Still Water Springs

Kafka

2012-01-10T23:27:00.000Z

Again I’m struck by the notion that mankind is completely insignificant. Reading Kafka’s diaries must have something to do with it. There is something glorious, a feeling of the world’s meticulously epic nature, unembellished, completely lacking in grandeur, when reading Kafka. Kafka always feels to me as one whose writing is to be read as that of a dead writer, but that this sensation was there even when he was still alive, even when he was writing it. In my life, at this moment in time, Kafka is to be read while listening to John Maus, to Ariel Pink, to Popol Vuh. Death, death, death is in them all. These musics, though so much more than just this, nevertheless always point to death. They point to lost times, lost worlds, and the cosmic. Yes, that’s what Kafka reads like to me. He makes man kind so strange, so fairy tale-like, that one feels as though this is a different species being documented here, with defunct behaviours and customs. But no, this is mankind and it is still the same. The attention Kafka gives to customs, to social etiquette and to systems is never incidental. He is fascinated by them – legal documents, enumerated tables, lists, manners, the lot. But he seems to always struggle with these systems. Struggling, it seems, not against them, as it may at first seem. The longer I read Kafka I come to realise that what I’m witnessing is not a man raging against confinement but, rather, truly fascinated and perplexed by this confinement – these endless confinements – and trying to understand them and their workings, not simply free himself from them. One gets the impression that Kafka engages with these systems not as his restrictors but as the very prism through which he may reflect upon his own consciousness at all.

Looking at things in such a way, the insignificance, the insectness of mankind, doesn’t seem to sweep everyone along with it. If anything, the meagreness of the multitudes seems to give the individual even more significance. I don’t know why I’m saying this, it just seems to make sense right now. Perhaps this is because in its complete form the above sentence would read: ‘the meagreness, the insignificance of mankind seems to me to give the individual even more significance, because this individual is me. And it is always “me”’.

The piety of difference

2011-12-08T17:42:00.001Z

The vastness of a memory’s sky, comforting in its infinite distance from the present, bathed in the beige foam that washes all my dreams. And what is it that evades me in each and every one? Myself, myself, I have never found myself. But then, I was never there. That which is dreamt is a slice of 80s Americana, a neon Hollywood Americana, a childhood memory that passes through golden fields of wheat lit by a sepia sun, where the colours of the air are made up of brown, yellow and a sandy blue, just as much as it passes through the rocky, dry baking roads of Israel and the lone flowers blooming in the desert’s oven air. For even my memories of Israel are not real and seem more informed by the image of Israel as sold to me through television and films than by my own experiences. Could life in the north have been like those movies? Eilat must’ve been a very different place to the rest of the country. And is there not a part of me that for this reason feels that I have not had a true experience of Israel? Rather than feel as though I have had a unique experience, growing up in a unique place among the various places of the world (not more special, just different, just as every place has some difference about it, small though it may be), I feel as though lacking before a genuine experience of Israel. Let it be said that difference is not a given. Everywhere is the desire for sameness – a reactive desire, yes, Deleuze and Nietzsche did not overlook this. This desire dictates my memory, the construction of my own narrative. For if, in spite of his brilliance, Deleuze took comfort in the fact that difference is in everything and saw in it a testament of the world’s eternal salvation and source of hope, then he was but a false prophet and a priest. He may not have been any better than the modernists. Deleuze may not have believed in the idea of dialectic resolution, but he did away with it only at the expense of his own integrity: he did not need to believe in a final resolution because he substituted for it the belief that salvation is already here, happening at every moment, in every human being and in every thought. Yet the truth of difference does not preclude the danger that the Same is forever winning, forever has the upper hand, and that we have not yet even begun to see the horrible potential of The Same and the great degradation to which it can lead.

Welcome to the Dollhouse

2011-10-27T22:09:00.001Z

Todd Solondz is one of my new favourite film-makers. This film nails so many things I don’t even know where to begin. Maybe it’s mostly that the experience of school as a place of unthinkable cruelty resonates strongly with me. School can be a place of almost surreal degrees of distress, and the fact that it is such a distant experience makes it easy for to forget. The fact that childhood is normally designated as a formative stage, a phase of non-sense because it is still forming the order, sense, rationality and even civility of adult life, of the supposedly fully formed human being, allows it to be dismissed as unworthy of serious attention. And yet, imagine the horror conjured up when trying to imagine a world where grown ups are as openly cruel to each other as kids are on a regular basis (and of course we are cruel to one another, but in ways so refined that any semblance of dirt and foul play is washed away from them). A world of name calling, of constant picking on and bullying, a place of violence, where it is absolutely normal to break into physical altercations and display your discontents publicly.
But it’s not just this experience the film shows. Throughout the film we are reminded of the penal and corrective nature of our lives, particularly the role that schools play in this. And perhaps ‘corrective’ is the wrong term to use here, for that suggests a reform, whereas in fact these institutions are there not in order to reform a subject gone wrong, but to form the subject in the first place. This system attempts to reign in the chaos and ill discipline of the child, and turn him into a good, model citizen. When Dawn is taken to the principal’s office along with her parents, she is reassured that no-one is there to get at her; this is swiftly followed by a reminder that this is the sort of incident that could go down in her permanent record and affect her chances in college and in other ways for the rest of her life. Her brother, in the meantime, is preoccupied with his adult future as though everything he does in the present holds value only insofar as it affects his future as an adult, that point where he will actually get to live life, as it were, where life will finally carry intrinsic value in relation to its present state, unlike childhood, which is merely formative and not an experience in its own right. How stifling for this poor girl, practically grappling for survival and gasping for air on a daily basis, to have to be confronted with the thought that this struggle must be affecting her future irreversibly and without her knowing how to do anything about it.

“I always felt as though God would come into my life at some point, but he never did”, said Tommy Lee Jones’s character in No Country for Old Men, and this reflects for me the way I have so often lived my life and still do, and the way I perceive so many others to live their life: forever waiting for that point in the future where they will finally be themselves, thinking of what we’ll be when we finally figure ourselves out and can start truly living life.

2011-06-23T09:14:00.001Z

Two very interesting articles on Tarkovsky's Mirror.

On Deleuze and Bergsonian time in Tarkovsky.

And an interesting analysis of Mirror

Of Tarkovsky and the uncanniness of history

2011-06-22T09:01:00.002Z

We are in the midst of a strange time in history. Well, perhaps this isn’t strictly true, at least not in as much as every time in history is a strange time. A sense of history, of history in the making – that is what’s truly strange. What’s changed for, then, what lies behind me write such an entry, is that I am beginning more and more to feel a sense of history in everything I see. A sense of removal from current events and of an outside perspective looking in. Not quite complete, of course. Not enough, that is, that I can see the precise motivations behind every act and tribulation taking place or that I could have the answer to the world’s problems. Even the best history books, no matter with how much hindsight they are written and how well documented their subject matter it, cannot help but try and impose some sort of sensible narrative on past events. Simply put, I get an overwhelming sense of us hurtling blindly through time, tentatively grasping for some sure-footedness and certainty in what the future holds for us and - for those of us fortunate enough to be involved in such matters – trying to steer history and the fate of empires in one direction or another. Maybe it’s reading history books that puts one in this mind-frame of a sense of history. Adam Curtis’s recent 3 part documentary for the BBC is a good example of something that might instil this sense of history, which is also a sense of awe, and of horror. Regardless of how accurate or insightful his presentation actually is, it performs a magical service by injecting a chain of events from the past 60 years with the same distance and sense of history as learning about the Roman Empire or the two World Wars. It takes huge events, events so large that occur on an unfathomable international scale, events so large, complex and all-pervasive we barely even notice them as events, and breaks them down into digestible components, draws lines between them, makes connections and links dots, so that suddenly we believe we can see something that has actually been in the making for at least a few decades. We suddenly believe that we can spot ideological shifts over the past few decades and actually make narrative sense of them. In an uncanny way (uncanny in the Heideggerian sense), it makes me feel as though I’m watching the machinations of human society reduced to a nature documentary about insects, with David Attenborough explaining their behaviour as part of a dance of life that simply must be so, with every insect falling into a predetermined role and having its behaviour dictated from the start. It makes me feel, when I watch mankind, that no-one understands their own debt to history, to the circumstances and context in which they make their decisions, and that it can only ever be so. Things could never have been any other way.
More so, however, what Curtis’s programme does is not merely leave us at a specific point in the past, as though history has stopped there. Slowly, without us realising it, the events which he is trying to analyse gush forth and spill right into the present. Suddenly, we are shaken and jolted out of our everyday existence, only to look around us and understand that we are in the midst of something that’s taking place right now, something that’s been building up throughout time, that has not yet ended, and that will not end for a while. The uncanny invades our everyday existence and our relationship to our own present and future. It is the historian’s role to piece together the past, but it is the philosopher’s role to both take apart and piece together the past, future and present.

Is it the philsopher’s role, though? Perhaps it is the artist’s. Themes in Tarkovsky’s Mirror. Much like my above ruminations on the nature of history and of nostalgia, Tarkovsky here appears to operate in a similar fashion. We have memories of the past interspersed in the present, flashes of images, all silent, flaring up indeterminately and with no real chronological sense. Even in scenes of conversation, the camera never focuses on a particular speaker but drifts slowly through the house, from detail to detail, as though to suggest that the significance of the memory haunts the totality of one’s environemtn, every object in the room rather than being concentrated in one person. No, not the totality, for that word would suggest a closed circle. Rather, every object and every instance has the potential of entering and making up a memory or a narrative, itself an open and inexhaustible field of signification.
The preoccupation with the meaning of the film is a mistake, as Grigory Yavlinsky notes. The film is so deliberately opaque that even if some of the scenes are in fact based on Tarkovsky’s childhood memories, they do not actually refer to or represent these memories as such. If anything, the structure of the film tells us that even those memories upon which the film is supposedly based are not Tarkovsky’s own, in as much as he has no direct access to his memories or to a coherent sense of the narrative of his own life. The film, in that respect, becomes something else the moment it is put on film. It resists meaning and interpretation so strongly that it can’t help but become one’s own film as soon as one watches it. The powerful emotions it might stir in some are new each time, as it can only provoke feelings of awe and wonderment, of mystery, and of the overwhelming realisation that we are lost and insignificant in the endless gush of history, which never stops changing and exerting its force on us, and which has always already moved on to pastures new while we still try to make sense of what’s just happened.

No matter how many different names Tarkovsky toyed with during the making of the film, the fact that he settled on Mirror is telling. The film itself might act as a mirror to whomever watches it, not in the sense that someone might suddenly be confronted with themselves as they are, but in our inability to ever fully grasp ourselves. This is not the only time a mirror has played a part in Tarkovsky’s films. Solaris, too, sees a planet attempting to communicate with a space station’s inhabitants by entering their subconscious and replicating what it finds. More than an attempt at self-healing, it perhaps depicts the manner in which we are confronted with the inevitable return of themes, dreams and memories that play a role for us throughout our lives and which are ultimately unassailable.

2011-06-11T19:26:00.002Z

Watching Janie Geiser’s short films makes me think about nostalgia in a new way. Nostalgia is no longer a case of images, sounds, or any other material, pointing to a memory in a suggestive manner, but a suggestion referencing nothing but itself – pure suggesting. Geiser’s film Lost Motion (to which I haven’t been able to find a link online but which you can buy from the wonderful people in The Other Cinema, San Francisco, on the DVD Anxious Animation) felt more nostalgic to me than almost anything I’ve experienced before; it brought to me the kind of feeling of deaf and dumb opaqueness that makes up my most intense nostalgic experiences. I believe now that what has characterised the way in which I have experienced the recollection of past experiences – what must characterise so many people’s experience – is not a the repeating of certain aesthetic or actual experience that can be repeated, but the way in which the world refuses us in these moments of nostalgic recollection, dumbfounds us, repeatedly strikes us with a sense of awe, bewilderment, of something greater and unfathomable – and, subsequently, a sense of fear… I can remember watching films and, perhaps because I was too young to have a sufficient understanding of this world’s signifiers, my mind would create all sorts of suggestions and inferences from images that otherwise made no sense at all. This might still happen to me when I watch a film without concentrating or if I keep falling asleep. Something fills in the blanks, creates narratives and signification for me. This is precisely the feeling I got from Geiser’s film – an inability to follow any tangible narrative, and my mind, already in a dream-like state thanks to the film’s unique form, entering a state whereby it creates the vaguest and most incomprehensible inferences from the images and sounds that it encounters. Perhaps from this sense of fear comes an introversion, a retreat into oneself, the creation of a bubble where everything makes sense, where one feels warm and protected. Maybe it’s whence that feeling of warmth and innocence so often associated with nostalgia comes? Then perhaps nostalgia can be divided into different – at least two – elements or states: the protective reaction, and the droney, unintelligible sensory experience that leads to it?
In this sense, nostalgia is it not possible that nostalgia is not the re-enactment of an old experience per se, but a re-experiencing of this awe in a way that’s different each time.

Here's another film by Janie Geiser, albeit not as powerful as Lost Motion.

2011-06-09T10:52:00.006Z

Attending the Prelinger Archives screening at the AV festival provided some fascinating insights. The idea, in the film Destination Earth, that quality of life comes from increased production, and that this comes from competition, is echoed in many of the other propaganda films in the archive and can be recognised as one of the foundational tenets of our capitalist age. In the film we are introduced to Mars as an inhabited planet, whose inhabitants are ruled by a hated and self-deluded tyrant named Ogg. Ogg does not believe in competition because, you know, competition breeds free thinking. Instead they work, you know, towards a common goal, thus stifling creativity and a natural urge for discovery. He is also unloved by his people because, as we all know, tyrants don’t come to rule by being admired and desired by people. This goes pretty well with the great democracy/dictatorship dichotomy created and permeated by America and its cultural industries throughout the 20th century, where anyone who isn’t democratic in the capitalist sense (because democracy means freedom, and freedom means infinite choice), is undeniably forcing people into an unnatural and oppressive form of living. Never mind the fact that most despots have been unusually charismatic people who were, for the most part, brought into power with the support of the people. This is not to justify despotism, not at all, nor to say that democracy is bad… but this all depends on what we mean by “democracy”. The point is simply that over the years America has succeeded in appropriating to itself certain terms (such as freedom and choice) and changing their meaning so much they don’t really mean anything anymore, and anything that doesn’t conduct itself, economically and socially, in exactly the same manner (such as socialism), is then seen as standing against all of America’s values, which are America’s and America’s alone.
A similar thing occurs in “King Joe”, where Joe is proclaimed to be the king of all workers simply because he has the power to buy more than any other worker in the world.

Also found this a while ago: Destination Earth used as a video for a Kassem Mosse track. Enjoy.

Welcome back

2011-06-07T11:21:00.004Z

It's been a long, long time since I last gave writing on the blogosphere any importance or high priority in my life. It used to be the case that I easily wrote over 1,000 words each day while at university. Maybe that wasn't always a healthy thing and maybe I don't necessarily want to go back to that frame of mind, but one thing is for certain, and that is that I was always stimulated, so much sharper, with thought and ideas forever at my fingertips, on the tip of my tongue, I could enter a discussion at almost any moment and feel as though I could take on the subject matter in a critical way, play around with it, press it, squeeze it, take it apart and reassemble it. Now that feeling is gone. The ability to write has left me. Even when I try my hardest to set aside time for writing in my schedule, I have at times spent hours before the computer screen with not a single kernel of a thought passing through my mind.

I can't explain quite why or how, but I know that writing is incredibly important to me, not as an artistic tool (although that mustn't be discounted) but as an integral part of my existence as a human being in this world. Or rather, as a means of working through and figuring out the never-ending puzzle that is existence (without wishing to sound too dramatic or self-indulgent). Writing is what allows me to grab an image of thought as it floats in the ether of my consciousness, smack it down on the table and begin to dissect it... No, this is the wrong verb, the wrong way to look at thinking or writing. What writing allows me to do, is to latch on to that flash of thought and let it blindly take me to places I couldn't have possibly predicted at the start of the journey.
Similarly, I can't quite explain why thought has deserted me. I suspect it has a great deal to do with my relationship with time and work. It used to be the case that I didn't have that much to do other than read for write for my degree, which back then I considered to be my 'work'. Yet the nature of this work was so lacking in urgency, that I happily allowed myself to write in an unfocused, undirected manner whenever I wanted. Writing - writing for its own sake, for the sake of thought - was my top priority at all times, and if I was overcome by the urge to write then it would take precedence over any other urge or obligation, usually to the detriment of my course work. I was obsessed with writing; and writing, thus, became a great experiment. Not a means to understanding the world, but a thing in its own write, to be reflected upon by itself, during its own act. Writing about writing, about the meaning of writing, about the effects of writing, and so on...

And so, I feel I need to make some sort of disclaimer. In view of what writing became for me in the past before I lost it, I feel as though starting up this blog again is a way of trying to get back into writing. With blogging there sometimes comes a fear of being perceived as vain. "Why would anyone want to read my stuff? Will I come across as self important?" and so on and so forth. I am a little older now, and I can happily say that I don't worry about these things so much now, at least not half as much as I might have worried about them in the past. I don't feel the need to justify making my writing public, as I feel it to simply justify itself. I am doing this because I feel that this might somehow spur me into thinking and writing regularly once again. I don't know how to go about it exactly, so expect plenty of posts about my inability to start writing, my inability to think, and other such bilge. The results may indeed be vain at times, boring at others, or, if everything goes to plan, downright megalomaniac. And so what? No-one is free of vanity, and vanity isn't enough to rule anyone, or anything, out.

2010-12-24T00:50:00.000Z

David Lynch, amazingly, says that he will never go back to using film. He admits that film looks better than digital but insists that the highest importance should be placed on the capturing of ideas, for which a giving in to rhythm is required. Digital cameras, he says, allow the director to, first of all, shoot with a minimum amount of people and therefore allow connections to manifest themselves that would not do so in a busier environment and, secondly, to shoot long takes without interruption and allowing one to mess things up without worrying, to talk to the actors while filming, and therefore capture any ideas that might come up in the moment.

My love, still, for all things smacking of Blanchot, nearly forces me to agree with him. However, just as profoundly I carry a strong mistrust of all allusions to immediacy, particularly from artists. Yet Lynch can’t be dismissed as a mere artistic romantic just as the lovers of film cannot be branded mere nostalgic purists. Lynch recognises the beauty of film, but he is willing to sacrifice it. Has he lost something, though? Is it just a coincidence that Inland Empire is my least favourite Lynch movie? It does feel to me as though Lynch had lost some focus with that film rather than gained it through the uninterrupted technique of shooting in DV. He is too free. He needs restraint if he is to produce something truly great again.

19.6.10

2010-07-12T22:40:00.001Z

- I had a very interesting walk home last weekend after Road to Rimini; let’s see if I can remember it. I took a pill that didn’t quite get the chance to spend itself in a positive manner, and so, as is often the case in these instances, triggered an unpleasant and somewhat schizophrenic trail of thought in my head, albeit a highly lucid one, which is almost always the case. In fact, I find the lucidity of my thinking when taking pills overwhelming, and perhaps it is this that is partially responsible for what we term a ‘comedown’. Some say, of course, that the drugs are to blame for my experience, but that is a gross over-simplification and misunderstanding of the experience.
It’s very important that we understand, first of all, that it is a mistake to divide this experience into independent factors such as ‘the drug’ and ‘the individual’. What occurs at such an intensification of self-reflective thinking is not made up of separate factors, but is in fact one experience, and whatever factors might be said to be present in the experience operate together and off the back of one another. The pill does not trigger an effect that is in some way contained within the pill and operates on the subject. Rather, the process that can be observed during the experience is one which is always already occuring within the subject as an inextricable part of the very fact of being a subject, or of the process of subject-formation, which is in itself a never ending process, but a continual process of layering, holding together, and breaking up of multitudes. There is always, at the same time as - and as part of – the will to stability, also present an undermining process of disintegration. This process, we understand from Nietzsche, Deleuze, and many other thinkers, must not be seen as a negativity, but as a crucial drive in a healthy psyche. Any identity can only maintain itself as identity, paradoxically, precisely through its capacity for disintegration and reorganisation. Too strong a tipping of the balance in the direction of this drive, however, can be dangerous, and it is perhaps true that only certain souls are fortunate to be strong enough to withstand such trials (although I’m wary of siding with Nietzsche’s opinion that these characters are in some way ‘stronger’ or higher individuals, or rather, some people’s interpretation of Nietzsche to this effect. One must ask ‘stronger for what?’ But we shan’t dwell on this point here). What occurs during the comedown is one experiencing the removal of the defence mechanisms that occult from view the fact of drives balancing off one another, and are exposed to the lie that is our life (this experience is necessary for one to learn the secrets of acting). Walking past a group of lads I heard one of them talking about Jermaine Defoe. Defoe, of course! England had played that evening the opening match of their world cup campaign and got off to a demoralising and disillusioning performance, drawing 1-1 with the U.S. Months and months, nearly two years of the most meticulous preparations, both mental and physical; the expectations of millions and the instilling of self-belief, cultivating an unshakeable faith, a strength, the strength to believe that they are, in fact, world class players capable of the ultimate feat in football – winning the world cup. All of these beliefs explode in one night of doubt. A few minutes where things don’t go their way during the game might trigger a chain reaction of self-doubt: “what if we lose this game? What if we fail to achieve our goals? What if we’re not good enough, not as good as what we’ve led everyone to believe?” And suddenly they find that they can’t answer those questions other than by forcing themselves to believe them, which they no longer can. How will they recover the belief in their stability and unshakeability? How do you do this once you’ve been exposed to the fragility of quotidian efforts for sanity? This is a call of conscience. I believe that most players might experience an instance of anxiety, in a Heideggerian sense, and hear the call of conscience, yet the majority must overcome this precisely by ignoring the call and reassemble their strength again around their identity as per its role within the sport of football. It must be this ability, after all, that makes them champions and others losers. They sacrifice a certain questionning in favour of social achievements, and I don’t intend this as a criticism. There is something awe-inspiringly impressive and strong about this, but it is a strength driven by fear – fear of disintegration – a fear of death. I wish to desire a stronger, truer strength. I wish to know what desiring that strength feels like. I wish to know what that strength is so that I may even begin to desire it. What would this strength be, this strength born from the embracing of death?
I kept walking past towering buildings in the sobering light of dawn that seemed to reflect the gradual awakening of my soul, its attention pointed towards its own frailty. A new Generator Studios building, not even finished yet, the product of Labour investment in this area and of so much waste. What will become of this building now that we have a Conservative government? What will happen to this city? It will be opened up to the folly of its own existence, the façade that Labour had managed to put up here for such a long time, the image of sustainable prosperity.

Nietzsche, "Beyond Good and Evil", 261

2010-04-06T09:45:00.000Z

“Among the things which a noble human being perhaps finds hardest to understand is vanity: he will be tempted to deny its existence where a different type of human being will thing it palpably evident. For him the problem is to imagine creatures who try to awaken a good opinion of themselves which they themselves do not hold – and thus do not ‘deserve’ either – and yet subsequently come to believe this good opinion themselves. This seems to him in part so tasteless and lacking in self-respect and in part so baroquely irrational that he would prefer to consider vanity exceptional and in most cases where it is spoken of he doubts its existence…. The vain man takes pleasure in every good opinion he hears about himself (quite apart from any point of view of utility and likewise regardless of truth or falsehood), just as he suffers from every bad opinion: for he submits to both, he feels subject to them from that oldest instinct of subjection which breaks out in him. – It is ‘the slave# in the vain man’s blood, a remnant of the craftiness of the slave – and how much ‘slave’ still remains I woman, for example! – which seeks to seduce him to good opinions about himself; it is likewise the slave who immediately afterwards falls down before these opinions as if he himself had not called them forth. – And to say it again: vanity is an atavism.”

11.6.08

2010-03-01T01:21:00.000Z

- What? What the fuck is life about?! The kind of thoughts that go through my head, I can’t make any sense of them. I feel stuffed after my dinner, and I feel my bloated belly and think about my dad; I think about his slight stature, his bald scalp and his droopy belly. What kind of physique did he have when he was my age? Am I doing well compared to him? I’d like to be fitter than he is when I’m his age. It’s hard to get fit though; I’m not a naturally athletic guy. Or at least, I didn’t have the right habits instilled in me to be more athletic and have more of a tendency towards it. Because potential, that may be in almost anyone, but potential means nothing without the right habits, and without the desire and dedication to achieve something. But first habits, mostly habits.
I think about my dad, and how he didn’t instil the right habits in me. And why not? Because he didn’t have those habits himself, and it seemed he never learnt their importance, or if he did, then he never managed to instil them in himself. Was it a question of strength? Was my dad just not strong enough to overcome himself? Would I be strong enough to overcome myself? Oh, but that’s surely not all it comes down to. To say that a man is or is not strong enough to overcome himself – is that not to answer the question with its own presuppositions? If we say a man is strong enough to change himself, then we are not talking about true overcoming, but about a gift he’d been endowed with by nature. Overcoming always appeared to me to consist of cultivating strength in oneself. How, then, may we ask whether a man can be strong enough to make himself strong? How are we to even phrase the question? Where are we to find this strength that precedes strength?
Then I think about my future children. Do I have the right habits to instil in them? God, no, I’m a mess. What kind of person thinks they’re ready to have kids? People who don’t feel any trepidation about the possibility of offspring horrify me; to become a parent is to be guilty of the greatest arrogance, and the greatest harm towards one’s children. Our original sin was against our Father, when we ate from the tree of knowledge. But we commit another original sin, an original sin against our children the moment we bring them to life; did not God himself commit the original sin when he planted the tree’s seed in the ground?
To return to your question, no, I do not have what it takes to be a good parent. When will I get there? Have I not been striving for this my whole life? To reach that point where I can finally say – I am fine, I am complete, I don’t need to change anymore. But that point will never come, and I’ve accepted it long ago; so why can’t I just live with it? Why do I keep racking my brains about what it is I’m doing with my life? My life, my life; what does it come down to? Philosophy is great, but sometimes I wonder if my life goes beyond these kinds of meaningless, sporadic thoughts, these little niggling anxieties and uncertainties that go almost unnoticed through my mind in never-ending loops, unable to break out of their own vicious cycles; breakthroughs come when these cycles exhaust and spend themselves. And I wonder if my preoccupation with philosophy doesn’t miss the point sometimes? Is there not something behind philosophical questions which is obscured by those very questions? Does my life not consist in precisely those little anxieties and niggling uncertainties, regrets and accusations, that are so common-place we do not even bother to consign them to our memory? I will sooner remember a trip to the local corner shop than give a second thought to the thought I had about my dad earlier.
If this was a story, a ‘proper’ narrative, would I not be recounting to you my trip to the shop, how I bought a pack of tobacco and the huge Asian man behind the till who looked ready to crush me for interrupting while a game of football was being shown on television? Some people call this kind of story ‘stories about nothing’, and tell us that those stories are about real life, as though the role of literature was to be as true to real life as possible, and as though life could be ascertained or pinned down to one quality or tendency, as though is was the tendency of life? So is life about nothing? It seems to me that this nothing, even in the most banal and repetitive of daily tasks, is a loud, noisy grind, an endless stream of thoughts and struggles, always taking form, shaping up, looking like culminating, but always disappointing, always failing.
So what is potential? Potential is nothing without actualisation. Potential can only be claimed in retrospect, after one has exerted one’s potential.

Being-Towards-Death

2010-02-26T01:43:00.002Z

I see why so many people stick with 9 to 5 jobs – it’s the easiest thing in the world. Running your own life, your own career and trying to direct your own productivity is crippling and takes much trial and error. There are so many possibilities at any given moment that one loses sight of any clear future (and therefore any clear present) and becomes paralysed with the weight of abundant choice. I don’t know what I should be doing, I don’t know where I want to go, and I also don’t know when to just give myself a break, when to say to myself “You’ve worked enough, now rest”, and therefore I just burn myself out.
A person in a 9 to 5 job doesn’t have to worry about the future, about where they wish to steer it – they allow it to come to them. No, not even that. They drag it alongside their present, limply and straight ahead, almost hovering forward through space in undisturbed inertia (Wait, this is pure Heidegger, isn’t it? An authentic Dasein, in that case, would be one that opened its own future possibilities, even without knowing what it is that’s being opened. There is a link here between Heidegger and Deleuze).

They go to their jobs, work their hours, have their breaks, and when the day is done they are left with a few entertainment-designated hours – time in which they are free to forget about work completely. They can actually enjoy their free time, because it is truly freed by dint of the structured sacrifice of the rest of their time to work.

Herzog’s films are full of individuals who live truly solitary lives. Why is it that whenever I think about my life in terms of qualitative worth I think about its benefit to others? Why does something in me instinctively berate some weirdo who’s dedicated his life to living on the edge of the Sahara desert and study an elusive species of lizard for not taking an interest in the world? After all, perhaps in doing so he takes more interest in life. If life isn’t actually about or for anything, then what harm is there in exploring its oddest, most unusual, and even seemingly inconsequential paths? It is the sick, Judaeo-Christian gregarious instinct in me that reacts to this refuser of common sense.

Dylan

2008-11-03T14:04:00.003Z

I'm currently rereading Bob Dylan's autobigraphy and it's inspiring me more than any philosophy book I've read in years. Inspiring me to write, to play music, to get up and leave, and just generally making me restless.
You get this great sense out of reading Dylan’s autobiography that he had an insatiable thirst for learning. In some way, you sense that to him, living life to its fullest potential meant creating as diverse and colourful an identity as one possibly could, by observing, imitating, absorbing everything you encounter that’s of any interest to you, anything you find original and fascinating, and then toying with it, shaping it some more, pounding it like dough, really getting your knuckles stuck in there until you’ve managed to turn it into something, well… Your own. Although precisely what “your own” means, I don’t really know.
But Dylan, clearly driven into momentum by reading On The Road, wanted to go into every big city out there like a vacuum cleaner, sucking up everything in his path, drinking the Mississippi dry. If something was happening out there or if someone had a new trick up their sleeve, he wanted to know about it, wanted to be there when the trick was being invented, if he could, wanted to be present in the moment and then move on as fast as he could, like some hungry monster devouring town after town and needing a metropolis to satiate his hunger now. I can almost see him with fire in his eyes as he grows bloated with life, shoving more into his mouth when it’s already crammed full of building and shacks and people with juice running in purple streams all down his chin and way down his shirt, which is itself already bursting like the Incredible Hulk.

On sexism

2008-10-22T19:57:00.001Z

What sick impulse is it in me that makes these lost causes into lost souls in need of salvation? And salvation – is that really what I want to give them? After all, what would this salvation consist of? Would it mean bringing them back into this world? Back onto the path from which they’ve strayed? No. No, this isn’t it, even if I tell myself that’s what I would like to do. For do I not at the same time contradict myself by wishing to keep them away from the path, away from this world, which I come to see as too callous, cold and cruel for these souls? These souls I exalt as being too good, too pure not to be overwhelmed by this world and the monsters that inhabit it. As though most people were corrupt! Ha! As though it is they that have strayed from the path! As though it is they who are lost! But in my perverse, absurd and infinitely sexist little mind do I not convince myself (How?! How do I convince myself of such absurdities?!!) do I not convince myself that humans are not corrupt, contaminated, but are merely naturally malicious, and that it is the lost souls that are corrupt, those young girls (and it is always young, vulnerable girls) are not whole – they are pure through an inverse corruption, their goodness emanates from a lack: they lack the maliciousness of most people. Their goodness is a form of impurity. Oh, and how by doing so I do them a disservice. How I rob them of any agency, of any face and will of their own. They are there, not to live in this world, but to be sheltered by me in perpetual fear and active blindness.
What scum I am. What a confused, mislead and ridiculous cretin. But don’t worry, I haven’t the power to make things worse. For in the end the joke is always on me. When you try to help these lost souls ward off this cruel world you are being cruel to them tenfold; and besides, the pure, lost, innocent, virginal and angelic lost souls are the ones most liable to hurt you. “For they know not what they do…”.
And you can’t blame them, as you created them that way.

#

2008-10-12T23:08:00.005Z

Lessons learnt this summer:

A) Escape from oneself is the best one can hope for in this world. Philosophy is self-indulgent, all philosophers are self-indulgent, and excessive exposure to philosophy breeds nothing but harmful self-absorption.

B) The only cures for the self-absorption bred by philosophy are as follows: alcohol; drugs - not depressants; incessant immersion in the company of others, to the point where you no longer remember how to be with yourself - you have to reach the point where you feel scared of your own company, and see this as a blessing; dancing; seemingly superficial music; stop reading anything "profound" or "intense". If possible, stop reading altogethe; take up a manual/physical occupation - this helps you to forget yourself and forget thinking altogether.

C) A and B build up your confidence; they allow you to get on with things without having to make recourse to writing. You no longer need to ask yourself why it is that anyone would even bother talking to you.

D) Ultimately, you are something of a social retard, and cannot help but inevitably fall back into the same vicious loops of self-doubt and paranoia which you have only been staving off; meaning, no matter how hard you try to distance yourself, remove yourself from yourself, to have no regard and even forget yourself, you are only putting something off, and you will eventually be sucked back into yourself and your own despair like some shitty black hole. Certain fundamental insecurities, phobias and paranoias are permanent, and you will never, ever, remove them. Do not be fooled by power trips. Do not fool yourself into believing that you can in any way have control over yourself or that you can make your life better at all, as you'll only be disappointed. The harder you fight it, the more painful it'll be when you are crushed, as will inevitably be the case. And yet, not fighting is simply not an option.

Conclusions:

There's still hope. I don't know why, but some masochistic drive in me keeps me believing, struggling, and refusing to give up hope. It's all a lie, of course, and we are doomed to nothing but self-contempt. You can never fully break out of yourself, and that's why we're all doomed to go around in circles till the day we die. I recognise my being fucked up, but am powerless to do anything about it.

Pffft...

2008-06-26T17:19:00.000Z

Is it coming back to what it was before? Another round of the same old shit. Something you begin to notice when you write regularly over a long period of time is how the focus of your writing changes and shifts from certain vectors and carries along new ones, and even returning to old one’s every now and then, trying to find a footing, some stability, a certainty. I felt like I was on to something interesting last year, at least for me, when I began to write about nothing in particular, writing about wasting time, wasting whole days, weeks at a time – wasting my life away in inescapable inertia, trapped inside myself, wanting desperately to change that self, for no particular reason, really; not because I don’t like myself or because my life is particularly horrible, nor because I wasn’t happy with the way things were going… On second thought, it wasn’t that I wasn’t happy, I just wasn’t satisfied. Always restless, but never quite sure why. Looking and groping, slowly, hesitantly, tentatively, reaching out in the dark, and knowing all the while that some veil is right before my eyes, but I didn’t know how to remove it. Or maybe it wasn’t a veil; maybe it was a prism, distorting the view and disorienting me. I had no good reason to be restless. All I knew was that I wanted out, anyway, anyhow, shatter myself and smash my life to pieces, just so I could remove myself from myself, look outside the senseless, confused and paralysed mess that is my consciousness; I’d forgotten how to breathe.
What’s happened since? Too much. So the writing has changed; stopped, really. Too many things, too hectic a year.
That bloody cat is in heat, and she’s driving me insane. All I can think of is squashing her fragile little skull in my hand. Just watching her rub up against me, presenting her behind and hearing her constant pleas for some cock, my skin begins to burn, like a horrible itch I can’t scratch and that’s growing worse by the minute. It’s making me restless and horny, and I resent the cat for it. When it comes to the crucial moment, I have no sympathy for anyone. All my purported understanding and compassion – no, fuck that word. I prefer ‘empathy’, though that’s not quite right either. Anyway, whatever it is, it goes out the window; I forget all my lessons and understanding, and lose my temper. My patience fails me. I forget, I forget. I forget all too often. It’s always a disappointment, a failure on my part. I can’t even have sympathy for a cat in heat; how the fuck am I supposed to have sympathy for a human-being? What, just because I’m human too? That’s not the answer. I feel I have a much better understanding of what it’s like to be a cat than to be human. Cat’s are easier to forgive (not this cat, though. I want to squash her fragile skull in my hand).

How can I go back to writing the same stuff as last year? Has my life really changed that much that I can’t bring myself back to that state of mind? No, not really. This year has, in many ways, been one of change. Lots has happened. I started the year writing more than ever, then making the decision to cut down significantly on writing; a conscious decision. ‘Let yourself breathe. Let your ideas breathe.’ And in many ways I feel like I’m breathing again, like I’ve torn down some walls, smashed some mirrors. Not as suffocated as I felt a few months ago. Things, I feel, are going somewhere. But have I not missed the lesson? Things never really go anywhere. Maybe that’s all I meant. Yes, that’s all I meant. Things are becoming just a little bit easier and a little bit lighter every day. Yet here I am again: I have deadlines. I can see opportunities being lost again just on the horizon. ‘Next year, next year, I’ll change. Next year it’s serious’. And once again I’m not stressed about any of it, except for the odd jolt of panic here and then, but those are more like unpleasant farts or trapped wind than a crisis. And now I feel myself going back to writing about nothing and about wasting my life. And, strangely enough, at the same time I’m regaining my will to write. I feel as though there’s much I have to let out of my system, much that I might not have realised was building up. So I’ll go back to writing about wasting my life – it seems to be the only thing I can do at the moment. I’m looking forward to it.

A life about nothing

2008-06-11T22:24:00.002Z

What? What the fuck is life about?! The kind of thoughts that go through my head, I can’t make any sense of them. I feel stuffed after my dinner, and I feel my bloated belly and think about my dad; I think about his slight stature, his bald scalp and his droopy belly. What kind of physique did he have when he was my age? Am I doing well compared to him? I’d like to be fitter than he is when I’m his age. It’s hard to get fit though; I’m not a naturally athletic guy. Or at least, I didn’t have the right habits instilled in me to be more athletic and have more of a tendency towards it. Because potential, that may be in almost anyone, but potential means nothing without the right habits, and without the desire and dedication to achieve something. But first habits, mostly habits.
I think about my dad, and how he didn’t instil the right habits in me. And why not? Because he didn’t have those habits himself, and it seemed he never learnt their importance, or if he did, then he never managed to instil them in himself. Was it a question of strength? Was my dad just not strong enough to overcome himself? Would I be strong enough to overcome myself? Oh, but that’s surely not all it comes down to. To say that a man is or is not strong enough to overcome himself – is that not to answer the question with its own presuppositions? If we say a man is strong enough to change himself, then we are not talking about true overcoming, but about a gift he’d been endowed with by nature. Overcoming always appeared to me to consist of cultivating strength in oneself. How, then, may we ask whether a man can be strong enough to make himself strong? How are we to even phrase the question? Where are we to find this strength that precedes strength?
Then I think about my future children. Do I have the right habits to instil in them? God, no, I’m a mess. What kind of person thinks they’re ready to have kids? People who don’t feel any trepidation about the possibility of offspring horrify me; to become a parent is to be guilty of the greatest arrogance, and the greatest harm towards one’s children. Our origin sin was against our Father, when we ate from the tree of knowledge. But we commit another original sin, an original sin against our children the moment we bring them to life; did not God himself commit the original sin when he planted the tree’s seed in the ground?
To return to your question, no, I do not have what it takes to be a good parent. When will I get there? Have I not been striving for this my whole life? To reach that point where I can finally say – I am fine, I am complete, I don’t need to change anymore. But that point will never come, and I’ve accepted it long ago; so why can’t I just live with it? Why do I keep racking my brains about what it is I’m doing with my life? My life, my life; what does it come down to? Philosophy is great, but sometimes I wonder if my life goes beyond this kind of meaningless, sporadic thoughts, these little niggling anxieties and uncertainties that go almost unnoticed through my mind in never-ending loops, unable to break out of their own vicious cycles; breakthroughs come when these cycles exhaust and spend themselves. And I wonder if my preoccupation with philosophy doesn’t miss the point sometimes? Is there not something behind philosophical questions which is obscured by those very questions? Does my life not consist in precisely those little anxieties and niggling uncertainties, regrets and accusations, that are so common-place we do not even bother to consign them to our memory? I will sooner remember a trip to the local corner shop than give a second thought to the thought I had about my dad earlier.
If this was a story, a ‘proper’ narrative, would I not be recounting to you my trip to the shop, how I bought a pack of tobacco and the huge Asian man behind the till who looked ready to crush me for interrupting while a game of football was being shown on television? Some people call this kind of story ‘stories about nothing’, and tell us that those stories are about real life, as though the role of literature was to be as true to real life as possible, and as though life could be ascertained or pinned down to one quality or tendency, as though is was the tendency of life? So is life about nothing? It seems to me that this nothing, even in the most banal and repetitive of daily tasks, is a loud, noisy grind, an endless stream of thoughts and struggles, always taking form, shaping up, looking like culminating, but always disappointing, always failing.
So what is potential? Potential is nothing without actualisation. Potential can only be claimed in retrospect, after one has exerted one’s potential.

The badass

2008-05-01T23:44:00.003Z

We walk the streets at a sluggish pace
taking the long way home
A drunken detour at the end of a day’s drinking
and drunken ramblings
It’s still light outside
and the night is only starting for most people
With arms hanging limply around one another
we reassure each-other that we’re ok
when really we only want each-other because we
both know we can’t do any better
and we laugh desperately
drunkenly
ugly
She sees me as a consolation
because I remind her that there are people just
as pathetic as her in this world
She has to be a mess
and so must I
it wouldn’t work any other way because I am the last authentic gutter poet
I AM CHARLES BUKOWSKI
all those other kids are impostors
but I’m real
I live the hard life
and we’ll probably go back to mine
and have another three bottles of red wine
and then we’ll fuck like animals
I’ll comment on her chunky manly thighs
and slap her on the back and call her a whore
and she’ll say something about my big hairy belly
and huge ugly balls
and then when it’s done I’ll turn cold and tell her to go home
(‘cos that’s the kind of guy I am)
and then I’ll sit in my poorly lit room
and write poems about it
referring to her as ‘that dirty whore’
while chain-smoking over my typewriter
and I’ll write these simple beastly poems
that every man can read
because I am everyman
I’m just like you and the next guy along
and I hate people
not because I think I’m better than them
but because I’m an arsehole and I know I am
that’s just the kind of guy I am
I live rough
I look bad
I’m scruffy
I don’t shave for days
even weeks
and I’m always in a mood
I have no time for people
and I scratch my arse when I wake up in the morning and have a beer
BECAUSE I’M THE REAL CHARLES BUKOWSKI
The next day I might go to the racetrack and make some money
and maybe drive my car around some bars for the day
and get into a fight
or a conversation with some whore
except I don’t know where the track is in this city
or if there even is one
and besides I don't even drive
and even if there was one I wouldn’t go
because I get bored at those places
and I wouldn’t know what to do
and don’t like betting on horses anyway
I much prefer card games
I’d probably feel out of place
and wouldn’t make small chat with anyone
because I don’t have anything to do with these people
I’m not a working-man
or an everyman
or any-man
I’m more of a no-man
a simple
boring
no-one
But that doesn’t matter
‘cos I’m still the real thing
and I’m dirty
and I’m mean
got no time for in-between
I’m the real deal
I’ll smash your skull
and then I’ll write about it
BECAUSE I AM THE REAL CHARLES BUKOWSKI

The day I sat down and did something, except that something wasn't a productive something, so it was really nothing, and I wasted my time writing a...

2008-03-06T00:20:00.003Z

"Time is a matter of fact,
and it is gone and it'll never come back,
and mine
is wasted all the time"

-Daniel Johnston

It's not every day one gets to choose how to pass the time, and let us pray it stays that way, for nothing is worse than the guilt incurred upon us by the wasting of valuable, potentially productive time with idleness. God didn't give us hand so we can stick them in our pockets, and he didn't give us pockets without giving us things to fill them with. Fill them with tools if you're a labourer, money if you're a trader, or even stolen goods should you be a thief; whatever you do, don't be idle, and don't put your hands in your pockets!
Alas! I have been cursed with so much spare time! I've have long ago become an idler. It wasn't my fault, but the conditions into which I was brought, you see. Time is to man what food is to a dog: he needs someone to regulate it for him. If a dog is given infinite amounts of food, what's to stop it from stuffing itself to an unhealthy degree? It doesn't know any better. And time, I fear, may be infinite.
I try to fight it, god knows I do. Why do you think I'm writing this pointless... I don't know if I can even call it a story. Shall we say an idle rant? But it doesn't matter how many things you find to fill your time, there'll always be more time. You do your best to keep up with it, you put up a good fight; let no-one call you an idler. But at some point you have to stop (you're only human, for fuck's sake), and while you stop, time just keeps running and slipping through your fingers.
Time is infinite, as I suggested above, but our time most certainly isn't. Maybe that's why we're so concerned with it. I dare say that if I was immortal I'd never get anything done. "What's the rush? I have all the time in the world", I'd say, and mean it. Maybe then I could actually enjoy life?
When did I become like this? All the signs were pointing the other way. I come from a family of doers. Honest, good, hard-working, dumb doers. My grandfather worked in factories for as long as he could remember. He only retired when they finally shut the factory down. For the remaining few years of his life he rotted in idleness, not knowing what to do with himself. He'd sit around all day watching German tv, probaly thinking about working. His wife, on the other hand, never did a thing in her life. For as long as I can recall she watched American soaps, with the occassional interval for sleep, so she could gather more energy to watch some more soaps. I'd almost respect her if she wasn't such a stuck-up princess. She never quite came to terms with marrying a blue collar worker. She would pretend she could speak French and English, throwing random words about, which she'd probably picked up from the soaps. She had a brain like you're still interested in this story.
Time! Won't someone take away my time?! No, don't! What a funny creature we are: we hate having time on our hands and keep looking for ways to avoid it, yet as soon as we get our wish and find a way to kill 8 hours a day we start complaining and asking for more time. We haven't come a long way from being young children, paying no attention toa boring, dispensible toy, but damned if we let anyone else have it!

2008-01-31T22:43:00.000Z

Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!! The Romantics? who prove very clearly that the song is very seldom the work, that is to say, the idea sung and intended by the singer.
For I is smeone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. To me this is obvious: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I listen to it..."

Arthur Rimbaud, Letter to Paul Demeny, 1871

Potential

2007-07-31T22:06:00.001Z

- Larval is right, I am invariably influenced by every text I read. I’m guessing he would also agree that by text I mustn’t necessarily limit myself to written words, but any film, event, piece of music, or even piece of news coverage in how they mould my perception of the world as I grow, how it styles my own personal discourse in an endless process, and – touching on his reference to the idea of eternal return – how the manner of my absorption of each new text must surely be determined by the events and perceptions which preceded it. In other words, any new fact or perception that inscribes itself in me must necessarily enter through the gates of an existing discourse in the subject's mind. Even if one is a blank slate at birth, he is sent on a particular and irreversible direction from the first sensible experience. I remember, for example, how watching films about the Holocaust shaped my perception of myself as a Jew when I was young, in a way that was entirely unintended by the film makers and which went on to affect my reception of any new image or text (more on this in a future post). In other words, we can say that any object has the potential to become many different signs, depending on the subject's already existing mental map. Each individual may react to such texts differently, depending on the utterly unique discourse which they already occupy (I am painfully aware, as I write this, of the crude manner in which I'm expressing myself. I lack the appropriate reading and terminology to convey my thoughts eloquently at this time, so any recommended reading on the topic would be most welcome).

An article in Scientific American from 2004 discussed the effects of different experiences on the the neurological processes which take place while listening to music. It's been a while since I read the article, but I believe experimenters monitored the response of gerbils (could have been some other unpleasant rodent) to certain note sequences, then administering an electric shock to the gerbil each time a note was played so as to completely alter its reaction to the sequence of notes as a whole. This may seem unimportant, but it's just one small example of how perceptions and neurolgical reactions may be dependent on past experiences.

> I finally understand what Nietzsche meant when he said “blessed are the forgetful”. I’ve just scared the shit out of my housemate by trying to philosophise with him. He was telling me about a Kiefer Sutherland film where angels of some sort would transform events in real-time, though the mortals involved would be unaware of the change even happening. A man walking down the street may be transported to India and to him it would be as if he’s been in India forever. Maybe it was that I was off my face, but I was fascinated. –‘What if you’ve just been placed here in the middle of this conversation and you don’t even realise it because your memory now tells you that you’ve been here the whole time?’ I asked J. Ideas came rushing into my head from reading and thinking about Derrida so much lately and gradually I became more animated. The more I talked the more excited I got, the more excited I got the more I talked. Lately I’ve been talking only to people with an interest in philosophy, and I’m finding it difficult to talk about other things. This was it, J. was under attack from a maniacal barrage of words and images of me trembling in a fit of geekiness and he didn’t know how to get out of its way. –‘What do you believe in, J.?’
-‘What do you mean?’ he says nervously, as if unsure whether I’m asking an innocent question or preparing the ground for another attack.
-‘I mean what are your interests? What are your opinions or beliefs on anything? I want to get to know you, J. We’ve lived together ten months and I still don’t know you!’ I hate these kind of questions, but can’t resist discomforting others with them. He looked at me for a moment and then began to snigger nervously. J. is scared. What is he supposed to say? What’s the right answer? What does one do in a situation like this? J. was knee-deep in shit and no-one could help him. It’s up to him now. He stutters a little while trying to say something, before managing to force out –‘Well, I like technology. A lot of people think it’s bad and destructive, but I think they just don’t realise how much it benefits us..... I dunno…’ he sounded unsure. –‘No, no, that’s a good answer!’ I assured him. I contemplate this for a moment and continue: ‘Have you heard of Derrida?’ He hasn’t. So I try to explain some Derrida to him and go into binary oppositions, and how in each particular discourse exist binary oppositions which are constructed through language and in which one end of the spectrum is privileged over the other. ‘These all operate unconsciously,’ I assure him so as to avoid sounding silly, and tell him how one side may invoke notions of authenticity or ‘presence’ to justify itself. I can't help but think that any system, anything 'logical' and rational decision or belief is fundamentally based on incommensurable contradictions which must remain hidden for the sake of sanity and order. This makes me think about Nietzsche when he said that everything we do is the result of a myriad wills vying for dominance. I think about how I would get angry and defensive when I was younger each time someone would point out a mistake or contradiction in something I said, or in some way questioned my conduct. I guess every time I felt angry it was because something in me felt threatened, some notion of wholeness, of a unified narrative, ordered and logical, and after all. I am almost tempted to say that if there’s one thing that’s fundamental about every consciousness it’s that something about it aims solely at the creation and maintenance of such illusions of unity. I used to think that whenever someone pissed me off in such a manner it was because they threatened to undermine something of my fragile identity, but now I’m convinced that what’s really defending itself is a logic which knows that underneath it there is nothing, so that when one threatens to remove something of my identity by pointing it out to me some goddamn self-defence mechanism is triggered to try and ward off the assailing thought, this attack on my personal logic or discourse, because if it doesn’t defend itself then it will be exposed for the collection of contradictory wills that it is, grounded in nothing. We are nothing but endless contradictions trying to disguise themselves as unity, because the one principle or need that appears to govern all human-beings is the need for unity, for order, for logic.
By this point I was already half-mumbling to myself, with Johnny sitting in his chair staring uncomfortably at the floor the whole time, until he took his advantage of a short pause to make his excuses and leave. –‘I’m actually pretty tired now. I think I’ll go to bed,’ he said and just left me there with all these ideas. Maybe that Kiefer Sutherland movie was stupid, and maybe these were stupid ideas, but I finally realised what Nietzsche had meant by “Blessed are the forgetful”. Yes, he may have meant it in the context of amor-fati. But isn't amor-fati a demand to remember and embrace rather than forget? What could he have meant by 'forgetful'? It seems to me that the philosopher must be one who can see something new and interesting in that which is most familiar, even the most seemingly absurd points, who no longer views things in as healthy or unhealthy, good or bad, good art and bad art, and I remembered how Nietzsche had written that one day he wished only to be a ‘yes’ sayer and see that which is essential and valid in everything, not merely as amor-fati, I suspect, but as some sort of creative nihilist who, in spite of his nihilism, has more spirituality than the most religious person because he places creativity above all else and sees everything as creative; this is why even a Kiefer Sutherland film will appeal to me as intriguing. I, too, wish to be a 'yes'-sayer. The next day I remembered how some guy in first year asked wouldn’t it be great if we could forget a song each time we heard it so that each time would be the first and last time I heard it, and how fascinating that idea seemed to me then and now it seemed more fascinating than ever, and that all Nietzsche was doing was warn us against overlooking the obvious. I thought about this and I walked through the quayside on a sunny day when a butterfly white as a flapping summer’s cloud got in my way as if begging to be noticed and saying look at me, I carry within me a trace of true beauty! Are you? I thought to myself. But butterfly, surely any notion of beauty is always socially constructed and if that’s the case then what is this trace you carry? Only the infinite trace of earlier conceptions of beauty with no origin from which these conceptions may have originally been derived, because everything, every single concept and event in time is but an interruption of infinity, a time without beginning, a time of time’s absence – everything starts in a moment of infinity, an instant laden with infinite potential where everything is possible, but that spark of infinite possibility can only manifest itself within a system, within a moment of striation, within some finite order, so that discourse works like some kind of filter or sieve , imposing stability and allowing controlled doses of potential inside so as not to upset the system too much, because a system requires stability, but nevertheless the system only survives because it never remains the same, because it is not allowed to stagnate and turn to stone, because it always allows little pockets of difference to seep through the sieve every now and again, and how these pockets of chaos, while being subdued by stability, nonetheless carry with them a trace of infinity, of infinite potential, and a mark of that moment when it passed through the filter, and how discourse, the resonance of ideas, is always marked with each and every single one of those moments, and each idea is thus infinite but at the same time not entirely original, depending on the existing discourse through which it comes into existence, for nothing ever exists without finitude – without finitude there is only existence, there is, il y a. I thought about how it is that changes come about in the first place. Why is it that certain thoughts are allowed to filter through while others are filtered out? Then I thought back to the idea that each system insists on defending its apparent stability and unity by defending each and every one of its multifarious components in an illusion of cohesion.

-Spurious quotes Deleuze and Guattari:

'We believe that narrative consists not in communicating what one has seen but in transmitting what one has heard, what someone else said to you. Hearsay[....] The 'first' language, or rather the first determination of language, is not the trope or metaphor but indirect discourse[....] Language is not content to go from a first party to a second part, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen.'

Is this not how Heidegger concept of the-they operates? By endless impressions and reflections of impressions? I can sympathise with Plato's notion of the cosmos, and of our world as mere mirage - at best, an approximation.

Spurious goes on to add:

'Not 'I speak', the linguistic cogito then, but 'we speak'. But not that, either, for it is not that a collective subject replaces the individual one. An assemblage is not a 'we', a collection of individuals; when I speak it is to engage the 'one speaks' of language - to engage, speaking in the first person, but also to be engaged, so that it is language that speaks of itself. Of itself: but as that structure that cannot be reduced to the individuals that speak it, which has a consistency, a patterning confirmed and deepened by those movements of feedback between us.'

Spurious is right, it’s something between I and WE which speaks. But is it necessarily language of itself? I’m always fascinated by how new words pop up in idioms, how small groups of friends might create their own terms and words. And mostly, how is it that a new word might come about in the first place? Does it not originate in something outside of language? An affect which precedes it? The last time I visited some family in Argentina I was foiled in my attempts at deriding Argentine television by the absence of an equivalent to the word "cheesy". I could not think of a satisfactory replacement. What did people do before they had this word? Did they still feel something similar without having a word for it? Or, and I find this more convincing, do new affects appear in each new era? in each new Heideggerian 'world'? Affects which are singular and could appear only in this 'world'? Of course new words eventually tend to striate, and create a new, more homogenous signification through a process of approximation. But do these concepts not finally settle and striate precisely because it appears in roughly similar fashion in several individuals at round about the same time? A word could not become a concept if it alluded to an affect experienced by just one single person. "Cheesy" is thus a new concept because the affect has only surfaced recently. It may,however, contain many elements of earlier concepts which have become sublated in a new affect conceptualised as "cheesy".

Larval subjects says:

“Deleuze’s account of static genesis, actualization, or individuation allows us to explain the movement from structure to actuality or the mechanics and type of “causality” required by structural thought. However, as important as the idea of static genesis might be, it is nonetheless ultimately dissatisfying as while it accounts for the genesis of actualities it does not account for the genesis of structures themselves.”

> But of course, I thought to myself, each individual contains within himself his own logic and version of discourse, does he not? Then can we really speak of a social discourse? An episteme? It would be tempting to accept that each individual logic is singular, but I remembered my recent conversations with Ibitsu, as we were obsessed with the problem posed by the impression that people’s ideas are not entirely random, that they all seem coherent and as though they’re all alluding to the same thing. How can that be? And then I realised that each logic, while being entirely subjective, nevertheless gives the impression of being objective and timeless, and that this is a necessary condition of any logos or system. How does it achieve this? Any facet of logos or discourse is always reinforced by searching for signs of itself in other people, it looks for marks and traces of something similar to itself. The same, however, must occur in the person being observed as he observes me in return, looking for signs of sameness and approval, so that in fact what ends up happening is that each individual discourse continually feeds off another in an endless process of exchange and mutual shaping. Is this why people appear to be talking about the same thing – because they’re constantly approximating each-other, never quite reaching unity or perfect commensurability because in each individual there occur constant new thoughts beyond his control, instants of infinity which constantly strives for expression? Is this the only way discourse can be said to exist, only through he countless networks of inter-woven relations, logos within logos, creating ever new and endless logoi and possibilities, never present to itself, forever renewing, regenerating? But a renewal which occurs only as part of an attempt at stability and at legitimizing a logos’s own claim to unity and truth.
And how would these new thoughts make their way through a system that aims at stability? I recalled my conversation with Ibitsu about how a musician or performer may introduce a new element to performance which may appear genuinely new yet is embraced by a majority of people. And now I wonder – is a new idea or gesture embraced because there is already something recognisable in it which has occurred in others, or because there’s something truly new about it? I suspect the answer must lie somewhere between the two possibilities. Nothing can be entirely original if it passes through the filter of discourse and is thus marked by it. In fact, it can only be through discourse, through a system, as system and logos, that anything may be produced out of those moments of infinite potential. For that potential to become actualised and manifested it must give in to order and must give up the infinite amount of possibilities open at the time. Could this be something similar to what Heidegger had meant by Dasein’s already being-guilty in every decision it takes, or Derrida’s idea that each moment of decision is a moment of madness. Because at each moment there’s an infinite amount of possibilities, and ultimately no “objective”, fundamental justification for any decision over another, or for holding any belief over another. Beliefs are generally adopted insofar as they are conducive to the reinforcement of one’s existing discourse or belief system. Yet, once taken, no decision is truly mad, for it is made within a contingent discourse which provides the foundation for all decisions. But foundation is always contingent, we say. Perhaps this explains why some ideas may be born in such a manner that appears to almost escape and defy discourse. I’d like to think that these moments are the moments of writing in the Blanchotian sense, where the world falls away and one is left facing the Other. But then again, most trends are embraced precisely because they’re not so Other at all. Surely a shift in paradigm or episteme is something much more severe, yet at the same time subtle and unfelt?

-In reply to Ibitsu on Reading – can we not say that, while one does not experience reading or the work as an 'I', the 'I' is nevertheless irreversibly transformed by this experience? After all, the experience always occurs as a relation, and event, between the text and the reader. On a neurological level, perhaps the relation is an interaction of sub-conscious traces with the text that’s being encountered. Meaning, what really encounters the text is not strictly a conscious and immediate “I” , but rather the collection of conceptions, presumptions, images, meanings and significations which are already found in me, or in the brain (or wherever they may be inscribed) as a result of a lifetime of previous experiences. I think what I’m trying to say is that the “I” of the everyday (which never remains the same) is in someway founded upon and motivated by an endless array of traces, traces with no beginning and no clear or intelligible locus in the body, which make up the "I". In other words, the “I” is founded on, ultimately, nothing. This is not a radical point, Levinas makes it, and even Heidegger does in a way. Every such experience of an interaction with a text, then, occurs on a largely subconscious level, which in turn shapes the way in which the conscious “I” would interact with any future texts or signifiers. Ibitsu points, quite rightly, to the fact that it is never an “I” which experiences the work, and asks: “Is it subsequently this death we ignore when we speak of neurological and psychological impacts of reading, whereby an ‘I’ endures what l’œvre inscribes upon it? Are we not thereby assimilating the il y a of language into the mediating and dynamic logic of the Hegelian Aufhebung?” Ibitsu would say, as is suggested in the above quote (and I can speak for Ibitsu here because we agree on at least this much), that the notion of the “I” has for a long time been a mirage, a construct of language – a simplification of consiousness. What I fear is that Blanchot’s work may lead to an equally simplified misinterpretation by creating a new concept: the il, or the ‘he’, or ‘it’, or whatever you’d like to call this. Of course, this is a non-concept, and Ibitsu is in no danger of reification, I’m sure. What I am afraid of is that with the notion of the ‘he’, we create too clear-cut a distinction between ‘he’ and ‘I’, which may be misleading as to the intricacies and complexities of consciousness and neurological operations. Why make such a distinction at all? Does such separation not in fact reinforce the very notion of the ‘I’ of which we pertain to be so wary? I believe we must begin to assume, or at least entertain the possibility, that no such distinction exists. From day to day and moment to moment, one does not experience things or relations as either ‘I’ or ‘he’, but as something that constantly hovers between the two, sometimes leaning more towards one end of the spectrum, and sometimes towards the other. The spectrum itself is not determinate either. So that in any experience, even in that of reading, and even in the experience of reading or writing in the Blanchotian sense, one does not make a clear transition from one mode to another. The ‘I’ must always be ‘present’, as it were, in the experience, even if only in a marginalised capacity. Thus, the ‘I’ can never come out unscathed. I would therefore have no qualms about using the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung, so long as we critically revise its significance to us. It must not be seen as part of a dialectical process pertaining to the Absolute, but rather an endless, and in someway senseless, process of infinite subsuming of trace after trace after trace, each trace being subsumed and absorbed in a manner which is dependent, if not entirely dependent, on the traces which precede it. Ibitsu chooses an eloquent quote from Thomas Wall when he says: “…the “he” who is never anyone-never anyone other than I, myself, but without me.” Indeed, even in the experience of the ‘he’, there is a ‘mineness’. And as Ibitsu himself so aptly and concisely puts it: “A collection of inscriptions from that which we have read, a collection which is constantly renewing and becoming, effected in each singular moment detailing our perpetual overturning of myself. An ‘I’ is penetrated by reading not as ‘I’ qua identity, but as the potential to be an ‘I’."

A glimpse of infinity?

2007-07-13T09:24:00.001Z

Jack Kerouac pays the price for a months-long drinking binge in Big Sur:

"All my self saying suddenly blurting babbles so the meaning cant even stay a minute I mean a moment to satisfy my rational endeavours to hold, control, every thought I have is smashed to a million pieces by million pieced mental explosions that I remember I thought were so wonderful when I'd first seen them on Peotl or Mescaline, I'd said then (when still innocently playing with words) 'Ah, the manifestation of multiplicity, you can actually see it, it aint just words' but now its 'Ah keselamaroyot you rot' - Till when dawn finally comes my mind is just a series of explosions that get louder and more 'multiply' broken in pieces some of them big orchestral and then rainbow explosions of sound and sight mixed."

An out of control reply

2007-07-12T11:01:00.000Z

This post was started as a reply to Sinthome, Ibitsu and Laura's comments on my previous post, 'a punishing faith', as well as to ibitsu's latest post and the various paragraphs posted by Sinthome on his blog lately. But the more I wrote the more the ideas evolved, until I could no longer contain them or make any sense of them whatsoever. I therefore apologise in advance for the rickety nature of this post. It is intended as pure, unrestrained speculation, and if anyone is reading this at all I would appreciate any bit of advice or criticism you may have to offer in trying to make sense of these ideas.

First, I’d like to try and explain my understanding of faith in relation to failure in reply to Sinthome and Ibitsu's comments.

They make some interesting points, and I guess I'm just not sure where the "I" stops and the 'it' begins. They very experience of the 'it' in Blanchot (if we can call it an experience), appears to be not so much a complete dissolution of the "I", as some suggest, but more a blurring of the lines. As far as the matter of faith is concerned, it's become harder for me to talk about it lately, as the more I think about it the more confused I become about - as Larval Subjects says in a post - precisely "what is to be explained. I am confused as to what is to be changed. I am confused as to how change takes place. I am confused even as to the questions I am asking. I am confused about my confusion". I'm tempted to say that the idea of faith is inextricable from the notion of failure, and that both are inextricable from the process of writing, whether as "I" or as "it". But this is still too vague. I guess what I'm trying to say is that we can still say that it is "I" to whom faith and failure occur here, at least in the sense that before one's self dissolves as he 'enters' the space of literature there is a kind of promise being made which makes us sit down and write anything at all. Perhaps we can all identify with a kind of tickling sensation or an itch begging to be scratched, which causes us to act at all. I mean, surely the "it", or 'space of literature', is not something which 'occurs' in parallel with the actual act of writing, rather it comes about as a distraction which occurs as we write, when we have lost ourselves in writing, so to speak. It's only through distraction that one truly 'writes', in the Blanchotian sense. As Blanchot says, one hasn't the power to control the hand that writes, but he can use the other hand to stop himself from writing. This suggests to me that the "I" is still present to such moments in some sense, albeit in a detached and powerless capacity, the role of an observer alone. Powerless to summon the "it" yet capable of banishing it. As such, I would say faith is not a matter of choice, but more of a recurring event necessary for the moment of writing. Perhaps writing can be thought of as this continual play of forces between faith and failure. i.e. each time I set down to write something it is because of a rekindling of faith in me, faith in the possibility of being able to say something tangible through writing. This faith is not a willing of any sort, but something which overtakes us and makes us forget about the world, with its notions of practicality and ends. As I see it then, the "I" is sent on this senseless search for the source of a trace, each time thinking he can see a different part of the source, perhaps even catch a glimpse of the source itself, as if there was such a source. Inevitably, however, the writer's faith can never be strong enough to last forever, and it ends up burning itself out in another moment of despair at not having achieved anything at all. Doesn't the same go for us, who believe there's nothing at the end of the tunnel yet keep going nontheless in the belief that something can be said? Writing is thus the eternal return of the rekindling of faith and of failure. We talked about the story of Moses the other day and decided that he was the writer par excellence. Recall that Moses, after having led the Hebrews through the desert for 40 years in search of the promised land with unquestioning devotion, was eventually denied entry to Cna'an as punishment for a momentary lapse in faith. Moses begged God to allow him to enter, even as a bird or any kind of animal, but God refused. For his lack of faith Moses would never come to see the promised land.
Doesn't writing follow the same 'principles'? There's always a promised land that demand pure faith, yet no person can ever live up fully to the demand of writing. As Derrida would say, something is 'produced', something occurs, only insofar as it is attempting to attain an impossible future. This future being also 'barely possible', as it may occur as a singular event, outside all intent and calculation. Failure, however, must consist not only in never being able to achieve an end in writing, but also in not being able to stop myself from trying to reach that end time and time again. Each time it is an exhausting and ‘meaningless’ endeavour, never quite satisfying, yet strangely enticing.

I hope I've somewhat explained what I mean by the relationship between faith and failure, it still feels vague so please let me know if I haven't made sense. I have a nasty habit of saying things without really explaining what I mean by them because they make some sense in my head.

Laura, I think you’re absolutely right in what you say and it fits pretty well with what we’ve been talking about on the blog lately. There is this inevitable frustration involved in never being able to precisely reproduce (if we can even say that) any emotion or idea that seems to occur to us. As to what it is that causes this frustration and where it occurs, well, that’s the million dollar question. The brain? I would never dispute that it must play its part, but any such arguments seem to always lead us to a fatalistic determinism. One of the reasons I love Blanchot, Levinas and Derrida so much is that they’ve problematised the question of free-will beyond recognition, so that it’s no longer a question of determinism or randomness, but something which appears forever suspended between the two, or even beyond them. I can’t go into it in much detail at the moment as it would warrant a full-sized essay, but the moment of decision would always have to be, ‘essentially’, a moment of madness, outside memory and cognition. A time of time’s absence and the dissolution of the “I”, as we keep saying here, yet also beyond determinism, for it lies beyond any notions of originary movers, an original spark or big bang which is needed to set everything in motion. But I’m just making superficial descriptions now.

I’d like to try and touch on something which seems to be bothering Sinthome at the moment, and which has been on both my mind and Ibitsu’s of late. How do social networks come about? How does striation occur, and what is it that striation is attempting to subdue? The following section will deal with something for which I have neither an adequate vocabulary nor a clear idea of what it is I’m trying to express, so please excuse me if this sounds even more vague than usual. This is also highly speculative, far more so than anything we’d ever be allowed in an academic essay, as I haven’t read half as much as I should do before going on to talk about such matters. I’m still nothing more than a novice when it comes to Blanchot, Levinas and Derrida, and virtually a foetus where Deleuze is concerned.

Ibitsu asks – are we always talking about the same thing? Are we bringing back a trace of the space of literature? A trace of the impossible? I’m not sure. I’ve always been tempted to think of differance in terms of a pool of infinite potential, giving birth to finite identities. This pool, however, - and we shouldn’t even call it that – surely cannot be said to be some-thing to which all writing or language refers, for to assume so is to go back to an essentialist notion of Being, a la Heidegger. As both Derrida and Deleuze explain to us, nothing can be said to be genuinely referred to in writing, as that ‘thing’ itself never remains the same, is never present to itself, is never itself. ‘It’, this infinite potential, can only be given expression to by means of finitude. These finite words and concepts, while appearing to point at something stable or present, only do so retrospectively, after the act, deductively. Maybe some deeply ingained human tendency to make sense of things, similar to the tendency to see things in terms of causality, which Nietzsche so aptly critiques in the Genealogy of Morals. But here I seem to be suggesting a fundamental human nature, so I will move away from this point as I don’t wish to be sucked into this argument right now. Perhaps in this sense we can say that every being or identity carries with it a trace of infinity, or is even founded on an infinite nothingness. I believe Levinas says the same thing, and Thomas Wall does a much finer job at explaining this. I wonder, however, whether Derrida and Blanchot don’t make the same mistake as Heidegger by prioritising chaos over stability or striation. As Ibitsu pointed out, the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Sinthome points out that the laws of physics needn’t necessarily constitute an absolute logos, but a plethora of logoi that are always open to change. This reminds me of Hume’s argument that one can never be sure that the sun will rise tomorrow simply because I see it rise every other day. Such laws as deduced from empirical observation are exactly that – deductive. It’s possible, then, that I will wake up tomorrow to find that the familiar logos has changed, or been replaced entirely by a new logos where the planets no longer move in the same manner. Nevertheless, it seems that the stability of any particular logos (be it the laws of physics, human nature, language or whatever) isn’t simply shaken arbitrarily from one moment to the next. Stability appears to prevail for long periods of time, even when it’s not absolute stability and small micro-changes occur within a logos almost unnoticed. I’m also aware that any such assumption of the stability of any logos is purely deductive and that I’m in danger of contradicting myself. But if we do accept that stability is maintained, to a degree, for long periods of time even as it is has the potential to collapse, then perhaps we may suggest that it is not difference or chaos which gives birth to stability, but rather that identity is always born out of friction between the two, as Ibitsu mentioned earlier. To use a Derridian way of talking about this, we may say that there is no absolute chaos or stability, only degrees. So, whereas many of us have become accustomed to taking Nietzsche at his word when he says that all is becoming, we may want to consider a new alternative: everything is not strictly becoming, but an endless struggle between becoming and being. Perhaps any identity is thus the result of a collision between the two, being neither entirely chaotic (i.e. constant becoming) nor absolutely stable (i.e. being), but rather constantly carrying a trace of the two. I’m not sure how to talk about this struggle. Is it a struggle between two forces, two wills? This sounds too crass and even idiotic. But I’m nevertheless convinced that there is something in this idea which warrants further contemplation.

How can we think this in terms of discourse? Sinthome makes reference to the idea of resonance. If I understood Sinthome correctly, we seem to be returning to the idea that one thing is apparently being alluded to by different individuals, something in the air. This is where my thought process becomes really flimsy, so in the next few paragraphs I only wish to throw some ideas into the air without them being taken as statements of any sort.
George Orwell says in 1984 that the best books are the ones that tell us what we already know in a manner we could never express. This sentence has stuck with me ever since, and I suspect it is because it, too, told me something I already thought of in one way or another. This experience is not limited to myself; every single person I’ve spoken to can relate to the frustration of reading one of ‘your own’ ideas in somebody else’s book. What does this tell us? Surely, if everything was governed by pure chaos, then members of the same society would have an infinite amount of different incommensurable ideas that seem to come out of nowhere. Yet what makes a society? I don’t want to answer that here, it’s far too troublesome a word. Suffice to say, for now, that a prerequisite would have to be a certain shared environment or conditions within which all members of society have developed and existed for the majority of their lives. We may think of the Heideggerian idea of ‘world’, which must, to an extent, be shared by various Dasein at once. The problem with Heidegger, as far as I could understand him, is that he conceives of ‘world’ as something under which lies Being. Being always being the same ‘thing’ which gives birth to truth only through the creation of a ‘world’, thereby concealing something of itself at the same time. ‘World’, then, may be seen in this sense as a kind of trace of Being. A similar thing appears to happen in his later conception of the setting-to-work of truth in the work of art, where ‘earth’ gives birth to ‘world’. However, an interesting turn occurs in his conception of the work of art: ‘earth’ is no longer that which gives birth to truth via the medium of ‘world’. Instead, truth is the result of a ceaseless conflict between ‘earth’ and ‘world’. This is how I like to think of the idea of constant conflict between chaos and stability, Being and Becoming, so that nothing is ever either this or that, but only a degree. In that sense everything is indeed always becoming, but only insofar as it is also always stable. Now, let us recall Sinthome’s pointing out that there mustn’t necessarily be one absolute logos, but a multitude of logoi. If that the case, perhaps we can assume that each logoi may spend itself after an unfixed and unpredictable period of time, just like the idea of drops creating waves in a pool. Perhaps we can think of the instant a drop clashes with the pool as an instant of conflict between ‘earth’ and ‘world’, chaos and stability. The resulting ripples would then be a new logoi or ‘truth’ in a Heideggerian sense. Thus, what we’re envisioning here is not an essential notion of Being, but a continual and infinite rekindling of new kinds of being or different logoi. Nevertheless, I find it too simplistic to think about logoi in terms of emergence and dying out. I mean, I don’t believe clear-cut transitions are made from one paradigm or episteme to another. Rather, change must occur continuously on a micro-level. So that ripples and waves in the pool collide and merge with each other infinitely. What is it that allows the introduction of a microchange to an existing discourse in the Foucauldian sense, for example? I like Sinthome’s reference to resonance. Could we now say that, after everything we’ve said above, these ripples or waves, these temporary logoi, affect all members of a particular discourse? Meaning, a human being can only have any ideas insofar as he’s in relation to other human beings. This is not to suggest a kind of Habermasian shared basis, but a shared basis nonetheless. This shared basis would be fragile, with pockets of infinite possibility permeating it throughout. This is not too far from Deleuze, I guess. There appears to be a kind of zeitgeist, then, albeit never a tangible one. Or, more appropriately, a kind of echo of being which seems to resonate. Discourse, as such, can be thought of not as something stable or an asolute shared basis, but a kind of echo which seems to resonate. Would it be too much to assume, then, that as human beings exist and grow-up exposed to the same echo or resonance, they will tend to produce similar thoughts? Surely this isn’t too far fetched, particularly is we no longer tend to think of thought as something summoned by us, but as something which occurs to us.

Now, assuming that language never constitutes a direct representation of reality, we may say that language acts as a kind of echo or resonance. Meaning, communication is only made possible by way of hinting. Even in everyday conversations we don’t talk directly of things, because our own words do not represent anything directly or tangibly. We speak in approximation, which, upon being heard by a fellow interlocutor, appears to resonate with him. There is, therefore, a kind of “hinting” occurring continuously within any discourse or paradigm. So, when a musician comes out and does something which appears completely new, or when a philosopher expresses a new idea, it is embraced precisely because it resonates in some way. I realise that we’re still left with the problem of determinism versus randomness, but I would still like to try and think of this as something beyond randomness and determinism, or at least something which is forever suspended between the two. Not an either/or, but a degree. A constant play of forces between being and becoming. This is the only way in which a discourse may allow the introduction of new aspects – by making sure that they are never entirely foreign, never purely outside.

As a final point, I would like to pose one more question: I tend to agree with Sinthome that there is no absolute logos, only different logoi. But then I find myself asking why it is that logoi must emerge at all, and what it is that governs the emergence of logoi in the first place. Is the emergence of logoi dependent on the existence of a more fundamental law? Similar to the question of dark matter. If dark matter is to an extent that which gives birth to space and matter, what space does dark matter ‘exist’ in? can it occur outside any notions of space or occurrence? It’s tempting to simply say ‘the time of time’s absence’ and leave it at that, but I just can’t stop thinking about it.

Also, as an aside, perhaps we can say that in writing or speech we are never referring to differance as such, but merely to the disguise differance ordains at that particular point in time. This, however, would suggest a Heideggerian essential Being underlying all disguises. but what if this differance, or whatever you'd like to call it, only exists as disguise, never present to itself.

I'm not sure whether at the end of this post I've managed to say anything at all or just make a greater mess of things, so again, any comments would be most welcome. Help. Please.

A punishing faith

2007-07-09T20:00:00.000Z

Larval Subjects wishes to rediscover his conviction that writing ‘makes any damned difference at all’… How pointless to try and find a point to writing. What difference does it make if writing makes a difference or not? Writing is a form of faith, I now realise, and true faith involves great risk. How many times have I stopped myself in the middle of writing, asking myself what I’m doing with my life, wondering how many more years I can waste away before regret catches up with me. For that’s what life seems to consist of – a continual warding off of guilt and regret. Amor fati has served me well so far, though I fear at times that I have not yet had good reason for it. When the time comes, will I stand the test? The prospect of great regret terrifies me. It’s this fear which petrifies me, freezes me in my place and drains me of all my faith. I’ve been weak, I’ve not been stern enough in my faith; I can never give myself over wholeheartedly to anything, that much I realise. Always a “What if? What if?...” I would’ve made a lousy Christian. I’m inspired by the story of Kafka writing The Judgment in eight hours straight, without leaving his desk once. Such faith! An exemplary believer. Whenever I write I find myself asking –‘What if this is wrong? What if it’s shit? It is shit! Where is this going? I’ve been writing for two hours when I could be doing something practical, something important’. This disease of practicality pervades us all from one time to another, usually most of the time. And so I go, time and time again, and time and time again I find myself called back into writing, by god knows what, and I don’t want to know about it. Yet over the years I’ve found that each time I write the experience becomes more intense. I remember Nietzsche talking of those exalted sensations that can last for hours or even days in the noble individual until one has become a mood incarnate. I thought I understood Nietzsche as I read those lines for the first time. What a joke! I’m only now beginning to have an inkling of what he must have meant, though that inkling is enough to show me that I can never understand completely, but always begin to understand anew. If I only understand one thing, then it is this: these sensations cannot be subjected to the will of the world. They have neither goal nor justification. They are not practical. They don’t put food on the table or help old women cross the road. They are good to no-one; in fact, in terms of benefit to mankind and practicality they may even be harmful. Most of all (and here I must contradict everything I’ve said so far), we can’t even say that writing isn’t good for anything, as the Blanchotian writer, by ‘definition’, does not know what lies at the end of writing. As such, he has no knowledge of what isn’t there either, nor can we be certain of its having or not having an end. Recall that in The Gift Of Death Derrida criticises Christians for not being true givers and not having true faith, as they believe in a reward to be reaped after death. True faith, we suspect, is impossible. Yet it is also ‘barely possible’, as Derrida would say, in that it may occur only unexpectedly, unbeknownst even to the believer. Then can we say that true faith would depend on our giving away our own death, making the gift of death, so to speak, and thus giving up the very possibility of an afterlife. But how can the writer give away that which is not even in is power to give? (This is but another interpretation of the term ‘the gift of death’, a term for which Derrida himself offers numerous interpretations, so that we may continue to speculate ceaselessly) The writer alone strives for death. Striving only to achieve glimpses of it when he finds himself removed from the scene of acting.

What happened to Rimbaud? Maybe he gave up, realising early on that he could never bring his writing to an end. Maybe he didn’t have the patience, the patience Blanchot speaks of each time one becomes the il. A patience imbued with impatience, a continual struggle between the two. He gave up. And perhaps he was right to do so? Wise and strong beyond his years. It is we who are weak, we who keep writing and can’t bring ourselves to stop, who can do nothing but say ‘yes’, even when at the end of each experience we vow ‘never again!’.

In the wake of my poor performance on the degree I’ve decided to become more disciplined at any cost. I’ve set up a schedule for each day from which I’m forbidden to veer. 8-9 am – Shower and breakfast. 9-13 – read, etc, etc. But every time I sit down on my trusty rocking chair with the best of intentions I get the urge to write! It’s hard to read anything without getting ideas. This workless demand of writing is ruining everything for me. Writing, if I may be poetic, is like a fart. You can only hold it in for so long before it remains painfully trapped inside, only to come out eventually with considerable discomfort and in unsatisfying intervals, or it forces itself out at an inopportune moment (beautiful, I know). Writing tears up all plans and calculations. As Derrida says, to truly respond to something is to relinquish all calculations. It must be an event occurring beyond all intentions. Writing is always intention plus a little extra, always n+1. That ‘little extra’ lying forever at an infinite distance from me, even as it appears to happen.

Ibitsu told me the other day how in an interview, after being asked how he knows when a song is finished, Maynard from Tool replied that a song is never finished. There comes a point where one simply has to say –‘this is enough’. And here lies our weakness, both Maynard’s and mine, or anyone else’s who ever tried to write or compose; we cannot finish writing, only leave it indefinitely. Like Ibitsu said in his last post, ‘the weakness of suicide belongs to one’s strength to commit it’. Our very setting down to write is each time attempted suicide, and each time a failed attempt. A powerlessness to bring about our own end. Such horror; at least until Blanchot one could take comfort in death as the end of existence. And now? We can’t even die. All that’s left is this never-ending dying, an incessant failure to die – a dying stronger than death.

Writing is and forever will be a matter of faith. To keep writing, to return to writing time and time again, to keep returning to such punishment knowing that it is only ever an interruption, requires the strongest faith. That faith is forever our strength and our weakness. I hear of these people who lock themselves away from the world in a small room for years, perhaps decades, and dedicate their whole time to writing and to reading philosophy. And for what? to get nearer to the space of literature? But don’t they harbour, in the deepest and most secret crevices of their hearts, a desire to bring back something of it with them? To bring back some proof, a piece of evidence to show that magical place really does exist? Yet anything from that place would dissolve in the air of our world, and vice versa, for the world and writing are mutually exclusive. It’s precisely this constant failure to bring back proof of the slain giant, except in the form of traces, which keeps us writing.

A faithfull reply

2007-07-05T22:38:00.000Z

Ibitsu is right to point out that Heidegger’s call of conscience must not be confused with the ethical experience of Levinas or the il in Blanchot. Of course, as Ibitsu himself is aware, our intention with these posts is not to stick blindly to the writings of an individual philosopher, but to be faithful to them in the manner in which Blanchot conceives of fidelity when he writes of Levinas, - namely, that we must reappropriate their ideas in such a way that challenges their accuracy and allows us to develop a new and unique understanding of their ideas. Bearing this in mind, let us think the significance of Heidegger – a significance which he may not even have intended – further. As Ibitsu points out, in the Blanchotian experience of death, ‘the world is now and henceforth severed’. Why should this not be the case with Heidegger as well? After all, is this not precisely what ‘occurs’ during the mood of Anxiety, which is itself a prerequisite for the call of conscience to be heard? In this experience Dasein may be said to be horrified by death, i.e. by the lack of concrete foundation underlying one’s existence, and by the realisation that Dasein has thus far existed as the they-self. For Heidegger, it is this stripping away of the world as constituted by the they which allows Dasein to become acquainted with his ‘authentic Self’. But now let us re-elucidate this notion, in faithfulness to Heidegger, by using some of Blanchot’s ideas. If we accept that the “I” can really exist as meaningful only within a world, then we may say that this dissolution of the world is in fact an instant of the Self’s dissolution as well. But when Ibitsu says that at this instant ‘the world is now and henceforth severed’ we must ask ourselves: ‘”Now”? “Henceforth”? what do these words mean? By using the word “now” are we suggesting an intelligible beginning? And “henceforth”, what does that mean? Until when? the end of time, perhaps?’ For we mustn’t forget that this experience is, for Blanchot, one without beginning and without end. Ibitsu reminds: ‘one must heed the warning of the verb occur, for its temporal constitution leads us astray’. This being the case, and considering that the “I” does not even experience this instant of a time of time’s absence, we may conclude, as Thomas Wall himself states several times, that this experience cannot be registered in memory in the same way with which we usually record events and images. This would mean that one cannot escape the they-self, as the dissolution of the world and the “I” cannot themselves be remembered by the “I” which is itself constituted by the world. Once the experience is ‘over’, the “I” has missed any lesson that such an experience may have taught him, for in reality there was no tutor, no lesson to be taught, and most importantly, no pupil. In that case, we may assume that this experience cannot pertain to an overcoming of the they-self, but merely a temporary dissolution; an interruption, as Blanchot would have it, an experience of failure and eternally recurring failure at that. A failure to liquefy the they-self once and for all. These events of authenticity (as I would like to term them), are only authentic insofar as they consist of, and insist on, a kind of meaninglessness – it insists on our failing the world. And why is it that, as Ibitsu rightly states, ‘the meaning occurs in that there is no meaning’? Perhaps we can even say that these events are the only one’s with ‘meaning’ at all? For every other meaning in the world is forever dependent on something else for its meaning, everything holds meaning only insofar as it serves an end of some sort – which is to say, nothing holds any meaning at all. Rather, meaning is always deferred, much like in Blanchot’s understanding of language as relational. As such, we may say that this experience, this event, is the only ‘thing’ that holds any meaning at all, for it has no end, and so has only itself as any source of meaning; itself, which is to say – nothing at all…
Nothing, for there is no memory of this event, no “I” to experience it, just interruption, suspension. As the il takes over, the they-self may itself be said to be suspended; suspended, not merely as frozen and paralysed, but as the dissolution of the they-self (if we may return to thinking of Heidegger). The dissolution which not simply unearths a deeper more authentic Self, but the very vacuity of one’s existence. When the they-self is pulled apart, all that’s left is the bottomless chasm, a space empty of all matter, in which one can neither fall nor rise, but merely remain infinitely suspended.

Ibitsu also reference Thomas Wall (“this crepuscular event is the writer’s most quotidian milieu”) before going on to reference Bukowski as one who has no desire for the pain of writing. Writing fails Bukowski, for it is an experience of horror, yet one which nevertheless leaves the writer seeking it time and time again through methods and different concoctions for the inducement of creativity. Bukowski wrote in a poem:

‘And I walked into a dark hall
where the landlady stood
execrating the final,
sending me to hell,
waving her fat, sweaty arms
and screaming
screaming for rent
because the world had failed us
both’

One may ask, though, what right has Bukowski to accuse the world of failing him? What business does he have looking for writing in the world? Has he forgotton that in order for one to become a writer he must first fail the world? The writer is a traitor par excellence.

Interruption number #?!^*£

2007-07-03T23:03:00.000Z

We’ve decided to take things a bit more seriously here at Still Water Springs, which means that from now on we’ll be posting full-sized essays on various topics, always with a philosophical eye. We decided that it would be more efficient to have some focus, particularly now as our degree is over and we have no-one telling us what to do again; a naked feeling. What does this mean for the scattered, sporadic posts which seem to appear every once in a while? It appears to us that ever since we first set-up the blog we’ve been engaged in a search for the blog’s meaning. And perhaps along the way we forgot that that very ‘meaning’ of the blog is in this continual opening of new possibilities of meaning. Instants of deterritorialization alongside constant striation. For this reason we cannot simply close off openings in the blog through predetermined and dogmatic goals. At first I thought of starting a new open-ended category under the title musings, but decided that even this would threaten to be too constrictive. After typing the previous post I decided to assign it to several categories to which I felt it belonged, but as I began to do so realised that the list could go on endlessly. I was not merely talking about authenticity, Heidegger, Derrida or deconstruction. Blanchot, Deleuze, Kant, Foucault, and a multitude of other names and ideas could have fitted the post just as well, even if they were not mentioned directly. Thought cannot be restricted to a particular topic, and that is precisely what these bastard and orphan posts are – instants of thought. In these posts we make no commitment to scholarly rigour or accuracy. Instead, they are to be seen as an opportunity to through any ideas into the air as they’re evolving. As such these posts may appear at times incoherent, even nonsensical, but we feel that we must allow ourselves to entertain any thought to the best of our abilities. And who knows, we may even come to see an identifiable thread going between all the thoughts, building-up to something, trying to express something, perhaps even giving birth to a large essay – but forever searching, never culminating.

The Other This

2007-07-03T20:22:00.000Z

During a long and intense conversation with Ibitsu the other day we found ourselves pondering yet again Heidegger’s notion of authenticity as laid-out in Being and Time. Most details of that conversation have now been forgotten, but I’ll take the liberty of continuing that line of thought independently. ‘Was Derrida right to criticise the notion of authenticity in Heidegger as metaphysical and as holding out for some ineffable essence?’ we asked ourselves. Are we to understand that the concept of ‘authenticity’ as conceived of in Being and Time is suggestive of an irreversible enlightenment? Nowhere in the ocean of passages laid out systematically across the book does it say that the instant of the call of conscience cannot be repeated. Indeed, the call may be made several times before it is actually heeded for the first time, with Dasein fleeing the call of conscience and remaining within the milieu of the they-self.
For now, however, let us leave the question of whether the ‘heeding’ of the call can only occur as a one off, as it requires a much more detailed argument. We will come back to this later. Let us consider the fact that in order for Dasein to exist intelligibly it requires a degree of inauthenticity. Dasein exists within what Heidegger calls ‘world’, i.e. a pre-conscious and even pre-conceptual network of meanings and significations. As Being-in-the-world Dasein finds all he comes into contact with as ready-to-hand, viz. as already occupying an understood place, role and function within Dasein’s world in such a manner that we must think of it not as an ‘understanding’, but a pre-understanding of sorts, an intuition. Not the intuition of a thing-such-as-it-is, but rather a kind of intuition which intuits itself, as Thomas Wall says. As in Kant’s intuition of space and time. As such, this ‘intuition’ of ‘world’ may not point at anything ‘objective’ (we really shouldn’t use such words anymore), yet it is like a necessary piece of programming without which Dasein would be entirely paralysed. It is the concreteness of this intuition, amongst other things, which is brought to the fore of attention as precarious and fragile in the experience of the mood of anxiety. The experience, then, much as in Levinas ethical experience, is a paralysing one. Being-in-the-world is a lie of sorts, a kind of illusion, though not in the negative sense, for it is a lie which obscures no deeper truth, nothing which can ever be uncovered. In fact, only from this lie can any ‘truth’ arise at all. For ‘truth’ in the Heideggerian sense can only exist as correlative with the totality of meanings and signification embedded and interlinked within a ‘world. If we thus accept the lie as necessary, we come to understand that absolute authenticity is not possible, as this would mean the very undoing of Dasein. This is implied in Heidegger’s magnum opus based on everything we’ve mentioned so far.

Let us try to think of authenticity in terms of deconstruction. What if authenticity can be thought of as the experience of singularity, as this paralysing experience we’ve been discussing so far? We may yet find that we would be right to understand authenticity and the call of conscience as unrepeatable, but only insofar as we make of ‘call of conscience’ a synonym of deconstruction, and think of authenticity as an event of singularity. Can the call of conscience be that event of deconstruction which occurs ‘within me’ time and time again? As Thomas Wall reminds us: the call of conscience is not mine to make, as my ‘self’ was not mine to forget in the first place. To take it a step further: just as it isn’t in my power to make the call or to forget (for it is always ‘it’ who always calls and forgets in the Blanchotian sense), it isn’t even in my power to heed the call. The consequences of heeding the call will be felt entirely by me as an “I”, but the heeding itself will never be registered or undertaken by me. It must be an event which paralyses and dissolves the “I”. The instant of heeding – or event of authenticity as I would like to think of it – are each time singular and unpredictable, and it is only thus that they are paradoxically prone to ‘recurring’. The next instant of ‘authenticity’ infinitely singular, infinitely different from the last, and infinitely different from ‘it-self’. Yet it will also be infinitely of the same ‘genus’ of singularity as any other such event (can we entertain this thought for kicks?). The next instant will be entirely singular and new because each time it recalls us to the guilt of a forgetting that was not ‘done’ by the same “I”. I am not the same “I” that I was before that last event of authenticity precisely because that which ‘precedes’ the “I” is and is forgotten by the “I” – namely, the Other in Levinas – is itself never the same, never itself, but always becoming. We could even say that the forgetting is the forgetting of the very moment of forgetting and of the forgetter, by the forgetter itself. Always Other because it manages to remain other, different, nothing but difference, in the Deleuzeian sense. To conclude, the event of authenticity, this ‘call of conscience’, is never the same, not only because ‘he’ who forgets is never the same, but because that which is forgotten is never the same either. It is the split atom, that which continually disguises itself and shape-shifts at the same time as it is revealed. Therefore it cannot be traced. It merely leaves a trace, this trace being but the trace of a trace of a trace of a trace…

Exhaustion

2007-06-15T10:36:00.000Z

I have worked so hard lately, all I want to do now is actively distance myself from anything that might even remind me of the idea of work. I sat in my room, then, with nothing to do. What to do, what to do? Do not! Don't do! Do nothing. So I began to read a novel that's been lying half-read on my nightstand for months. But I could not be absorbed by the reading, the way reading demands one to give up himself and denounce mastery, to be soaked into it like wine into the carpet, like vapour trickling upwards into the ceiling, stealthily, unawares. Instead the book merely succeeded in awakening in me a passion for reading; I became excited about the idea of reading, and as soon as this happened I could no longer read. I got the urge to go through my pile of unread books and decide which ones I would read this summer. I put a bookmark in each, and so felt as if something had been done, a decision had been taken. As I climbed off the chair I'd just used to reach my books, I noticed it was next to the bed, where I always placed it whenever I studied these past few months. Should I sit in the chair and read the novel? I wondered. But the very idea of sitting in the chair reminded me of working, so I sat on the bed instead, and for all the discomfort this brought could not bring myself to sit in the chair. I need a break from that chair and the chair needs a break from me. It was then that I began to write these lines, which I am still writing now. How long has it been since I'd experienced the joy of writing? I've written a lot lately, enough to fill a small book. Yet even though I've been writing good stuff, interesting stuff, it hasn't been a complete pleasure; it was calculated writing, writing with a purpose. How long had it been since I'd written anything spontanaeously? joyously? when was the last time I was surprised by writing? I realise now why I've been so lax in the past with self-discipline; I was afraid. Afraid that I'd be closing off the possibility of ideas visiting me. Ideas will come even in strictness, but they will struggle and wear out along the way. One can't force thought; he may try, but in doing so will only push it further away. This is not the place to remain concentrated, to stop yourself from being distracted - this is the place of constant distraction, constant yet inconsistent. If you find the impetus of writing waning, allow it to wane, fiddle with something else, though never too far away from your pen and never too seriously. Soon enough the urge to write will return, as soon as you are absorbed by the other activity. Why? Because writing only occurs as a distraction, a distraction from a distraction ad infinitum.

Authenticity - reply to previous post

2007-06-07T20:21:00.000Z

That's interesting, I've been thinking a lot about authenticity again lately. I understand the problems philosophers like Blanchot, Levinas and Derrida have with this notion, and I agree with them to an extent. After all, we can't assume that there's some unified 'self' to Dasein, hidden under the veil of the they-self, and which offers Dasein the possibility of being present to itself. I remember that for the Heidegger essay I tried to write against the elitism that can be interpreted from this notion of authenticity after a few people on the course started saying that some people are just 'inauthentic' (in the Heideggerian sense that they're not in control of their own thoughts and decisions). How can we fight such a claim? It seems to me that the very nature of inauthenticity requires that one not be aware of his own inauthenticity. I mean, how can I ever know whether I'm inauthentic or not? No one ever thinks they're inauthentic, because to recognise oneself as inauthentic is the very moment of "breaking free" from inauthenticity and into authenticity. Yet, at the same time, it appears that in order for one to be authentic, he must be aware of his own inauthenticity. The moment he's no longer aware of a trace of inauthenticity still present in him, he can no longer know whether he's authentic or not. Therefore it seems that we have a Derridean aporia here: one must be inauthentic in order to be authentic! Authenticity is impossible without the coexistence - in the same Dasein - of inauthenticity. Perhaps we can say that inauthenticity is the impossible limit of authenticity? There can be no clear cut distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity. So perhaps there's still room for thinking about authenticity? Maybe we shouldn't discard it so disdainfully. I still do think Heidegger was on to something there, and though he may have taken it in the wrong direction it's up to us to reappropriate it. Let's give authenticity some more thought.

Purposeless

2007-04-18T15:59:00.000Z

Lately I’ve been facing the question of the nature of our blog. ‘It’s pretentious’, a kind friend said. ‘It’s narcissistic’, suggested another. Why do we keep up this blog? Is it to prove ourselves to the world or to each other?
Perhaps we need humbling. Self-deprecation is not genuine humbling, because it suggests disappointment in oneself, which is only possible so long as one has special expectations of oneself. To be truly humble is not to see the fact of one’s ordinariness as negative, but to embrace it and even love it. Indeed, amor fati applies even here.
And yet, I have been in a rotten mood for the past few weeks which I can’t seem to escape. My only moments of happiness (yes, I use a word that strong) come during these moments of stirring and unsettled excitement when something in me pushes me to write. This has been true writing – when I completely forget any notion of a potential reader while writing. For the idea of being read by anyone has been my problem, particularly when attempting fiction, as I’m constantly worried about what image of myself I might be projecting onto the world; this is corrupt and dishonest writing. Are we guilty of this to an extent on the blog? But we have kept our anonymity. Nevertheless, the question of the very purpose of the blog has been kept open throughout our time on the blog. Is this a problem? Are we to decide upon or even discover some sort of essence to our activity? And here we are again, tempted to measure and justify, falling back into the trap of putting a price on our writing, viewing it in terms of value judgments. This is our biggest flaw. This is our biggest flaw! What do we want, then? We’re inspired by Blanchot’s communism. We wish to write and act for a community, and for that community to do the same for us. We want our thoughts to be read by others, not so that we may be admired and applauded, but as part of an endless free exchange of thought and ideas; because we desire to be read by others just as much as we would like to read their thoughts. We desire merely to have a perpetual opening of possibilities, a never-ending stretching of our horizons, and an incessant blurring of the lines of friendship. To be not in competition (this primitive survival instinct surely must be overcome, that is to say, subdued to a certain degree of restraint or even mastery), but to help each other realise our fullest potential and extract as much joy in wonder out of this life, whatever this may mean (I realise these last few points raise a host of ethical questions, which I will not deal with here). This, to us, can include the exchange of music, literature, abstract thought and whatever else we feel like. Our community can be open to anyone.
This is an impossible future, a messianistic belief, in Derridean terms. It will forever remain in the realm of the ‘to come’, never realised, yet perhaps ‘barely possible’. This ethic of a pure exchange of knowledge or ideas is what friendship or a Blanchotian community must surely be based on. What we desire is the impossibility of pure trust and sharing – pure co-operation. And so, to answer the aforementioned question: is our indecisiveness regarding the nature of our activity a problem? No. For our activity is grounded in having no grounding, its essence is the activity itself which may never come to an end. And yet, along the way to an impossible future may lie some truly w

Untitleable

2007-04-03T15:03:00.000Z

Here I am again, at writing’s departure point, writing’s beginning, and yet I see again that it has already begun, begun before its beginning, before its time, “A beginning anterior to all beginnings”. It has begun because it never begins, nor does it ever end – it always is. Always, because it is eternity, and eternity because it is only ever eternal repetition, always repetition. To return, time and time again, to that same point from which I never depart in the first place. Time and time again, yet it is beyond time itself. Time and time again return to that same starting line – that line which is never there in the first place, which always eludes me; the line I only become aware of once I’ve started running, once I’ve crossed it, as I catch myself running, never myself starting to run. And sometimes it morphs, always it morphs, it becomes the finishing line and I am drawn back toward it. But here in writing’s expanse, in writing’s space, death’s space, these distinctions carry no weight. This is the space of eternal differentiation and incessant merger. I run neither away from the starting point nor towards the finishing line. Here there is only one point, and all one can do is circle it, revolve endlessly, not drawing nearer because one cannot draw further away either. And at that, one does not revolve as an act, but rather is given to the inertia of an orbiting satellite, to stagnation and impossibility. The more I read Blanchot the more I feel that Blanchot is the only way to write, that Blanchot is writing par excellence. Yet I feel that now I write only in an inability to write; that ‘truth’ can only be written in error, only in failure, can only be spoken in silence as it is only heard in silence. And what is truth to us? By using that word I become a utilitarian traitor, a liar. One can only, must only, write error.
“I need weed”, I thought to myself. So much time without an idea. How does anyone ever manage to write without drugs? They don’t, they only think they do. And yet, what’s the use of using drugs? To write the same all over again? To never begin anew, but “to begin all over again”? And in the end… Discover that there is no end. Nevertheless, as I sat in my trusty rocking chair – that sturdy rocking chair which hasn’t let me down yet, which hasn’t broken like the last one – I got the urge. Why, why does it always come as I’m reading? –‘Write’. –‘But I’m reading. No, I’m sick of you. I won’t write.’ –‘Write’. I go on reading, but it’s hopeless now. The words fall away from the page; not a single one enters my mind. All I can think of now is this urge to write. The tingling sensation is getting worse and worse, and the leg begins to shake again. I read the paragraph again, I make another effort – nothing. –‘Bollocks!’ Impatience. And perhaps this is what Blanchot spoke of – not only the need for patience once one has started writing, patience not to try and term the interminable, but to patience not to begin writing, not to grab hold of what has already begun itself within you, without you. Patience to prolong and defer writing as if it were an orgasm. Patience not to reach an end. And even this patience is insufficient on its own – it is only significant when it contains within it impatience, when it holds an inevitable impatience at bay. Allow ideas to ferment. Who knows, we’ll see… Writing, only ambiguously. Anyone else is a liar.

Uninspired

2007-03-14T17:13:00.000Z

This is where I stopped writing. I was writing a post which quickly turned into a rant about my housemate and the corruptive aspects of capitalism on creativity, thought and self-responsibility, but soon stopped when I began to feel heavy and limp; the flow of words was slowing down and everything began to feel forced. How long can one keep writing without conviction? Kafka, we learned the other day, hated his writing until, one night, he wrote a whole story in eight hours without getting up once. To have such conviction, such unwavering belief in one’s writing! If only for 8 hours… Why write? Who wants to read about this? Who would want to know of my disgust at my housemate or my inability to love my writing? But does it even matter if no-one cares? Must I always write with the idea of a reader in mind? Conversely, can I ever write without the idea of a potential reader? All of a sudden I stopped writing. It appeared to have lost all purpose. Never stop writing in the middle. To have the unflinching dedication that Kafka had for his writing for those 8 hours. And at times I have, I have been lucky enough to experience the joy of writing, those moments when, as Blanchot says, one no longer feels like the master of his writing, as the agent in control. Now, I was an agent only insofar as writing acted through me. One becomes so deeply submissive that he is no longer aware of the master standing over him, nor even of the whip as it cracks on his back. I’ve even woken up to find myself inside that dream, and tremble with delight at its ecstasy. A force so strong that my brain tingles and my leg can’t stop from shaking as my hand pours out word after word after word. One must learn to have confidence in these moments of inspiration, and allow it to take him wherever it wishes. It’s a terrifying feeling, to let yourself be borne by an unknown force. Inspiration may visit time and time again, that one might even hope to become familiar with it; yet each time it seems more strange and foreign than the last. “To let yourself go” – such a cliché. And why is it a cliché? Because this expression is inadequate; because our language is powerless to describe such moments. It isn’t you who’s letting yourself go – that implies action on your part. You are simply being let go of, by yourself and by no-one at the same time. You fall. You fall as one falls into a dream, in to sleep. How does one fall asleep? He doesn’t force himself into it, nor does he try to force the silence which we mistakenly feel is needed for sleep. Rather, we fall into sleep while we’re thinking, as we are distracted from ourselves by ourselves. We fall. And when we wake again we realise we are walking in the air, just like the coyote always kept walking in the air while chasing the roadrunner, until he looked down and realised what he was doing, at which point he plummeted. Likewise, in inspiration as in sleep, what is needed is not to let oneself go, but to be distracted. Or even, “the letting go”. The only aspect of writing over which one has power, Blanchot says, is the power to stop oneself from writing. Here was where I’ve had to learn my hardest lesson; have I finally learnt to allow my hand to write uninterrupted? Have I finally learnt to trust inspiration and allow it work through me, to let myself fall and be caught by it? Perhaps falling is too harsh; you only fall initially, but as inspiration catches you, you levitate. I’m scared of heights, and for me this is a hard thing to accept.
One who reads these lines may well accuse of being vague and writing cryptically. Be direct, they would say to me. Yet, considering the topic and the language at my disposal I am probably being as direct as humanly possible, for this experience can only be described indirectly. The more I circle it the more I think I’m about to see it. ‘Another line and I will have made myself clear’, I think to myself. Clear? To whom? It’s not even clear to me. Yet I can still communicate this to you, but only if you have experienced this elusive moment yourself. What am I saying? Anyone who’s ever written a word will have experienced this. The experience alone is not enough; once must become aware of this experience as unique, as set apart from all other experiences.
Still the question goes on begging, -‘Why write?’ For the joy of this mystery and nothing else; for its sheer elusiveness and inexplicability. Like a fetish, one can never have enough of it once he’s had a taste. Why write? Because I’m amazed that there is something within me which actually wants to write these things down. And perhaps once written down, author and meaning removed, this text becomes its own master, never ceasing to command and adjust, always teeming with life, always glowing end ebbing. Perhaps, as Nietzsche lived for the sake of the eternal return, we live for the eternal return of inspiration. What better reason for writing can there be?

They call me Dr. John

2007-03-07T23:40:00.000Z

This headache; this fucking headache. It begins with a tapping - a warning. -'Heed me now or suffer the consequences'. I sit in his room, window open, fag burning, smoke rolling, twirling, dancing and rising; out the window and into the atmosphere - but the headache remains. Into a different room - go. Another's room, same headache. Is this Anxiety? Fuck Anxiety, this is a headache. A Headache. What does it want from me? What does it demand? To acknowledge it? Would be hard not to. To embrace it? I'd have to be a masochist. I want to kill this headache - at this point, one would rather die than suffer this headache. Take a paracetamol. -'you'd be fleeing the call of conscience. You can't make this headache disappear; it's always there, waiting to come back when you least expect it'. Fuck this headache - it's me or the headache. So it's come to this? I choose me, I choose the pill. The headache is gone. It's been gone for hours, yet I still write about it. Can I write about the headache now? It's as if it never existed, so here I am trying to recreate that singular experience which is the headache, and which nevertheless seems to repeat itself again and again. Is it not the same headache? They're so similar I could swear they're one and the same. Perhaps they're related. An extended family. -'The reason you get these headaches is because you keep lusting after every little girl you see', H. said to me, or words to that effect. It's true, little girls give headaches. Even from the age of 16-17 they seem to possess this trigger. What to do? -'stop it'. I can't stop. I'll try to stop. It's not the girls, It's anxiety. Anxiety is a headache, and the call of consciense is but the desire to assuage it, to make it stop by any means possible. If you're smart enough you won't need a pill. I used to be smart enough, I'm not anymore. Or perhaps I've become smarter, and require more ingenious self-deceptions? Don't flatter yourself. You've killed more braincells than you've regenerated over the past 6 years. -'It's those little girls.' It's not the little girls. But the headache is gone - why write about it? You can't write about it; this isn't the headache you're writing about. Even before writing this post, walking home, I thought about writing this post. Even as I had the headache I thought -'This would be a good topic for a post'. Why write? To kill the headache. Why is there a headache? To make you write. Which comes first? Which causes which? Which exists for which? Perhaps an unbreakable bond. They need eachother. Has life become a story, a collection of interesting things to write about? Not even so interesting... Why write them? Why not absorb and live them? Transfer the words onto paper, make them the paper's problem. Writing for writing's sake. Maybe I just enjoy writing. Running out of steam - the engine is dying. Should I keep on writing? Is it worth forcing? I think I'll stop. Last night Dr. John brought me back to life as I was falling into sleep and further into dream. 'Gris-gris gumbo ya ya', and all that voodoo shit. Scared me half to death. Forget analysing reading, forget the text. Ask yourself, -'Why do I write?'

The Procrastinator

2007-01-13T02:50:00.001Z

I looked for information on procrastination on Wikipedia today. Lately Wikipedia has come to be my sole source of knowledge. Forget reading the news if you wanna know the reason for a conflict. Go read about it on Wikipedia instead. A click, and a world of answers cascades before me. From head to toe, valuum in the form of text. If you can say one good thing about Wikipedia it’s that it gives you answers. I click on one of the myriad choices before me. What difference does it make which one I pick? They’re all good! “Procrastination – an in-depth psychological article and suggestions for overcoming”. Ah, Wikipedia even knows of ‘overcoming’. What a truly magnificent sage. The next headline reads “How to defeat procrastination”. This is it, the moment I’ve been waiting for. The answers to all my ills lie but a click away. –click- . I guess I deserve to be disappointed. What do I find if not more fuel to add to the fire of my steadily increasing lack of belief in the power of science to answer the important questions of Being. For that you need at least a philosopher, and even they do not suffice. What can a scientist tell me about mood except that it happens? The same answers I have come up with a thousand times before: “Rationalize. Recognize that you procrastinate. Identify why you procrastinate. Once you are aware of the reasons, you’re bound to be able to overcome them, right?” Well, not really. I used to believe that too, but it means fuck all. I know very well why I treat people the way I do, and I’m still nowhere nearer being more understanding towards them. I am aware of my insecurities. And yet they are still there? They have not vanished into thin air like the nice guy on Wikipedia assured me they would? But the wicked witch had been slain, and you promised it would break the spell. Guess I’ll stay a monkey forever. But what’s this? A further piece of advice: “And above all, the most important ingredient – always make schedules and lists!” Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? I, who has made lists for the past 6 years. I, who has made list upon list, until I was buried under scraps paper, and got to the stage where I had to read notes just to remind me to look at my lists!
The CD’s finished playing. At this moment the silence is unbearable. The heating and the smoke trapped in my room are making it hard to breathe. Even the smoke wants to escape from this room, but I keep the windows shut. This stuffy void need music right now, so I break my recently adopted rule of never stopping to write in the middle and play Jackson Browne’s ‘For Everyman’. Ah, here was my problem: The music. I was trying to control my mood using music, looking for the right mood that would allow me to finish writing my stinkin’ essay. That right, I’m supposed to be writing an essay, and instead I’m doing this. I tried to listen to Danielson Famile’s latest album at first. I love that album, and when I play it in the morning as the sun shines through my window it makes me feel like this is all I need. Indeed, those moments, of which I never tire, remind me of the feeling that good country music can give me in the mornings. But now that the sun has long ago set, this album seemed intrusive. Too happy. It became a toil to listen to. “Cat Power, then” I thought to myself. Cat Power felt right, so on goes Myra Lee into the CD player. There’s something disturbingly dark about this album. Perhaps because she is so much younger and less refined. Her voice certainly sounds so. It felt right, but it helped only to drag me further down into lethargy. And now, here comes Jackson Browne, and his first words to me are “Take it easy, take it easy”. Ah, sage advice. Somehow he’s fixed it, for a few moments at least. Country music always fixes it. And yet so many people view it as “depressing” or “whiney”. Don’t they understand how uplifting it is? Don’t they understand how comforting? They just remind me of the suspicion with which our society views anything that doesn’t look like happiness. Anything that doesn’t look like their happiness. This website on procrastination epitomises it. Everything is easy, must be easy and digestible. Everything is explicable. Shall I call you a shrink? I remember the psychological evaluation I had in the summer. That doctor really got to know me in less than 10 minutes. How does he do it?! That man knew me before he walked in through the office door. His tone of voice and pensively squinted eyes implied as much. “Do you ever feel like crying?” he asks me. –“Doesn’t everyone?”
The next day I was lucky enough to be entrusted with my file thanks to an administrative error. So I take it to the café outside the hospital, order a black coffee and begin sifting through the notes. There it is, my evaluation: “Of a melancholy disposition”. 10 minutes, maybe less. I think I pretty much agree with the rest, but that one line surprised me. Am I not the most positive and cheerful person I know? I guess not, ‘cos that doctor must know what he’s talking about. Had he been there at that moment I could have told him that my melancholy is part of my happiness, and that if there was any other concept to which he would like to ascribe the word ‘happiness’, then I don’t wanna know about it. One can be happy without being content. Indeed, I can only be happy when discontent. And the procrastination? I’ll keep that too, thank you very much. I only seem to be productive when I’m avoiding work anyway.

Title anyone?

2007-01-11T20:08:00.000Z

Don't really have the time to write any posts at the moment so have asked a friend to write one up instead. I should state again that this is not my post but my friend's, so if you find any of the material upsetting or offensive in any way you can go fuck yourself. Here goes:

Hey man, heres my rant. Please give it a title for me, Im terrible at them.

WASTER; a destroyer: The Vandals were wasters of cities

This is an alternate meaning as stated in the dictionary. If I use this description then we are all wasters in one sense or another.. What would we actually class as a waste of time? If you can create(which anyone can) then it was never a waste of time.
Everybody is growing more alienated and we live in a day and age where the only way of connecting, is through an abhorrent lust for destruction, usually satisfied by the modern sensationalistic media. I read an article in one of the ass rags today claiming that 50% of criminal offenders have smoked cannabis, which brought Labour’s policy into question. How ridiculous, I am going to partake in a virtual study which I’m sure will show results that 99.9988777666% of offenders drank alcohol. Their scaremongering over the war on terror has stirred a racial divide that will equal certain points in the first half of the twentieth century. But propaganda is nothing new and will continue to work until people learn to see through it and trust their self judgement a little more. Especially living in small northern town, I’ve seen an Indian person get onto a train and everyone eyes them suspiciously, on one occurrence the gentleman in question had owned a local tandoori for the past 30 years and had been a resident before the onlookers were fish in their dad’s sack. Facial hair will be next you may come back from a holiday in the sun to jeers of hey Osama beard-laden etc.
We are supposed to be living in enlightened times, we can feel comfortable letting Bobby Geldoff try to save a nation by releasing insipid wailings of musicians who think they have done their part for humanity by donating their ‘time’, but they could do the human race a bigger service by slitting their wrists in a cold ice bath(Ice so the stench of their corpses wont intrude on our nasal senses, like their aural assault on our ears whilst living, thus ridding us of their self righteous, pointless existence.
Small minded people need drama in their sterile lives, seeing as though they have trouble communicating they resort to trash like Jeremy Bile to make themselves feel better because they weigh 50 stones less than the beached whale agitating the onlookers. I can sympathise, escapism is an important part of life it is just a shame they can’t make better use of it.. Like rigging a generator to peddle power the television, take that NHS obesity crisis!
Make something of yourself, a usual criticism, but make what? A middle aged beer gutted work horse who one day will be so phased by his plight that the day will arise when he hangs himself by the tie rather than have to select another one for the daily grind. They never look happy , they fail to realise the more you earn the greater the greed for pointless lifestyle accessories and the responsibilities that occur with them, i.e working more to pay for them, second car, paying more to the government. It may seem naive but short of providing for a family there is no great need for that much excessive working. Cars as penile extensions or status symbols, why do wee need status symbols, what the fuck are we ?silver back gorillas? Sometimes I don’t know. We have faces to form expressions with. They are the only status symbols we require. Smile, frown, scowl its that simple. The townies who tread the streets have a perma-scowl at all times. Since when was it the norm to repress emotions in that way. Eye contact is a very powerful thing in the animal kingdom and we are no different, so it is understandable that sometimes people cannot bring themselves to look around them, but again the persuasive paranoia beamed out to them will no doubt help.
We all need distractions, I think it is the way we choose to distract ourselves that should question if we are wasters in little john’s sense. Wasters are the new bohemians, we complain about the circumstances around us, revel in it sometimes, but make no attempt to change it. Secretly that’s the way we like it, everyone wishes to be self categorised.

A post about nothing

2007-01-07T20:07:00.000Z

This is getting to be a real problem. I read something and am immediately caught by the urge to write, when I should be reading and doing work. Why is it I only feel inspired to write or play music when I should be doing something else? That's why I can't finish reading my books. Good writing is too inspiring. Here I am, 24, and nothing has changed. I'm still the lazy waster I always was. The worst thing is that it doesn't look like it's gonna change any time soon.
I've always tried to find out what it is that typifies our generation, for it seems that there's something to be said about every generation. So what is it that typifies ours? Our generation is characterised by its emptiness. By its struggle and utter inability to cope with its nothingness, its meaninglessness. It's hard to get out of bed in the morning. It's always warmer under the sheets, and there's very little outside that's worth giving up that comforting warmth for. Everyone I know is a waster. Those who are not wasters I don't want to know. My housemate is watching Gordon Ramsey in the next room, and he can't seem to hear unless the volume is set to a window-shattering level. He's not a waster. He's 18 and has a full time job working almost 15 hours each day. He knows what he wants from the future and doesn't have to worry about uncertainty. He makes me sick and I can't stand to spend any time with him, and right now he's drowning out the sound of my CD player. Well, actually, the CD's finished. Should I get up and change the CD? But that would mean I would have to stop writing, and I promised myself not to stop writing in the middle from now on. When it gets you you have to let it wear itself out.
P. came over for new year's. He, too, is a great waster. As great as me. 'Greater', he would probably insist. He's been unemployed for almost a year. I think that's his greatest achievment, as well as the most endearing one in my eyes. 'We're better than them', he assures me. 'Why?', 'Because they're monkeys! At least we're interested in films and music and literature, and we can still laugh at Spongebob and Ren & Stimpy!'. 'But look at some of these people. They wouldn't be caught dead with us.'
That's why we always end up in dingy shitholes at the end of every night instead of at some classy nightclub with some stunning whore who wears her skirt up to her bellybutton. And what's more, we love it that way. That's the only place where we can be happy at the end of a night of drinking, when we're too pissed to stop our eyeballs from oscillating wildly, unable to fix on anything, and are so slow that we must help eachother complete our sentences. We're content with being here at the end of the night, surrounded by these middle-aged wrecks who attend nightly, carried inside on their own powerlessness to help themselves. This is where these women belong. This is their lair, where they like to inspect whatever unlucky young creature happens to wander in. It is the web, and they the spiders, returning for leftovers. Well, you can't have any of this meat, you old hags! I'm just here to watch. you intrigue me. Why do you all have such interesting stories? 'I'm raising my girl to be proud of her Geordie heritage. 'Cos it's a dying dialect, you know?'. 'If I had my roots in you', I think to myself, 'I wouldn't have much to be proud of'.
So we eventually leave the bar and make out way towards the studios behind the Cluny. We'd been told there was a party taking place there. 'As if they'll let us in. I've told you, P., we're not good enough for those kind of places!'. We walk up the steps and I ring the bell. 'Hello?', says a voice. 'Hi, I was told to come to the party'. 'By who?', 'Harry'. The voice consolts someone in the background and returns with a verdict. 'Sorry, don't know any Harry'. 'But you gotta know Harry! Everyone knows Harry!'. Thus ends another night of nothing.

Hank Williams' Light

2006-11-30T22:58:00.000Z

I wondered so endless, life filled with sin,
I wouldn't let my dear saviour in,
Then Jesus came like a stranger in the night,
And praise the lord, I saw the light!

I saw the light! I saw the light!
No more darkness, no more night,
Now I'm so happy, no sorrow in sight,
Praise the lord! I saw the light!

Hank Williams. Died January 1st, 1953

I walked home drunk. I was more drunk than I thought I was when I'd left the pub. Safe to say that when you're drunk you walk. You walk, and if you're lucky, you think. What do you think about? Unhappy thoughts, for the most part. Ugly thoughts. Wretched thoughts. But you think, and no more. There's no point in describing environmental details. Your environment doesn't occur to you when you're walking home drunk. It doesn't happen to you. So there's no point in going into the usual descriptions of my surroundings at the time; that would be superfluous. My life consists of what happens in it, and what happens in my life depends on what my mood allows. I sit in my room, and that's all that happens. But so much more happens! Thoughts upon thoughts upon thoughts go through me. Some pleasant, some less pleasant, all of them involuntary. And so my life happens. It happens, and it will cease from happening when I cease from thinking. When thinking ceases from happening. Thinking happens to me, so much more than sitting in that cheap rocking chair - the chair was a replacement for the first rocking chair I had in my room, which I broke in a party several days after we moved into this freezing flat, along with a window handle in the hall. So much more than sitting... Ah, but one is always aware of future possibilites, and of those future possibilities as part of a unity of life along with the past and present. What's that you say Heidegger? But in so far as those thoughts occur to me they happen to me. Life is that which happens to me. Redemption, redemption. Mmmm... What a word, what a word! On the way home I walk along the quayside. It's a longer route but it raises my spirits. I choose not to walk through the urban shortcut into town. Walking through the quayside fools me into feeling safe, into feeling that there's a nice side to this world. A glaring searchlight is beaming at the quaside with no distinct pattern, like a headless chicken. It gets me, then it gets me again. I'm not running away from you, I want your control. I saw the light! I saw the light! No more darkness, no more night. Could it be? I can't be that drunk, though the line between dream and reality is momentarily blurred by surprise aided by alcohol. Hank is singing! Oh, Hank, you never saw the light any longer than the effect of your pills lasted. And when you sang to me of the light, you showed me even more darkness. The sound of Hank Williams was blowing from a nearby nightclub to the sight of a kaliedoscopic projection alongside the opposite building's wall. Quite why it was playing, I don't know. That scene made no sense, and being drunk certainly didn't help me make any more sense of it. It's his greatest song - jubilant, unrestrained, desperate, submissive, filled with pain, redemptive and pious. All at the same time. Indeed, it is the kind of jubilation and redemption reserved only for the pious. If there was ever a thing worth saying, a sentiment worth expressing, a pain worth crying - don't bother. Hank Williams has said it before. He's said it better than you ever could. The truth of his words is not in their complexity - he was too rough for that. Rough but not crude, as so many mistakenly impute to him just because he wore a cowboy hat and flashy suit. On my CD case it's blue, but his skin is grey, so who knows how accurate a testimony of his taste in fashion this is? The truth of his words resonates through the unmistakeable pain in his voice. If you don't hear his pain you haven't heard pain in your life. And Hank Williams knew all about pain. Sometimes I think his life consisted of nothing but pain, with every song sung and pill taken being just a momentary respite from his troubles, of which chronic back problems of unimaginable pain was probably the least. Legend has it that Hank used to buy a new guitar every week because he would smash them on opponents heads during fights. His money was spent on pills, alcohol and cheap guitars. Heidegger, don't you know that anxiety doesn't visit you once? Once it visits, it will visit you again and again and again, and each time will be emptier than the last. The beauty of the song, its achievement, is in its ability to communicate to me the pain of life and the transcendant redemption it can offer. Not for me, though. Not for us. We've crossed that line long ago. But maybe, just maybe, I can feel it just for 3 minutes through the great voice of a great musician. After Hank only silence is worthy. Rest in peace, Hank Williams.

On Clarity

2006-11-26T20:32:00.001Z

To ask a banal question - why do we write? But this query is not banal, it may be as important to one who writes as the question of the meaning of Being is to a human-being according to Heidegger, for it is at the heart of what we do - on this blog for example. It IS what we do. So how can we not ask this question?
We've been studying Heidegger on the course lately, and, inevitably, the question of authenticity has been on my mind the whole time. It has, in fact, preoccupied me for the past few years (as is the case with my fellow students, I feel), as well the the question of writing. More than a question, an obsession. I write even when I don't know why I write anymore. It started out with an attempt to make sense of and record philosophical ideas and assumptions, and slowly worked its way to its current state, in which I find myself recording every minute feeling that I observe, criticising every book, film and album that comes my way, keeping a diary - and for what? I still don't know. The only thing I can say is that I can't stop; I have to keep writing. Perhaps it's reached an unhealthy degree. It certainly has been getting in the way of course work. For a while I thought that I (and secretly everyone) write in the hope of becoming a good writer in the eyes of others. But what does it mean to be a good writer? Let's not go into that now. I know now that this is not the case. I don't even find myself dedicating much time to writing stories or prose anymore. I'm concerned with writing on a much more personal level.

So is it authenticity that I look for in writing? Is writing a means to authenticity? And assuming it is, how can it lead me to authenticity? Can it mislead me? Can it damage? A fork may be a tool, a means to eating, but I can also stab myself in the eye with it. My writing, it would seem upon superficial inspection, has progressed on a straight line from an inability to express my sentiments with precision, difficulty in putting my finger on precisely what it was that I felt, what it was that I liked or disliked about things, what made me feel uncomfortable for no apparent reason, to a sense of eloquence and articulation. A sense of clarity. But what does this word mean? Clarity - to clear, to remove an obstacle, a veil, an illusion. The Hebrew word used to describe clarity of speech or writing is 'Tzakh', which also means purity, and is used to describe the morning air, particularly after a thick and rainy night, a smouldering night. An air that's been relieved of its weight, an air that's breathed effortlessly. Am I to understand that the practice of writing, of self-exploration through writing, is analogous to the clearing of the air, the receding rain? But has writing become my torch? Am I now able to point the way to that which I wish to see, or more, to that which I wish to feel? What is IT? IT seems to deflect illumination, it's always vague, like a face in a dream. IT seems centrifugal - I always revolve around IT, circling IT, never quite touching IT. Never speaking IT. IT won't allow itself to be spoken. Perhaps a notion of self, or even authenticity, demands a measure of unknowing?
What is it I think I'm articulating ,anyway? Am I ever nearer the end? Is articulation ever anything more than the elaboration of language? The elaboration of an illusion? Perhaps attempts at direct articulation are bound to fail; a ship that never leaves the dock. And I wonder, can literature and poetry not communicate to us that which we strive to understand, and does it not succeed precisely because of its indirectness?

Noise continued

2006-11-24T14:01:00.000Z

Wow. What a great start to the blog, and one which I can only hope to match with a fitting response. I particularly find interesting the suggestion (and I hope I've not read too much into this suggestion) that 'Noise Music' - sorry. I mean 'noise' - is in some way a means "ofovercoming our means/end disposition and articulating something inherently opposed to utility and productivity." This was originally intended to be a comment to Ibitsu's initial post on 'noise', but has gone far longer than I'd intended, so I've decided to turn it into a full post.

Two terribly important points there to address, one of which shall be momentarily left aside for the sake of clarity, though a connection can eventually be achieved at the end of a short detour. First, is it not ironic that in attempting to transgress the narrowness of our means/end disposition (and on its inherent narrowness I wouldn't disagree) we in fact create a) an end (i.e. the very transgression of music as we know it becomes an end, even if only temporary), and b) a means to achieving that end ('noise'). This begs the question, to what extent can our means/end disposition ever be overcome? It seems that the only way to truly transcend it would be to rid oneself of one of the aforementioned factors: the means or the end. But to rid ourselves of the means - in this case, 'noise' - would leave us with a static and hollow end. It can never be met. It is unintelligible. Then we would have to rid ourselves of the end! But this would mean that 'noise' would be produced at random, aritrarily and for no apparent purpose. And was that not its purpose in the first place? Perhaps I'm digressing here. We must remember, however, that even Breton and his fellow Surrealists, while claiming to transgress language, nevertheless created some of the most beautiful, colourful and vivid prose I've ever had the fortune of reading.
I would like to point out before I go on any further, that one must not infer from what I've said so far that I don't see noise as playing a positive role. As is the case with political activism, just because the system seems to function smoothly does not mean that we shouldn't challenege it. On the contrary, we must continually challenge it to look at itself, lest it stagnates and falls into decay. And the case of music is no different. Yet a call of dissatisfaction always pressumes that something is wrong with the system. Ibitsu says tht 'noise' wishes "to be heard amongst the current wave of mediocrity and banality". The problem for the great Japanese sage Ibitsu, then, is that music has already fallen into this state of stagnance and decay, and certainly the continuous recyclying of music over the past 5 years does little to reduce the stench emmanating from the airwaves, and can be seen as the peak - or bottom - of music's decaying process. Ibitsu also says: "Our gift of aural perception should not be restrained to 3 minute sounds, which have beats in time to our heart, and which speak of codified beauty. Are we not tired of our societal production line, in which 'true originality' is spoke of something that has passed?" Two points to note here: a) The assumption that the 3 minute formula has exhausted itself, or that it can indeed ever exhaust itself. And b) That originality can no longer be achieved within that familiar structure of coherent beats and beauty.

I feel as if I'm beginning to lose myself and the direction of the argument, as Ibitsu touches on too many points, so I will refrain from touching on these points for now, which would themselves warrant a seperate investigation into the nature and - curse this word - purpose.
So, to go back to an earlier point, we must ask what it is that we achieve by transgressing norms, be they musical, linguistic or social. Are we not bound to fall into emptiness, only to claw our way back into socially enforced blindness? By this I refer to ideas such as Kant's 'a priori' principles, without which the world would appear to us as a mere collection of floating atoms. Nietzsche believed that values were to be transgressed, only to impose his own values on himself. And even in escaping the constraints of language, we're bound to eventually submit to some sort of order and meaning again. I guess Shakespeare put it most eloquently, which is why he's such a genius: "A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet" (or something like that).
One last important touch on wish I intended to touch was the importance of the commodification of music. Questions of originality and purpose cannot be answered without reference to the capitalist system of which they are a part today. But I've gone on for far too long now and am tired. So if anyone would like to get the discussion rolling again, that would be great.

Brave New Blog

2006-11-23T12:23:00.000Z

Hello, and welcome to our new log. We’re currently in the process of adding a couple of new administrators and contributors to this blog in the hope of generating some serious discussion. Ideally, this blog would cover absolutely anything, from general philosophy and actual events (which should perhaps never be seperated anyway) to music, film, literature, poetry, and just anything fitting under the whatever your definition of Art may be. But inevitably we expect the range of the topics discussed to dwindle itself down in a nice, natural, painless process, into a, sadly, stage for our contributors to address more specific and defined concerns.
Enough introductions. Start writing! Also, any suggestions are more than welcome, so please don’t be afraid to ask or comment about anything. Oh, and does anyone know how to start that “Feed My Mind” feature that so many bloggers seem to have? You know, where people recommend books and stuff to you.