believe in being a poet in all moments of life. Being a poet means being human. I know some poets whose daily behavior has nothing to do with their poetry. In other words, they are only poets when they wrote poetry. Then it is finished and they turn into greedy, indulgent, oppressive, shortsighted, miserable, and envious people. Well, I cannot believe their poems. I value the realities of life and when I find these gentlemen making fists and claims--that is, in their poems and essays--I get disgusted, and I doubt their honesty. I say to myself: Perhaps it is only for a plate of rice that they are screaming. "

Cordyceps

2009-05-07T22:01:00.003-06:00

From a Planet Earth segment (imperative to watch in HQ):

Its infected brain directs this ant upwards. Then, utterly disorientated, it grips the stem with its mandibles. Those afflicted that are discovered by the workers are quickly taken away and dumped far away from the colony.

The fungus is so virulent, it can wipe out whole colonies of ants. There are literally thousands of different types of cordyceps fungi, and, remarkably, each specializes on just one species.

Cordyceps sinesis, for example, specializes on the caterpillar of a type of ghost moth found in some parts of China. Other types of ghost moth, susceptible to other types of cordyceps, are found in Tibet, where their medicinal use may have originated.

Photo by David Gerrard

According to Wikipedia, the Chinese name for caterpillar fungus means "winter worm, summer grass." The medicinal use of the fungus became well-known in connection with the success of Chinese athletes at the 1993 Beijing Olympic Games.

Today the most common way to prepare the caterpillar fungus is to stuff a duck with the caterpillar fungus then after boiling the duck in hot water, patients drink the liquid. It sounds unpleasant, but Vivian reports the aroma is pleasant and the broth tastes sweet. The caterpillar fungus is reported to have many benefits as a traditional medicine. Some consider the benefits to be similar to those of another valuable Chinese tonic, ginseng. Traditional Chinese medicines like the caterpillar fungus and ginseng are bought in Chinese drug stores. The price varies from $27 to $53 a pound depending on quality. The fungus fruiting body has been removed in the most expensive grade. Caterpillar fungi are also used as gifts. A large gift box costs about $400. [As of 1998.]

In addition to its aesthetic, medicinal, and shock values, cordyceps has a considerable metaphorical value, which is explicated by Arthur Schopenhauer (whose aphorisms are available to read in their entirety online) by way of another example:

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body: and leisure, that is, the time one has for the free enjoyment of one's consciousness or individuality, is the fruit or produce of the rest of existence, which is in general only labor and effort. But what does most people's leisure yield?—boredom and dullness; except, of course, when it is occupied with sensual pleasure or folly. How little such leisure is worth may be seen in the way in which it is spent: and, as Ariosto observes,how miserable are the idle hours of ignorant men!—ozio lungo d'uomini ignoranti. ...And if there is nothing else to be done, a man will twirl his thumbs or beat the devil's tattoo; or a cigar may be a welcome substitute for exercising his brains. Hence, in all countries the chief occupation of society is card-playing, and it is the gauge of its value, and an outward sign that it is bankrupt in thought. Because people have no thoughts to deal in, they deal cards, and try and win one another's money. Idiots! But I do not wish to be unjust; so let me remark that it may certainly be said in defence of cardplaying that it is a preparation for the world and for business life, because one learns thereby how to make a clever use of fortuitous but unalterable circumstances (cards, in this case), and to get as much out of them as one can: and to do this a man must learn a little dissimulation, and how to put a good face upon a bad business. But, on the other hand, it is exactly for this reason that card-playing is so demoralizing, since the whole object of it is to employ every kind of trick and machination in order to win what belongs to another. And a habit of this sort, learnt at the card-table, strikes root and pushes its way into practical life; and in theaffairs of every day a man gradually comes to regard meum and tuum in much the same light as cards, and to consider that he may use to the utmost whatever advantages he possesses, so long as he does not come within the arm of the law.

Twelve-foot high wax busts of Schopenhauer afflicted by several varieties of cordyceps fungus, which fungus he termed the Will, can be viewed in an upcoming conceptual exhibition.

More images.

Spiders' Legs

2009-05-01T13:35:00.002-06:00

A person steps into the shower, adjusts the shower curtain. A large spider is seen to scramble in every direction away from the falling water. The person's face displays mild surprise at the spider's appearance. While performing routine activities of the shower, the person uses one big toe to deflate air bubbles in the clear bath mat. The toe deflates bubbles only in places where black specks, the decaying corpses of previously deceased spiders, can be clearly seen. The person's face registers mild irony as the now half-dead spider finds a small opening through which to crawl under the bath mat. As water impedes the spider's progress on all sides, the person uses the toe to help the spider through the rubber doorway. These words are spoken: "There's no hope for you."

An alternate title for this post:
ungeheuren Ungeziefer

For some reason, the tall, empty room where [Gregor Samsa] was forced to remain made him feel uneasy as he lay there flat on the floor, even though he had been living in it for five years. Hardly aware of what he was doing other than a slight feeling of shame, he hurried under the couch. It pressed down on his back a little, and he was no longer able to lift his head, but he nonetheless felt immediately at ease and his only regret was that his body was too broad to get it all underneath.

*****

Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities for escape, again, are as many as hiding places.

How blest am I
In my just censure! in my true opinion!
Alack, for lesser knowledge! how accurs'd
In being so blest! There may be in the cup
A spider steep'd, and one may drink; depart,
And yet partake no venom (for his knowledge
Is not infected), but if one present
Th' abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider.
(The Winter's Tale, II.i.36-45)

For more on this topic, see Story from North America by Kristen Lepore and Garrett Davis.

(Kristen Lepore's other films are available for viewing on her website.)

Attrition

2009-04-26T20:44:00.001-06:00

YouTube video	Number of views
The Seashell and the Clergyman, Part 1	36,496 views
The Seashell and the Clergyman, Part 2	7,992 views
The Seashell and the Clergyman, Part 3	5,330 views

For more information about the film, see this post at Documents.

Baby

2009-04-20T23:25:00.002-06:00

The Brazilian band Os Mutantes created two versions of their song "Baby," one in Portuguese in 1968 and the other in English in 1971. Until today, I always assumed that the English version was a close translation of the Portuguese, just slightly different stylistically. Reading the lyrics to the English version alongside a translation of the Portuguese version (from the Luaka Bop website) gives a different impression:

Baby (1971)
click here to listen on YouTube

You know,
you must take a new look at the new land
The swimming pool and
the teeth of your friend
The dirt in my hand
You know,
you must take a look at me

Baby, baby
I know that’s the way

You know,
you must try the new ice-cream flavor
Do me a favor,
look at me closer
Join us and go far
And hear the new sound of my bossa nova

Baby, baby
It’s been a long time

You know, it’s time now to learn Portuguese
It’s time now to learn what I know
And what I don’t know
I know, with me everything is fine
It’s time now to make up your mind
We live in the biggest city of South America
Look here, read what I wrote on my shirt:
Baby, baby
I love you

Baby (1968), translated
click here to listen on YouTube

You need to learn of swimming pools
Of margarine, of Caroline, of gasoline
You need to learn of me

Baby, Baby
I know you do

You need to eat an ice cream cone
At the corner diner, to hang out with us
To see me up close
To hear Roberto Carlos’ new song

Baby, baby
It’s been so long

You need to learn English
And learn what I know
And what I don’t know

With me, skies are blue
With you all is cool
We live in the best city
In South America
You need to... you need to...
I don’t know, read it on my shirt
Baby, baby
I love you

Although I have no idea how this song comes across in Portuguese, in English the 1968 version is distinctly more emotional, more adolescent. The 1971 version sounds surreal and whimsical, the 1968 version more exasperated and simple. The tiny, tiny difference between "We live in the biggest city of South America" and "We live in the best city in South America" is a perfect example. Living in the biggest city in South America is chance, a randomish factoid, but living in the best city is full of possibilities, suggests a world or a life that's fresh and almost perfect. (For more thoughts on this song, see the interesting discussion in the comments of this post.)

Here is the English translation (from notbored.org) of the lyrics to "Panis et Circenses," one of my favorite Mutantes songs, and an example (in my opinion) of the band's more political side. Click here to watch a video of the band performing this song (YouTube).

I wanted to sing a song illuminated by the sun
I raised the sails to the wind
I freed the tigers and the lions in the yard
But the people in the dining hall
Are busy being born and dying

I demanded that a dagger of pure luminous steel be made
To kill my love and I killed her
At five o'clock on Central Avenue
But the people in the dining hall
Are busy being born and dying

I demanded that leaves of dreams be planted in the Garden of the Sun
The leaves know how to seek the sun
And the roots seek, seek
But the people in the dining hall
These people in the dining hall
But the people in the dining hall
Are busy being born and dying

Non-fiction

2009-04-05T12:11:00.003-06:00

Note: This post must be viewed directly at Altarpiece, (click here), rather than through an RSS reader, because such applications often do not render background images.

Please be patient with the large images in this post. After some deliberation I opted to embed high-quality versions rather. I think the result is worthwhile.

The images below were captured in Google Earth from panoramas taken by the Opportunity and Spirit Mars rovers. Experiencing the panoramas in Google Earth has the advantage of better-simulated reality; the viewer can move dynamically through the picture in such a way that the true-color photographs of Mars have a more startling impact than can be achieved in these static images. One gets a sense of how wonderfully strange it would be to move around beneath a sky like dust and skin and olives, of how untouched the planet is, of how real it is as a location, and of how (somehow) absurd it is to stand there and snap a picture.

The text accompanying the images consists of excerpts from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, which can be read online in its entirety at Scribd.com. The sterility of Mars on the one hand, and the virility of Rilke's thoughts on the other... perhaps posting these two things together will mute them both, but the juxtaposition seemed so unlikely, even ridiculous and impossible, as to be somehow necessary.

Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent - ?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
Click for larger image.

Bodily delight is a sensory experience, not any different from pure looking or the feeling with which a beautiful fruit fills the tongue; it is a great, an infinite learning that is given to us, a knowledge of the world, the fullness and the splendor of all knowledge. And it is not our acceptance of it that is bad; what is bad is that most people misuse this learning and squander it and apply it as a stimulant on the tired places of their lives and as a distraction rather than as a way of gathering themselves for their highest moments.... If only they could be more reverent toward their own fruitfulness, which is essentially one, whether it is manifested as mental or physical; for mental creation too arises from the physical, is of one nature with it and only like a softer, more enraptured and more eternal repetition of bodily delight.
Click for larger image.

Richard Dehmel: ... You have characterized him quite well with the phrase: "living and writing in heat." - And in fact the artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss. And if instead of "heat" one could say "sex" - sex in the great, pure sense of the word, free of any sin attached to it by the Church - then his art would be very great and infinitely important. His poetic power is great and as strong as a primal instinct; it has its own relentless rhythms in itself and explodes from him like a volcano.

Click for larger image.

Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, there is not general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, - then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.
Click for larger image.

We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called "apparitions," the whole so-called "spirit world," death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. To say nothing of God. But the fear of the inexplicable has not only impoverished the reality of the individual; it has also narrowed the relationship between one human being and another, which has as it were been lifted out of the riverbed of infinite possibilities and set down in a fallow place on the bank, where nothing happens. For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we can deal with. but only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
Click for larger image.

2009-03-17T13:21:00.002-06:00

Harun Farocki's documentary Images of the World and the Inscription of War is available in English on YouTube in 8 parts. (Click here for part 1). Two highlights:

The idea of obtaining measurement through photography came to [the inventor of the technique] after he was suspended between life and death. That means, it is dangerous to hold out physically on the spot... safer to take a picture.
...
Arduous and dangerous to hold out physically on the spot. Safer to take a picture and evaluate it later protected from the elements at one's desk.

***

[On the examination of aerial photographs of concentration camps in the 1960s and 1970s:]
The snow on the roofs of the neighboring barracks is already melting, which means that they are still inhabited. The evaluators verify, that means they establish the verity, of the existence of the camp down to the last detail, and they do this with relish for their role as specialists.

Although the film is about many things, it is basically about the Holocaust. In this regard and in others, it is the same color as W. G. Sebald's book The Rings of Saturn, which, although it never mentions the Holocaust directly, is basically "about" the Holocaust in the sense of "around".

In China, the placating of the elements has always been intimately connected with the ceremonial rites which surrounded the ruler on the dragon throne and which governed everything from affairs of state down to daily ablutions, rituals that also served to legitimize and immortalize the immense profane power that was focused in the person of the emperor. At any moment of the day or night, the members of the imperial household, which numbered more than six thousand and consisted exclusively of eunuchs and women, would be circling, on precisely defined orbits, the sole male inhabitant of the Forbidden City that lay concealed behind purple-coloured walls. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the ritualization of imperial power was at its most elaborate: at the same time, that power itself was by now almost completely hollowed out. While all court appointments, rigidly controlled as they were by an immutable hierarchy, continued to be made according to rules that had been perfected down to the last detail, the empire in its entirety was on the brink of collapse, owing to mounting pressure from enemies both within and without.

I read this book some months ago, but I didn't realize that it was about the Holocaust at all until I heard a radio interview with the author in which he explains it. Originally I was unimpressed, since I don't like puzzles that can't be figured out and I don't like art that can't stand alone. With time, though, I've come to the conclusion that the Holocaust serves in both these cases as a horizon against which concepts can be set. It's not necessary to understand the horizon in order to use it as a new way of linking concepts, a new way of thinking. The point, rather, is that historical events create interpretive possibilities, possible routes to the truth, that did not exist before. And the method is an innocent one because the truth always stands alone.

Brief clips of many of Harun Farocki's other excellent documentaries (most of them are not feature length) can be found on YouTube and here.

An Interview

2009-03-13T19:48:00.001-06:00

Q: What first drew you to the idea of bioluminescence?
A: When I was, like, 14 or 15 I think, maybe as late as 16, my dad told me about it. He had seen a blurb about it in one of his science magazines. Fish who eat a certain kind of glowing bacteria or something, and then they make the algae change color within their stomachs, glowing to camouflage the fish or frighten enemies. He showed me the article, which he had cut out of the magazine, and then later he wanted it back! I was devastated! (Laughs) I made him photocopy it for me, which he found odd.

Q: So you were immediately attracted to this image, then?
A: I fell in love with it. It was something... so unexpected and unbelievable that it could have been magic, a little bit of magic at a time when the world was such a disappointment for me. But yes, I loved it with that adolescent passion... you know, somehow emotionally sexual but still totally pure. I posted my photocopied blurb on a bulletin board for years.

Q: Were you trying to recreate that adolescent feeling in your exhibit?
A: No, nothing like that. I would rather find passion in new places, though it gets harder and harder. But no, I wanted to create the magic, real magic--to make people feel with a sense they didn't know they had, or see that... I don't know... the world can still be exciting despite everything being fed to us as a let-down.

Q: Did you do a lot of research beforehand, or did you just jump in so to speak?
A: Well, there was a lot of research. We were working in collaboration, the three of us in the show, and a lot of the science was uncovered by JC. But over the years you learn things as well... In 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne describes a bloom of bioluminescent algae, which is called a milk sea in the book. We wanted people to walk in and for there to be that sense of surprise.

About seven o’clock in the evening, the Nautilus, half-immersed, was sailing in a sea of milk. At first sight the ocean seemed lactified. Was it the effect of the lunar rays? No; for the moon, scarcely two days old, was still lying hidden under the horizon in the rays of the sun. The whole sky, though lit by the sidereal rays, seemed black by contrast with the whiteness of the waters.

Conseil could not believe his eyes, and questioned me as to the cause of this strange phenomenon. Happily I was able to answer him.

“It is called a milk sea,” I explained. “A large extent of white wavelets often to be seen on the coasts of Amboyna, and in these parts of the sea.”

“But, sir,” said Conseil, “can you tell me what causes such an effect? for I suppose the water is not really turned into milk.”

“No, my boy; and the whiteness which surprises you is caused only by the presence of myriads of infusoria, a sort of luminous little worm, gelatinous and without colour, of the thickness of a hair, and whose length is not more than seven-thousandths of an inch. These insects adhere to one another sometimes for several leagues.”

“Several leagues!” exclaimed Conseil.

“Yes, my boy; and you need not try to compute the number of these infusoria. You will not be able, for, if I am not mistaken, ships have floated on these milk seas for more than forty miles.”

Towards midnight the sea suddenly resumed its usual colour; but behind us, even to the limits of the horizon, the sky reflected the whitened waves, and for a long time seemed impregnated with the vague glimmerings of an aurora borealis.

Q: Were you happy with the way the show was received?
A: The reviews were mostly positive, so yeah, I was mostly happy. But I think a lot of people saw it as just another experimental thing or gimmicky or too contemporary. Not enough people let themselves go when they walked into the first room, not enough people saw the magic we were trying to portray. People don't want to see real magical things. When they do see it they're always looking for a guy behind the curtains, you know? All the pieces we put up were totally self-contained, you know, no electricity or lights anywhere or anything, but people just assumed there must've been something. We could set it up in the middle of a forest and it would be the same, but I don't know if even then people would see it as magical. (Laughs) They'd blame it on aliens or something.

The Face of Post-Impressionism

2009-02-27T17:39:00.002-07:00

a) Paul Gauguin
b) Henri Rousseau
d) Paul Signac
d) Henri Matisse
e) Vincent van Gogh
f) Émile Bernard
g) Paul Cézanne
h) Odilon Redon
i) Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

confession continued

2009-02-26T10:54:00.001-07:00

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It is many years now that I have had only myself as object of my thoughts, that I have been examining and studying only myself; and if I study anything else, it is in order promptly to apply it to myself, or rather within myself.
-Michel de Montaigne

is baseball holy? is everything holy? is aligators holy? is the world holy? is the basketball holy? is the organ of man holy?

are holy flowers holy? is the world holy? is glasses holy? is time holy? is all the white moonlight holy?

empty rooms are holy? neal holy? toy holy? byzantine holy? mark holy? is the american flag holy? is girl holy? is your sister holy? what is holy?

and car holy? and light holy? is holy holy? are you holy?

(Adapted from Pull My Daisy, the first video on the linked page. The second video is also worth watching, but I wouldn't recommend reading the essay underneath.)

Clowns

2009-02-17T10:36:00.001-07:00

A young man goes to see his doctor. He is overcome by a terrible sadness and doesn't think anything will make him feel better. The doctor says, "Why not do something happy, like going to see Grimaldi the clown?". The young man answers, with a knowing look, "Ah, but Doctor", he says, "I am Grimaldi."

(Photo taken at the Münchener Stadtmuseum)

Karl Valentin

From Angela Carter's Magic Toyshop:

[A group of clowns dances in honor of a fellow clown, George Buffins, who had gone mad during a performance and was taken away to an asylum as the audience laughed, thinking it was part of the act.]

Didn't clowns always summon to your mind disintegration, disaster, chaos?
This dance was the dance of death, and they danced it for George Buffins, that they might be as him. They danced it for the wretched of the earth, that they might witness their own wretchedness. They danced the dance for the outcasts who watched them.

On novelty

2009-01-28T17:50:00.002-07:00

This is worth living for: that I can imagine as hard as I wish, I can mentally construct in the maximum detail of which I am capable the most mundane of future events, build a daydream out of things I already know, but that despite my best efforts, the future is always absolutely novel. Each moment I am alive is a complete surprise, and never more than when I am in fact experiencing things for the first time. May he who denies life novelty come face to face with himself in the realization that every moment runs aground all his expectations, and this, instead, is what it is like.

From Henri Bergson's The Creative Mind:

Our action exerts itself conveniently only on fixed points; fixity is therefore what our intelligence seeks; it asks itself where the mobile is to be found, where it will be, where it will pass. ... But it is always with immobilities, real or possible, that it seeks to deal.
...
But how can we help seeing that the essence of duration is to flow, and that the fixed placed side by side with the fixed will never constitute anything which has duration.
...
Intuition is what attains the spirit, duration, pure change.
...
To think intuitively is to think in duration.
...
Criticism of an intuitive philosophy is so easy and so certain to be well received that it will always tempt the beginner.
...
[When thinking intuitively] our mind is as if it were in a strange land, whereas matter is familiar to it and in it the mind is at home. But that is because a certain ignorance of self is perhaps useful to a being which must exteriorize itself in order to act.
...
This direct vision of the mind by the mind is the chief function of intuition.
...
True, the faculty of intuition exists in each one of us, but covered over by functions more useful to life.
...
Man is essentially a manufacturer.

Anarchist folksongs

2009-01-20T22:29:00.001-07:00

Click here to listen to "Das Zelt" by the Jeans Team (YouTube)

Mach Dich auf
In die Welt
In ein andres Land
Wo's Dir gefällt
Bis zum Rand
Und übers Meer
Dich hält
Hier nichts mehr

Ref:
Kein Gott
Kein Staat
Keine Arbeit
Kein Geld

Aus dem Haufen
Dieser Stadt
Musst Du raus
Und Du wirst sehn
Du wirst Dich verändern
In all diesen Ländern

Ref:
Kein Gott
Kein Staat
Keine Arbeit
Kein Geld
Mein zu Hause
Ist die Welt
Mein zu Hause
Ist die Welt

Das Himmelszelt
Ist Dein Dach
Mit all den Lichtern
Die Dich leiten
Von den Sternen
Die Dich begleiten
Kannst Du lernen
Klar zu sehn

Ref:
Kein Gott
Kein Staat
Keine Arbeit
Kein Geld
Mein zu Hause
Ist die Welt
Mein zu Hause
Ist die Welt

(My amateur translation)

Move away
Into the world
To another land
That you like
Up to the edge
And across the sea
Nothing more
Holds you here

No god
No country
No work
No money

Out of the ruins (?)
Of this city
You must go
And you will see
You will change
In all these lands

No god
...
My home
Is the world

The tent of the sky
Is your roof
With all the lights
Which lead you
From the stars
Which follow you
You can learn
To see clearly

Wind

2008-12-14T05:28:00.001-07:00

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Night falls early. If you are in a windowless room, you become aware of the darkening subconsciously, as the lights inside seem somehow to change in color or intensity. Gradually you become filled with a feeling that you are in the wrong place. The clock on the wall reads 4:23, and you know this to be true. Still, in your mind it is much later than this. You should be home now, surrounded by the warm lights you are accustomed to, surrounded by your familiar things, safe and stationary until tomorrow. This spectral feeling fidgets around inside you, breaking your concentration. You glance at the clock more often than you would like to, struggling to stay interested in what you are doing. Your back is turned toward the door.
From behind you comes a noise unlike anything you have heard before. It is the sound of the sun setting; the sound of a holy wind; the sound of an air duct falling apart; the sound of smooth thunder; the sound thunder aspires to; the sound you would have heard if the light had not killed you. Your eyes widen. You are paralyzed until the sound passes, and you realize it was a sound that could not have occurred under any other circumstances. As you begin to recover, you look breathlessly at the others in the room. They did not hear it. They wait impatiently for the day to end.

Realism

2008-12-08T06:46:00.007-07:00

"Invalides de Guerre Jouant aux Cartes" ("War Cripples Playing Cards") by Otto Dix, 1920

Click to read an article from the August 6, 1934 issue of Time Magazine about Otto Dix.

"I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I'm therefore not a pacifist at all - or am I? - perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that for myself. I'm such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it's like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths for life for myself; it's for that reason that I went to war, and for that reason I volunteered."

Otto Dix c. 1920

What follows is an example of a painting that is almost photorealistic. In the space filled by the almost, there is some kind of magic which makes paintings in this style feel more real than reality itself.

Oswald Achenbach, S. Pietro in Vincoli, 1883

What is the difference?

2008-11-30T03:43:00.004-07:00

Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi

To which groups are our identities opposed? Who do we place outside of ourselves so that we may draw a boundary around ourselves and know that boundary to be safe? There is no mystery in ourselves; we know what we are not. I know what I am not--I am not you. At least I am not you. There are five castes.

There are five senses. Everything you perceive must come through one of these or it is a fantasy. There are seven colors in the rainbow. A wave of light stretches from red to violet in six violent jerks as if it is falling down the stairs.

An evicted Roma family (Budapest, 2000)

- Tell me more about the village where your grandmother lives.
- It is a very nice village, 120 kilometers from here. There is a lake on the edge of a forest.
- How many people live there?
- It is a small village, 3,000 people. And no gypsies!

I have been thinking ...
I have been thinking of the difference between water
and the waves on it. Rising,
water's still water, falling back,
it is water, will you give me a hint
how to tell them apart?

Because someone has made up the word
"wave," do I have to distinguish it
from water?

There is a Secret One inside us;
the planets in all the galaxies
pass through his hands like beads.

That is a string of beads one should look at with luminous eyes.

-Kabir, 13th Century

On boiling

2008-11-27T03:26:00.002-07:00

"I show you light now. It burns bright forever.
No more blue tomorrows. You’re on high now, love."

People overthink all sorts of things. The truth boils underneath like an underground lake.

Art causes the soul to boil. Interpreting and reading and thinking about this boiling is a way of turning the heat down. "Cinema is a language that can say abstractions."

2008-11-24T13:11:00.001-07:00

I.

Instructions:
Read the items in the list one at a time. Close your eyes and picture each one vividly as you can. Imagine it in whatever context comes to you. Picture it with every feeling it brings with it. When your picture is complete, count to ten. Then move on to the next thing on the list.

snow

dark night sky

red brick

a silhouette in a window

white lights on a marble theatre

copper-green statues

shadows on the wall

II.

This is an experiment in showing you the inside of my head. It is an explanation, but not the kind you find in books. Dreams are an explanation of your mind. This is something like a dream I have had every day for the last week.

It is not poetry unless the inside of my head is poetry.

Imagine asking for directions in a country where no one speaks your language. You have to communicate somehow. When you open your mouth, sounds come out. You disassociate from yourself because you are too embarrassed to take responsibility for what you are saying. You watch yourself as if from the outside. You gesture wildly. It is raining. There is no time to think about it. You speak from your gut. Somehow, you make yourself understood.

Strange divination

2008-11-18T06:47:00.001-07:00

(What follows refers to the I Ching, or Book of Changes, an ancient Chinese divinatory & philosophical text. Here is a wonderful introduction to the I Ching; the section on moving lines is particularly relevant.)

An interesting reading: Lake over Lake, all 6 lines moving, therefore changing to Mountain over Mountain.

#58 - Joy/Pleasing/Joyous Pleasure

THE IMAGE

Lakes resting one on the other:
The image of THE JOYOUS.
Thus the superior man joins with his friends
For discussion and practice.

A lake evaporates upward and thus gradually dries up; but when two lakes are joined they do not dry up so readily, for one replenishes the other. it is the same in the field of knowledge. Knowledge should be a refreshing and vitalizing force. It becomes so only through stimulating intercourse with congenial friends with whom one holds discussion and practices application of the truths of life. in this way learning becomes many-sided and takes on a cheerful lightness, whereas there is always something ponderous and one-sided about the learning of the self-taught.

THE LINES [selections]

2.
We often find ourselves associating with inferior people in whose company we are tempted by pleasures that are inappropriate for the superior man. To participate in such pleasures would certainly bring remorse, for a superior man can find no real satisfaction in low pleasures.

3.
Those who lack inner stability and therefore need amusement, will always find opportunity of indulgence. They attract external pleasures by the emptiness of their natures. Thus they lose themselves more and more, which of course has bad results.

4.
Only when he clearly recognizes that passion brings suffering, can he make up his mind to turn away from the lower pleasures and strive for the higher.

#52 - Keeping Still

THE IMAGE

Mountains standing close together:
The image of KEEPING STILL.
Thus the superior man
Does not permit his thoughts
To go beyond his situation

The heart thinks constantly. this cannot be changed, but the movements of the heart - that is, a man’s thoughts - should restrict themselves to the immediate situation. All thinking that goes beyond this only makes the heart sore.

THE LINES [selections]

1.
The beginning is the time of few mistakes. ... Not yet influenced by obscuring interests and desires, one sees things intuitively as they really are. A man who halts at the beginning, so long as he has not yet abandoned truth, finds the right way.

3.
...in exercises in meditation and concentration, one ought not to try to force results. Rather, calmness must develop naturally out of a state of inner composure. If one tries to induce calmness by means of artificial rigidity, meditation will lead to very unwholesome results.

5.
...injudicious speech easily leads to situations that subsequently give much cause for regret. However, if a man is reserved in speech, his words take ever more definite form, and every occasion for regret vanishes. [Cf. line 2 in #58.]

6.
One is at rest, not merely in a small, circumscribed way in regard to matters of detail, but one has also a general resignation in regard to life as a whole, and this confers peace and good fortune in relation to every individual matter.

There is a wide difference of opinion on how best to interpret moving lines, particularly multiple moving lines. Six moving lines presents an interesting case. Is the second hexagram more important? Is there an implication that the first hexagram is a warning, something to be avoided?

In this example I have found it most useful to interpret the change chronologically. Joy can be achieved in the short term, but must eventually give way to Stillness. In striving after Joy, one should always remember that Stillness is on the horizon, making Joy possible.

With regard to my present situation and this particular consultation, it also makes sense to see Joy as something that can be achieved within stillness, without the necessity of major movement or change. One must recognize that movement is not necessary for happiness. Indeed, if one is unhappy, it might even be better to purposely keep still and make as few life changes so that the external forces (warned about in #58) don't get in the way or confuse the situation. Once joy has been achieved, life changes can be productive because they won't be based in brute force (warned about in both hexagrams).

(I Ching text from the Wilhelm-Baynes translation, as transcribed at theAbysmal.)

2008-11-15T06:17:00.003-07:00

To be gifted is to be lost, unless one sees clearly in time to level the slopes instead of sliding down them all. How to conquer a gift should be the main study of anyone who recognizes one in himself
...
And what a complex matter it is to be clear-sighted, since gifts assume the first shape they meet and this shape might perchance be the right one.

-Jean Cocteau, La Difficulté d'Etre

Phrase from sample essay		Grader's comment
1. As an elementary educator, I believe this stance is extremist. Educators and the public must come to a middle road.		A. The discussion is generally confusing and barely addresses the central issue presented in the topic.
2. Hard work must be lauded, while freeloaders are punished.		B. This is an insightful, well-articulated discussion of curricular responsibility and the larger issue of academic responsibility.
3. Content and performance standards (i.e. curricula) need to be developed by the district's educators as a map for teachers. When educators provide students with choices WITHIN the map of curriculum, students relish in the freedom and take ownership for their learning.		C. Language use is generally precise and effective, and sentence structure is well controlled.
4. Of course, any school in which the students decide "what goes" is bound to have problems controlling students. Once the educators, be they administrators or teachers, are under the control of students, even a democratic situation would be like holding royalty acountable to the mob.		D. The examples are varied and used effectively to further support the writer's position.
5. Presently, students hear for hours that they should not forget to use a condom in the heat of the moment, and educators think the message gets through, while half the kids can't even remember to bring a pencil to class.		E. The careful choice of words and carefully structured paragraphs help unify the structure of the argument.
6. I do NOT think it is unfortunate that today's educators emphasize students' interests. It IS our duty, however, to provide the parameters for their education.		F. This response presents a well-developed analysis of the issue and displays strong control of the elements of writing.