Musings of the Moribund

Fearful Symmetry

2011-03-26T13:26:00.002+09:00

Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.

Free Flight and Rest

2007-07-04T12:36:00.000+09:00

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure but from hope to hope.

Samuel Johnson

Di(e)apositive

2007-07-01T14:17:00.001+09:00

I find it incomprehensible that the idea of one's own mortality can seem like a natural and indifferent fact on one day, but send cold dread into the depth's of one's being on another (or even five minutes later on the dame day.)

Landscapes of the Mind

2007-06-25T00:25:00.000+09:00

« Par l’art seulement nous pouvons sortir de nous, savoir ce que voit un autre de cet univers qui n’est pas le même que le nôtre, et dont les paysages nous seraient restés aussi inconnus que ceux qu’il peut y avoir dans la lune. Marcel Proust

Only through art can we get outside ourselves and know what worlds other see that are not the same as our own and these landscapes in which we can find ourselves would be as unknown as those of the moon.

State of Fear

2007-06-12T03:05:00.000+09:00

" . . . the affluent society has become a society of permanent mobilization against the risk of annihilation (and terrorism) and . . . the sale of its goods has been accompanied by moronization, the perpetuation of toil, and the promotion of frustration."

Marcuse continues, "Today, in the prosperous warfare and welfare state, the human qualities of a pacified existence seem asocial and unpatriotic - qualities such as a refusal of toughness; . . . disobedience to the tyranny of the majority- . . . a sensitive intelligence sickened by that which is being perpetrated . . . In the totalitarian society, the human attitudes tend to become escapist attitudes, to follow Samuel Beckett's advice: 'Don't wait to be hunted to hide...'"

Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, page 242.

Deception Perception Redemption

2007-05-19T23:35:00.000+09:00

Was wir wissen?

"...dass der Mensch Etwas sei, das überwunden werden müsse, - dass der Mensch eine Brücke sei und kein Zweck: sich selig preisend ob seines Mittags und Abends, als Weg zu neuen Morgenröthen"

...that Human being is something that needs to be overcome, that it is a bridge and not its own purpose, praising itself sanctimoniously be it afternoons or evenings as a way to the new dawn.

Friedrich Nietzsche - Also Sprach Zarathustra

Graduation Ceremony

2007-05-14T01:16:00.000+09:00

I have problems with public ceremony. I admit it. Graduation ceremonies seem like one more instance of honoring the endpoint rather than the process.

Elemental Riddle

2007-05-11T23:26:00.000+09:00

Carvable element holding fresh precious things,
Oaken pillow, won't burn, lubricates joints and rings
Roundly unsinkable, removed by screw or knife
Keeps things bottled up and protects the sappy life

Hope? Journal 25. Februar 1915

2007-05-10T01:08:00.000+09:00

"Wäre ich ein Fremder, der mich und den Verlauf meines Lebens beobachtet, müßte ich sagen, daß alles in Nutzlosigkeit enden muß, verbraucht in unauf- hörlichem Zweifel, schöpferisch nur in Selbst- quälerei. Als Beteiligter hoffe ich."

"If I were a stranger, who observed myself and the course of my life, I would have to say that everything must end in uselessness, used up in inexorable doubt, creative only in self punishment... (but) as a participant in the process I still hope."

Franz Kafka

Aging

2007-05-09T01:49:00.000+09:00

Is someone different at age 18 or 60? I believe one stays the same.
Hayao Miyazaki

Early Environmentalist in a Way

2007-05-08T02:09:00.000+09:00

From Kafka's Diary - September 25, 1917 -

Weg zum Wald. Zerstört hast du alles, ohne es eigentlich besessen zu haben. Wie willst du es zusammenfügen? Was für Kräfte bleiben nochdem schweifenden Geist zu dieser größten Arbeit.

Path to the trees. You have destroyed everything without ever really having possessed it. How do you intend to bring it back together? What power is left to this restless spirit for such an enormous task?

In need of (Cordial?) Inspiration

2007-05-05T03:40:00.000+09:00

From Kafka's Diary 2. March
"Wer bestätigt mir die Wahrheit oder Wahrscheinlichkeit dessen, daß ich nur infolge meiner literarischen Bestimmung sonst interesselos und infolgedessen herzlos bin."

Who will (is) confirm(ing) the truth or probability that as a reult of my literary nature I am otherwise without interest and therefore heartless."

Not a question- a statement!

Automotofetal

2007-04-29T23:54:00.000+09:00

I've been curled up, not like a closed-eyed fetus that directs its attention inwards and sucks in the world through limited links, but like a wagon wheel that spins dizzily and faces the bumps and diversities of the road. Somwhere in between stands the mechanism of sanity. I guess that is why we sit curled in our automobiles; we have shock absorption, we have control as well as a protected rounding of our body , we have safe mobility and we can see where we are going. Who knew that Henry Ford had designed the perfect cyborg environment?!

Lying Fallow

2007-04-29T04:15:00.000+09:00

Anybody can become a writer, but the trick is to STAY a writer.
- Harlan Ellison

Or to stay a blog writer!!

Janus

2007-04-27T12:05:00.000+09:00

I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
- Georges Bataille

Knowledge or Bliss

2007-03-05T01:13:00.000+09:00

Back Again

2007-02-28T23:51:00.000+09:00

“Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it enkindles the great.”

Comte DeBussy-Rabutin

Sorry to be gone so long. I've been debating whether I really wanted my email info etc on google so I have been reluctant to switch my account. After missing the blog, I finally decided it was worth it. Apologies to anyone who might have missed me.

Heinrich Heine

2007-02-06T10:31:00.000+09:00

"Ja, mich dünkt zuweilen, der Teufel, der Adel und die Jesuiten existieren nur so lange, als man an sie glaubt."

It occurs to me now, that the devil, the noble(man) and the Jesuits exist only as long as we believe in them."

Heinrich Heine

It doesn't seem to work with Presidents.

President's Budget

2007-02-06T10:04:00.000+09:00

I never intended to write anything about politics in this blog, but the recently proposed U. S. budget leaves me absolutely flabbergasted. This budget proposes to raise the amount of money for the military and take food away from children, medicine away from the elderly and never mind the subsidizing of nuclear energy and coal energy and making permanent tax-cuts to the wealthier segment of the population. I'm about to go nucyular myself!

Enough Said

2007-01-28T02:40:00.000+09:00

Persistence Redux

2007-01-22T22:33:00.000+09:00

The man from the country seeks the Law and is forbidden entrance despite his entreaties. At the end he dies without ever having gained access out of fear of the terrifying guard who stands before the door. What does he fear? (Death?) His door is closed as the light fades from his eyes. A reminder to forcefully pursue one's own path and keep trying!

No Mystery

2007-01-07T01:39:00.000+09:00

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

Agatha Christie

Time and Control and More Resolutions

2007-01-01T01:07:00.000+09:00

I've been thinking about time for quite a while now. I live a hectic life and therefore often conceive of time as a relentless, hyper-consistent tyrant cracking its whip above my head as I move to its mechanical rhythms. There are at least a couple of problems with this perspective. The first is the issue of control. My initial reaction is that we must assert our own control and not let ourselves be turned into automatons by some external factor that we ourselves have organized into existence. K in The Trial fails to even question the reasons and terms for his arrest and allows himself to be lead around by the nose (and other more nether body parts) never taking the responsibilities for his own existence upon himself. It is (and Kafka recognizes this explicitly) human to fall into the easy acceptance of a life controlled by exterior circumstances (particularly (I realize) for a writer in post fin de siecle Austria, who must experience his aliveness in the night away from the banks and bureaucracy of the highly hierarchical, diurnal and spiritually dead business-world of Prague.

But it is a second and perhaps less Kafkaesque quality of this construct that interests me today. This very concept of time as mechanical clock, I have decided, is an inappropriate precept. A result of the enlightenment concept of physics, this clock model of time assumes regularity and consistency which is not in accord with human experience. People inately sense that time is plastic, malleable and idiosyncratic. As humans we know that things we love doing can span large units of clock time and small segments of experienced time. Likewise tedious paperwork tasks can drag on experientially and make a simple 8 (or 9) hour work day extend a not so virtual eternity. This experience has its proof in nature which also has inconsistent clock days (No matter what the nuclear clock people tell us.) Lengths of days and nights change with the seasons and the latitudes and they do not add up into nicely divided years and centuries. It takes leap years, periodic (haha) clock readjustments and number-obsessed enlightenment-influenced scientists to enforce such a system.

I recently heard a physicist talking about the mapping of space. She did not mean organizing the locations of stars and planets, but rather understanding its shape. We now know that space is not the consistent and infinite entity (that we have somehow modelled on our concept of the Deity) but that it is full of wrinkles and black holes and nonvisible bumps and hiccups. If this is true of our third dimension, then I believe there is reason to suspect that this will be the case with the fourth dimension too. Maybe time, the fourth dimension, has no real relation to time, the 18th century concept. Maybe they are two different entities with the same name, but I have no doubt that the time I live in is bumpy and slippery, arhyhtmic, and full of holes. I have decided that time is like a giant amoeba, that despite its visible boundary has no physically graspable edge. It ebbs and flows and contains detritus and elements that obstruct and ones that slide us forward on slippery protoplasmic currents. We can try really hard to pretend that it fits our rigid equi-segmented model or so to speak, we can go with the flow.

I'm not sure where this leaves the question of control. On the one hand, the concept of irregular time renders the idea of deadlines meaningless, but on the other, if one lives in that world of deadlines, the pressures of obedience and adherence multiply exponentially. Kafka had no choice but to live in the world of deadlines and the act of rebellion (which K fails to engage in in The Trial) would have produced in all likelihood absolutely no improvement in his own life. Perhaps that is the ultimate paradox of life as shown in The Trial. We have a moral responsibility to resist the proclamation of our guilt, but as human beings we are already imperfect and lacking in cosmic innocence. While the road to perfection may well be the one that seeks to understand and control, the means may not exist for imperfect beings to comprehend the true complexities. So what does one do? Go with the flow and end up in a ditch like K because that is where water naturally flows to? My sense is that Kafka wants us to fight, to seek truth even if it seems to be the same barren subject created and recreated in Titorelli's paintings.

My own guts (something that animals think with according to Kafka and therefore inferior to human means of making a determination) tells me that adhering to strictly to the mechanical time standards of our day is harmful and while Kafka's world of the Law (and Torah inspired vision of the cosmos) is a very masculine hierarchical structuration, he also recognizes that the chaotic, sexual merges on the other side. Perhaps Kafka was in a tiny way already atuned to the coming postmodern view of truth (even though his artist figure is not). The high court officials love their sex and pornography and in the "real world" the sources of higher life are still at once mesy and entropic. This viewpoint leads me to an attempt to navigate place (and in this sense I mean moving on rather than stagnating). I resolve to be less concerned about the way time passes, to seek out aesthetic solutions and be strong in questioning the way things are and what happens without falling into stagnant paternalistic judgmentalism. Time will flow the way that it does and I will use it to my best abilities, but also let go of the desire to stuff it into a mold of rhythmic consistency thereby forcing myself into that same restricted environment. Time will be as it is and I will be as I am, searching to continue on and not get bogged down in the mini-(many?)tribulations and trials of daily life. Kafka answered this question with humor. Let me be able to do so too!!

Things I Don't Understand

2006-12-25T00:30:00.000+09:00

Why do holiday songs have to be so ridiculously repetitive?

Fishin'

2006-12-24T06:23:00.000+09:00

Do you think Fish care if it rains?

Of Dogs and Beetles (and Solstice resolutions)

2006-12-14T01:45:00.001+09:00

From http://www.geocities.com/brisbane_beetles/index.html

I know they have no etmological correlation, but it just seems like there must be a reason that change and chains sound so much alike in English. The former requires disentangling from the latter and oh what a colossal effort. I should remind myself that chains are a good thing for the weak. Our good friend Gregor Samsa could have used aq mooring in some fatherly discipline to retard his devolution into coleopteric decay and the same might have saved the easily seduced hero of The Trial from finding his end "like a dog," (really more like a cur if you read the original German). Still, for those who aspire forwards those same anchors of security can be impossible to hoist aweigh.

Every year about this time as I approach the end of the year and the coming solstice, I look at the mess of my life and try to find hope to make the changes that could make my life less hectic and filled with useless material things. Each December I recognize that my tendency to melancholy would be reduced by more physical activity, more care in food choice and dedication to reading and writing (the things that give me a modicum of satisfaction.) So I strain at my chains knowing that that wretched eagle is somewhere around the corner waiting to peck at my liver and realizing that I do not have the strength of the man who brought fire from the gods.

Still if one learns just one lesson from Kafka, then it is that we must keep trying until we can not do so any more. In the larger scheme of things dogs and beetles are necessary elements and if one must be a cur, then at least one can try to live the best dog existence one can.

So this mongrel resolves to keep working with photography and writing and thinking, to get better organized, to reduce material possesions and to eat a better quality of Alpo. I'm not sure I'm up yet to playing nicely with the other pups, but I think this effort to approach "the Law" will help me in my struggle to get out of the ditch of inaction and melancholy.

Etymology: (http://www.etymonline.com/)
Chain: c.1300, from O.Fr. chaeine, from L. catena "chain," from PIE base *kat- "to twist, twine." The verb is attested from 1377.

Change c.1225, from O.Fr. changier, from L.L. cambiare, from L. cambire "to exchange, barter," of Celtic origin, from PIE base *kamb- "to bend, crook."

Enervation

2006-12-12T14:57:00.000+09:00

Haven't felt like posting lately, but I'll do better now. I promise. (At least for a while).

Here are a couple of new images that I took that I like:

response to Kaf Ka

2006-11-28T10:48:00.000+09:00

Beginnings and Ends and Means

2006-11-24T18:52:00.000+09:00

"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."--Semisonic

I often think about the way that our media re-create us. M. McLuhan noted that the medium is the message and showed how technology such as the railroads and electric light have modified our social structures and even cognitive processes. Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy demonstrates how oral cultures think differently from written ones and the way that the technology of print alters the way we think, causing us to be capable of a different level and intensity of abstraction. In moving from a visual to a symbolic structure, our perceptions of our world changed drastically and I wonder how moving from a writing based culture to an internet one will further modify our thinking. It seems to me our attention spans and ways of understanding are already shifting as we move to short code communications and quicktime intertctions on Utube and the like. This fits with McLuhan's ideas that technology increases our corporeal reach and speed up our processes. We can now "google" or "Wikapediate" almost any desired information within seconds, make instantaneous decisions based on this data and have the consequencesof our actions affect almost any location on earth. I wonder if we will think quickly and as carefully as before? I hesitate to join the ranks of people (such as Plato) who decry the new technologies and see the foreshadowings of doom. Books, he argued, would make our memories weak and spell the beginning of the end.

To "book end" this query I would like to conclude with another quote. Life after all is not a zero sum game.

"The secret to a rich life is to have more beginnings than endings".--Dave Weinbaum

(Image from www.yeshivakishiniev.org/)

Requiem

2006-11-23T11:11:00.000+09:00

Ding, dong, Milty's dead!

Creaky but still around

2006-11-17T16:57:00.000+09:00

I haven't given up yet, just haven't been functioning smoothly lately.

No One Else...

2006-11-11T11:48:00.000+09:00

And when its twelve O'clock, I climb the stair.

Wall

2006-11-03T21:44:00.000+09:00

Pret a Porte(r)

2006-10-29T23:29:00.000+09:00

Progeny

2006-10-29T23:14:00.001+09:00

A(n un)rrested Development?

2006-10-23T09:54:00.000+09:00

The addiction to sports, therefore, in a peculiar degree marks an arrested development in man's moral nature”
--Thorstein Veblen

While I expect that quote to be unpopular, I must confess to thinking a lot lately about the function of sports in society. I have been contemplating the ways that the rules of sports reflect the values of society, especially in terms of looking at the variations in rules that one sees in similar games across a wide variety of cultures. Surely these differences in rules reflect the conceptions of "fairness" for each particular region and in some ways echo and reinforce the sense of what is just within a particular culture or sub-culture. (Why do Australian "football" players wear no pads and have no off-sides rules? Why do American "football" players play in lines and wear body armor? Think of the ceremony and extreme gravity of Japanese Sumo "judges"

versus the earthy quality of American wrestling (not to even mention TV wrestling.)

I do not know the full context of Veblen's statement above, but I suspect for him it represents some kind of masculine ritual for determining superiority within a physical context. This is the sentiment that resonated with me, and yet to give sports and their fan(atic)s their due, one might also view sports themselves as representing a codification of rules rather than supportive of a nuanced ethical system and thus a stagnation in terms of "moral" (ethical) development.

Theories/Practices of Blogging: Why I Blog

2006-10-20T21:27:00.000+09:00

"Only reason can convince us of those three funda- mental truths without a recog- nition of which there can be no effective liberty: that what we believe is not necessarily true; that what we like is not necessarily good; and that all questions are open." -- Clive Bell

I begin my musing with the question of what makes a web-log different from a standard diary or journal and how the essence of what is produced might differ from such items.

As with journals, there are definitely different types of blogs. While many seem to be daily notations thrown up for the satisfaction of their writers and perhaps a few of their friends, it is interesting to look at some of the more far-reaching creations and think a bit about how the use of the computer interface affects style and especially content.

Certainly hand-written journaling has a long history and there have always been less or more adept, less or more interesting writers, less and more public access to these “writings”. Journals can and have also been more than just written chronicles often including drawings, paintings, and sundry memorabilia (ticket stubs, pressed flowers, locks of hair.)

What makes web-logging different from previous written journals is perhaps the immediate access of these mixed media to a large public and the possibility for that public to interact with the writer/artist. I have noticed also that the majority of blogs that seem to have philosophical and critical content are produced by teachers or academics of one sort or another.

Perhaps this is not so surprising since, schools and universities have been quick to jump on computer bandwagons and tend to stay on top of technical innovations. I think however that there is at least one other additional reason for this coincidence.

In my own personal opinion, the most interesting blogs combine the elements of memoir (being focused thoughtful or emotional considerations of events or people) with the opportunities of modern technology – the possibilities of instantaneous public interaction. They work as a forum that allows for support and intercourse for those working in intellectually or artistically exploratory areas. In this respect, they may well offer an antidote to a problem that I have been observing for some time now – the increasing isolation and splintering off of the individual from the group (and particularly of the creative and intellectual individual). This may seem like a tangent at first but be patient with my argument as it is being built.

As universities and colleges have become more and more democratized, the community of artists and scholars has become more and more dispersed and the belief in the values of their work has been diminished. This occurs from a desire to make the world and our communities a better place. It is a natural progression that as one seeks to improve the education of the masses, that the expectations of what a University or College prep degree will offer will change. When the university was a place for the elite to school the elect, (and produce the well-rounded individual in the form of Castiglione’s Renaissance “man”, the Courtier) then it was possible to have institutions that supported education in the things that made the culture great. These days, as we introduce more and more people who do not have guaranteed or preplanned roles in state and the professions to the ideas of academia, the question for those individuals becomes not what does it mean to be a well-rounded individual, but how is (any of) this going to help me with my future life – how is this going to help me with a job.

Academia, while having done a good job of insisting that education is important and should be available to all, has done a poor job of publicising the importance of the ability to think flexibly, of the value of knowing about history and philosophy and of having an appreciation for the arts (despite the fact that all of these things make for a more versatile person who is a better worker and world citizen.) This means that it has attracted more and more students, become larger and larger and lost one of its very important foci, that of creating communities for scholars and artists that preserve and critique the bases of culture.

Academies have grown and introduced new “more practical” curricula, hiring a diverse variety of lecturers and professors and thus the once small supportive ivory tower communities became diluted with nursing, management, and technical area staff. To differentiate oneself from the droves of other faculty (as the numbers of attendees increased), it became necessary for teachers to become authorities in a particular field and with so many others in the field, it became necessary to specialize in increasingly ridiculous and narrow areas. Teachers went from studying broad fields of understanding to immersing themselves in highly technical and specialized ones. The model of the Renaissance “man” was all but lost to the academy along with the ability to interact with and find others with similar issues and interests.

In short, thinkers find it harder and harder to find each other and find meaningful interaction with others.

The web-log offers the possibility of those intellectually isolated artists and thinkers to explore broader areas and find others who have similar interests or who have interests in taking up the discussion of such interests. This of course goes for other groups who are feeling isolated too. On a broader level, what we see in the weblog is the possibility of a kind of intentional community – solving the problem of Marshall McLuhan’s global village a bit, by offering (two-way) communication that is instantaneous in bridging space and time and gratifying. In short I blog because I have the opportunity to send out ideas and interact with others about them in a wide variety of media and areas. As an intellectual loner I have been given for the first time the opportunity to become a member of a meaningful community.

For other responses to the question of why one blogs please visit:

"What mankind have long possessed they have often examined and compared, and if they persist to value the possession, it is because frequent comparisons have confirmed opinion in its favour. As among the works of nature no man can properly call a river deep or a mountain high, without the knowledge of many mountains and many rivers; so in the productions of genius, nothing can be stiled excellent till it has been compared with other works of the same kind."
--- Samuel Johnson

That's What I Want!

2006-10-19T15:42:00.000+09:00

Humpty Dumpty says he makes words mean what he wants them to mean. Thank you semiotics. Here's to images that mean what we want them to mean! Or perhaps to mean images that we want!

Mean, mean, mien, mean, mean, mean!

What does the facial expression intend to connote in its cruel, average quality?

Wormhole

2006-10-13T11:25:00.000+09:00

"Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next."

Charles Dodgson/Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Precisely!

2006-10-09T20:36:00.000+09:00

Absence

2006-10-08T20:35:00.000+09:00

Sometimes absence makes the heart grow melancholy. I've been away on holiday and enjoying the mysteries of the natural world. Now that I'm back at my flat, the thrill is gone. I have to go back to work, deal with unpleasant people again, withstand those trivializing details, surround myself with the imaginationless and insensate.

Ay, in the very temple of delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous
tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

John Keats

Learning From the Trees

2006-09-22T00:56:00.000+09:00

Do we know how to reach for the things that sustain us and to take the time we need to attain them?

Who Me?

2006-09-17T21:42:00.000+09:00

Tenacity of the vivificated

2006-09-16T12:18:00.000+09:00

As a naturally depressive person, I marvel sometimes at the tenacity of the will to live. It is almost as if the struggle to persist lends a value to existence that is missing when one has the luxury of ennui and superfluous time.

Particle Mass

2006-09-13T12:56:00.000+09:00

On optimistic days I adore the energy of bouncing around through the glory of chaos. I thrill to bumping into unexpected things and collect energy from the frentic enviring world. (Other days, of course, this abrades the soul and jangles cross the nerves, but today the spirit of jazz and 20th century physics infuses harmonic and lively waves.)

Asylum

2006-09-11T20:34:00.000+09:00

What do we look for in safe (h)arbor? Freedom or protection?

Fruits of... ?

2006-09-07T22:34:00.000+09:00

Jeu de Palme

2006-09-06T22:33:00.000+09:00

Palm
Calm
Call
Cell
Well

Jeu
Feu
Fou

palm
pale
pole
role
roll
roil
coil
coal
coat
chat
chap
clap
clay
play

Nexus

2006-09-01T12:15:00.000+09:00

Even though we change, react and grow only incrementally day by day, it is amazing what complexity we can create for ourselves.

Elemental Interaction

2006-08-27T12:17:00.000+09:00

The words "friend" and "acquaintance" are often abused. I have noticed that certain cultures and subcultures have a tendency to call people they have just met and shared fleeting time at a bar with "friends". Other cultures seem reluctant to call even the most intimate relations they have known for years by that same name. I have been fortunate to be able to wander the globe a bit over my life time and it is interesting to wash up against hundreds of strangers on a regular basis, greeting, trading casual remarks, polite comments, overlooking rude mumblings and then sometimes bouncing up against people that one seems to have known for a multitude of millenia. What a sensation of warmth and home, when one begins an exchange that seems to be carried over from many late night philosophy discussions or coffee house political battles! Somehow it is like being one of those floating shells in the ocean that after washing up on the shore nestles for a time on a warm sand beach in some seaweed with other similar treasures.

I have just encountered such a peson, only to learn today that this treasure will be leaving my life again for a job in the big city ...and the tide comes in and we are once again swept back into the amniotic fluid of the sea. Friend or acquaintance? We have known each other 5 scant weeks. The depth of our exchanges belies the time. The words reify and diminish the experience.The sea is swirling with opportunity and life, but made of salt water, the same as tears.

Conundrum

2006-08-25T21:35:00.000+09:00

Bau(m)kunst

2006-08-24T23:35:00.000+09:00

Sensed but unseen

2006-08-22T21:52:00.000+09:00

Fourth Person said on his blog today, "There is always something moving beneath. It can be sensed but not seen." This reminds me of a realization I made because of a very close friend. He enters a house and locks all the doors, closes all the blinds. These are the actions of a person at peace with himself. At peace with himself, but fearful of the world outside. When I enter a house, I rip open the curtains, unlock all the doors and turn on all the lights. These are the actions of a person who knows the world outside can not do more harm than the demons from within.These people know that the only protection is escape away. As harborers of internal monsters, we become ever better at locking the fear down in the dungeons of our beings and pretending that they are docile and tamed. We know they are there, but we lull ourselves into a sense of security as if we have found the much vaunted stillness, but still "There is always something moving beneath. It can be sensed but not seen."

Life-ous-ness and machinery

2006-08-20T00:23:00.000+09:00

Early this morning I could hear the noise of a big ship shrieking and groaning at the dock. It had an almost musical quality, with its mechanical clanks and metallic grinding; quasi organic in sound. There is a rhythm and vivacity to port life. I want to say life-ous-ness. (Funny that there is a word lifelessness but no opposite, except perhaps the word organic - which is precisely what
these technologies are not.) These are sounds that are unsettling, piercing and tortured like small animals squealing and musk oxen bellowing - still their very repetitiosness and inherent declaration of productivity make them somehow reassuring. Funny how we take comfort in the habitual.

2006-08-14T23:24:00.000+09:00

To be alive one should be able to see old things in a new way.

On Photography

2006-08-13T22:24:00.000+09:00

In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photo- graphed it.

Emile Zola

On the Town

2006-08-11T09:12:00.000+09:00

We have American sailors in port right now and I am always so impressed with U.S. Navy uniforms. They are by far my favorite American uniform. The women look so neat and efficient and the guys all Gene Kelly/Frank Sinatra jaunty like they'll burst into tap dancing any moment. Perhaps it fits the enthusaism of youth on shore leave in an exotic place. There is excitement in the air.

Sounds of Water

2006-08-10T17:53:00.000+09:00

What a reassuring sound the drip drop of water, unless is coming down from the ceiling onto your floor boards.
(smile)

Things of comfort

2006-08-08T19:00:00.000+09:00

A breeze on a warm day, the sound of flute music in the distance, a slice of hard German bread with fresh sweet butter

Entropy

2006-08-07T11:14:00.000+09:00

Why is it that when one rewarms something in the microwave, one tends to forget it until it has cooled down to its previous temperature. There seems to be no such thing as a warm cup of coffee in the morning around here. Only tepid. Tepid coffee reheated endlessly. Dante must have missed this punishment in the inner circle, but I feel like Tantalus and Sisyphus combined. Up the stairs, down the stairs, no food or drink ever getting to my stomach or causing satisfaction.

Okay, after thinking about this a bit I realized that I have said and portrayed absolutely nothing new. The image below should present more than sufficient explanation. (grin)

(The painted image above is by Franz von Stuck. For a wonderful gallery of such images please check the website http://franz_von_stuck.tripod.com/ )

State of Mind

2006-08-07T10:44:00.000+09:00

Cacophony - a marvelous word!

Sweat

2006-08-06T13:16:00.000+09:00

When we are sick we sometimes isolate ourselves from the world in a casing of salt water. Perhaps it is a return to the amniotic fluid of our prebirth: Freud's oceanic. Unfortunately it makes me feel seasick. (grin)

Flu

2006-08-05T12:17:00.000+09:00

(Image from http://www.gradualdazzle.com/ Check out her paintings! They are wonderful)
I wonder why illnesses can't be fun. I mean, if you have to be comatose in bed or stuck in the loo for half the day, then why can't there be a relaxing, euphoric feeling associated with it instead of fevers, chills and headaches? I have no problems with symbiotic relationships, but I'm in favor of appeasement, mutual support pacts, tolerance! I'm going back to bed to try to negotiate with my virus - I know I'm not working from a position of strength, but maybe viruses need love and understanding as much as the next being. Maybe not, but for now I hear and obey! Back to bed!

City and Town

2006-08-04T12:54:00.000+09:00

I mentioned before that I am staying in someone else's (very elegant) flat for a few months and with this transformation comes a transition from a rural location to living in the city. I find it fascinating that in places where there are an abundance of people that there is concomitantly such an ability to isolate oneself from others.

I was sitting on the upstairs balcony yesterday and listening as the streams of people conversed while walking by and it struck me that they walk around little knowing or caring who else is out there and might be listening. I've noticed this in busy underground trains or buses in larger metropolitan areas all over. One sits in the car and might as well be in a glass isolation booth no matter how many people are packed in around one. In Paris, London, New York, Rio De Janeiro, Sydney, Montreal (and on and on) people chat with their comrades, but scowl darkly when unaccompanied or look off in an indifferent fashion as if they were the sole occupant of the cabin. In Tokyo it is even more extreme. Even when crammed up against six or seven others, a subway rider seeems encased in his or her own plexiglass world.

Interestingly, it is just the opposite in the rural communities I've inhabited. There it is impossible to get away from one's neighbors, their prying eyes and sharpened ears. Everyone instinctually tunes in to the business of everyone else and even people who believe they have secured the utmost privacy; locked themselves away in the most inner chamber of their domiciles to act their private acts, become the avid topic of local conversations.

I will be giving nothing away to say, I love the isolation of the city. Nowhere else do I feel less alone in my isolation, because there are so many others out there being alone with me.

(I wanted to cite the artist of the book cover above, but have been unable to locate any information. The novel is by Greg Egan, a science fiction writer of dystopic visions).

Heat is not a drag

2006-08-03T13:09:00.000+09:00

"Heat is the enemy of drag."

Boy George

(Perhaps especially if you get arrested by them for Cocaine use?)

Desire

2006-08-02T01:24:00.000+09:00

“Desire links non-being to being.”

Riq Veda

Tangles

2006-08-01T22:31:00.000+09:00

I'm sure I seem like a Kafka obsessed individual to those who read this blog, and it is funny because before undertaking to write it, I had not read him for years and rarely thought about him. Yet now I seem to be living his existence. I say this, because I had one of those days today. You know the kind comprised of solving endless, trivial, boring, intertwined, neurasthenic tangles. The kind of day during which you think these little things should take ten minutes to get ironed out and then one little snag leads to another and yet another and so now I find myself thinking about Kafka working meticulously in his bank and I understand perfectly why he came home late and wrote uncontrollably all night.

But in the long run I remind myself to keep a sense of humor:

Baroque and can't be fixed

2006-07-31T10:58:00.000+09:00

Fourth World

2006-07-30T11:04:00.000+09:00

Perhaps, my post to today should be called Musings ON the moribund.

Franz Kafka wrote of his Father:

"Hence the world was for me divided into three parts: into one in which I, the slave, lived under the laws that had been invented only for me and which I could, I did not know why, never completely comply with; then into a second world, which was infinitely remote from mine, in which you lived, concerned with your government, with the issuing of orders and with annoyance about their not being obeyed; and finally into a third world where everybody else lived happily and free from orders and from having to obey." (Dearest father, 148)

I dreamed of my own Father last night and cried. Like Kafka I had a strained relationship with mine. Like Karl in America, whose Father sent him off across the ocean after he was seduced by a scullery maid, I took off away from mine and never managed to really come back before he died. The third world that Kafka references has never seemed like my own third world. To me that world is one where others willingly obey and I long so to live in a fourth world resembling the third world of Kafka. I do not understand the will to obey and live with orders that seems so prevalent in the rest of the outward world.

Apple

2006-07-29T10:25:00.000+09:00

Knowlege. Sin or progress?

To Dream

2006-07-28T15:45:00.000+09:00

"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." Shirley Jackson

Block

2006-07-27T20:40:00.000+09:00

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Can you tell I'm having a hard time writing right now? No free time. No thinking time. To the left is a picture of Rappacinni's Daughter - from one of my favorite

Hawthorne

stories. She is raised in a garden of poisonous things. It is a haunting and delightful story.

Regarding Sophist bastardry

2006-07-27T19:35:00.001+09:00

Mendacity is a system that we live in. Liquor is one way out and death's the other.

Tennessee Williams

Poisonous Things

2006-07-25T19:40:00.000+09:00

Why are so many poisonous things so beautiful?

Pleasure

2006-07-24T22:39:00.001+09:00

No matter how old I get, I always feel that eventually I will have to decide what I should do with my life. I am envious of those who have a calling, because no matter how hard I try to find my vocation, I am pulled hither and thither by the curse of great potential. This puts to mind a quote by Marcel Proust, who said,"People can have many different kinds of pleasure. The real one is that for which they will forsake the others." Unfortunately, this still does not help me choose between the figurative arts and the literary ones. Those desert island puzzles keep me amused for hours and still I can not choose between my Shakespeare and my Beethoven, between my Arbus and my Mann. Perhaps the beauty of different media is the breadth of expression one can produce in trying to evoke the same emotion or concept.

How different are these media dealing essentially with the same topic and yet each quite poignant in its effect:

O Solitude! If I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings.

John Keats

Which pleasure would I forsake for the other, the painting or the poem? My response can only be that I am unrepentently thankful that I do not have to make such a choice.

Faulkner and Sophist bastardry

2006-07-23T10:18:00.000+09:00

In a blog on Wiiliam Faulkner, teacher John B. poses a fascinating question upon which I love to muse myself. For my own purposes I often reframe ithe query about whether our great writers must be sophist bastards in terms of suffering and misery, but I believe the issue is one and the same. Must one suffer for art and in turn be insufferable (to others and perhaps even to oneself). Along with this is the idea that these artists commit suicide either slowly via alcohol or drugs (Faulkner, Hemingway etc.) or all at once (Woolf, Plath, Kleist, etc.) Certainly it is part of the modernist myth of the "great" writer, painter, composer etc that one must suffer for one's art and that most "great" men (another part of the myth) do so. I have been assured by teachers of literature that it is not necessary to either suffer nor be a bastard, but somehow our culture loves the story of the suffering genius. I leave you, however, with the more optimistic words of Katherine Anne Porter:

“The real sin against life is to abuse and destroy beauty, even one's own -even more, one's own, for that has been put in our care and we are responsible for its well-being.”

Katherine Anne Porter

Achieving one's dreams?

2006-07-22T23:15:00.000+09:00

Henry Spencer, Did you run away with your radiator lady or isn't everything fine after all?

A Book

2006-07-22T09:35:00.000+09:00

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

Franz Kafka

Environment as Determinant of Self

2006-07-21T09:15:00.000+09:00

I'm living in a borrowed flat for a few months and have been
remembering something one of my University Professors said once in an art class about our environment creating us. This new place is like something out of an architectural digest item - clean and elegant and completely alien to my cluttered, dung beetle existence. The lay-out is open with prisitne lines and minimalist decor and has all the zen qualities that I long for in life and have up to this point seemed to elude me. Gregor Samsa in Kafka's marvelous story undergoes a terrible metamorphosis sinking back into an animal existence after a sexual slip that leaves the apple of knowledge rotting and embedded in his carapace. Dare I hope for the opposite kind of metamorphosis as I live in an entirely ordered and graceful environment? Will I even be able to work without the pressure of four walls closing continuously in on me? I fear that it will be too great a change all at once and rather than evolving slowly into a higher winged being, I will explode from the lack of oppressive atmosphere. At least the computer hook-up is in a small basement room where I can hide from my own progress/process or lack thereof.....

(This above is definitely not the environment I want to create me and perhaps an argument to the contrary of my Professor's claim! Interesting to see how some personalities remain unchanged regardless of the essentials!)

Rain after dryness

2006-07-20T21:26:00.000+09:00

It rained today with a barrage of drops on the tin roof overhead. What a reassuring sound! It was a day of accomplishing the detail work and now there is the rain to drum away the doldrums of quotidienne activities. A nice shiraz and a bit of Dickens should round off the day quite nicely. Here is a happy memory of a sunny day that gives me the same feeling of content as today's shower.

Back From Holiday

2006-07-19T20:09:00.001+09:00

What a lovely time I had on holiday. I am so relaxed now. I have no brillliant observations to make, no cynical comments and no deep thoughts. I am floating on the surface like a slime mold that has bubbled up from below the ground. No doubt in a day or two I will be back to my morose old self, but in the mean time I am and I enjoy.

Vacation

2006-07-13T23:11:00.000+09:00

Boring as it may seem. I'm off on vacation and may not get a chance to post over the next few days. So for your viewing entertainment I've enclosed a Lisette Model image to contemplate and enjoy.

Between Pain and Nothing

2006-07-13T13:44:00.000+09:00

William Faulkner famously stated in the Wild Palms, "If I had to choose between pain and nothing, I would always choose pain." Funny, although I consider myself Buddhist, I have to admit that I would also choose pain. Perhaps this means I should reconsider my self-classification. For some reason we consider suffering noble. Goethe said he did not want anything to do with a religion that worships suffering and so he moved on to pantheism. Still, those things we are weaned with are so hard to reconfigure at a later time, and how can one not be awed by the sublime beauty of that tormented face on the crucifix or the visage of Laokoon just before he cries out as he and his sons are carried by the monster off to the sea.

Of Acorns and Mackerels

2006-07-12T13:50:00.000+09:00

Philip Roth recently said on an NPR interview, "Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel." This seems appropriate for writing and I wonder if it also applies for the other arts. In writing I do find that the characters tend to take over the narrative and demand certain actions even if they are contrary to my original intentions. This is not the case for me in painting or other arts. Indeed some pictures change as they are worked upon, but not in the way the events and characters do. I wonder if there are some people who are dominatrices of fiction and who write exactly what they plan - no less, no more and no nonsense. Perhaps I am a wimp to let my characters push me around so, or a masochist because I enjoy them doing so.

This blog is a bit of an acorn for me in its newness and I certainly hope I will end up with something other than a mackerel, maybe a nice piranha or blue ringed octopus.

Link

Sewing and Arbus

2006-07-11T14:38:00.000+09:00

There has been no time for cosmic musings today. I had hoped to issue a thought-provoking comment each day, but today was a get up too late and be in a fog the entire day kind of situation. I did manage to get my treadle sewing machine that I bought on e-bay (yes you can buy cast iron objects on e-bay!!) working today and that was cosmic victory enough for one day.

I've been thinking a lot about Diane Arbus and her wondeful protraits. Such faces one rarely sees. I wonder if it is just the conglomeration of numbers of peole that allows one to see such marvelous faces in the big city or whether the city creates the faces. Do we learn to hide the loneliness and disappointments in towns and rural places or do towns
chisel different types of diappointments onto the faces of their inhabitants?

First Thoughts

2006-07-11T04:48:00.000+09:00

I have been inspired by the blogs of the Fourth Person on this very website ( http://bloggsend.blogspot.com/ ) to try my hand (and more to the point my brain) at blogging. Over the weeks I will post random and not so random thoughts that relate to life and its progression.