the dark

It rained for days. Thin rain that soaked you in half an hour without the thrill of a real torrent. I went from home to home gossiping and seeing friends; helping with whatever had to be tended or gathered. My friend the priest was on a pilgrimage, so I left him long letters of the kind I would most like to receive.

I like the early dark. It's not night. It's still companionable.

No one feels afraid to walk by themselves without a lantern. The girls sing on their way back from the last milking and if I jump out on them they'll shout and chase me but there'll be no pounding hearts. I don't know why it is that one kind of dark can be so different from another. Real dark is thicker and quieter, it fills up the space between your jacket and your heart. It gets in your eyes. When I have to be out late at night, it's not knives and kicks I'm afraid of, though there are plenty of those behind walls and hedges. I'm afraid of the Dark. You, who walk so cheerfully,whistling your way, stand still for five minutes. Stand still in the Dark in a field or down a track. It's then you know you're there on sufferance. The Dark only lets you take one step at a time. Step and the Dark closes round your back. In front, there is no space for you until you take it. Darkness is absolute. Walking in the Dark is like swimming underwater except you can't come up for air.

Lie still at night and Dark is soft to the touch, it's made of moleskin and is such a sweet smotherer. In the country we rely on the moon, and when the moon is out no light can penetrate the window. The window is walled over and cast in a perfect black surface. Does it feel the same to be blind? I used to think so, but I've been told not. A blind pedlar who visited us regularly laughed at my stories of the Dark and said the Dark was his wife. We bought our pails from him and fed him in the kitchen. He never spilt his stew or missed his mouth the way I did. 'I can see,' he said, 'but I don't use my eyes.' He died last winter, my mother said.

It's early dark now and this is the last night of my leave. We won't do anything unusual. We don't want to think that I'm going again.

from The passion, Jeanette Winterson

collage/montage

its (collage's) heterogeneity, even if it is reduced by every operation of composition, imposes itself on the reading as stimulation to produce a signification which could be neither univocal nor stable. Each sited element breaks the continuity or the linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to the text of its origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality. The trick of collage consists of never entirely suppressing the alterity of these elements reunited in a temporary composition. Thus the art of collage proves to be one of the most effective strategies in putting into question all of the illusions of representation. ( collages 34-5)

Grammatology Derrida

Montage does not reproduce the real, but constructs and object ( its lexical field includes the terms "assemble, build, join, unite, add, combine, link, construct, organise" Montage 121 or rather mounts a process ( " the relation of form to content is no longer a relation of exteririty, the form resembling clothes which can dress no matter what its content, it is process, genesis, result of a work" in order to intervene in the world, not to reflect but to change reality.


from-
The object of post criticism
Gregory L Ulmer

The anti aesthetic

eco essay in asian age

to be the same is really boring or on identity

" If we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity unique to ourselves. But the relationships we have to have with our selves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be of relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. "- Michel foucault, Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity

... elephant (essay)

[…] precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life.

– Slavoj Zizek (1)

Thus we can understand poetry is anarchic in as much as it questions all object relationships between meaning and form. It is also anarchic to the extent its occurrence is the result of disturbances leading us nearer to chaos.

– Antonin Artaud (2)

essay here

To Music Rainer Maria Rilke

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what? --: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,--
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

Mani Kaul interview

here

Myth

levi strauss myth

Desiredeleuze

Desire is the internal causality of an image with respect to the existence of the object

Sky

For the sky does not at all signify a height which would merely be the inverse of depth. In opposition to the deep earth, air and sky describe a pure surface, and the signifying field of this surface. The solipsist sky has no depth.
It is a strange prejudice which sets a higher value on depth than on breadth, and which accepts superficial as meaning not of wide extent but of little depth...

Yet it seems to me that a feeling such as love is better measured, if it can be measured at all by the xetent of its surface than by the degree of its depth.

of the refrain

A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with his little song as best he can. The song is likea rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings, hastens or slows his pace. But the song itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is in danger of breaking apart at any moment. There is always sonority in Ariadne's thread. Or the song of Orpheus.

Deleuze

mirror utopia

I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy.

Michel Foucault. Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias.

Slaughterhouse

Library of Dust

Storytellers have not imagined that Sleeping Beauty would have awoken covered by a thick layer of dust; neither have they thought of the sinister spiders' webs torn by her red hair as soon as she stirred. Yet sad blankets of dust endlessly invade earthly dwellings and soil them uniformly: as if attics and old rooms were being arranged for the imminent entrance of obsessions, of ghosts, of larvae fed and inebriated by the worm-eaten smell of old dust.

When the big servant girls arm themselves, each morning, with big feather dusters, or even with vacuum cleaners, they are perhaps not entirely unaware that they are contributing as much as the most positive scientists to keeping off the evil ghosts who are sickened by cleanliness and logic. One day or another, it is true, dust, if it persists, will probably begin to gain ground over the servants, overrunning with vast quantities of rubble abandoned buildings, deserted docks: and in this distant epoch there will be nothing more to save us from nocturnal terrors.

Georges Bataille, ‘Poussière,’ Documents, 1, no. 5, 1929, p. 278.
8

the grain of the voice

"Isn't the truth of the voice to be hallucinated? Isn't the entire space of the voice an infinite one?"

"His art- expressive, dramatic, sentimentally clear, borne by a voice lacking in any 'grain', in any signifying weight fits well with the demands of an average culture."

- Roland Barthes
The Grain of the Voice
Image Music Text

crescendo

“I’ve never been to a concert before on such an empty belly. Nothing escapes me, not even the tiniest pin falling. Its as though I had no clothes on and every pore of my body was a window and all the windows open and the light flooding my gizzards. I can feel the light curving under the vault of my ribs and my ribs hang there over a hollow nave trembling with reverberations “ Henry Miller Tropic of Capricon

Music2

‘ Take a good look at people who try to dedramatize, to desymbolise and designify. They seem to think they can achieve complete demystification and reach things per se, in all their unadorned nakedness, revealing the aims and values that lie hidden beneath the mask. It’s pure platitude, too black and white. With no symbols, no fictions, how could you carry out the cruel dialogue between the I and the me, between living and life? How otherwise could this tale be told, with all its ellipses and silences? Without images and symbols how could you condense the vapours of the living, how could you trace man’s long journey into the dark recesses of his own memory? How could you conjure up the past, that zombie, how could you reanimate it in the name of what is possible, unless you call upon the power of images? If it is true that life as it is lived was always more shoddy and more lousy than could be expressed by a glorious and tragic symbol, at the same time it always makes something much vaster. Music, for example. What does music you make become? Everything. Small worlds and the world at large. The universe. All moments, every one of them. Love, play, knowledge, calmness. An inexhaustible presence- time overflowing with presences- takes hold of you, sweeps you away and changes you by becoming your own presence and your own present, the present moment which- at last- you offer yourself as you enter the realm of everything possible. Everything: joy and suffering, serenity and pain, more and ever more. Inexhaustible depths: a translucent abyss unlike that of the sea (which swallows you up) and the sky (which fascinates you and drowns you in its luminous void). The purest, the simplest, the noblest, the lowliest, divine and demonic- this is what music makes you become. The distance between life and living is bridged. You are clothed in splendor, the splendor of totality. An illusion? Not entirely. Alienation? Maybe, but an alienation which disalienates you before it negates you once more. So do not hesitate to glorify yourself.’

Henri Lefebvre, The message of the crucified sun- Introduction to Modernity

wordlove

"And what words do between themselves -- couplings, matings,
hybridizations -- is genius. An erotic and fertile genius. A law of
life presides over their cross breedings. Only words in love sow. Clandestine semantics." --Hélène Cixous

(equus eroticus) from how do you make yourself a bwO

Take a masochist who did not undergo psychoanalysis: "program ... At night, put on the bridle and attach my hands more tightly, either to the bit with the chain, or to the big belt right after returning from the bath. Put on the entire harness right away also, the reins and thumbscrews, and attach the thumbscrews to the harness. My penis should be in a metal sheath. Ride the reins for two hours during the day, and in the evening as the master wishes. Confinement for three or four days, hands still tied, the reins alternately tightened and loosened. The master will never approach her horse* without the crop, and without using it. If the animal should dis play impatience or rebelliousness, the reins will be drawn tighter, the mas ter will grab them and give the beast a good thrashing."11 What is this masochist doing? He seems to be imitating a horse, Equus eroticus, but that's not it. Nor are the horse and the master-trainer or mistress images of the mother or father. Something entirely different is going on: a becoming-animal essential to masochism. It is a question of forces. The masochist presents it this way: Training axiom—destroy the instinctive forces in order to replace them with transmitted forces. In fact, it is less a destruction than an exchange and circulation ("what happens to a horse can also happen to me"). Horses are trained: humans impose upon the horse's instinctive forces transmitted forces that regulate the former, select, dominate, overcode them. The masochist effects an inversion of signs: the horse transmits its transmitted forces to him, so that the masochist's innate forces will in turn be tamed. There are two series, the horse's (innate force, force transmitted by the human being), and the masochisfs (force trans mitted by the horse, innate force of the human being). One series explodes into the other, forms a circuit with it: an increase in power or a circuit of intensities. The "master," or rather the mistress-rider, the equestrian, ensures the conversion offerees and the inversion of signs. The masochist constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously draws and fills the field of immanence of desire; he constitutes a body without organs or plane of consistency using himself, the horse, and the mistress. "Results to be obtained: that I am kept in continual expectancy of actions and orders, and that little by little all opposition is replaced by a fusion of my person with yours.. . . Thus at the mere thought of your boots, without even acknowl edging it, I must feel fear. In this way, it will no longer be women's legs that have an effect on me, and if it pleases you to command me to receive your caresses, when you have had them and if you make me feel them, you will give me the imprint of your body as I have never had it before and never would have had it otherwise."12 Legs are still organs, but the boots now only determine a zone of intensity as an imprint or zone on a BwO.