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