Juxtaposition III

A re-cap for all you late arrivistes (of course this being the web, the last are the first): finding my library in disarray one lugubrious night spent staring at spiderwebs in the corners, I found that the disarray of the books did indeed seem to have a shimmering order, if not aura, to them in the chance clinamen that had happenstanced them. Herewith selections from some of the juxtapositions -- without, however, lingering on possible overtures which the collisions may generate. But first another fortuitous selection from a new Greg Bear novel, The City At the End of Time, I was reading last night. I trust you will see the resonance.

"His texts, hundreds of thousands of them, were acting as a kind of lens, focusing the improbable and retrieving from not so far away, perhaps, those things that would only become likely across a greater fullness of time. A fullness now deeriorating coming apart in sections -- jamming and mixing histories in alarming ways. If nothing more were done, the future would drip-drop into their present like milk from a cracked bottle."
Greg Bear

From Proust, Samuel Beckett:

"The point of departure of the Proustian exposition is not the crystalline agglomeration but its kernal -- the crystallized. The most trivial experience -- he says in effect is encrusted with elements that logically are not related to it and have consequently been rejected by our intelligence: it is imprisoned in a vase filled with a certain perfume and a certain coor and raised to a cerain temperature. These vases are suspended along the height of our years, and, not being accessible to our intelligent memory, are in a sense immune, the purity of their climatic content is guaranteed by forgetfulness, each one is kept at its distance at its date. So that when the inprisioned microcosm is besieged in the manner described, we are flooded by a new air and a new perfume (new precisely because already experienced), and we breath the true air of paradise, of the only paradise that is not the dream of a madman, the Paradise that has been lost."

from Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic, Dan Auiler:

Sequoia sempervivens is the classic redwood that gives this forest its beauty, and its ancient slendor would of course have attracted Hitchcock. The stand of trees through which Novak and Stewart wander is more than a thousand years old. The Latin name and definition is prominent in all the literature connected with the Big Basin; the film's explicit reference suggest the same was true in 1957.

No on at the park has any recolletion of the Vertigo filming nor does ajy park record remain lof the two-day visit. The crew's shooting days were shorter than usual -- under five hours.

"On October fourteenth, most of the time was spent on the conversation just prior to the redwood cross-section scene. Judging from where the Jaguar is parked and where the redwood lcut is positioned, the scenes were filmed on a trail known today as the Redwood Trail. The two and a half page sequence was completed in a number of setups, the most difficult one requiring seven takes; in the final cut of the film, only a page of the material remains. Though Big Basin has (and still has today) a cross section like the one in the film, all of the dialogue surrounding the cross section itself was shot later on a soundstage and then integrated seamlessly with the location footage."

from In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space, Douglas Curran:

Madeleine Rodeffer became interested in flying saucers through reading a 1954 classic, Cederic Allingham's Flying Saucers From Mars. The book mentioned George Adamski's similar encounter with a blond Venusian named Orthon. A search of her local library turned up three titles by Adamski: Flying Saucers have Landed (1953), Inside the Space Ships (1955), and Flying Saucers Farewell (1961). Deeply moved by Adamski's writings, Madeleine paced a call to his home near Mount Palomar, California. 'I became so convinced that Mr. Adamski was telliing the truth that the first time I called him on the phone, I offered, 'I would like to know what I can do to help you spread the word.' Adamki's reply was simple and direct: 'Read and learn all you can. Be open-minded and do what you feel is right.'"

Juxtapositions II

The second one of these, these...bibliomancies for lack of another word, until I get tired of these diffraction grates...but of course a book person ... or perhaps rather some kind of feral scholete who, rather than truth, enjoys the sparks ..but then, what is truth without the sparks and grating mists?

Again, the books were found lying together after a year of debauchery; the first bookmark or placeholder was followed. The sometimes Orphic nature of the concatenations comes from chance placement. There are times when the whole library becomes a visceral writhing of energies, sedimentations, cautious circumspections and ebullient demands, patent nonsense mied with the darkest but profound obscurities --and me stymied in differentiating the two, that it seems as if a Lovecraftian door will --or perhaps already has done so -- open any second and draw them all in with a deep eldritch inhalation combined with the sound of snapping shut.
rc
--

Awaiting Oblivion, Maurice Blanchot

• You will never find the limits of forgetting, no matter how far you may be able to forget.

• "But if I remembered eerything and told you everything, there would be nothing more for us than a single memory." -- "A common memory? No," he said solenly, " we shall never belong in common to memory." -- "To forgetting, then." -- "Perhaps to forgetting." -- "Yes, when I forget, I already feel closer to you." -- "In a proximity, however, without approach." -- "That is correct," she eched fervently, "without approach." Also without truth, without secrecy." -- "Without truth, without secrecy." -- As if disappearance were the last pace of any meeting. Forgetting will separate us slowly, patiently, though an identically unknown movement, from whatever still remains in common between us." [....]

• Being is yet another word for forgetting.


Mesopotamian Myths, Henrietta McCall

Radiant with terro, Marduk sets out on the road to Tiamat, but at the sight of her his will crumbles and he cannot decide what to do. Although this sees somewhat unrealistic, it is a common mythical device (used also in the epic of Gilgamesh) to heighten tension, by putting the inevitable victory temporarily in the balance. Tamat sneers, and Marduk's courage returns. He challenges Tiamat to single combat.. His the climax, the geat battle scene towards which everything has been leading:

Face to face they came, Tiamat and Marduk, sage of the gods.
They engaged in combat, they closed for battle.
The lord spread his net and made it encircle her,
To her face he dispatched the imhullu -wind, which had been behind:
Tiamat opened her moth to swallow it,
And he forcced in the imhulla -wind so that she could not close her lips.
Fierce winds distended her belly:
Her insides were constipated and she stretched her mouth wide.
He shot and arrow which pierced her belly,
Split her down the middle and slit her heart,
Vanquished her and extinguished life.
He thresw down her corpse and stood on top of her.

The gods who had formed part of Tiamat's terrifying army then panic and turn tail, but they are caught by Marduk and bundled into the net where they cower


Saint Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre

We expect the harvest of cut grain to be fine and rich; but these grains are breaths, nothing, not even a bit of air that one exhales: one will make sheaves of nothingness. The strange being who haunted the woods, whether woodland god or criminal, was defined only by his functions: having beocme a harvester of nothing, he vanquishes with his breaths, everything is canceled; the rocky, compact density of this of this sound unit and the shimmering of the light around the t=stone concealed a cold, dark emptiness. A signification beyond ;the syncretic interpenetration of the meanings was suggested to us; and this signification is the destruction of all signification, the challenging of all prose; Genet put the whole country side into this verse, but only to annihilate it. The capturing of the world, an act guided by resentment, ends in catastrophe.

Juxtapositions I

Yesterday I was staring with no particular purpose at the bookcase in front of me. The books have been moved around repeatedly and so are mostly in no order, many of them lying on tops of shelved books by the threes and fours.

I was reminded of some quip about the connections and patterns that a library can make, even under fairly well-ordered circumstances so herewith a series of volumes that were truly found together, usually stacked on top of each other, set adrift into meaning by the clinamen, by making a nice trinity.

I have, more or less, randomly selected a a quote from each book, in the cse of two of these, by a pencil or other bookmark stuck and left in place.

Looking For Orthon: The Story of George Adamski the first flying saucer contactee and how he changed the world, Colin Bennett

"Western thinking in general has great difficulty with these intermediate forms and partial states of being. Such an order of matter is excluded (rather than unkow) from science, banished to those far regions (either microscopic or interstellar) where rationalists alwasy locate thier mysteries, if only to daunt inquistive heathens, the uninitiated, and, of course the great partly-washed."

Economy of the Unlost (Reading Simonides of Keos with Paul Celan), Ann Carson

'The riddle (griphos) was a popular form of after-dinner entertainment and Athenaios tells us that Simonides was an expert riddler. He preserves two examles of Simonidean riddles (both incomprehensible to me) and appends a list of popularly conjectured solutions. 'Some people explain the riddle thus...but ohters say...and others again...' The point is, good riddles do not say what they mean. It is an innately stingy form of discourse, disguising its data and begrudging its truth. 'You know the riddle advertises all the techniques that the joke conceals,' said Freud. The ridde advertises everything except its own punchline.'"

The New Spinoza, Warren Montag and Ted Stolze.

"The Lurian conception of evil, the qelippah, which is for the Kabbalah the obverse of the En-Sof, was to play in this event, we have said, the role of a crystiller of the new doctrine. The rein of husks and shells (the literal meaning of qelipah) traditionally used by the abbaloists to designate the universe of 'evil and the demonic powers' had drifted, since Isaac de Luria, toward an interiorization of the demonic prinicple at the very root of the En-Sof (the hidden god who is indefinite and foreign to every creation, which Jacob Boehme will Grund, the foundation of God the Creator) so that the word in its complexity can reach existence:

'Know therefore that the supernal space is like a field, and ten points [that is, sefroth] are sown in it. And even as the grains [of seed] grow each according to its virtue, so also these points grow according to its virtue; and as the grains do not attain to growth and perfection if they remain in their original manner of being -- for only in their decomposition is thier growth -- so it is also with these points .... Only by their breaking could the divine configurations [parsufim] be perfected.'

As elliptical as the text is this is the rule of Kabbalah), one thing, in any event, appears indisputable: the idea of the necessity of a wrenching that, setting out from the essential negativity of the divine, provokes the scattering whose splinters are the world. This world of disorder and multiplicity -- sometimes cmpared with that of the various colors issed from the compostion of white light -- 'had to fall from the high summit to the depth of the pot soa s to be smashed and dished to pievces, like the wheat which is separated into flour and bran by grinding. Moreover by their fall the unclean forces are separated from holiness.'

Dromos: Life After Ever: Our Glorious Future in the New Quantum

"For we live surrounded, in the invisible air, by wandering avengers who never forget the 'ancient contaminations'." Roberto Calasso

The race course has been pitched to a new level---but levels go up AND down, right? (bad case of enantiadromia: every state of development at its zenith pitches over into its opposite). But...even so... those levelings can be crossed, obliquely (there you go, loxodromic), perhaps requiring abandoned gods fitting the descriptions of Gustave Moreau as it ITSELF becomes crossed with the clonal crossings of the Island of Dr. Moreau:

"Huge, pale figures, tremendous, lonely, dark and desolate, fatal, mysterious lovers condemned to titanic infamies. What will become of you? What will your destiny be? Where can you hide your fearful passions?"

(But we have a plan, we, us humans, to deal with such, and this is always where we seem to wind up folks; as that great metaphysician Bela Lugosi put it in Bride of the Monster "Home? I have no Home. Hunted, despised, living like an animal; the jungle is my home. But I shall show the world that I can be it's master. I shall perfect my own race of people. A race of atomic supermen that will conquer the world." )

Suffering from gadget disorders, the fundamentals of fetishism, we will no doubt find it hard to pass from the Thing to its outlet, to its let out-ness or even better, to the acting-out (escape even) of that Thing in itself, that bit of plastic, silicon, copper, whatever, scooting away from us (always 'scooting away' but never quite making it, the nature of the act-trying-to-get-out, can't get no traction in the rain), tending to its chores in the solar system.

It's the hardest cross-over act in the world, hanging on the edges of frayed rotting matter, looking over to the next clump zipping ahead of us, maybe into the future we think -- always brighter and shinier, yes? Atomic supermen on the march!

It's the fearful en-trance of Einstein's spukhafte fernwirkungen accusation against Niels Bohr's new quantum club, beginning to beat god about the head: 'Spooky action at a distance'‹-too much like some hoo doo infection, some non-locus hocus pocus (etymologically speaking, some transsubstantiation going on there, from the latin meaning: "here is the body"‹-now of course it means: "WHERE the heck is the body!?", just about the only thing we can get out of Freud's fort/da swollen foot dance now, the Oedipus Waltz, holding our collective family drama breaths [in waltzology, atem pauze] in between phase-state changes.

And then, too, this, ex post facto, is what the old folks pass back and forth:

"...he is surrounded by night; suddenly a bloody head juts forth here, there another white figure, and just as suddenly they disappear. One glimpses this night when one looks into the eyes of another human -- into a night which becomes frightening; here each of us is suspended confronting the night of the world." G.W.F. Hegel

Apocatastasis

APOCATASTASIS* ( " the heretical doctrine of the redemption of even the radically evil as well as the good; it promises a fulfillment without sacrifices." )

Inexorable and reversible. The inescapability associated with fate and the linearity inexorably connected with technology would not seem to make a good match and even to be at odds. Everyone would perhaps like to do away with the melancholy of fatefulness and the never-going-back of inexorable life (which always seems to have only one end). Much better to concentrate on the care and tending of our machines which seem to back up on a dime, undo the done, and seem to want to save us even while they are killing us. The interesting question is this: what happens when you mix the two modes or they meet in the middle: the abject melodrama of the inanimate and the newly-found technical messianic reversibility (from death to life) of the animate? This is perhaps the ONLY question for art - or anything else - now.

Kenosis: The False Meat of Empty

Kenosis: The False Meat of Empty

Phil. 2:6 sqq.: "Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied [ekenosen] himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as man."

"Too bad for the wood which finds itself a violin if the copper wakes up a bugle, that is not its fault."

Gilles Deleuze in Kant's Critical Philosophy

the elements of the avatar:

Fundamental to the idea of the avatar is a temporal constellation of: multiplicity, simultaneity, periodicity, historical intrusion in, and often for, a sacrificial economy; then, lurking to the side of, and perhaps inherent to 'avatar periodicity' is trauma, suffering, and re-gathering or redemption. Although foremost in its mystical and millennialist form, this phase is rarely considered in technical circles where representation of a 'personality' or type or even representation itself, in the case of post-structuralism and postmodernism, is foremost. The avatar is also 'powerless' in a fundamental sense whence derives the concept's great power and a strategy of winning based on loss, defacement, and dis-ability a position which would seem to put it at considerable odds with the calculative power of techné and sacrifice even as it opens it to the concept of 'collapse' as integral to the technical.

(One could also make a point that techné is coterminous with reclamation, gathering, collecting and that chasmatically indigenous to the density of collapse and catastrophe is redemption. That density finds its aufhebung, relief, or grace in Christian kenosis. The notion of kenosis, or self-emptying, allies with both Avataric and Lacanian suturing / point de capiton, a point that is extruded by and makes oblique the forces which 'quilted' it into existencethe suturing of the Real and the Symbolic similarly forms a visible 'ridge' which simultaneous indicates and obscures its processes of creation. This is all too similar to the Catholic Church's dictum that "According to Catholic theology, the abasement of the Word consists in the assumption of humanity and the simultaneous occultation of the Divinity." [This also very close to the Heideggerean assumption of both the uncanny and the divine as "the Being that shines into every thing ordinary" (Parmenides, pp 101 and 115)] There is no getting to the 'other side' of the process because human reality is stitched together in such a way that 'both' sides are always present, but the visibility of one always obscures the other. Compare with kenosis, for example in Philippians 2:6 : "Who being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied [ekenosen] himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as man." The notion of kenosis also overlaps certain eastern spiritual concepts as well as an emphasis on concepts such as the impersonal, the inhuman, and the extreme in Lyotard, Agamben, and Benjamin, among many other modernist philosophers.)

The 'hard' definition of avatar is the descent of a god into matter of many different forms, a rotation of divinity into humanity, a form of incarnation but without exhaustion of the godstuff, plus a plenitude of representatives popping up occasionally through history.

Perhaps the avatar, in both the mystical and the technical variant, could be thought of as a leading edge of a foreign mass which becomes intimate with the crudities of barely conscious matter (that is, us humans), the simple animacy of animal life not being sufficient for its purposes. (though it does raise the question of whether animals can have avatars and whether an avatar is a three-way or two-way mimetic consultancy.) For consciousness which has suffered a fundamental fall into the darkness of matter, the avatar is a guide back to the homeland of consciousness through avenues of delay, return, suffering, redemption, witnessing. Without separation and suffering there would be no need for the concept of avatar to have developed.

the rest here

The Discovery of People in the Invisible Part of the Universe

materials: concrete, laser, glass case, sand, cigar, day-glo paint, video
size 10' x 4'

The Discovery of People in the Invisible Part of the Universe

In the recent Korean film 'Old Boy,' the protagonist is put into solitary confinement for 15 years, with nothing but popular television for entertainment. When he escapes, the pivot scene happens when he stops into a sushi bar and orders something live. He is delivered a live octopus that he maniacally consumes, then falls into a swoon. Thus begins a switch into another symbolic level of (in)operability, signaled by the omnipresent signifier of radical otherness, the tentacle. (As a hint: the film very cleverly plays off the relations between 'octopus' and 'Oedipus,' both entities signposts of coming forbidden liminal states.)

'Tentacularity' is always a spectacular gateway to various extremes of otherness in cultural representations, a representation of that which is furthest from the human and which is always portrayed as a monstrous collapse into a regime at destructive odds with the human. The most well known popular representative of this visual motif is the portrayal of the aliens' craft in the recent film 'War of the Worlds'’

One can be sure that the arrival of the tentacle is also the arrival of the inhuman and uncanny in opposition to the human. One only has to remember those animations in the fifties of the world picture of the great octopus of communism and its encircling red arms.

But tentacularity is part of a larger body of symbology which includes Medusa and the concept of aura. All three, tentacle, medusa, and aura, are active liminalities which reach out beyond their immediate ground to encircle and tear from the human its essential humanness, Medusa causing a stone-like paralysis, a mortification of time, and in the aura, or halo, a radiance creating a 'leak' in the human into the divine as well as effecting a porosity into (and out of) the material substrate of its surroundings.

The recognition of these three facets – an unapproachable and monstrous inhumanness, a lapse into the pure materiality of a stone-like death, and the leakage into and out of the human by some form of transcendence -- signifies a rupture and switch into new forms.

(By the way: these three states all entail some form of luminescence: the octopus uses a form of polarized light to communicate—and it has been theorized that this ability to perceive in the polarized state acts a 'secret' form of communication with its kin, perhaps through its ability to change the color and patterns of its skin through chromatophores; the Medusa Effect is a cessation of sight through a direct seeing of the forbidden, while the aura / halo is an excess of light, radiance, and intolerable to a materialist culture, a form of incompatable de-monstration.)