THE LUNCH
"Not without some labor, a cronopio manages to invent a thermometer for measuring lives. Something between a thermograph and a topometer, between a filing cabinet and a curriculum vitae.
For example, the cronopio received at his house a fama, an esperanza, and a professor of languages. Applying his discoveries, he established that the fama was infra-life, the esperanza para-life, and the professor of languages inter-life. As far as the cronopio himself was concerned, he considered himself just slightly super-life, but more poetry in that than truth.
Came lunchtime, this cronopio took great pleasure in the conversation of his fellow members, because all of them thought they were referring to the same things, which was not so. The inter-life was maneuvering such abstractions as spirit and conscience, to which the para-life listened like someone hearing rain- a delicate job. Naturally, the infra-life was asking constantly for the grated cheese, and the super-life carved the chicken in forty-two separate movements, the Stanley Fitzsimmons method. After dessert, the lives took their leaves of one another and went off to their occupations, and there was left on the table only little loose bits of death."
Julio Cortazar
27 January 2010
26 January 2010
"But the oracle comes, because we had previously laid siege to the shrine. It seems as if the law of the intellect resembled that law of nature by which we now inspire, now expire the breath; by which the heart now draws in, then hurls out the blood,—the law of undulation. So now you must labor with your brains, and now you must forbear your activity, and see what the great Soul showeth." - RW Emerson
**
Transients, Julie Mehretu
**
selfp
**
Transients, Julie Mehretu
**
selfp
25 January 2010
24 January 2010
Milton: The Sky is an Immortal Tent Built by the Sons of Los
"1 The sky is an immortal tent built by the Sons of Los:
2 And every space that a man views around his dwelling-place
3 Standing on his own roof or in his garden on a mount
4 Of twenty-five cubits in height, such space is his universe:
5 And on its verge the sun rises and sets, the clouds bow
6 To meet the flat earth and the sea in such an order'd space:
7 The starry heavens reach no further, but here bend and set
8 On all sides, and the two Poles turn on their valves of gold:
9 And if he moves his dwelling-place, his heavens also move
10 Where'er he goes, and all his neighborhood bewail his loss.
11 Such are the spaces called Earth and such its dimension.
12 As to that false appearance which appears to the reasoner
13 As of a globe rolling through voidness, it is a delusion of Ulro.
14 The microscope knows not of this nor the telescope: they alter
15 The ratio of the spectator's organs, but leave objects untouch'd
16 For every space larger than a red globule of Man's blood
17 Is visionary, and is created by the Hammer of Los;
18 And every space smaller than a globule of Man's blood opens
19 Into Eternity of which this vegetable Earth is but a shadow.
20 The red globule is the unwearied sun by Los created
21 To measure time and space to mortal men every morning.
2 And every space that a man views around his dwelling-place
3 Standing on his own roof or in his garden on a mount
4 Of twenty-five cubits in height, such space is his universe:
5 And on its verge the sun rises and sets, the clouds bow
6 To meet the flat earth and the sea in such an order'd space:
7 The starry heavens reach no further, but here bend and set
8 On all sides, and the two Poles turn on their valves of gold:
9 And if he moves his dwelling-place, his heavens also move
10 Where'er he goes, and all his neighborhood bewail his loss.
11 Such are the spaces called Earth and such its dimension.
12 As to that false appearance which appears to the reasoner
13 As of a globe rolling through voidness, it is a delusion of Ulro.
14 The microscope knows not of this nor the telescope: they alter
15 The ratio of the spectator's organs, but leave objects untouch'd
16 For every space larger than a red globule of Man's blood
17 Is visionary, and is created by the Hammer of Los;
18 And every space smaller than a globule of Man's blood opens
19 Into Eternity of which this vegetable Earth is but a shadow.
20 The red globule is the unwearied sun by Los created
21 To measure time and space to mortal men every morning.
-William Blake
**
23 January 2010
.
"...he insisted, dragging his cot from outside his hut to mine while Johnny, Jeetendra, and the others hugged and mock-wrestled me into submission, and our cries and laughter rolled away toward the time dissolving everness of the sea.
For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. "
_Shantaram_ close
with love, with longing
For this is what we do. Put one foot forward and then the other. Lift our eyes to the snarl and smile of the world once more. Think. Act. Feel. Add our little consequence to the tides of good and evil that flood and drain the world. Drag our shadowed crosses into the hope of another night. Push our brave hearts into the promise of a new day. With love: the passionate search for a truth other than our own. With longing: the pure, ineffable yearning to be saved. "
_Shantaram_ close
with love, with longing
Trading Cities 2
" In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.
A girl comes along, twirling a parasol on her shoulder, and twirling slightly also her rounded hips. A woman in black comes along, showing her full age, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling. A tattooed giant comes along; a young man with white hair; a female dwarf; two girls, twins, dressed in coral. Something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene: a blind man with a cheetah on a leash, a courtesan with an ostrich-plume fan, an ephebe, a Fat Woman. And thus, when some people happen to find themselves together, taking shelter from the rain under an arcade, or crowding beneath an awning of the bazaar, or stopping to listen to the band in the square, meetings, seductions, copulations, orgies are consummated among them without a word, exchanged, without a finger touching anything, almost without an eye raised.
A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste cities. If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop."
_Invisible Cities_, Italo Calvino
" In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.
A girl comes along, twirling a parasol on her shoulder, and twirling slightly also her rounded hips. A woman in black comes along, showing her full age, her eyes restless beneath her veil, her lips trembling. A tattooed giant comes along; a young man with white hair; a female dwarf; two girls, twins, dressed in coral. Something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draw arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment, and other characters come on to the scene: a blind man with a cheetah on a leash, a courtesan with an ostrich-plume fan, an ephebe, a Fat Woman. And thus, when some people happen to find themselves together, taking shelter from the rain under an arcade, or crowding beneath an awning of the bazaar, or stopping to listen to the band in the square, meetings, seductions, copulations, orgies are consummated among them without a word, exchanged, without a finger touching anything, almost without an eye raised.
A voluptuous vibration constantly stirs Chloe, the most chaste cities. If men and women began to live their ephemeral dreams, every phantom would become a person with whom to begin a story of pursuits, pretenses, misunderstandings, clashes, oppressions, and the carousel of fantasies would stop."
_Invisible Cities_, Italo Calvino
19 January 2010
18 January 2010
17 January 2010
Song of the Cronopios
"When the cronopios sing their favorite songs, they get so excited, and in such a way, that with frequency they get run over by trucks and cyclists, fall out of windows, and lose what they're carrying in their pockets, even losing track of what day it is.
When a cronopio sings, the esperanzas and famas gather around to hear him, although they do not understand his ecstasy very well and in general show themselves somewhat scandalized. In the center of a ring of spectators, the cronopio raises his little arms as though he were holding up the sun, as if the sky were a tray and the sun the head of John the Baptist, in such a way that the cronopio's song is Salome stripped, dancing for the famas and esperanzas who stand there agape asking themselves if the good father would, if decorum. But because they are good at heart ( the famas are good and the esperanzas are blockheads), they end by applauding the cronopio, who recovers, somewhat startled, looks around, and also starts to applaud, poor fellow."
Julio Cortazar
"When the cronopios sing their favorite songs, they get so excited, and in such a way, that with frequency they get run over by trucks and cyclists, fall out of windows, and lose what they're carrying in their pockets, even losing track of what day it is.
When a cronopio sings, the esperanzas and famas gather around to hear him, although they do not understand his ecstasy very well and in general show themselves somewhat scandalized. In the center of a ring of spectators, the cronopio raises his little arms as though he were holding up the sun, as if the sky were a tray and the sun the head of John the Baptist, in such a way that the cronopio's song is Salome stripped, dancing for the famas and esperanzas who stand there agape asking themselves if the good father would, if decorum. But because they are good at heart ( the famas are good and the esperanzas are blockheads), they end by applauding the cronopio, who recovers, somewhat startled, looks around, and also starts to applaud, poor fellow."
Julio Cortazar
[ Marco says]" The description of the world to which you lend a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life, if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear."
"At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, will come to life again."
_Invisible Cities_ , Italo Calvino
"At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, will come to life again."
_Invisible Cities_ , Italo Calvino
16 January 2010
15 January 2010
STRATEGIC QUESTIONS / Buckminster Fuller
202. Are we all experts?
203. What are the politics of seriousness?
204. What is a public secret?
205. When does a conversation between aesthetics and politics become repressive?
206. Is every architect a potential fascist?
**
" Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary. What then[century of the Enlightenment] was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning.... few things were better suited to this end than an idea of nation."
_Imagined Communities_, Benedict Anderson
14 January 2010
13 January 2010
The Latin word for the sacredness of a place is cultures, the dwelling of a god, the place where a rite is valid. Cultus becomes our world culture, not in the portentous sense it now has, but in a much humbler sense. For ancient people the sacred was the vernacular ordinariness of things: the hearth, primarily; the bed, the wall around the yard.
_The Geography of the imagination: forty essays_ , Guy Davenport
**
"in the Indo-European languages, as Darmsteter has pointed out, the root meaning "two" should connote badness. The Greek Prefix dys- and the Latin dis- are both derived from "duo." The cognate bis- gives pejorative sense to such modern French words as bevue ("blunder, literally " two-sight)...Zweifel- for to doubt is to be double-minded ["Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray" - Kabir]"
"the cult of unity on the political level is only an idolatrous ersatz for the genuine religion of unity on the personal and spitirual levels. .. political monism...Only the pure in heart and poor in spirit (?) can come to the unitive knowledge of God. Hence, the attempt to impose more unity upon societies than their individual members are ready for makes it psychologically almost impossible for those individuals to realize their unity with the divine Ground and with one another."
_The Perennial Philosophy_ , Aldous Huxley
"the cult of unity on the political level is only an idolatrous ersatz for the genuine religion of unity on the personal and spitirual levels. .. political monism...Only the pure in heart and poor in spirit (?) can come to the unitive knowledge of God. Hence, the attempt to impose more unity upon societies than their individual members are ready for makes it psychologically almost impossible for those individuals to realize their unity with the divine Ground and with one another."
_The Perennial Philosophy_ , Aldous Huxley
11 January 2010
" When he awoke the fug was thick. He got up and opened the skylight to see what stars he commanded, but closed it again at once, there being no stars. He lit the tall thick candle from the radiator and went down to the w.c. to shut off the flow. What was the etymology of gas? On his way back he examined the foot of the ladder. It was only lightly screwed down, Ticklepenny could rectify it. He undressed to the regulation shirt, stuck the candle by its own tallow to the floor at the head of the bed, got in and tried to come out in his mind. But his body was still too busy with its fatigue. And the etymology of gas? Could it be the same word as chaos? Hardly. Chaos was yawn. But then cretin was Christian. Chaos would do, it might not be right but it was pleasant, for him henceforward gas would be chaos, and chaos gas. It could make you yawn, warm, laugh, cry, cease to suffer, live a little longer, die a little sooner. What could it not do? Gas. Could it turn a neurotic into a psychotic? No. Only God could do that. Let there be Heaven in the midst of the waters, let it divide the waters from the waters. The Chaos and Waters Cafilities Act. The Chaos, Light and Coke Co. Hell. Heaven. Helen. Celia.
In the morning nothing remained of the dream but a postmonition of calamity, nothing of the candle but a little coil of tallow.
Nothing remained but to see what he wanted to see. Any fool can turn the blind eye, but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?
He would not have admitted that he needed a brotherhood. He did. In the presence of the issue (psychiatric-psychotic) between the life from which he had turned away and the life of which he had no experience, except as he hoped inchoately in himself, he could not fail to side with the latter. His first impressions ( always the best), hope of better things, feeling of kindred, etc., had been in that sense. Nothing remained but to substantiate these, distorting all that threatened to belie them. It was strenuous work, but very pleasant.
Thus it was necessary that every hour in the wards should increase, together with his esteem for the patients, his loathing of the text-book attitude towards them, the complacent scientific conceptualism, that made contact with outer reality the index of mental well-being. Every hour did.
The nature of outer reality remained obscure. The men, women and children of science would seem to have as many ways of kneeling to their facts as any other body of illuminati. The definition of outer relaity, or of reality short and simple, varied according to the sensibility of the definer. But all seemed agreed that contact with it, even the layman's muzzy contact, was a rare privilege.
On this basis the patients were described as "cut off" from reality, from the rudimentary blessings of the layman's reality, if not altogether, as in the severer cases, then in certain fundamental respects. The function of treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of discrete particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable balanced manner, and comfort himself with the society of others in the same predicament.
All this was duly revolting to Murphy, whose experience as a physical and rational being obliged him to call sanctuary what the psychiatrists called exile and to think of the patients not as banished from a system of benefits but as escaped from a colossal fiasco. If his mind had been on the correct cash-register lines, an indefatigable apparatus for doing sums with the petty cash of current facts, then no doubt the suppression of these would have seemed a deprivation. But since it was not, since what he called his mind functioned not as an instrument but as a place, from whose unique dleights precisely those current facts withheld him, was it not most natural that he should welcome their suppression, as of gyves?
The issue therefore, as lovingly simplified and perverted by Murphy, lay between nothing less fundamental than the big world and the little world, decided by the patients in favor of the latter, revived by the psychiatrists on behalf of the former, in his own case unresolved. In fact, it was unresolved, only in fact. His vote was cast. " I am not of the the big world, I am of the little world" was an old refrain with Murphy, and a conviction, two convictions, the negative first. How should he tolerate, let alone cultivate, the occasions of fiasco, having once beheld the beatific idols of his cave?...
But it was not enough to want nothing where he was worth nothing, nor even to take the further step of renouncing all that lay outside the intellectual love in which alone he could love himself, because there alone he was lovable. It had not been enough and showed no signs of being enough. These dispositions and other ancillary, pressing every available means ( e.g. the rocking chair) into their service, could sway the issue in the desired direction, but not clinch it. It continued to divide him, as witness his deplorable susceptbility to Celia, ginger, and so on. The means of clinching it were lacking. Suppose he were to clinch it now, in the service of the Clinch clan! That would indeed be very pretty."
from _Murphy_ , Samuel Beckett
In the morning nothing remained of the dream but a postmonition of calamity, nothing of the candle but a little coil of tallow.
Nothing remained but to see what he wanted to see. Any fool can turn the blind eye, but who knows what the ostrich sees in the sand?
He would not have admitted that he needed a brotherhood. He did. In the presence of the issue (psychiatric-psychotic) between the life from which he had turned away and the life of which he had no experience, except as he hoped inchoately in himself, he could not fail to side with the latter. His first impressions ( always the best), hope of better things, feeling of kindred, etc., had been in that sense. Nothing remained but to substantiate these, distorting all that threatened to belie them. It was strenuous work, but very pleasant.
Thus it was necessary that every hour in the wards should increase, together with his esteem for the patients, his loathing of the text-book attitude towards them, the complacent scientific conceptualism, that made contact with outer reality the index of mental well-being. Every hour did.
The nature of outer reality remained obscure. The men, women and children of science would seem to have as many ways of kneeling to their facts as any other body of illuminati. The definition of outer relaity, or of reality short and simple, varied according to the sensibility of the definer. But all seemed agreed that contact with it, even the layman's muzzy contact, was a rare privilege.
On this basis the patients were described as "cut off" from reality, from the rudimentary blessings of the layman's reality, if not altogether, as in the severer cases, then in certain fundamental respects. The function of treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of discrete particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable balanced manner, and comfort himself with the society of others in the same predicament.
All this was duly revolting to Murphy, whose experience as a physical and rational being obliged him to call sanctuary what the psychiatrists called exile and to think of the patients not as banished from a system of benefits but as escaped from a colossal fiasco. If his mind had been on the correct cash-register lines, an indefatigable apparatus for doing sums with the petty cash of current facts, then no doubt the suppression of these would have seemed a deprivation. But since it was not, since what he called his mind functioned not as an instrument but as a place, from whose unique dleights precisely those current facts withheld him, was it not most natural that he should welcome their suppression, as of gyves?
The issue therefore, as lovingly simplified and perverted by Murphy, lay between nothing less fundamental than the big world and the little world, decided by the patients in favor of the latter, revived by the psychiatrists on behalf of the former, in his own case unresolved. In fact, it was unresolved, only in fact. His vote was cast. " I am not of the the big world, I am of the little world" was an old refrain with Murphy, and a conviction, two convictions, the negative first. How should he tolerate, let alone cultivate, the occasions of fiasco, having once beheld the beatific idols of his cave?...
But it was not enough to want nothing where he was worth nothing, nor even to take the further step of renouncing all that lay outside the intellectual love in which alone he could love himself, because there alone he was lovable. It had not been enough and showed no signs of being enough. These dispositions and other ancillary, pressing every available means ( e.g. the rocking chair) into their service, could sway the issue in the desired direction, but not clinch it. It continued to divide him, as witness his deplorable susceptbility to Celia, ginger, and so on. The means of clinching it were lacking. Suppose he were to clinch it now, in the service of the Clinch clan! That would indeed be very pretty."
from _Murphy_ , Samuel Beckett
10 January 2010
07 January 2010
Tim Hussey's first etching**
"by the time i get to the border, i’ve already forgotten
why i came. must be for its own sake, for the point now
seems moot. anyway, it’s a good place to camp,
and i can still see out my own window. it might be just
a fantasy that the panorama appears broader here,
or that i can quibble as long as i like. it would be a different
matter to change the story, brutish but at least not yet
malevolent. i think i know my disease, but really
i only catalogue the symptoms. for example,
my eyes being the exact shade of the tree bark they invert.
and my thoughts having no passport, no home, just
background noise to accompany their inevitable mistakes.
here i can fail the rorschach out my window every
time, giving dubious answers to indefinite
prompts"
from Six, camille Martin
why i came. must be for its own sake, for the point now
seems moot. anyway, it’s a good place to camp,
and i can still see out my own window. it might be just
a fantasy that the panorama appears broader here,
or that i can quibble as long as i like. it would be a different
matter to change the story, brutish but at least not yet
malevolent. i think i know my disease, but really
i only catalogue the symptoms. for example,
my eyes being the exact shade of the tree bark they invert.
and my thoughts having no passport, no home, just
background noise to accompany their inevitable mistakes.
here i can fail the rorschach out my window every
time, giving dubious answers to indefinite
prompts"
from Six, camille Martin
03 January 2010
01 January 2010
" What does it mean, to live in a room? Is to live in a place to take possession of it? What does taking possession of a place mean? .. Is it when you've put your three pairs of socks to soak in the pink plastic bowl?... Is it when you've experienced there the throes of anticipation, or the exaltations of passion, or the torments of a toothache?"
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Georges Perec
Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Georges Perec
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