'Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.'
Fig. 1. Edgar Degas - Woman by a Fireplace, 1880-90
'There are two kinds of light - the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures.'
James Thurber
Your Ears Will Orgasm #54: Fever Ray - Mix(MixPod Player)
1. If I Had A Heart 2. When I Grow Up 3. Dry And Dusty 4. Seven 5. Triangle Walks 6. Concrete Walls 7. Now's The Only Time I Know 8. Keep The Streets Empty For Me
Fig. 1. Utagawa Kuniyoshi - Fishermen at Teppozu, early 1830s
'It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.'
Charles Baudelaire
Addendum: Anon's poetry corner ...
Ophelie
1
Sur l'onde calme et noire où dorment les étoiles La blanche Ophélia flotte comme un grand lys, Flotte très lentement,c ouchée en ses longs voiles ... - On entend dans les bois des hallalis.
Voici plus de mille ans que la triste Ophélie Passe, fantôme blanc, sur le long fleuve noir. Voici plus de mille ans que sa douce folie Murmure sa romance à la brise du soir.
Le vent baise ses seins et déploie en corolle Ses grands voiles bercés mollement par les eaux; Les saules frissonnants pleurent sur son épaule, Sur son grand front rêveur s'inclinent les roseaux.
Les nénuphars froissés soupirent autour d'elle; Elle éveille parfois, dans un aune qui dort, Quelque nid d'où s'échappe un petit frisson d'aile: - Un chant mystérieux tombe des astres d'or.
2
O pâle Ophélia! belle comme la neige! Oui tu mourus, enfant, par un fleuve emporté! - C'est que les vents tombants des grands monts de Norwège T'avaient parlé tout bas de l'âpre liberté;
C'est qu'un souffle, tordant ta grande chevelure, A ton esprit rêveur portait d'étranges bruits; Que ton coeur écoutait le chant de la Nature Dans les plaintes de l'arbre et les soupirs des nuits;
C'est que la voix des mers folles, immense râle, Brisait ton sein d'enfant, trop humain et trop doux; C'est qu'un matin d'avril, un beau cavalier pâle, Un pauvre fou, s'assit muet à tes genoux! Ciel! Amour! Liberté! Quel rêve, ô pauvre Folle! Tu te fondais à lui comme une neige au feu; Tes grandes visions étranglaient ta parole - Et l'Infini terrible effara ton oeil bleu!
3
- Et le Poéte dit qu'aux rayons des étoiles Tu viens chercher, la nuit, les fleurs que tu cueillis, Et qu'il a vu sur l'eau, couchée en ses longs voiles, La blanche Ophélia flotter, comme un grand lys.
Fig. 1. William Hogarth - The Interior of Bedlam (from A Rake's Progress), 1763
MAD, adj. Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; not conforming to standards of thought, speech and action derived by the conformants from study of themselves; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that themselves are sane. For illustration, this present (and illustrious) lexicographer is no firmer in the faith of his own sanity than is any inmate of any madhouse in the land; yet for aught he knows to the contrary, instead of the lofty occupation that seems to him to be engaging his powers he may really be beating his hands against the window bars of an asylum and declaring himself Noah Webster, to the innocent delight of many thoughtless spectators.
Ambrose Bierce
Your Ears Will Orgasm #51:Peter Maxwell Davies - Eight Songs for a Mad King(MixPod Player)
'I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.'
Fig. 1. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes - Grotesque Dance (from Los Disparates), c. 1820-24
'Look for the ridiculous in everything and you will find it.'
Jules Renard
* 'And I join my slime, my excrement, my ecstasy to the great circuit which flows through the subterranean vaults of the flesh. All this unbidden, unwanted, drunken vomit will flow on endlessly through the minds of those to come in the inexhaustible vessel that contains the history of the race. Side by side with the human race there runs another race of beings, the inhuman ones, the race of artists who, goaded by unknown impulses, take the lifeless mass of humanity and by the fever and ferment with which they imbue it turn this soggy dough into bread and the bread into wine and the wine into song. Out of the dead compost and inert slag they breed a song that contaminates.' Henry Miller (from Tropic of Cancer)
Your Ears Will Orgasm #36:El Camaron De La Isla - Soy Caminante (MixPod Player)
The Sunday Six #10:Roy Lichtenstein - Bull Profile Series, 1973
Fig. 1. Bull I
Fig. 2. Bull II
Fig. 3. Bull III
Fig. 4. Bull IV
Fig. 5. Bull V
Fig. 6. Bull VI
'Happiness is the longing for repetition.'
Milan Kundera
Your Ears Will Orgasm #29:Oh shit, here comes the fucking sun! (MixPod Player)
Ten versions of Here Comes the Sun by: The Beatles, Carl Perkins, Nina Simone, Peter Tosh, Jewel & Rob Thomas, Nick Cave, Richie Havens, Voodoo Glow Skulls, Sarah Bettens, Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel. Take your pick.
Fig. 1. Joan Miró - Le chant du rossignol a minuit et la pluie matinale, 1959
'Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.'
'Speed and conciseness of style please us because they present the mind with a rush of ideas that are simultaneous, or that follow each other so quickly that they seem simultaneous, and set the mind afloat on such an abundance of thoughts or images or spiritual feelings that either it cannot embrace them all, each one fully, or it has no time to be idle and empty of feelings. The power of poetic style, which is largely the same thing as rapidity, is pleasing for these effects alone and consists in nothing else. The excitement of simultaneous ideas may arise either from each isolated word, whether literal or metaphorical, from their arrangement, from the turn of a phrase, or even from the suppression of other words and phrases.'
Giacomo Leopardi (from Zabildone di pensieri)
* '[Above] all stupendous inventions, what eminence of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, no matter how far distant in place and time? Of speaking with those who are India, of speaking with those you are not yet born for a thousand or ten thousand years? And with what facility? All by using the various arrangements of twenty little characters on a page.' Galileo Galilei (from Dialogo dei massimi sistemi)
Addendum:
Fig. 2. The death mask of Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)
'In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.'
Marcel Proust
* 'In reading, friendship is suddenly brought back to its original purity. There is no false amiability with books. If we spend the evening with these friends it is because we genuinely want to.' Marcel Proust
Your Ears Will Orgasm #25: J. S. Bach - Sonata for Violin Solo No.3 in C, BWV 1005, v. Arthur Grumiaux (MixPod Player)
Addendum: I'll Have The Sole, Please ... And Don't Dawdle - I'm About To Die!
'There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness. Had we been placed on earth by a malign creator for the exclusive purpose of suffering, we would have good reason to congratulate ourselves on our enthusiastic response to the task. Reasons to be inconsolable abound: the frailty of our bodies, the fickleness of love, the insincerities of social life, the compromises of friendship, the deadening effects of habit. In the face of such persistent ills, we might naturally expect that no event would be awaited with greater anticipation than the moment of our own extinction.
Anyone looking for a paper to read in Paris in the 1920s might have picked up a title called L'Intransigeant. It had a reputation for investigative news, metropolitan gossip, comprehensive classifieds and incisive editorials. It also had a habit of dreaming up big questions and asking French celebrities to send in their replies. "What do you think would be the ideal education to give your daughter?" was one. "Do you have any recommendations for improving traffic congestion in Paris?" was another. In the summer of 1922, the paper formulated a particularly elaborate question for its contributors.
An American scientist announces that the world will end, or at least that such a huge part of the continent will be destroyed, and in such a sudden way, that death will be the certain fate of hundreds of millions of people. If this prediction were confirmed, what do you think would be its effects on people between the time when they acquired the aforementioned certainty and the moment of cataclysm? Finally, as far as you're concerned, what would you do in this last hour?
The last celebrity to be consulted on his pre-apocalypse plans was a reclusive, mustachioed novelist not known for his interest in golf, tennis or bridge [though he had once tried draughts, and twice aided in the launching of a kite], a man who had spent the last fourteen years lying in a narrow bed under a pile of thinly woven woollen blankets writing an unusually long novel without an adequate bedside lamp. Since the publication of its first volume in 1913, In Search of Lost Time had been hailed as a masterpiece, a French reviewer had compared the author to Shakespeare, an Italian critic had likened him to Stendhal and an Austrian princess had offered her hand in marriage. Though he had never esteemed himself highly ["If only I could value myself more! Alas! It is impossible!"] and had once referred to himself as a flea and to his writing as a piece of indigestible nougat, Marcel Proust had grounds for satisfaction. Even the British ambassador to France, a man of wide acquaintance and cautious judgement, had deemed it appropriate to bestow on him a great, if not directly literary honour, describing him as, "The most remarkable man I have ever met - because he keeps his overcoat on at dinner."
Enthusiastic about contributing to newspapers, and in any case a good sport, Proust sent the following reply to L'Intransigeant and its catastrophic American scientist:
I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies it - our life - hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly.
But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! if only the cataclysm doesn't happen this time, we won't miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X., making a trip to India.
The cataclysm doesn't happen, we don't do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
Feeling suddenly attached to life when we realize the imminence of death suggests that it was perhaps not life itself which we had lost the taste for so long as there was no end in sight, but our quotidian version of it, that our dissatisfactions were more the result of a certain way of living than of anything irrevocably morose about human experience. Having surrendered the customary belief in our own immortality, we would then be reminded of a host of untried possibilities lurking beneath the surface of an apparently undesirable, apparently eternal existence.
However, if due acknowledgement of our mortality encourages us to re-evaluate our priorities, we may well ask what these priorities should be. We might only have been living half a life before we faced up to the implications of death, but what exactly does a whole life consist of? Simple recognition of our inevitable demise does not guarantee that we will latch on to any sensible answers when it comes to filling in what remains of the diary. Panicked by the ticking of the clock, we may even resort to some spectacular follies. The suggestions sent by the Parisian celebrities to L'Intransigeant were contradictory enough: admiration of Alpine scenery, contemplation of the extraterrestrial future, tennis, golf. But were any of these fruitful ways to pass the time before the continent disintegrated?
Proust's own suggestions (Louvre, love, India) were no more helpful. For a start, they were at odds with what one knows of his character. He had never been an avid museum visitor, he hadn't been to the Louvre for over a decade, and preferred to look at reproductions than face the chatter of a museum crowd ["People think the love of literature, painting and music has become extremely widespread, whereas there isn't a single person who knows anything about them".]. Nor was he known for his interest in the Indian subcontinent, which was a trial to reach, requiring a train down to Marseilles, a mailboat to Port Said and ten days on a P&O liner across the Arabian Sea, hardly an ideal itinerary for a man with difficulty stepping out of bed. As for Miss X, to his mother's distress, Marcel had never proved receptive to her charms, nor to those of the Misses A to Z; and it was a long time since he had bothered to ask if there was a younger brother at hand, having concluded that a glass of well-chilled beer offered a more reliable source of pleasure than lovemaking.
But even if he had wanted to act according to his proposals, Proust turned out to have had little chance. Only four months after sending his answer to L'Intransigeant, having predicted that something like this would happen for years, he caught a cold and died. He was fifty-one. He had been invited to a party and, despite the symptoms of a mild flu, he wrapped himself in three coats and two blankets and went out all the same. On his way home, he had to wait in a glacial courtyard for a taxi, and there caught a chill. It developed into a high fever which might have been contained, if Proust hadn't refused to take the advice of doctors summoned to his bedside. Fearing that they would disrupt his work, he turned down their offer of camphorated oil injections, and continued to write, failing to eat or drink anything besides hot milk, coffee and stewed fruit. The cold turned into a bronchitis, which snowballed into a pneumonia. Hopes of recovery were briefly raised when he sit up in bed and requested a grilled sole, but by the time the fish was bought and cooked he was seized by nausea and was unable to touch it. He died a few hours later from a burst abscess in his lung.'
Alain de Botton (from How Proust Can Change Your Life)
Fig. 1. Joseph Kosuth - Titled (Art as Idea as Idea, Nothing), 1967
'Singularities are the true transcendental events. . . . Far from being individual or personal, singularities preside over the genesis of individuals and persons; they are distinguished in a 'potential' which admits neither Self nor I, but which produces them by actualising or realising itself. . . . Only a theory of the singular point is capable of transcending the synthesis of the person and the analysis of the individual as these are (or are made) in consciousness. . . . Only when the world, teeming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and preindividual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental.'
Gilles Deleuze (The Logic of Sense)
Addendum: Coup de Silence (or, The Dictatorship of Dumbness)
John Cage - 4'33", 1952 (BBC Symphony Orchestra - c. Lawrence Foster, 2004)
‘The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these, is composing. I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.’
Fig. 1. Michael Hutak - Dead Aphorism, 1991 - 2006
Fig. 2. Tracey Emin - It’s Not the Way I Want to Die, 2005
Fig. 3. Julius Popp - bit.fall, 2006
Fig. 4. Oliver van den Berg - Cameras, 2007
Fig. 5. Sophie Calle - Breast Cancer, 2008
Fig. 6. Anish Kapoor - Memory, 2008
Fig. 7. Diana Larrea - Electrocosmos 2, 2008
'Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.'
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Addendum: Is this a case of irreverent one-upmanship or simply a humorous homage? Either way, it's amusing, and I thank Elise for having made and posted it (on the quiet).
Fig. 1. Max Ernst - Les Malheurs des Immortels, 1922
'Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos, and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself.'
Georges Bataille (Eroticism: Death and Sensuality)
'Narcissism! There is not narcissism and non-narcissism; there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. What is called non-narcissism is in general but the economy of a much more welcoming, hospitable narcissism, one that is much more open to the experience of the other as other. I believe that without a movement of narcissistic reappropriation, the relation to the other would be absolutely destroyed, it would be destroyed in advance. The relation to the other - even if it remains asymmetrical, open, without possible reappropriation - must trace a movement of reappropriation in the image of oneself for love to be possible, for example. Love is narcissistic. Beyond that, there are little narcissisms, there are big narcissisms, and there is death in the end, which is the limit. Even in the experience - if there is one - of death, narcissism does not absolutely abdicate its power.'
