But there are movements of the mind like a headache without pain, nagging as a toothache: these are deformations of ego from within, slowly being forced as orthodontic braces guide the teeth, by elements not yet admitted to consciousness, that cast their grinding, the voice of a continent in flight, apparently to the stars, white noise--becoming sense. ...thoughts that don't yet carry the burden of a thousand repetitions, so light you must hold your breath beside them...
"Skunkworks"
There are no atoms
indivisible at last to be broken to.
If i was once
the site and source of such resplendent fire
or, oak, stood riven
lit from a forking lode, then more i shall be.
Atoms into atom-shards
and into shards of shards, there is no ending,
no last dust
but may be made to walk and weep again.
2 24 84
Empirical art history, which makes out the purposes of art to be so divergent, is like a physics that concludes gravity used to be weaker than it is now, because of the Dinosaurs. What changes is the set & setting, the means, and the prejudices to be overcome.
I think instead of blindness deafness is a better metaphor for the havoc wrought by egotism. Because deafness isolates whereas blindness makes dependent; deafness leaves you apparently still in the world, still able to get around and do things, it's not seen as such a disability...and the egotist does perceive well the world of matter, of things, though ignorant, as though deaf, to the subtle dynamic manifestations; finally, what the egotist is most deprived of, is world-silence, self-silence, union of these... His art if he has it is a form of shouting...no music of the spheres, he is the first to scoff; and never sings.
Personal and Collective Unconscious. Isn't what distinguishes these, a qualitative difference, oil/water, such that the ego can penetrate the first, but stops cold at the second? For the latter is the realm of form-genesis, and the ego is only another form-structure; in the personal unconscious all is change and transformation (ceaselessly: the sea) but never new, not the worldshaking novelty which the collective can unleash (and the myths say as much...), thrusting time into plateaus of complexity, and giving us the illusion of continual evolution... And going down, it's as if your bathyscape turns into a toy in the Marianas Trench, you return and find all the other selves like dolls, like stupid counterfeits of a real identity--but this is the essence of identity in fact--what more could it be? The ego postulates gods: ego which is real...which can make things new... And it's all a mistake. The interface is shiny like a mirror, so that you see (inevitably) shallows in the deep. Fish there, and submarines... What's really down there isn't a "what", hasn't eyes unless it be all Eye... (the myths say so) Mysticism is the science of seeing through mirrors, the language of mirrorback-black...
'It is unlikely that much more than a hundredth part of French literature of the Middle Ages has survived changing fashions.... the number of authors must have been immense in a time when the writer was his own editor, the poet his own reciter, the dramatist his own actor. In a certain sense, the printing press was a hindrance to the practice of letters. It exercised a selectivity and cast contempt on writing that had not succeeded in being printed. This situation still obtains [1900], but is attenuated by the low cost of mechanical typography. The invention that threatens us now--a home printing apparatus--would multiply by three or four times the number of new books, and we would find ourselves in the situation of the Middle Ages: everyone who is the least literate--and others, as is the case today--would venture his lucubration which he would pass out to his friends before offering it to the public.
All progress ends by negating itself.' --Remy de Gourmont (tr Glenn S Burne)
Saturday, January 17, 2004
Friday, January 16, 2004
Elvgren Follow-up.
A reasonably scientific look at baseball on Mars.
Mysterious Sosaria.
A note on the Martian Language. (James Hampton, a visionary artist i found in the same place.)
I hadn't realized grok was in the OED.
"Actually there were two Martian languages."
A reasonably scientific look at baseball on Mars.
Mysterious Sosaria.
A note on the Martian Language. (James Hampton, a visionary artist i found in the same place.)
I hadn't realized grok was in the OED.
"Actually there were two Martian languages."
"The poem that was lost for a thousand years is not the same poem when it is found again & published, given a second life. It is encrusted with beautiful white salt." --Reading & Writing
All about Summoning, a "tolkien-epic-sympho-black-metal band from Austria".
All about Summoning, a "tolkien-epic-sympho-black-metal band from Austria".
Some fictional places & what may have inspired them. (via Metafilter)
My bumper stickers are ready, albeit in an unfortunately reduced form.
Snowflakes (thanx Xian!).
"And wealthy right-wing ideologues have joined with the most cynical and irresponsible companies in the oil, coal and mining industries to contribute large sums of money to finance pseudo-scientific front groups that specialize in sowing confusion in the public’s mind about global warming. They issue one misleading “report” after another, pretending that there is significant disagreement in the legitimate scientific community in areas where there is actually a broad-based consensus.
The techniques they use were pioneered years earlier by the tobacco industry in its long campaign to create uncertainty in the public’s mind about the health risks caused by tobacco smoke. Indeed, some of the very same scientific camp-followers who took money from the tobacco companies during that effort are now taking money from coal and oil companies in return for their willingness to say that global warming is not real." --Al Gore (via Salon)
Continues to be the sharpest satire this side of...
My bumper stickers are ready, albeit in an unfortunately reduced form.
Snowflakes (thanx Xian!).
"And wealthy right-wing ideologues have joined with the most cynical and irresponsible companies in the oil, coal and mining industries to contribute large sums of money to finance pseudo-scientific front groups that specialize in sowing confusion in the public’s mind about global warming. They issue one misleading “report” after another, pretending that there is significant disagreement in the legitimate scientific community in areas where there is actually a broad-based consensus.
The techniques they use were pioneered years earlier by the tobacco industry in its long campaign to create uncertainty in the public’s mind about the health risks caused by tobacco smoke. Indeed, some of the very same scientific camp-followers who took money from the tobacco companies during that effort are now taking money from coal and oil companies in return for their willingness to say that global warming is not real." --Al Gore (via Salon)
Continues to be the sharpest satire this side of...
I notice on the Mars Rover page they refer to Mars's period of rotation as a "sol". (I wonder what scifi novel this is from--?) (No, it was coined by the scientists of Viking.)
Survival Research Laboratories started it; now it's a whole genre, & there's a new book about it: Robotic Sports.
They printed a ghazal of mine in the new Lynx.
I know i sent one of my own, but i don't know if it's in this new compendium of haiku about sea cucumbers.
Part of the preface. A glimpse of the editor. (Another of his books is apparently called Anti-Japanology.) Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!
Of local interest: Jonathan Van Voorhees is back on the scene, & is interested in starting a slam/performance venue in Richardson.
Survival Research Laboratories started it; now it's a whole genre, & there's a new book about it: Robotic Sports.
They printed a ghazal of mine in the new Lynx.
I know i sent one of my own, but i don't know if it's in this new compendium of haiku about sea cucumbers.
Part of the preface. A glimpse of the editor. (Another of his books is apparently called Anti-Japanology.) Rise, Ye Sea Slugs!
Of local interest: Jonathan Van Voorhees is back on the scene, & is interested in starting a slam/performance venue in Richardson.
...the conscious and unconscious as one visible reality: like a palindrome you can't read backwards and forwards at once.
--of time as a fractal: neither continuous nor discontinuous, except as an artifact of scale/sampling-limitation. For if time had quanta, for beings of some degree there would be no change; if time was totally smooth there would be no permanence. Yet, since time is not regularly irregular, within the range of sampling available sometimes to some humans, there is a possible experience of time which seems to move very slow or very fast: these are reaching toward the limits of the species, not the total form of universal time.
Who doesn't prefer poverty is no true anarchist. Like so many others i'm, rather, a chaotic person.
Story is a landscape of feeling. Nothing we have but is story or story's end.
Creating art without human contacts (relationships are its substance, as emotions are its impetus) is like getting pregnant on a starvation diet.
I read about the lives of artists; i say, "my god, it wasn't worth it!" Well, the rest had it just as bad, and what did they leave?
Inspiration gives me the method all at once, and i can work it out at lewisure...with linear thought.
Have i lost my taste for ecstasy, like a painter who gives up Cadmium Yellow--because of the cost?
All an ego can hope for is to decently evaporate.
Insofar as people polarize as extraverts and introverts, they divide their realm into two according to what seems most real to each of them. And speech preserves the moment of that fission, that confusion. (It couldn't get further until introverts began dropping out.)
...("after Babel, no Art" is a truism we'll have to outlive, not outwit)...
Strange how not-knowing-the future can pass for freedom.
Questions. --That is an answering.
'And what if after so many words, the word itself doesn't survive?' --Vallejo (tr Bly)
Tongue-tied, ashamed of my eloquence.
'I can solve differential equations and I can write verses; are these not the extreme limits of human potential?' --Letters of Kleist tr Philip B Miller
...(my solitude fits in my pocket and goes everywhere)...
--of time as a fractal: neither continuous nor discontinuous, except as an artifact of scale/sampling-limitation. For if time had quanta, for beings of some degree there would be no change; if time was totally smooth there would be no permanence. Yet, since time is not regularly irregular, within the range of sampling available sometimes to some humans, there is a possible experience of time which seems to move very slow or very fast: these are reaching toward the limits of the species, not the total form of universal time.
Who doesn't prefer poverty is no true anarchist. Like so many others i'm, rather, a chaotic person.
Story is a landscape of feeling. Nothing we have but is story or story's end.
Creating art without human contacts (relationships are its substance, as emotions are its impetus) is like getting pregnant on a starvation diet.
I read about the lives of artists; i say, "my god, it wasn't worth it!" Well, the rest had it just as bad, and what did they leave?
Inspiration gives me the method all at once, and i can work it out at lewisure...with linear thought.
Have i lost my taste for ecstasy, like a painter who gives up Cadmium Yellow--because of the cost?
All an ego can hope for is to decently evaporate.
Insofar as people polarize as extraverts and introverts, they divide their realm into two according to what seems most real to each of them. And speech preserves the moment of that fission, that confusion. (It couldn't get further until introverts began dropping out.)
...("after Babel, no Art" is a truism we'll have to outlive, not outwit)...
Strange how not-knowing-the future can pass for freedom.
Questions. --That is an answering.
'And what if after so many words, the word itself doesn't survive?' --Vallejo (tr Bly)
Tongue-tied, ashamed of my eloquence.
'I can solve differential equations and I can write verses; are these not the extreme limits of human potential?' --Letters of Kleist tr Philip B Miller
...(my solitude fits in my pocket and goes everywhere)...
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Listening to: Dakota Staton- "Cry Me a River."
Beyond cool. (via Metafilter)
"Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy"
body of the
Prince with mortar that those
seed pods that the
pyrotechnicians nibbled him as
a world War that
we would call
my veinsColdly and I forgot the
Suicide Academy nominations
are made
the Union, took
pictures of
letters to call
them all its
own conspiracy. On the
fingers of night brightened, We found
words are going
to some material saying that
we cling to the end
the depository of Mars Our lordly despairUnder cushioned decay:
End, of America for Mystic River, and to
reconcileWaking with one thing; signified; therefore
should i am a
single year not discover
their destination, rather than that
part of which
would have been mixed with
the
magic of Blake that supposed to
make believe been directed Best to
pen and song I snuck around tamer. But
still mutable case.achieved
a darkened as assuming that together tear
it A physical center that anybody reads
what a real or
starry ore ...nobody
has invented and a chessboard, to
the Monuments of Tides,
1991 have
lower infant mortality
rates .
Beyond cool. (via Metafilter)
"Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy"
body of the
Prince with mortar that those
seed pods that the
pyrotechnicians nibbled him as
a world War that
we would call
my veinsColdly and I forgot the
Suicide Academy nominations
are made
the Union, took
pictures of
letters to call
them all its
own conspiracy. On the
fingers of night brightened, We found
words are going
to some material saying that
we cling to the end
the depository of Mars Our lordly despairUnder cushioned decay:
End, of America for Mystic River, and to
reconcileWaking with one thing; signified; therefore
should i am a
single year not discover
their destination, rather than that
part of which
would have been mixed with
the
magic of Blake that supposed to
make believe been directed Best to
pen and song I snuck around tamer. But
still mutable case.achieved
a darkened as assuming that together tear
it A physical center that anybody reads
what a real or
starry ore ...nobody
has invented and a chessboard, to
the Monuments of Tides,
1991 have
lower infant mortality
rates .
"...I hate the politics/ which have crept/ into my poetry." -Eric Lerner, Seditious Delicious #2
All things we love we love because we can perceive them as we would human personalities; and the less one knows other people, the more real (person-like) these analogues seem.
The disappearance of our most delicate and important perception is like the stealing of the stars by city lights: imperceptibly gradual and so total in its consummation that the question of its existence can hardly be raised among us.
Painters want to be loved like Van Gogh, but to live like Rubens.
Some computer systems are like this: past a certain point of fulness, it drops the oldest memories to make room for new. Perhaps humans can only learn three things, and if there's more it just becomes a different three you know. Personality, with its dark corners and shifting tumblers, its rhythms and its anomalies, may be a way to get around that limitation.
Personality as a nation-artifact.
Personality as a nation-toxin.
Nation as a personality-construct.
Nation as a personality disorder.
Sheepishly i would have to admit that i get more thoughts only after i have gotten up and gone into the next room to take a piss, than in an hour of sitting here with the book in front of me. ...If i were honest about creating, i would want to chop wood or lift boxes ten hours a day. Then i would sing unfettered by wanting to sing.
I am properly appalled by Kerouac's claim of an art-phase in which he destroyed everything; but if he hadn't bragged about it, i might even envy that freedom.
...Ego is after all a simple deception, as well as a complex process of transmutation...
'He was like one who hears a glorious language and feverishly conceives plans to write, to create in it. He had still to experience the dismay of learning how difficult this language was; he was unwilling to believe at first that a long life could pass away in forming the first short fictitious phrases that have no sense. He flung himself into this study like a runner into a race; but the density of what had to be mastered slowed him up. Nothing more humiliating could be thought out than this apprenticeship. He had found the philosopher's stone, and now he was being forced ceaselessly to transmute the swiftly made gold of his happiness into the lumpy lead of patience. He, who had adapted himself to space, like a worm traced crooked passages without outlet or direction. Now that with so much labor and sorrow he was learning to love, it was shown to him how trivial and careless up to now all the love had been which he thought to have achieved. How none of it could have come to anything, because he had not begun to work at it and make it real.
...We do not know whether he remained; we only know that he came back.' --Rilke, Malte
All things we love we love because we can perceive them as we would human personalities; and the less one knows other people, the more real (person-like) these analogues seem.
The disappearance of our most delicate and important perception is like the stealing of the stars by city lights: imperceptibly gradual and so total in its consummation that the question of its existence can hardly be raised among us.
Painters want to be loved like Van Gogh, but to live like Rubens.
Some computer systems are like this: past a certain point of fulness, it drops the oldest memories to make room for new. Perhaps humans can only learn three things, and if there's more it just becomes a different three you know. Personality, with its dark corners and shifting tumblers, its rhythms and its anomalies, may be a way to get around that limitation.
Personality as a nation-artifact.
Personality as a nation-toxin.
Nation as a personality-construct.
Nation as a personality disorder.
Sheepishly i would have to admit that i get more thoughts only after i have gotten up and gone into the next room to take a piss, than in an hour of sitting here with the book in front of me. ...If i were honest about creating, i would want to chop wood or lift boxes ten hours a day. Then i would sing unfettered by wanting to sing.
I am properly appalled by Kerouac's claim of an art-phase in which he destroyed everything; but if he hadn't bragged about it, i might even envy that freedom.
...Ego is after all a simple deception, as well as a complex process of transmutation...
'He was like one who hears a glorious language and feverishly conceives plans to write, to create in it. He had still to experience the dismay of learning how difficult this language was; he was unwilling to believe at first that a long life could pass away in forming the first short fictitious phrases that have no sense. He flung himself into this study like a runner into a race; but the density of what had to be mastered slowed him up. Nothing more humiliating could be thought out than this apprenticeship. He had found the philosopher's stone, and now he was being forced ceaselessly to transmute the swiftly made gold of his happiness into the lumpy lead of patience. He, who had adapted himself to space, like a worm traced crooked passages without outlet or direction. Now that with so much labor and sorrow he was learning to love, it was shown to him how trivial and careless up to now all the love had been which he thought to have achieved. How none of it could have come to anything, because he had not begun to work at it and make it real.
...We do not know whether he remained; we only know that he came back.' --Rilke, Malte
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
'Rock
When I die,
I will become a rock,
never touched
by compassion, joy or anger.
While being torn down by wind and rain,
It will only whip itself inwards
in eternal, impersonal silence.
and at last forget its own existence;
Floating clouds, distant thunder!
Though it may dream,
it will never sing.
Though broken in pieces,
it will never utter a word.
I will become such a rock.'
--Chi-hwan Yu, in: Best Loved Poems of Korea, Selected for Foreigners (1984)
'Here I am, condemned to live apart, for I am still too much of a man of letters to become a monk, and yet I am already too much of a monk to remain among men of letters...' --Huysmans
"non fleo privatum, sed generale chaos" --Maximian
'When Providence alone governed the earth, during the interregnum of mankind, she caused such slaughters that intelligence nearly perished. In the year 950, the son of one of Aurillac's serfs, the young Gerbert, sumed up almost an entire European tradition. He was, all by himself, civilization. What a moment in history! Men, through an admirable instinct, made him their master: he was the Pope Sylvester II. When he died, they began to build, on that column that had sustained the world, the legend that was to culminate in the Faust of Goethe.' --Remy de Gourmont
'Is it possible ...that one has not yet seen, known and said anything real or important? Is it possible that one has had millennia of time to observe, reflect and note down, and that one has let those millennia slip away like a recess interval at school in which one eats one's sandwich and an apple?' --Rilke
'On the day I was born, God was sick.' --Vallejo
Art may only be a moment in the awakening of our race, yet that nascent consciousness is and will be made up of such moments, light-quanta, each a bridge to morrow and promise for the past. One day materialism will mean that all things are artist's material; spirituality, that all things are perfected form already: and no paradox. This word Art is a name for the paradox. There are others.
When I die,
I will become a rock,
never touched
by compassion, joy or anger.
While being torn down by wind and rain,
It will only whip itself inwards
in eternal, impersonal silence.
and at last forget its own existence;
Floating clouds, distant thunder!
Though it may dream,
it will never sing.
Though broken in pieces,
it will never utter a word.
I will become such a rock.'
--Chi-hwan Yu, in: Best Loved Poems of Korea, Selected for Foreigners (1984)
'Here I am, condemned to live apart, for I am still too much of a man of letters to become a monk, and yet I am already too much of a monk to remain among men of letters...' --Huysmans
"non fleo privatum, sed generale chaos" --Maximian
'When Providence alone governed the earth, during the interregnum of mankind, she caused such slaughters that intelligence nearly perished. In the year 950, the son of one of Aurillac's serfs, the young Gerbert, sumed up almost an entire European tradition. He was, all by himself, civilization. What a moment in history! Men, through an admirable instinct, made him their master: he was the Pope Sylvester II. When he died, they began to build, on that column that had sustained the world, the legend that was to culminate in the Faust of Goethe.' --Remy de Gourmont
'Is it possible ...that one has not yet seen, known and said anything real or important? Is it possible that one has had millennia of time to observe, reflect and note down, and that one has let those millennia slip away like a recess interval at school in which one eats one's sandwich and an apple?' --Rilke
'On the day I was born, God was sick.' --Vallejo
Art may only be a moment in the awakening of our race, yet that nascent consciousness is and will be made up of such moments, light-quanta, each a bridge to morrow and promise for the past. One day materialism will mean that all things are artist's material; spirituality, that all things are perfected form already: and no paradox. This word Art is a name for the paradox. There are others.
Monday, January 12, 2004
'Everything on our way is slippery and dangerous, and the ice that still supports us has become thin; all of us feel the warm, uncanny breath of the thawing wind; where we still walk, soon no one will be able to walk.' --The Will to Power, 57
Primo Levi has an essay on Celan, one camp survivor to another (both later suicides), & criticizes him for being obscure...
"Bring the pigeons watermelons, Abelrd." --Jose Garcia Villa
"Blaspheme when sowing cummin; that is the way to make it grow well." --Stobaeus
'Why, hapless one, to the unhearing rocks,/ To the dumb billows, to the eery woods/ Do I thus cry, and sound my mouth's vain note?' --Moony's Lycophron (1921), 1451
"...we have more names for parts of horses than we have for kinds of kisses..." --William Gass, On Being Blue (1976)
'...in the thirties and forties the regime [i.e. Stalin] was producing writers' widows with such efficiency that in the middle of the sixties there were enough of them to organize a trade union.' --Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One
"Why do the Basques speak Algonquin?" --Eliot Weinberger in Sulfur 30
"In the late 1800s one scientist, Willy Kuhne, from his studies of the action of the chemical rhodopsin, saw the possibility of taking pictures with living eyes, 'optograms'. Among other things, he exposed the eyes of a rabbit to a barred window, then kiled the rabbit, removed its eyes and fixed its retina, upon which was seen the light and dark pattern of the bars. In 1880 he arranged to obtain the eyes of a man who was beheaded, and from them he printed an optogram that does show an image, but one that is impossible to interpret." --Jillian Smith, Senses and Sensibilities (1989)
'You will take the book up where you left it,/ You will say, These were the last obscure words.' --Bonnefoy (tr Richard Pevear)
"Thus either Time his sickle brings
In vain, or else in vain his wings." --Carew
"The local storyteller Johnny Moses (Nuu Chah Nulth tribe) told this Salish tale at a gathering:
'Long ago the trees thought they were people.
Long ago the mountains thought they were people.
Long ago the animals thought they were people.
Someday they will say
Long ago the human beings thought they were people.' " --Brenda Peterson, Living By Water
Primo Levi has an essay on Celan, one camp survivor to another (both later suicides), & criticizes him for being obscure...
"Bring the pigeons watermelons, Abelrd." --Jose Garcia Villa
"Blaspheme when sowing cummin; that is the way to make it grow well." --Stobaeus
'Why, hapless one, to the unhearing rocks,/ To the dumb billows, to the eery woods/ Do I thus cry, and sound my mouth's vain note?' --Moony's Lycophron (1921), 1451
"...we have more names for parts of horses than we have for kinds of kisses..." --William Gass, On Being Blue (1976)
'...in the thirties and forties the regime [i.e. Stalin] was producing writers' widows with such efficiency that in the middle of the sixties there were enough of them to organize a trade union.' --Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One
"Why do the Basques speak Algonquin?" --Eliot Weinberger in Sulfur 30
"In the late 1800s one scientist, Willy Kuhne, from his studies of the action of the chemical rhodopsin, saw the possibility of taking pictures with living eyes, 'optograms'. Among other things, he exposed the eyes of a rabbit to a barred window, then kiled the rabbit, removed its eyes and fixed its retina, upon which was seen the light and dark pattern of the bars. In 1880 he arranged to obtain the eyes of a man who was beheaded, and from them he printed an optogram that does show an image, but one that is impossible to interpret." --Jillian Smith, Senses and Sensibilities (1989)
'You will take the book up where you left it,/ You will say, These were the last obscure words.' --Bonnefoy (tr Richard Pevear)
"Thus either Time his sickle brings
In vain, or else in vain his wings." --Carew
"The local storyteller Johnny Moses (Nuu Chah Nulth tribe) told this Salish tale at a gathering:
'Long ago the trees thought they were people.
Long ago the mountains thought they were people.
Long ago the animals thought they were people.
Someday they will say
Long ago the human beings thought they were people.' " --Brenda Peterson, Living By Water