Monday, October 5, 2020

Hermann Hesse on trees


“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”

Monday, June 22, 2020

Vogue

Margaret opened the Vogue at the Beauty Guide. It was simple enough, three magnified pictures, an eye, seven inches long, a mouth, wide open, twenty seven inches round, and a fingernail, five inches long. Each occupied a full page, bright and bold in a magnified background of salmon pale flesh. Most days Margaret might have flicked through the pages with an approving nod but today for some reason these pictures arrested her. Seen first and quickly, they had all the lit excitement of one’s own mouth or eye, suddenly springing to life with paint in the mirror. They had the mystery, the exhilaration as Henry had seen it in the flower-films, of colors brighter than they are usually seen, the jeweled glitter of a medieval heaven. But Margaret looked too long, as one will sometimes look at a perfectly ordinary word until its spelling seems insane, and saw them too much, in too much detail. The eye was worst as it had first been most satisfactory. The mouth and nail were less compelling and nastier. The mouth, a swollen pink round, with every crack of the skin glittering, seemed to her like one of those animal fly- eating plants must be, moist and fleshy with chocolate-colored hole in the middle and three square wet teeth hanging below the upper lip. The fingernail oval, rested on the fleshy pad on the finger and protruded over it. They
had photographed the varnish being applied and the thick black hairs of the brush lay stickily on the fat pink slug, a molten lump settling slowly onto the nail, like a sweet half sucked.

From A S Byatt, the Shadow of the Sun

Friday, December 21, 2018

Life is thus simply the sex of the world



It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.
Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.
But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.
Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime.
Gold, water, the equator, or crime can each be put forward as the principle of things.
And if the origin of things is not like the ground of the planet that seems to be the base, but like the circular movement that the planet describes around a mobile center, then a car, a clock, or a sewing machine could equally be accepted as the generative principle.
The two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive’s wheels and pistons.
These two motions are reciprocally transformed, the one into the other.
Thus one notes that the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make the earth turn by having coitus.
It is the mechanical combination or transformation of these movements that the alchemists sought as the philosopher’s stone.
It is through the use of this magically valued combination that one can determine the present position of men in the midst of the elements.
An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality.
An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs, the hollow eyes of judges are the roots that nourish love.
A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a slobbering accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love.
A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others.
In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches.
Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.
Love or infantile rage, or a provincial dowager’s vanity, or clerical pornography, or the diamond of a soprano bewilder individuals forgotten in dusty apartments.
They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.
The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can look or pass.
I rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens.
It is impossible for her to know whom she will discover when I hold her, because she obstinately attains a complete forgetting.
The planetary systems that turn in space like rapid disks, and whose centers also move, describing an infinitely larger circle, only move away continuously from their own position in order to return it, completing their rotation.
Movement is a figure of love, incapable of stopping at a particular being, and rapidly passing from one to another.
But the forgetting that determines it in this way is only a subterfuge of memory.
A man gets up as brusquely as a specter in a coffin and falls in the same way.
He gets up a few hours later and then he falls again, and the same thing happens every day; this great coitus with the celestial atmosphere is regulated by the terrestrial rotation around the sun.
Thus even though terrestrial life moves to the rhythm of this rotation, the image of this movement is not turning earth, but the male shaft penetrating the female and almost entirely emerging, in order to reenter.
Love and life appear to be separate only because everything on earth is broken apart by vibrations of various amplitudes and durations.
However, there are no vibrations that are not conjugated with a continuous circular movement; in the same way, a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis.
Beings only die to be born, in the manner of phalluses that leave bodies in order to enter them.
Plants rise in the direction of the sun and then collapse in the direction of the ground.
Trees bristle the ground with a vast quantity of flowered shafts raised up to the sun.
The trees that forcefully soar end up burned by lightning, chopped down, or uprooted. Returned to the ground, they come back up in another form.
But their polymorphous coitus is a function of uniform terrestrial rotation.
The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide. From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon, comes the polymorphous and organic coitus of the earth with the sun.
But the first form of solar love is a cloud raised up over the liquid element. The erotic cloud sometimes becomes a storm and falls back to earth in the form of rain, while lightning staves in the layers of the atmosphere.
The rain is soon raised up again in the form of an immobile plant.
Animal life comes entirely from the movement of the seas and, inside bodies, life continues to come from salt water.
The sea, then, has played the role of the female organ that liquefies under the excitation of the penis.
The sea continuously jerks off.
Solid elements, contained and brewed in water animated by erotic movement, shoot out in the form of flying fish.
The erection and the sun scandalize, in the same way as the cadaver and the darkness of cellars.
Vegetation is uniformly directed towards the sun; human beings, on the other hand, even though phalloid like trees, in opposition to other animals, necessarily avert their eyes.
Human eyes tolerate neither sun, coitus, cadavers, nor obscurity, but with different reactions.
When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene.
It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.
For that reason I am not afraid to affirm that my face is a scandal and that my passions are expressed only by the JESUVE.
The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus.
Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails.
Those contents shoot out with a racket and fall back, streaming down the sides of the Jesuve, spreading death and terror everywhere.
In fact, the erotic movements of the ground are not fertile like those of the water, but they are far more rapid.
The earth sometimes jerks off in a frenzy, and everything collapses on its surface.
The Jesuve is thus the image of an erotic movement that burglarizes the ideas contained in the mind, giving them the force a scandalous eruption.
This eruptive force accumulates in those who are necessarily situated below.
Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.
Disasters, revolutions, and volcanoes do not make love with the stars.
The erotic revolutionary and volcanic deflagrations antagonize the heavens.
As in the case of violent love, they take place beyond the constraints of fecundity.
In opposition to celestial fertility there are terrestrial disasters, the image of terrestrial love without condition, erection without escape and without rule, scandal, and terror.
Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.
I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.
The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.
The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.



Friday, April 13, 2018

Women recovering their clothes


an excerpt from Iris Marion Young's ' Women Recovering Our Clothes'

" feminine desire irigary suggests , moves through the medium of touch more than sight. Less concerned with identifying things, comparing them, measuring them in their relations to one another, touch immerses the subject in fluid continuity with the object, and for the touching subject the object touched reciprocates the touching, blurring the border between self and other. By touch I mean that specific sense of skin on matter, fingers on texture. But I also mean an orientation to sensuality as such that includes all senses. Thus we might conceive a mode of vision, for example, that is less a gaze, distanced from and mastering its object, but an immersion in light and colour., Sensing as touching is within, experiencing what touches it as ambiguous, continuous, but nevertheless differentiated .
When I "see" myself in wool it's partly the wool itself that attracts me, its heavy warmth and textured depth. Some of the pleasure of clothes is the pleasure of fabric and the way the fabric hangs and falls around the body. straight skirts with slits might give thigh for the eye, but the skirt in all its glory drapes in flowing folds that billow when you twirl. history documents the measurement of nobility and grace through fabric. Women have been imprisoned by this history, have been used as mannequins to display the trappings of wealth. 
But feminine experience also affords many of us a tactile imagination, the simple pleasure of losing ourselves in cloth. We wander through yard-goods stores , stroke the fabrics hanging off the bolts, pull them out to appraise the patterns, imagine how they might be best formed around the body or the chair or the windows.
Some of our clothes we love for their own sake, because their fabric and cut and colour charm us and relate to our bodies in specific ways - because , I almost want to say, they love us back. These wool blended striped elephant bottomed pants that held a crease so well and flopped happily around my ankles. The green herringbone wool blazer I made with my own hands after the lining fell apart, I sadly gave it to my sister because the new lining was to small. The wine-red-print full-sleeved smooth rayon blouse, gathered at the shoulders to drape lightly over my chest. Many of our clothes never attain this privilege of the beloved , perhaps because our motives for having most of them are so extrinsic: to be in style or to give our face the most flattering colour, to be cost effective, or to please others. Some we love with passion or tenderness, though, 

and we are sad or angry when they become damaged or go out of fashion.....


Misogynist mythology gloats in its portrayal of women as body decorators. We are trained to meet the gaze that evaluates us for our finery, for how well we show him off. we are then condemned as sentimental, superficial, duplicitous, because we attend to and sometimes laern to love the glamorous arts. The male gazers paint us gazing at ourselves at our toilets at our toilet, before the table they call a vanity. In their own image, the male myth makers can find only narcissistic pleasures. Outside this orbit of self reference , I find three pleasures we take in clothes: touch, bonding, and fantasy"
Hey 

Saturday, April 15, 2017

Micro politics and segmentarity- from a thousand plateaus 

The values, morals, father lands, religions and private certitudes our vanity and self-complacency generously grant us are so many abodes the world furnishes for those who think on that account they rest amid stable things ;they know nothing of the enormous rout they are heading for...in flight from flight

Maurice blanchot L'Amite

Friday, July 29, 2016

What is a filmic image- Roland Barthes- leaving the movie theatre

What is a filmic image (including the sound) ? A lure. This work must be taken in its analytic sense. i am shut up with the image as though i were taken in by the famous dual relation which establishes the Image-repertoire, the Imaginary. The image is there before me, for me: coalescent (its signifier and its signified nicely blended.), analogical, total, suggestive; it is the perfect lure: I hurl myself at it like an animal at a "lifelike' rag waved in front of it; and of course the image perpetuates in the subject I believe I am the misunderstanding attached to the self and to the Imaginary. In the movie theatre, no matter how far back i sit, I press my nose, to the point of flattening it, right up against the mirror of the screen, against this Imaginary "Other" with which I narcissistically identify (they say that the people who prefer to sit as close to the screen as possible are children and film buffs): the image captivates me , captures me: i am glued to the picture on the screen, and it is in this bond, this glue which establishes the naturalness (the pseudo-nature) of the filmed scene ( a glue prepared with all the ingredients of "technique'): whereas the Real knows only distances, the Symbolic knows only masks: only the image (Imaginary) is close, only the image is true (able to produce the ring of truth). (1975 a p. 106)