Klemperer, Victor. To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1942–1945. 1st ed. Vol. 2. 3 vols. New York, NY: Random House, 1999.
One hundred pages in, now into the fall of 1942 as, unbeknownst to Klemperer directly at the time, the “Final Solution” is being implemented by the Nazis. Hearsay begins to accumulate. Klemperer’s microscopic view, no, his immersion in life as a Jew married to an “Aryan”—a ‘special’ case in the Nazi hierarchy of depravity—is at once thoroughly banal as a daily journal while riveting as an unmasking of Arendt’s “banality of evil.” The horrifying details of the increasingly oppressive restrictions accumulate incrementally within a framework of conflicting logics each day, while random visits from the Gestapo destroy any vestiges of normality as the wider German population seems largely clueless by choice.
A partial list derived from the book encompassing some of the punitive laws and conditions in place by the early summer of 1942:
Mandatory Identification: Jews were required to wear the yellow Star of David visibly on their clothing. It could not be pinned on, it had to be sewn on a heavy outer coat, making the wearing of it even more unbearable in the summer.
Travel Restrictions: Jews were prohibited from owning cars or bicycles, and they faced severe restrictions on public transport usage. Travel between cities required special permission.
Property Confiscation: Jews were stripped of personal property, including homes, furniture, and valuables, which were often confiscated or forcibly sold at low prices.
Housing Restrictions: Jews were forced into overcrowded “Jewish houses” (Judenhäuser) and forbidden from renting or owning other properties.
Employment Bans: Jews were excluded from most professions and could only work in jobs deemed acceptable by the regime, typically low-wage manual labor.
Food and Shopping Restrictions: Access to groceries was limited, with Jews only allowed to shop during restricted hours, often when stores were nearly empty.
Education Prohibitions: Jewish children were barred from attending public schools, and higher education was entirely closed off to Jews.
Social Isolation: Jews were banned from many public spaces, including parks, theaters, cinemas, and libraries.
Medical Access: Jews could not visit non-Jewish doctors or hospitals and were denied most medical care except from a few Jewish professionals.
Curfews and Movement Limits: Jews were subjected to curfews and confined to specific areas.
Marriage and Relationships: Marriages between Jews and non-Jews were outlawed, and existing mixed marriages faced intense scrutiny and pressure.
Cultural Erasure: Jews were barred from owning radios, telephones, and typewriters, further isolating them from the broader world.
Confiscation of Pets: Jews were forbidden from owning pets, and any existing ones were often confiscated or destroyed.
Bank Account Monitoring: Jewish bank accounts were closely monitored, with savings often seized.
Deportations: The ultimate restriction was the ongoing deportation of Jews to ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination camps.
These measures, constantly being ramped up, aimed to dehumanize, isolate, and impoverish Jews, stripping them of their rights and dignity as part of the Nazi regime’s genocidal agenda. The diaries provide an invaluable firsthand account of the escalating persecution during this period. And, obliquely, how the wider population either participated in the process or remained purposely ignorant.
I will probably suspend reading this volume in the stead of first understanding the more insidious evolution he documents in the first volume where the initial Nazi take-over of Germany proceeds:
Klemperer, Victor. I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1933–41,. Vol. 1. 3 vols. Westminster: Random House Publishing Group, 2016.
When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented them. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library. A book is made from a tree. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.
Sagan, Carl. Cosmos. Random House, Inc., 2002 ed. New York, NY: Random House, 2002.
Somewhat innocent optimism on Sagan’s part, as the book is only one particular mechanism for the externalization of memory: there are costs across all means. ‘Social’ media as a prime example. The wholesale off-shoring of memory to external devices renders the embodied meat-space imprint of memory obsolete, while at the same time, allowing ubiquitous (and ultimately dangerous!) manipulation of what were once considered ‘my’ memories. Parsing of trillions of individual memories into commerce-driven meme-streams is a fundamental corruption of the internal and very-much embodied life of the individual.
Dark magic has arrived in this time: “Jesus wept.”
I had this lined up as part of a draft for Rocktalk, but with only a week left at the j-o-b, I’ll use it here:
Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent …. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.
The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men [Vol. 4] Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882., Emerson, Edward Waldo, 1844-1930.
The infinitely flat earth, lake of mud, river,
waveless sea, sky, sky of earth, blazing grasslands,
road, grey asphalt road for cars to drive along.
Rooted.
Immovable.
There is just a single cry.
What does it say?
It says
I AM ALIVE
I AM
That’s what it says. Faced with the immensity of time, with lake of
mud, river, sky, road, always the same cry
and it is not easy to hear what it is saying:
And it is not TO LIVE!TO LIVE! but perhaps TO LOVE! or TO DIE!
From deep in the throat.
Faced with indifference, pool of dead water amid
impassive vegetation, cold body between the sheets
refusing with closed mouth and eyes
It hurls itself forward
Smashing its way
It is yet another cry
It says: Slut! Filth! Trash!
Disgrace!
In the stifling black night, forests of sounds, vain
dreams, world turned upside down preposterous
shadow of the intelligible, mane growing inwards,
hairs that have already invaded throat and belly,
There is a light
the tip of a cigarette
the reflection from a storm-lantern
the eye of a cat
Straight rigid cry, hit, cat’s eye, gleam, droplet,
point, hole, tower, stone, word, noise, taste, skin,
being, being,
tigers, tigers,
ticks that I let loose upon you
demons that are my sentence of extermination
for me, for you, for all,
to burst through the sky, the skin, indifference. Ho! Ho! Houa! Houa!
Le Clézio, Jean-Marie Gustave. War. Translated by Simon Watson Taylor. New York, NY: Atheneum, 1973.
I first stumbled on the work of future Nobel Literature Prize winner, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, way back in 1986 or so, whilst cruising the voluminous stacks at CU’s Norlin Library, back when there were stacks, and back when I was moderately well-read in French literature—Duras, Mauriac, Malraux, Sartre, Barthes, Ellul, Weil, Breton, Baudelaire, along with the Situationists, etc., mostly in translation. Despite my familiarity with French literary landscapes and my extended experiences traversing France, Le Clézio’s language style posed a challenge to my modest proficiency level. Aside from Le Procès-Verbal (The Interrogation) for which he was awarded the Prix Renaudot, the CU library fortuitously had copies of all his early works in translation including Le Déluge (1966) – The Flood, trans. Peter Green (1967); Terra Amata (1967) – Terra Amata, trans. Barbara Bray (1967); Le Livre des fuites (1969) – The Book of Flights (1971); La Guerre (1970) – War (1973); Les Géants (1973) – The Giants, all trans. Simon Watson-Taylor (1975); Voyages de l’autre côté (1975); and Désert (1980). The impact of Le Clézio’s narratives, reminiscent of my earlier literary revelation with Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, was profound. Through immersive storytelling, he masterfully captures intricate and hallucinogenic details of diverse settings, unfolding psychospiritual voyages through the perspectives of rootless characters perpetually grasping at ever elusive meaning. Regardless of the particular protagonist, all Le Clézio’s works offer a highly recommended exploration of the human experience.
After meeting my future ex-wife for the first time in Köln, Germany in June of 1988, I somewhat reluctantly headed to Arles to attend the Rencontres internationales de la photographie. But first, I spent some days in Paris at pre-arranged meetings with folks at the [now defunct] Centre national de la photographie, the Bibliothèque nationale, and several other rendez-vous. While in Paris, still deeply ensorceled by Le Clézio’s work, I went to his publisher, Gallimard‘s office/bookstore where I bought a couple of his books. They had a binder of press clippings and critical reviews of his work that I mulled over for a time. After some mental practice runs, in my terrible French, I ventured to explain to a couple of the salesladies how much I appreciated his writing, and politely inquired if they could give me his postal address. L’un d’eux a passé quelques appels téléphoniques, faisant descendre une jeune femme extrêmement jolie des bureaux du dessus. Cela a fait tomber mon français primitif dans les toilettes. She said they couldn’t share the address (Je comprends, bien sûr!), but she did make a gracious show of taking the letter I had brought with me and said she absolument would forward it to him. Who knows. That era in Paris, no one willingly spoke English which was quite okay, but I was at more than one embarrassing disadvantage because my lousy French was spoken in a decidedly parler lyonnais, from the hinterlands, down south, mixed with a shifty accent américain: folks were at first confused, then clearly amusé at my miserable diction!
That accent was imprinted on my primitive linguistic neurons back in the third grade in rural Maryland, following the lead of Madame Moon, who taught French to a small group of us after school a couple days a week. A petite and severe silver-coiffed native of Lyon, Mme. Moon held us in a régime ancien of holy terror: if any of us got just a bit obstreperous, she would threaten to come over and sit on us! This provoked an existential fear that I never fully recovered from. We followed every lesson closely, not realizing our French discourse would be marked forevermore: indicated most overtly by our learning the Lyonnaise oui (pronounced as a slack and breathy “whey”) rather than the ‘proper’ Parisienne oui (pronounced as a clipped “we”). C’est comme ça!
Quand même, back to M. Le Clézio, I highly recommend any of his work that is now, since the Nobel in 2008, all in fresh English translation. Better still if you can manage en français, although again, his vocabulary and usage makes for a challenging stretch.
Around when M. Le Clézio received his Nobel, and I was about to undertake my PhD in Australia, I discovered that he had been teaching one semester a year at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Sadly, it never worked out for me to get through there after I returned to the US from Oz. And now, as he’s quite elderly, he’s no longer doing those gigs.
Je lève mon verre pour porter un toast à l’un de mes écrivains préférés!
Otherwise, thank god for those library stacks—a place for enLightened literary (and sometimes other!) encounters that has unfortunately met the same end as telephone books, logarithm tables, paper maps, and French teachers who were at liberty to punish children by sitting on them!
yarrow—stalks harvested under the towering Sangre de Christo mountains, cut for use casting the I Ching;
then it proceeded to
culvert—piping rainwater under the road upstream from the Prescott house, it’s clogged with debris and when a flood comes it washes down the road and through my yard. It’s definitely not a conduit although it does guide flows; then there are
tamales—they snuck in there somewhere between the known, tortillas, and the next mental blank:
box elder—the trees that shade campsite #12 in Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, and that host those weird black-and-red (western) boxelder bugs.
Let’s try this again, commit to Latinized memory:
Achillea millefolium
tandem tabernus
Ferculum Mesoamericanum ex masa, farinam ex segete nixtamalizato, quod vaporetur in folliculo grani vel fixa folium.
Acer negundo quod exercituum Boisea rubrolineata
recalling, naming what routinely … cannot be brought to mind.
Indeed my writing has always found itself facing two divergent roads that correspond to two kinds of knowledge: one that moves through mental spaces of disembodied rationality, in which lines can be drawn that connect points, projections, abstract shapes, vectors of force; another that moves in a space crowded with objects and seeks to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling pages with words, in a meticulous effort to match the written to the not-written, to the sum of the sayable and the not-sayable. These are two distinct drives toward exactitude that will never reach absolute fulfillment: the first because natural languages always say something more than formalized languages – they always carry a certain amount of noise that alters the essence of the information; and the second because in trying to account for the density and continuity of the world around us, language is exposed as lacunose, fragmentary: it always says something less than the sum of what can be experienced.
Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985–86. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
“A story must be judged according to whether it makes sense. And ‘making sense’ must be here understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, tuning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are.” ― David Abram
The question: what is the lineage of what is now called a story (a fiction, a documentary, a novel, a reportage …)? Where does this symbol-laden, semiotic act come from?
When many tell the same one, or when I tell one to myself, in a dream: these are different instances, very much so, than One telling a story—the story—to many. Numbers.
When the story is a deliberate inhalation and exhalation, the warmth of breath, vital, embodied, incarnate, voice: hypostasis.
Before writing, before the interpolation of symbolic systems, the story was the body: the body, a story.
What is at the core of the desperate need to tell stories in this moment, in this cosmos? What is the psychology of storytelling? Everyone has a story, but the embodied, singular telling is suppressed in the noise of the technosocial now.
And when is enough of this telling? word dialogue Light revolution action. When does telling change to listening, and when do words transform into actions?
I force myself to write something, anything, letters on a screen, filling line-by-line. Though there is little to be said and much to be done. A hollow emptiness that has overtaken days and days. Cosmological movement becomes the singular touchstone that allows demarcated time. The horizon, and zenith, the ecliptic and azimuth. Where is the sun, the moon, Andromeda, Orion, Sirius, and the Milky Way? The temporal where of heavenly transit becomes the story.
Finally done with the primary phase of an onerous rollover from GoDaddy hosting to ReClaim hosting, a mellow outfit which I hope survives and thrives. ReClaim provides hosting solutions for folks in educational contexts. After 20 fraught years dealing with GoDaddy’s abuse, I’d had it. In the (almost) thirty years of neoscenes web existence there have been many technological changes which have made the long-term survival of the site a shaky proposition at best, and at worst, it has come crashing down: offline on occasion. Many turns of angst and frustration at the forced change of specs, formats, codices, platforms, and protocols. I just wanna post audio-video-text-image material, along with hosting content from a few other folks (at this point, Anthony Zega (RIP my friend), and Rod Summers, aka vec world service).
Not having the platform secure and stable as a place to spontaneously create content is always disturbing. During those intervening thirty years, so many head-banging technical issues, ugh, not good to recall. Onwards and upwards … into the AI wilderness.
Now to repair all the collateral GoDaddy damage to various aspects of the site content and performance …
Inability to focus on particulars that swarm the mind, fleeting. What to write about? Is there anything of substance to say? The world is so full of re-creations of an infinite multiverse: the universe is … whatever you want it to be. After that, it is what it is, or, perhaps, what it isn’t.
The human race consists of a small group of animals which for a small time has barely differentiated itself from the mass of animal life on a small planet circling round a small sun. The Universe is vast. Nothing is more curious than the self-satisfied dogma with which mankind at each period of its history cherishes the delusion of the finality of its existing modes of knowledge. Skeptics and believers are all alike. At this moment scientists and skeptics are the leading dogmatists. Advance in details is admitted: fundamental novelty is barred. This dogmatic common sense is the death of philosophic adventure. The Universe is vast.
[John] Dewey has never been appalled by the novelty of an idea. But it is characteristic of all established schools of thought to throw themselves into self-defensive attitudes. Refutation has its legitimate place in philosophic discussion: it should never form the final chapter. Human beliefs constitute the evidence as to human experience of the nature of things. Every belief is to be approached with respectful inquiry. The final chapter of philosophy consists in the search for the unexpressed presuppositions which underlie the beliefs of every finite human intellect. In this way philosophy makes its slow advance by the introduction of new ideas, widening vision, and adjusting clashes.
Dewey, John, Paul Arthur Schilpp, and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds. The Philosophy of John Dewey. 3d ed. The Library of Living Philosophers, v. 1. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1989.
As I catch up, year-end, on a variety of old and new postings from folks, I engage in a blurred comparison process: between what they write (and illustrate), and what I write (and otherwise mediate via image and sound). A number of folks have jumped on Substack, or podcast subscription platforms. It’s hard for me to think about a paying subscription, though, as the monetary side of life is so … sensitive. And I haven’t received a penny in the last decade on my site. How to barter for access to their creative content? Perhaps I’ll raise the issue with some of them. How about a vintage photographic print from my archive for a year’s subscription?
Most others I know have a public (written) voice that is quietly friendly and ultimately readable, compared to mine. I explicitly recall a couple conversations with Norie, my PhD adviser, who said “Be kind to your readers”, something I appreciated, but honestly didn’t understand how to implement. There was and continues to be a profound internal pressure to simply get ideas down in the most precise way manageable with my particular (untempered) linguistic skill-set. As an editor I can clean up an unholy mess of words that someone else has regurgitated, honoring their ideas and intentions and making a kindly and readable text. My own ruminations, while well-edited, have only been subject to a precision test, not a ‘kindness’ test. That test, in itself, is reasonable, but tends to forge a dense, leaden text. My general excuse: texts that I have had to fight my way through understanding very often have been the most rewarding to and impactful of my worldview. Of course, I can’t make any such claims as to my own obfuscations. Giving back the energies of what I have received? Hardly. Ugh!
At any rate, George has now embraced substack with his Story Club; T.C. and her husband Dave continue documenting their interesting life between Alaska and Colorado with the Adventures of the Odaroloc Sled Dogs; Owen documents every day from Finland, India, and elsewhere with a short text and image, and has for the past decade; Christie and her friend have their Emerging Form podcast; Zander started Buzzcut both also on substack. Adam has Datatheism; John Hays has Relative Something. As a vital community exploring the sonic world, aporee::maps continues to evolve with more than 58,000 field recordings. I managed to contribute only a handful during the year, with my total around 1,700 since 2008. Just recently the World According to Sound (co-founded by talented public radio sound peeps Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett) announced an interesting calendar of live 90-minute binaural podcasts — Winter Listening Series — digging deeper into sonic phenomena beyond their shorter podcast series on sound. And, while I’m at it, Radio Web MACBA: a non-profit, cultural communication radiophonic project based at MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, hosts more than 800 podcasts covering the heights and breadths of radio beyond radio. Oh, not to mention the trove of 400,000 sound recordings from before 1926 that have entered the public domain as of last week. Finally, Lloyd Dunn, formerly a Tape Beatle, continues releasing his rich sonic and visual work on nula.cc.
Then the next anniversary of Art’s Birthday is coming up on 17 January …
If I had more time, I guess I could be rooting around endlessly online, posting a more full review of these and other voices. But then, how would I get any of my own work done? I wonder: what is the ratio of humans to verbiage? And, what was it before the Gutenberg press, before the typewriter, before the PC, before the iPhone, before Fazebuch?
“Should is the killer word in the English language.” Tobias Wolff quoting Michel Herr in conversation with George Saunders last evening, three authors. Should I explore this? Should I try writing about it? Nah. Another day. But it was nice seeing George on screen, an aside to our ether-mediated text trading of the last decades.
Morning comes and writing, any writing, needs to happen to both purge and to temporarily preserve what is left of Life. (While acknowledging that there is no craft available here to draw on, only a poorly exercised habit of projecting symbolic detritus from mind to screen: excretion.)
Okay, the should problem. One obstacle set oblique to it: the close-to-asymptotic barrier in writing truth. Especially when the perception of weakness arrives in view when attempting to write such. Why is this? Is it that behind any truth is the reified presence of mortality? Photographer Richard Misrach comes to mind, describing his impression of the desert as having a ‘terrible beauty.’ It is within the verity of instantaneous sensual engagement with the world we subsequently come to know that we are transitory. This initiates a deep terror: the only escape from which is a return into the ongoing flow of the senses receiving the source of that terrible beauty. It is the process of reification, fixing the image, that is the initial corruption of truth. Writing that approaches truth is writing that is sourced in the precognitive, the pre-rational, the pre-symbolic: the momentary encounter committed to page with a crafted or spontaneous urgency. Should is the reified abstraction of Life.
I should try to transcend this limit. I really should: Black speck on the wall. A fly. No compunction to snuff a life with dried and calloused hands made so after cleaning thousands of tiny fly-shits on surfaces, no, on edges around the house. Yes, insects excrete. And, yes, they habituate certain places for this: edges, corners, windows, shitting, tiny rust-red circles, a couple millimeters in diameter. I should cease writing and continue cleaning the house. Were that I was a fly on the wall, I should take a shit as well. Should write, should shit, should clean. This is how life goes.
[Ed: I will continue with these remembrances, in the moment this is all I can manage to compose.]
I’m tired of writing remembrances, each one reminds of the passing, fading nature of be-ing. I don’t need to be reminded that Life closes off, a box canyon with sheer varigated walls, cross-cut sediments of past-time on display. Fossilized life, fragments of bone, amber protrude from the sheer layered walls. Evidence of those who went before. Where are they? what are they doing? Somehow, Anthony’s passing clears something away, psychically: that he has made the transition, into the Bardo, and beyond. Not that he deserved it at his age, but that he was released from the physical ravages that cancer was imposing on his body. Following him, and the expanding number of others, will perhaps be less terrifying.
I met Anthony on the way out the door of Parson’s photo department building on 5th Avenue, just north of Washington Square Park, in the fall of 1985.
“The primary principle of this age in the West is decay.”
Yup. That resonated, still does. As elsewhere noted, that profound and concise observation marked the beginning of a long friendship that explored the surfaces of the world and the energies and patterns of flow behind those surfaces. It maintained itself for 34 years despite the infrequent crossings-of-path. Aside for a year or so when we were house-mates in a couple places in Boulder, it took the form of a rich correspondance along with the occasional meetings-up that were always electric. Princeton, Manhattan, Peters Valley, Newton, and then all the locales experienced on a handful of profound road-trips in the US West. Death Valley (including a legendary night in Las Vegas on New Years Eve — photographing the insanity of the place); across the Rez’ in Arizona, picking up hitch-hikers; dealing with extreme weather transiting the Colorado Rockies; time at the Great Sand Dunes; and all the while, closely observing the perfidy of the contemporary capitalist oligarchies and, if nothing else, making fun of it. National Dead People. Stick Puppets on Display. The George P. Schultz Delirium Tremens Telephone. He left the East Coast in 1987 or so, and engaged in a long meander around the West, deeply influenced by his encounters with the Native American cultures and histories. His passionate, spirited, sensitive, and brilliant intellect — a full-spectrum laser — initiated a reducing flux that operated powerfully in his poetic work. None of it easily consumed, he did not share it with more that a handful of people ever.
Our last day shared together was in 2014, a long one spent at the Met, wandering through Strawberry Fields and Central Park, and dinner at the Whole Foods cafeteria on the Upper West Side near his mother’s flat where he’d been living for a few years. He had been worn down by the ignominy of working in the retail “adrenalized sporting complex”. But he had also met Maite, a Catalonian woman, who he joined in Barcelona in 2016. Best that he was out of the US for the repugnance of oligarchy and destruction that has ensued.
The written word was his primary medium in more recent years, although his photographic work was an important and powerful expression as well. It was the case, however, that he was intensely private, and most of his creative output came in the form of letters, and for the last decade more than a thousand emails that included an image, a dense poetic work, or a carefully laid-out pdf word piece, or some combination of those. In the mid-80s he did have a few prose pieces published in Marvin Jones’ The New Common Good in New York City, as their “Western Correspondent”. The only one I have a copy of is an excerpt of “The Tourist“. All of his negatives and writings up to relatively recently were apparently lost to flooding at his mother’s place in Princeton. It appears that I am more-or-less the sole holder of his remaining artistic legacy: with a fat folder of beautifully hand-penned communications.
From a letter I wrote to Anthony, back in 1991, from what was home, then, Reykjavík:
There is a bit of nostalgia in my mind, but more, there is the respect for you as a creator, discoverer, synthesist, See-er, and, um, Voice-of-Consciousness from the Mouth of Chaos, more or less. (I find meself writing in Literal ways these days, unable to couch clearly or veil rightly, no figures dancing between the words). I have your three cards sitting, always self-aware, they are, there on the desk next to the Printer. In a small attic space, ceiling too low for me to stand, but fine to write, skylights at my back open to a 20-hour sun day. (Fela doin’ “Zombie”). I can feel the plasma mass pressure of the sun Light pressing down, trying to flatten the landscape into a line, a mote, but the earth is in constant retching here, heaving basalt sky-ward, building sites, Places for the People to live. You have fed me bits from a variety of Others — Others speaking about Others — or a saying about unsay-able things or, yes, That which is … … … Thank you.
Rozana Kekovska
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Research Team | Library | La Trobe University | Victoria | 3086 | Australia
T: +61 3 9479 2291 | E: R.Kekovska@latrobe.edu.au | W: latrobe.edu.au
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No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda. No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault. Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA. Lying on the ground two white bodies, each in its semicircle. White too the vault and the round wall eighteen inches high from which it springs. Go back out, a plain rotunda, all white in the whiteness, go back in, rap, solid throughout, a ring as in the imagination the ring of bone. The light that makes all so white no visible source, all shines with the same white shine, ground, wall, vault, bodies, no shadow. more “imagination morte imaginez”
Slipping through a day, from dawn to late evening, time is a field of flows. Attention calls flow from its progress, delineating it temporarily as distinct and heterogeneous. Pass through attentiveness, and one arrives at the granular curtain of awareness. Seeing both detail and the full over-flow of being.
Fighting to maintain constant attention to lived life. Back to breathing?
An attempt to address the title of this blog entry. Entries arise from these titles. Titles self-generate from the textures of living. Entries are attempts to address the titles, to address the textures of life, to form a text: a reduction of life. A tautology of be-ing — writing about be-ing — a pleonastic embolism destined to disrupt attention, flow, and life itself. And yet these become normative to the social. Normative to the day of lived-life, pried from living body, in service to social presence, social acceptance, and social ‘success’. If only all the world were ignorant of Plato!
1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.
2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person — a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.
4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it — bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.
5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.
6. If you are using dialogue — say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech. — Mr. Steinbeck
Gravity has arrived in its force, once again; and once again, profundity and levity have gone, if ever they occupied this corner of the cosmos. Time steps away, leaving eyes empty and sights, once focused up ahead, obscured by a dense fog.
Writing forms no way out. Yet here, again, I find myself writing rather than shoveling — rather than moving earth and rocks — grounded in a way that I have not been before. Nomadic becomes a faint word, sun-bleached and hard to read, painted on a wooden wall, blistered. Lizards thereon are sluggish even in the warming spring sunshine. Easy to catch but more, easier to have eye contact with. Eye-contact proves the reptilian: locative mediation.
So, Displace finally arrives from the printers — Dovile did a fine job designing it, and overall it looks good thanks to Mindaugas’ hard work as Editor-in-Chief. The editing process went on three times longer than we originally had hoped, but I guess that’s just another lesson on how to estimate the work on a complicated project. Mindaugas is sending me a case of sixteen for the record, and it will be interesting to look through the physical copy to see all the mistakes I might have made! Argh!
Subject: [MigAA] Displace: A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2015 18:59:36 +0100
Finally long awaited the third Migrating Art Academies publication Displace is out! If anyone is interested in ordering a copy, please do send a short note to info (at) migaa (dot) eu.
Best,
Mindaugas
Displace A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas
ISBN 978-609-447-143-8
This book — the third Migrating Art Academies (MigAA) publication — marks the end of the third phase of the MigAA program, which, over the course of seven years has grown into a dynamic and vital network of art academies and universities, independent arts organizations, many hundreds of people, and endless ideas. It documents the results of sixteen innovative workshops the network organized during the last four years that took place across nine European countries.
The book includes works, essays, concepts, and other documentary and peripheral material developed before, during, and after the sixteen different workshops. It is first of all presented as a source for any and all emerging artists who search for a means of creating, nurturing, and manifesting their ideas. Secondly, it is meant as a source for inspiring and fresh perspectives for professional artists experiencing a creative block or who are stuck in unproductive patterns of thought. Finally, for those seeking to understand contemporary art and its challenges, it constitutes an excellent window into the surprising variety of practices with which the participating artists addressed the issues that confronted them.
In order to emphasize the distributed nature of the MigAA network, the book is designed with no particular hierarchic continuity. The only source of continuity is the page numbering that follows the chronological sequence of the laboratories: each of them are separated into chapters corresponding to the name of the laboratory. The chapters are presented in a random order to reflect the open nature of the network. Each laboratory/chapter is formatted the same: identifying where it took place, and providing the relevant information on the input, the process, and the output, as well as an introduction section and a list of participants.
The publication of this book could not have been possible without the enthusiastic and farsighted support of the EU Culture Programme 2007-2013, Nordic Culture Point, and the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
Mitten-clad hands opened beer bottles with a key and we sipped from them while trampling the snow in dress shoes. We walked single-file through the graveyard, holding on to each other so no one lost their way among the gravestones. Beyond the graveyard followed a sharp, steep hill, which we didn’t realize until we had half-rolled, half-ran down it. Still we landed on our feet and stood in the backyard of a house. Made a racket under the bedroom window and smoked a bunch of cigarettes. We sprinted over Tjörnin’s sheet of ice, letting ourselves glide across, fell and hurt ourselves more than we expected. Kept going and kept falling. There were stars in the sky but we didn’t see them for the street lights. Anyway, we didn’t want to see anything in this ice cold gale. — Arngunnur Árnadóttir, Meðgönguljóð (Partus Press), 2013
whispers from the winter darkness of Reykjavík from a poetry collective returning to the radical roots of self-publishing, bravo! (The Grapevine published a long profile on them in English.)
Live through, which is the starting point in the formation of human personality traits, often can be in the vacuum space of the human experience. The given fact does not guarantee departing from the own internal disagreements concerning the choice of vector orientation and finding an optimal solution to assigned task.
This project is my personal and intimate story of contiguity with this situation later turned over my life. It is story about one moment in my biography, which describes developments and the internal struggle that began to unfold inside of me after a deep reassessment of the scale of values.
Really, how can this be done? (Without sitting the ‘author’ down in a chair facing a bright Light, and asking many hard questions, like, Why did you use Google translate to pull a random text from Romanian into faux English, why? and, What the f#$k are you talking about????) Argh! Two hundred more pages of this yet to ‘edit.’ Gott und Madre de Dios, help me!
After, euhuh, right…
Daily life, as the basis for the formation of human personality traits, occurs in the sometimes vacuous atmosphere of wider human experience. This in no way guarantees that abandoning one’s own internal struggle concerning the path to follow will allow an optimal solution to the problem.
This project is a personal and intimate story of the progress of the circumstances that later turned out to be my life. It is story about one moment of my life that describes the development of the internal struggle that began to unfold inside of me after a deep reassessment of human values.
Translato-torial work continues at such an intensity that nothing will be happening here until the book goes to the printers 30 November. I will have to maintain an average of 20 pages a day of garbled ESL texts on art, philosophy, you name it. (gedda life!) Started to hang out at the Wild Iris on the creek to escape from the production desk at home. It’s warmer here in the café than the 55F at home. The new R-60 blown-in attic insulation helps substantially, but I have characterized the process of doing that as “putting a fur hat on a naked lady.”
From an interview with Sam Shepard by Laura Barton:
He struggles to think of contemporary American writers he rates, beyond Denis Johnson. “The thing about American writers is that as a group they get stuck in the same idea: that we’re a continent and the world falls away after us. And it’s just nonsense.”
Did he ever get stuck in that idea? “I couldn’t see beyond the motel room and the desert and highway,” he says slowly, and turns his glass a little. “I couldn’t see that there was another world. To me, the whole world was encompassed in that. I thought that was the only world that mattered.
“And it’s still there,” he adds, “but now it’s redundant because everything’s replaced by strip malls.”
The situation, he believes, is irredeemable. “We’re on our way out,” he says of America. “Anybody that doesn’t realise that is looking like it’s Christmas or something. We’re on our way out, as a culture. America doesn’t make anything anymore! The Chinese make it! Detroit’s a great example. All of those cities that used to be something. If you go to a truck stop in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, you’ll probably see the face of America. How desperate we are. Really desperate. Just raw.”
But why, I ask, is the world still so infatuated with American culture? Why, even, do we remain gripped by a play such as True West? “Oh, because they all believe the American fable,” he says. “That you can make it here. But you don’t make it.”
You’ve made it pretty well, I say.
“Yeah but I’ve also… I’ve… yeah,” he hesitates, laughs, a long, rich wheeze. “But you know, oddly, I wasn’t even fucking trying.”
For those who could not join the many who did attend Bridget’s Celebration of Life in Boulder 15 August 2014, I recorded the event (despite the poor room acoustics!)::
(01:17:01, stereo audio, 184 mb)
David Kaplan: Greeting
Stories:
Geraldine Klauber and Katie Klauber Ross
Polly Duke
Ginger Perry
Cassie Kircher
Don Eron
The True Believers: “Mission in the Rain”
Effie Siebold
Mary Claire Mulligan and Kathy McGuire
Eliot and Nora Meade
Bridget passes. Memories of many evening dinners all the way back to the 1528 Mapleton house days of the 1980s. Her subtle but distinctive Baltimore accent always made me happy inside as it recalled my own Maryland childhood. Just last year (after her diagnosis) I had the pleasure of seeing her ‘on the job’ at the Jeffco Courthouse, an experience that underscored what a powerful, dedicated, and compassionate attorney she was for so many people. Most of our encounters were over lively dinners at the 1719 Mapleton house, where, surrounded by her family and friends, she was a warm presence — her exterior revealing her interior: all of beauty and of direct be-ing, as we ensemble shared the passing moments. more “Bridget Ann Klauber 1957 – 2014”
The artistic text, as we have ascertained, may be viewed as a specially organized mechanism which can contain an exceptionally high concentration of information. If we compare a sentence of colloquial speech with a poem, a set of paints with a picture, or a scale with a fugue, we immediately realize that the second element of each pair can contain, store, and convey a volume of information that is beyond the capacity of the first element.
Our conclusions are in full agreement with the fundamental idea of information theory which states that the volume of information in a message should be seen as the function of the number of possible alternative messages. The structure of an artistic text has a practically infinite number of boundaries which divide this text into segments that are equivalent in certain respects, and consequently may be regarded as alternatives. more “dense artistic information”
When the great earth, abandoning day, rolls up the deeps of the heavens and the universe, a new door opens for the human spirit, and there are few so clownish that some awareness of the mystery of being does not touch them as they gaze. For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars – pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time. Fugitive though the instant be, the spirit of man is, during it, ennobled by a genuine moment of emotional dignity, and poetry makes its own both the human spirit and experience.
. . .
Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, to-day’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd and evil as to know only artificial day.
Beston, H., 1976. The outermost house: a year of life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod, Harmondsworth, NY: Penguin.
As readily as one accepts the status of artistic creation, as a paradigm for human production, in terms of a terrestrial afterlife — the desire to leave something behind — so might we insist that the artifact functions as archive and memory bank. And the same might be said of technological invention in general, for, as has often been pointed out, the word tekhne was used in Greek as much for what was produced as art as what was manufactured; it stands for the artisanal all the way from art to industry. Although the relation to memory and to archivation might not be immediately apparent in the case of a rudimentary tool, it can be understood that whatever is produced as nonorganic or “nonbiodegradable” remainder will necessarily constitute some form of memorial trace. And it is an obvious fact that artifactual technologies such as language, especially via writing, consist precisely in what Bernard Stiegler refers to as the exteriorization of memory, and that the contemporary technologies of information amount to a veritable “industrialization of memory.” If technology is a matter of exteriorization, of the human reaching outside itself (but, as was argued regarding corticalization and the upright stance, in a way that calls into question the integrity of any interiority), then it is also a matter of archivation: what is created outside the human remains as a matter of record and increasingly becomes the very record or archive, the artificial or exterior memory itself. The production of an artifact is the production of an archive; it means depositing in the present- in some “present” — an object, which, as it inserts and catalogs itself in the past, will become available for a future retrieval.
In reaching outside itself, the human therefore reaches both forward and back; in seeming to turn away from the past, it leaves the artificial that will have it forever referring back to that constructed past as the trace of its memory, as promise of artificial memory and promise or threat, eventually, of artificial intelligence. Memory might be called, after all, the first artificial intelligence, and it comes to be recognized explicitly as such once Freud discovers the unconscious like some self-produced biochip that controls (and derails), as if from behind, the conscious. The life of memory, its status as alive or dead, internal or external, real or artificial, draws the fault line along which the question of technology is still debated, from the desirability of “replacing” mental functions by machines (oral histories by writing, arithmetic by calculators, spelling by word processors, to begin with) all the way to nanoscientific cerebral implants and the manipulation of genetic memory systems.
Wills, D., 2008. Dorsality: thinking back through technology and politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
on the island, with Tapio, Alejo, and Jerneja. wind, water, birds, working, fishing, writing, editing, eating, drinking, sauna every night (where night is only a sliding attenuation into a dusk that never finds darkness). beautiful on all counts. network connection, and some photovoltaic energy. for two more days.
Went to church at 11 AM in the Memorial Chapel. The sermon was on “Time to Triumph” by the minister, Mr. Daughtry. Shortly afterwards, as I was strolling back to the BOQ, Aubrey Stinnett caught up with me and invited me over for dinner. I had a most pleasant afternoon and then after two hours back writing in my room, went with them to see the neighboring home of the Scotts where a birthday party was going on. Ice cream was made with a hand-operated stirrer. Spare ribs, baked beans, and salad made a delicious dinner. Aubrey and I took some time out to take some sunset pictures. We left early, and returned to their trailer to see two of their slide films w/ the records — “Japan,” and another “On The Pacific Shore.” I think I’ll get them — $4 + postage/month.
Ah, well, so passes yet another seminal figure in youthful literary (mostly sci-fi) explorations via the Gaithersburg Public Library and the Bookmobile that visited my semi-rural neighborhood outside of Washington DeeCee in the late 60s & early 70s. Libraries are underscored as a crucial source of inspiration in his creative life. No doubt about that!
All that writing is is a protocol: a reductive way of describing reality. The best writing more deeply invokes the energetic nature and spirit of reality’s flow. The closer that writing lies to an individual framing of lived experience, the more powerfully it moves life, moves lives.
Taking walks with Luna a few times a day. Will explore the canyon edges (at the bottom). It’s an extremely interesting locale. It seems to have been isolated from heavy Western ranching that I thought was a feature here in Glade Park. Most typical areas of cryptobiotic soil are undisturbed. But with a well 600+ feet deep, no historic use of water, aside from the ambient fall, which is scant.
It did rain yesterday, a heavy passing shower in the night, starting on Thursday evening. The air was as the air in the last night and day in Dinosaur — dry for the prior month or two — then, after a fine rainfall the whole, the everything swelled up with sensations to be received (gratefully).
The scale of the place is very interesting — it is an intimate canyon. With the scale effect on human movement similar to Echo Park’s but without the massive 600-foot cliffs. Here they are perhaps 100 feet on average. Sometimes overhung, sometimes in cross-bedded and gentle sloping sinuosity looking like pink skin. The site of flash-floods, there are some massive water-transported boulders, and many small ones. But most the erosion is evident with the sandstone itself, which rots and powders quickly, in human-scaled time even.
posted
place: Echo Park, Dinosaur National Park, Colorado
I had the ‘ex’ send me four of these from Iceland a couple years back, but am on the last one now, they don’t do to well in hot & dry situations. But otherwise, they are an excellent and clean substitute for my exploding Koh-i-noor India Ink drafting pens which were just too sensitive to changing air pressure (i.e., flying), and had to be totally disassembled and cleaned prior to any travel. The beauty of the line, and the feel of the metal tip on paper was superlative, but the hassle was too much for the traveler to bear.
How many days have I been doing this? gah. Not sure it’s sustainable much longer. Although I am scheduled to finish well before the 3.5-year study limit (actually just approaching the 2.5-year marker since it all started in Sydney in ’09), it seems like a friggin’ eternity of sitting in front of the screen. and I think I’m goin’ to hell, thoughtlessly: righteous thanks George, for pointing the following out. you are spot-on again! (though I am certain that the truths contained in the dissertation are veiled by a cloak of passivity, argh!)
A petty bureaucrat writes to his superior: “The lighting must be better protected than now. Lights could be eliminated, since they apparently are never used. However, it has been observed that when the doors are shut, the load always presses hard against them as soon as darkness sets in, which makes closing the door difficult. Also, because of the alarming nature of darkness, screaming always occurs when the doors are closed. It would therefore be useful to light the lamp before and during the first moments of the operation.” The bureaucrat was the ironically named “Mr. Just,” his organization the SS, the year 1942.
What Mr. Just did not write–what he would have written, had he been taking full responsibility for his own prose–is: “To more easily kill the Jews, leave the lights on.” But writing this would have forced him to admit what he was up to. To avoid writing this, what did he have to do? Disown his prose. Pretend his prose was not him. He may have written a more honest version, and tore it up. He may have intuitively, self-protectively, skipped directly to this dishonest, passive-voice version. Either way, he accepted an inauthentic relation to his own prose, and thereby doomed himself to hell.
Working with language is a means by which we can identify the bullshit within ourselves (and others). If we learn what a truthful sentence looks like, a little flag goes up at a false one. False prose can mark an attempt to evade responsibility, or something more diabolical; the process of improving our prose disciplines the mind, hones the logic, and most importantly, tells us what we really think.
Saunders, G., 2007. The Braindead Megaphone: essays, New York, NY: Riverhead Books.
What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected – far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord. But we should not worry too much about this: it is all much less scientific, less functional than is ordinarily thought. All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us – and this itself is a superstition.
Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other—fatal—moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with the machine. This is a marvelous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen. — Jean Baudrillard
no time here to do anything but thrash through The Text. first big round of edits done, but a major second round to re-shuffle material, collect thoughts, delete extraneous threads will be arduous.
. . . the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. — Machiavelli
But we are up against a curious paradox. Something of immense importance to all of us does not find expression in the literary arts. The rational side of man, with its scientific and technological expressions, gets little literary space. It is curious that science and technology have always occupied so small a place in literature. What important literary figure, except Diderot, seriously occupied himself with the problems of technology? This is all the more extraordinary when one considers that literature is supposed to hold the mirror up to life. In life people spend a great deal of time involved in the technology of the period in which they live. They work, and their jobs are connected with technology and the organizations technology engenders. Yet one sees little evidence of this in literature. — Aldous Huxley
I have a little hope to somehow tap into a solution, or, an attack on this issue. The issue did come into my awareness this past spring, in Melbourne, following some conversations with different ‘humanists’ where I realized how poorly they understand the operational paradigms of technology. And, how they look at the world through a literal or metaphoric lens which effects an almost-complete disjunction between the ‘realities’ of the (techno-)social system that they are fully embedded within, and how they imagine that social system operates.
So, today I have to forge a short footnote on the ideas behind “systems theory” for a general and likely unwitting audience. Not easy.
But did turn in a final draft a couple days ago. One hurdle, now 120 days of writerly hell ahead.
The greatest joy, and the greatest triumph, in art, comes at the moment when, realizing to the fullest your grip over the medium, you deliberately sacrifice it in the hope of discovering a vital hidden truth within you. It comes like a reward for patience — this freedom of mastery which is born of the hardest discipline. Then no matter what you do or say, you are absolutely right and nobody dare criticize you. I sense this very often in looking at Picasso’s work. The great freedom and spontaneity he reveals is born, one feels, because of the impact, the pressure, the support of the whole being which, for an endless period, has been subservient to the discipline of the spirit. The most careless gesture is as right, as true, as valid, as the most carefully planned strokes. This I know, and nobody could convince me to the contrary. Picasso here is only demonstrating a wisdom of life which the sage practices on another, higher level.
This morning, awake at five o’clock, the room almost dark still, I lay awake quietly meditating about the essay I would get up to write, and at the same time, as though playing a duet, watching the gradual change of colors in my paintings beside the bed, as the light slowly increased. I had the strange sensation then of imagining what might happen to those colors should the light continue to increase in strength beyond full daylight. And from thinking about the unknown color gamut to the forms themselves and then to their significance — what a world of conjecture I explored. In that moment I was able, so to speak, to place myself in a future which may one day be realized. I saw not only what I might one day be able to do, but also I saw this — that the anticipation of the event was an augur of the deed itself. Suddenly I realized how it had been with the struggle to express myself in writing. I saw back to the period when I had the most intense, exalted visions of words written and spoken, but in fact could only mutter brokenly. Today I see that my steadfast desire was alone responsible for whatever progress or mastery I have made. The reality is always there, and it is preceded by vision. And if one keeps looking steadily the vision crystallizes into fact or deed. There is no escaping it. It doesn’t matter what route one travels — every route brings you eventually to the goal. “All roads lead to Heaven,” is the Chinese proverb. If one accepted that fully, one would get there so much more quickly. One should not be worrying about the degree of “success” obtained by each and every effort, but only concentrate on maintaining the vision, keeping it pure and steady. The rest is sleight-of-hand work in the dark, a genuine automatic process, no less somnambulistic because accompanied by pains and aches. — Henry Miller
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. — R.M. Rilke
I keep thinking — oh, I should stop at the cafe that is on my way to school to record the ambiance there; oh, I should make portraits of my house mate and his frequent guests; oh, I should get out of town to see some of the hinterlands and make images and audio recordings; oh, I should make portraits around the University; oh, shit, I don’t have the presence to do so. The absence of be-ing that the writing process entails is deeply disturbing. To the point that I believe I will be an Other person when I am done. I note that communicative connections have dropped off precipitously since I began the thesis project here in Oz. It seems unless I push life-energy outwards, initiating communicative events, not much happens — that is, I only receive (very) occasional spontaneous communications from others. Even people known for years. The apparent imbalance in this seems to say that those connections have no value when they require effort on the Other’s part.
It may simply be that immediate life is in everyone’s face(book), brutally or seductively, and all else is secondary.
That and my spine is making ominous crackling sounds all too often. I can’t tell whether this is merely an effect of the intensive swimming (hit 91 km today), or whether something is coming loose. I see a day when it fails. And since the major spinal prosthetic surgery is considered an untouchable pre-existing condition even with the Australian medical system not to mention the US system, I’ll simply be out of luck, a paraplegic, or with a whole heap of luck, dead.
well, made to the top of one list, for a change, and not on a ‘most wanted’ one with profiles from my bad side. averaging 48 km/month, I jumped in front of the next highest person (gal) on the Lap-it-up campaign at the uni Sports Centre. that’s 48 km of swimming for the month. it’s been relatively easy, but it’s a chlorinated pool system, so I develop what my Boulder students labeled the “Einstein Effect” with my poor hair. oh well. I’ll cut it all off again before heading to summer climes anyway.
anything to avoid the prospect of facing the act of writing: it’s a bane right now. and social life, remote and local, is sadly lacking. can’t seem to organize anything of a balance between the two. it’s all or nothing in tracking what the Self determines as important. versus cashing in on material bulwarks. and anyways:
We see then that the deepest problems are often found in the study of what seems obvious, because the “obvious” is frequently merely a notion that summarizes the invariant features of a certain domain of experience which has become habitual and the basis of which has dropped out of consciousness. — David Bohm
Matter is not what it appears to be. Its most obvious property — variously called resistance to motion, inertia, or mass — can be understood more deeply in completely different terms. The mass of ordinary matter is the embodied energy of more basic building blocks, themselves lacking mass. Nor is space what it appears to be. What appears to our eyes as empty space is revealed to our minds as a complex medium full of spontaneous activity. — Frank Wilczek
Sometimes I get the feeling that I don’t recognize even my own life. Among the array of phenomena which present themselves for the sensual body-system every … second … recognition shouldn’t be necessary for any one of them, given that change is the governing principle, or so. All should be new every time, all the time(s), and thus recognizable whether or not there are any observable and (relatively) invariant* features. It could be that this lack of recognition is itself merely the reliance on external models or comprehensions of ‘what’s out there’ as opposed to a deeper reliance on what is experienced by the Self as being (relatively) invariant. more “matters”
To write something compelling, in a sustained long form or even a short note, requires the writer to step outside normative social existence. Writing, as with any archival process, makes exception of lived-life, at the very same moment that the writer steps out of that lived moment. It is the same process as with photography except that the photographic stepping-out is typically of shorter, more fragmentary duration. Long term archiving of life — text, images — is a debilitating condition which, while projecting fragments of a life forward into other lives, at the same time, spends more quickly the life that is immediately available. The writer and image-maker begin to live a conditioned life, as actively passive consumers of staged tableau — or so they imagine. They condition themselves to see life as only a sequence of these discrete tableau, while the constancy of life in between, in its fullness, is ignored.
A low pressure system east of Tasmania brings rain squalls that flood the street out front this morning, and a deep bend in the gutter on the back roof is shooting water right down the side of the house onto the electric water heater. hmmm. doesn’t look good.
F.A. produced numerous chapbooks and alternative press publications. Not on many radars, but definitely expelling severe electro-magnetic radiation for the time he was around.
Demonic seconds of my history must not stop now. I am sober and writing this alone. No voice touch or folded skin of beings. I cannot remember. My father is a vapor inside a black box buried hundreds of yards behind my house. I have drunk the last of his beer. I have heard the last of his hollow laughter many long nights ago as coyotes joined in erasing tears, excuses, lies. I am left with what I have created of years. My structured words contained in slim volumes as proof that my face will not last. That here are many ways to spell a life. I cannot blame my vocabulary. I cannot blame the alcoholic seizures. I cannot blame the wet and sticky hours I have spent inside a woman. I cannot blame the relentless black night or the sun again. Again. As I still don’t give thanks for the days nor care to court the clock. Because I am owed millions of dollars. Because they don’t make enough damn booze to drink. Because you’re too stupid to understand. I am living here. As the stars punctuate all the past and future lives. I am living here. Possessed. — F. A. Nettelbeck
posted
place: en route Carrizo Plains National Monument - Lava Bed Mountains, Mojave Desert, California
dislocated, and wind-blown to another place (in the night). retrospecting from a great distance. not a travelog, but a long narrative story in pieces. a different kind of writing, but not too different: carrying some mapping of the movements imposed by life as it is/was. question: would all the fragments, displayed, end up having a meaning? or would they remain fragmented, and infinitely far from the lived life? can the flow that one feels while passing through this immediate temporal region be truly experienced by an Other, or not.
the San Andreas Fault dominates the feel of this place, though it is only a scarp of low hills cut by displaced drainage washes. I didn’t get to a focal point of the flat valley floor, a complicated outcrop with a sizable pictograph/petroglyph wall up near the entrance to the Monument. it has restricted access, and was closed when I came into the valley. but today, head further south to the southern exit from the valley, where the dirt track parallels the fault scarp a hundred meters to the east. the displaced gullies cannot be immediately decoded by their odd shapes — where the topography is shifting north/south 33-to-37 mm per year. ya’ gotta run to keep up!
Follow the fault scarp east-south-east across the Grapevine and down into the Mojave near Victorville, and end up in a very isolated area of the near Mojave — up at altitude, so it’s very cold and very windy, though that’s nothing new in the High Mojave in December. Simply unload the back of the truck enough to curl up and sleep.
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place: KCL Campground, Carrizo Plains National Monument, California
The argument may be made that a fence, a window, an article of clothing, a wall are — one-and-the-same — deflectors of the extant natural flow of energies out there. They represent a set of energy deflectors imposed by humans on their environs.
The other issue, tied to this is the production of waste (unusable) heat energy which impinges on a locality after the use of high energy sources which are subsequently rendered into usable and unusable forms of energy with varying efficiency. The primary source of this unusable energy is in the actual production and maintenance of the energy deflector systems: making and installing a fence, fabricating a window (glass being an extremely energy-intensive manufacturing process), building a wall, a building, a dam. more “change”
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place: en route Livermore - Carrizo Plains, California
If you look for the truth outside yourself,
It gets farther and farther away.
Today walking alone, I meet it everywhere I step.
It is the same as me, yet I am not it.
Only if you understand it in this way
Will you merge with the way things are.
— Tung-Shan
Loss, and the new. Preparing for the forward-fall to engage the conditions that hydrocarbon burning precipitates: back on the road, hydrocarbon flaring, with a slow drive down to Carizzo Plains via the “Petroleum Highway.” Along which are the still-operational fields of California’s early oil boom. Drive by the Kettleman Dome area, a structure that I examined as my first exploration review at Unocal back in 1982. I had to gather all alternative methods data, produce some maps and structural interpretations, and an exploration strategy that correlated seismic and well-log data sets.
Tracking the San Andreas Fault. The knife-through-birthday-cake-icing scar that runs from the here to the there of California. Rupture zone riding. Making images and writing. The usual. Or the unusual. Beginning or Ending.
This after the Solstice lunar eclipse last deep night which hung in a cleared sky slowly transforming eye-socket receivers into Light-cups, catching a burnt sienna flux from every sun-rise-and-set on the limb of the planet, at the moment. Very fine. And gone for this life’s time. On Earth as it is in Heaven.
On this movement, at this time, cars fill Interstate-5 everywhere, all the time. The pavement is uneven and shattered in some places from the heaviness of the truck traffic as well as the bankrupt state of the state of the Union. wads of toilet paper fill the grass at the scenic overlook like albino poppies. Later, I leave the interstate for less travelled roads, much less travelled, I see very few cars at all. But then there are oil pumps and pipes.
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place: en route Sydney, Australia - Auckland - Whanganui, New Zealand
Up at 0400 to make the hugely early flight to eNZed. Had to be totally packed for the US as well, as I’ll have only another 20 hours back in Sydney, in transit between Auckland – Sydney – San Francisco.
A new country, a new place to visit. The national memorial service is happening when we land, so I manage to record a minute’s silence in the baggage claim. Some people were oblivious. People are watching the ubiquitous flat-screen teevees rather intently. The cost of extractives, but only the most obvious one.
The jump flight from Auckland down to Whanganui reveals both sides of possible landscapes. Massive clear-cut forestry in the highlands, and intensive farming in the more level areas — both with the attendant geomorphology of erosion features marring the terrain. Much has changed since colonization, surely. Then there are the remaining highland forests which are not yet decodable, having not met them on the ground.
Finally get into Whanganui, Julian picks me up at the airport in their 1988(?) Honda named Buzzy Bee (?) — a vehicle with a history, too bad I’m writing this in far distant retrospect, or elsewise I could relate the story. It was funny. Great to finally meet Julian, and we immediately start up a substantial dialogue as I am dropped into the whirlwind of family life surrounding the community effort aimed at the Greenbench (Gallery space) and the ADA Symposium. I tell him that I am at his service, and that, officially, my workshop starts now. It’s all about energy, presence, be-ing, and raising these topics in whatever contexts that arise in the next ten days.
The evening starts with a rousing performance of Aladdin by the children of the Brunswick School located in the countryside near Whanganui. Julian and Sophie’s three daughters recently started attending the school. This was followed by some photo-ops — meeting more of Julian’s family and other folks in the community — in the playground, as the soft, mild summer twiLight closed in.
