Feeling (And Seeing) The World As A Limited Whole*

Fig. 1. Desiree Dolron - Xteriors VIII, 2004


'Death changes the facts qualitatively but not quantitatively.'

John Berger

'Feeling the world as a limited whole - it is this that is mystical.' (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

Six More Flaming Rhapsodies In Red, White & Green

Fig. 1. On March 8th 2008, pianist Yosuke Yamashita donned a fireproof suit and played a burning piano on a beach in Ishikawa prefecture. The improvised jazz performance went for about 10 minutes until the flames rendered the piano silent. (With thanks to Pink Tentacle.)

'The key to the mystery of a great artist is that, for reasons unknown, he [sic] will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another ... [leaving] us with the feeling that something is right in the world.'

Leonard Bernstein

Your Ears Will Orgasm #48b: Franz Liszt - Hungarian Rhapsodies 7-12, played by Michele Campanella (MixPod Player)

7. No. 7 in D minor
8. No. 8 in F sharp minor
9. No. 9 in E flat (Pesther Carneval)
10. No. 10 in E (Preludio)
11. No. 11 in A minor
12. No. 12 in C sharp minor

Sometimes, Kisses Are A Better Fate Than Wisdom*

Fig. 1. Marlene Dumas - The Kiss, 2003


'A kiss, when all is said, what is it? / ... 'Tis a secret told to the mouth instead of to the ear.'

Edmond Rostand

* since feeling is first (e.e. cummings)

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Addendum: Larissa (thank you!) writes:

I adore e. e. cummings. Here's another great poem by him:

[somewhere i have never travelled]

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Eldritch Traces, Left By Future Dust In Ancient Dust

Fig. 1. Footprint left during NASA's Apollo 11 mission (July 1969), when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked the lunar surface.


'If we could see ourselves as others see us, we would vanish on the spot.'

Emile M. Cioran

Addendum: Old Friends, New Words

Katie and Edna St. Vincent Millay are back, this time with a poem they refuse to dust off - and with good reason:

I vaguely remember the Apollo 11 mission. I was way too young to understand what was really happening though, so I missed my opportunity to want to be an astronaut.

ESVM wrote a little something about dust:

Autumn Chant

Now the autumn shudders
In the rose's root.
Fat and wide the ladders
Lean among the fruit.

Now the autumn clambers
Up the trellised frame,
And the rose remembers
The dust from which it came.

Brighter than the blossom
On the rose's bough
Sits the wizened, orange,
Bitter berry now;

Beauty never slumbers;
All is in her name;
But the rose remembers
The dust from which it came.

I Have Come To Debase The Coinage!, He Trumpeted*

Fig. 1. Vivek Vilasini - Between One Shore and Several Others (After Richard Hamilton's 'Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?', 1956), 2008

'The truth, whatever it is, be damned. What we need is laughter.'

Paul Karl Feyerabend

* 'I have come to debase the coinage.' (Diogenes)

Everything Can Not Be Seen From One Point Of View

Fig. 1. William Eggleston - Memphis, c. 1969-70


'If subjectivity constitutes "homes" as places of attachment, temporary addresses for people, agency constitutes strategic installments; these are the specific places and spaces that define specific forms of agency and empower specific populations. In this sense, we can inquire into the conditions of possibility of agency, for agency - the ability to make history, as it were - is not intrinsic to either subjects or to selves. Agency is the product of diagrams of mobility which define or map the possibilities of where or how specific vectors of influence can stop and be placed.'

Lawrence Grossberg

Being's Fragility Is Second To That Of "Nothingness"

Fig. 1. Book of the Dead of Amen-em-hat, 320 BC (Ptolemaic Period): Amen-em-het, on the left, greets the deities Horus, Isis, Nepthys and Anubis


'God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through.'

Paul Valéry