It is impossible to get beyond an image.
“Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom—is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty.”
— John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic” in Stones of Venice, 1851-53.
Morning breeze, its fragrance will exhale
The old world will once again youthfully sail.
Tulip will bring a red cup to the meadows
Narcissus’ eyes from poppy will grow pale.
When would nightingale put up with such abuse
In the chamber of the rose cry and wail.
I traded the temple for the tavern, fault me not
Prayer is long and stale, time is frail.
Leave not joy of the now till the morrow
Who can vouch that the morrow, the now shall trail?
Month of Sha’aban put not down the jug of wine
Till the end of ramadan you’ll miss this Holy Grail.
Hold dear all the flowers and commune
Came to be and will whither with a breeze or a gale.
This feast is for friends, O minstrel, play and sing
Sing again, it came thus and went thus, to what avail?
Hafez, for your sake, entered this tale
Walk with him, say farewell, he’ll tear the veil.
― Ghazal 164, Hafez. Welcome, the beginning of Spring.
My drawing began with a word, and ended with a word.
Absolutism is absurdism absolutely.
Mia: Don’t you hate that?
Vincent: Hate what?
Mia: Uncomfortable silences. Why do we feel it’s necessary to yak about bullshit? In order to be comfortable?
Vincent: I don’t know. That’s a good question.
Mia: That’s when you know you’ve found somebody really special: you can just shut the fuck up for a minute and comfortably share silence.
― Pulp Fiction, Mia and Vincent discuss speaking unnecessarily over awkward silences after a pause in their own conversation at Jackrabbit Slim’s. Quit yacking bullshit, embrace the silence.
“We learn … that when one looks for too long at reality through critico-ideological glasses, one gets a strong headache: it is very painful to be deprived of the ideological surplus-jouissance.”
― Denial: The Liberal Utopia, by Slavoj Žižek.
I will plant my hands in the garden
I will grow, I know, I know, I know
and swallows will lay eggs
in the hollow of my ink-stained hands.
― Another Birth, by Forough Farokhzad.
Whoever, to your face, such cheerful colours gave
Patience and serenity for poor me can also save
Whoever trained your hair so arrogantly to behave
His grace, such injustice for poor me can also waive.
I gave up my desires on the first day when
Beloved took my heart’s rein and made me his slave.
If there’s no golden treasure, at least satisfied I remain
He who gave that to the king, made this the lot of the knave.
This world, just like a bride, in appearance is glorified
He who gave his life to this, has only dug his own grave.
From now on, I spend my time in nature with rivers & trees
While the breeze, of time of spring, would rant and rave.
Hafiz’s heart was brave, rode hardships wave after wave
Though separations deprave, the King as our healer gave.
― Ghazal 112, Hafez.
“Keep the company of those who seek the truth – run from those who have found it.”
― In memory of playwright, essayist, poet, dissident, and politician, Václav Havel (5th of October 1936 – 18th of December 2011).
When did everyone start acting like they’ve got ADHD?
please, tell me.
Algorithms are incestuous. (Results: go and fuck* ** yourself. see what happens)
― an open plea for the widening of the algorithmic ‘gene-pool’ used by the usual suspects. i want the internet to broaden my view of the world, not limit it to an overly individualised experience.
*since updated because apparently profanities are offensive.
**since updated because, sometimes, profanities should be offensive.
The entwined polarity of a simultaneous dark fear of, and sublime desire for, nature and technological progress. Woman: a symbol of these entwined polarities.
NOTATEBENE EST. 2010
― each item, made in the age of relentless mechanical reproduction, is made by hand in London for the note taker, for the appreciator of written accounts and the lover and wearer of objects with a conscious yet understated charm.
Why I once left the Facebook
(closed-) network.
Aside from being brilliant at keeping family, friends, and colleagues together in one place, and even more brilliant at confusing all three, Facebook makes/made the internet boring. B-o-r-i-n-g. And I passionately hate feeling bored. This isn’t some kind of subversive act (or maybe it is?), it’s simply a reaction to bordom and perhaps I’ll return when it ceases to be so. Perhaps that bordom ensued as a result of it closing in on itself (Facebooks attempt to contain the internet in a bid to compete with Google. Sheesh. AOL and Compuserve failed for a reason, and yet – lo and behold – it just keeps growing), or it’s a result of unintelligent algorithms reinforcing this boring online world around me, perhaps not. Or perhaps it really just means that I’m boring and unintelligent, perhaps not. But you know what? I don’t particularly have a desire to sit in front of the ‘mirror’ and stare at my own reflection. And you know what else? Once you finally make it outside you can see “all kinds of things you can’t see from the centre”, and you can see all kinds of things when you’re not simply seeing a reflection of yourself.
“You think I’m insane?” said Finnerty. Apparently he wanted more of a reaction than Paul had given him.
“You’re still in touch. I guess that’s the test.”
“Barely — barely.”
“A psychiatrist could help. There’s a good man in Albany.”
Finnerty shook his head. “He’d pull me back into the center, and I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” He nodded, “Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.”
― ‘Player Piano’, 1952, by Kurt Vonnegut.
“The beautiful is perhaps the first uniform….”
― As is the ugly, my friend, as is the ugly. On naturally manufactured, genetically inherited, disguises. The ugly and the beautiful being two of them.
― Quoted text from ‘The Aesthetics of Disappearance’, by Paul Virilio.
One day it all just stopped and all that was left were the shadows to dance amongst the ruins…
To talk is to create images that are not objects but evocations from a body of memories that form a transitory series of frames in ones mind.
Your memory is a film, in a constant state of fluidity.
You press play, and talk – and in talking you recreate, a re-creation that forms for itself that subjective representation of an otherwise objective existence. Words, for that reason can never really say what one is trying to say.
Re-reading. Re-mixing. Re-wording. An investigation into the re-appropriation and manipulation of texts.
Reified and emptied, texts were treated like the lowliest of things. Texts were misunderstood, burned, erased, cut to pieces and destroyed. They were spat, pissed and shat on, tossed into toilets, sewers, fountains, canals, rivers, rubble heaps, garbage dumps, pigsties and charnel houses, and lewdly handled in brothels and inns. Texts were used as door stops, shelf brackets and support, or their contents were modified to represent something new. Books were burnt to destroy their ideas against the Gods, were found in heaps when they had ceased to be relevant to the thinking world, or waited in recycling dumps to be turned into new objects altogether with no memory of their previous lives. In 2010, pieces of texts by Borges, Sontag, Nietzsche, Foucault, Descartes, Vitruvius, and others, were turned into an essay on re-reading by extracting relevant paragraphs and re-piecing them together. And then, in 2011, there was this.
“Degradation followed display. Reified and emptied, the image was treated like the lowliest of things. Images were broken, burned, toppled, beheaded and hanged. They were spat, pissed and shat on, tossed into toilets, sewers, fountains, canals, rivers, rubble heaps, garbage dumps, pigsties and charnel houses, and lewdly handled in brothels and inns. Stone statues were used as cobblestones, keystones and infill, or were modified to represent something new. In 1608, a statue of the Virgin on the clock of the Basel town hall was turned into a personification of Justice simply by removing the Christ child and replacing him with scales. Wooden statues became table ornaments and toys, or were sold on the markets as firewood or distributed free to the poor. In Bern in 1528, images were taken from the church, broken and buried in a hole before the cathedral where they would lie until Judgement Day.
It takes two to make a thing go right. With famous books, the first time is already the second since we approach them already knowing them. The cautious common saying of rereading the classics turns out to be an innocent veracity [Jorge Luis Borges, Some Versions of Homer]. We are always somehow rereading a classic because we have encountered some previous incarnation of it, a refraction, in other stories, texts or versions. What are the many versions if not diverse perspectives of a movable event, if not a long experimental assortment of omissions and emphasis? [Sergio Gabriel Waisman, Borges and Translation, the Irreverence of the Periphery, p.52]
Just about everything has been photoshoped [remix of Susan Sontag, On Photography]. Precisely, it is about what five people think this reality consists of. How an incident happens may reflect nothing about the incident itself, but it must reflect something about the person involved in the happening and supplying the how. Five people interpret an action and each interpretation is different because in the telling and the retelling, the people will reveal not the action but themselves [Donald Richie, The Films of Akira Kurosawa, p.75].
For the first time several months ago, I spent hours looking at the façade of the cathedral, but only when I bought a book on the cathedral a week later did I really see it. The photographs enabled me to see in a way that my naked eye could not possibly see the cathedral [Susan Sontag, An Interview with Susan Sontag in Boston Review].
Same, same but different. If no one drawing should singly answer the personal taste, there will yet be found a variety of hints sufficient to construct a new one. I am confident I can convince all that will honor me with their commands that every design can be improved, both as to beauty and enrichment in the execution of it [remix of Master Chippendale, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker's Director]. Every writer creates his precursors [Jorge Luis Borges, Kafka and his Precursors]. I express unlimited thanks to all the authors that have in the past by compiling from remarkable instances of skill provided us with abundant materials of different kinds. Drawing from them as it were water from springs and converting them to our own purposes we find our own powers of writing rendered more fluent and easy and relying upon such authorities, we venture to produce new systems of instruction [Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, preface 7.10].
The function proper to knowledge is interpreting. Scriptural commentary, commentaries on ancient authors, commentaries on the accounts of travelers, commentaries on legends and fables: none of these forms of discourse is required to justify its claim to be expressing a truth before it is interpreted; all that is required of it is the possibility of talking about it. (…) There is more work in interpreting interpretations than in interpreting things; and more books about books than any other subject [Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, An Archeology of the Human Sciences, p.45].
Multiplication of an icon, far from diluting its cultic power, rather increases its fame and each image – however imperfect – conventionally partakes of some portion of the properties of the precursor [Anthony Hughes, Sculpture and its Reproductions, p.38]. Much roman sculpture is greek in style and subject and most of theses greek-seeming works have been assumed for at least a century to be reproductions of lost works by greek artists. Some now appear to be roman creations and even those that are reproductions are not considered mechanical ones. The theory that they were made with a pointing machine similar to the one invented in the 18th century for making mechanically exact copies has been discredited [Anthony Hughes, Sculpture and its Reproductions, p.8]. This shift entails moving to the more recent revisionist theory that draws attention to the Roman’s programmatic use of repeated, recognizable, often famous but not necessarily greek images. These images announce the use of a particular type of building and were valued for their subject matter rather than their formal or iconographic origins, creators or style [Elaine K. Gazda, The Ancient Art of Emulation: Studies in Artistic Originality and Tradition from the Present to Classical Antiquity, p.10].
A corpse, a dog, a stork, a gold coin, the color red and two dervishes from the mountain village resemble one another completely without it being possible for anyone to say which of them brought its similitude to the other [remix of Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red]. Flesh is a glebe, bones are rocks, veins great rivers, the bladder is the sea and the seven principle organs are the metals hidden in the shafts of minds [Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, An Archeology of the Human Sciences, p.25]. The more images, mediations, intermediaries, icons are multiplied and overtly fabricated explicitly and publicly constructed, the more respect I have for their capacities to welcome, to gather, to recollect meaning and sanctity [Bruno Latour, What is Many Worlds?].
Double the treat, double your pleasure, double your fun. Every lie recreates a parallel world, the world in which its true [remix of Mathew Evans, Solution 11-167 The Book of Scotlands].
It is a frequent habit, when I discover several resemblances between two things, to attribute to both equally, even on points in which they are in reality different, that which I have recognized to be true of only one of them [René Descartes quoted by Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, An Archeology of the Human Sciences, p.56]. Combined with this is another perversity, an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one. The defect of the real one is so apt to be a lack of representation. I like things who appear. Then one is sure. Whether they are or not is a subordinate and almost always a profitless question [remix of Henry James, The Real Thing].
A sculpture cannot merely be copied but always only staged or performed. It begins to function like a piece of music whose score is not identical to the piece, the score being not audible but silent. For the music to resound, it has to be performed [Boris Groys, Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction]. Touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork [Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of Idols, p.4], I cook every chance in my pot [Friedrich Nietzsche, [Thus Spake] Zarathustra, p.118]. Its the real thing.”
— Quoted text from Everything Has Been Photoshopped, Oliver Laric by way of Bourbakisme
I am all that is not me
The countenance that I envisage with the numbed, dumbed, dulled senses of my eyes
Makes me aware
Aware that I am not much more than a blind woman seated before a mirror
Marvelling at nothing
The mask, moulded for me of a plastic pulled into unknown shapes over this vacuum, with no precedence upon which to form
I am all vacuity and mask
And my skin senses, helplessly, acutely and yet
This longing does not know of a destination
“Ambition intoxicates more than fame; desire makes all things blossom, and possession makes them wither away; it is better to dream your life than to live it, even though living it is still dreaming it, albeit less mysteriously and less clearly, in a dark, heavy dream, like the dream diffused through the dim awareness of ruminating beasts. Shakespeare’s plays are more beautiful when viewed in a study than when put on in the theatre. The poets who have created imperishable women in love have often only ever known humdrum servant girls from taverns, while the most envied voluptuaries are unable to grasp fully the life they lead, or rather the life which leads them.
I knew a young boy of ten, of sickly disposition and precocious imagination, who had developed a purely cerebral love for an older girl. He would stay at his window for hours on end to see her walk by, wept if he didn’t see her, wept even more if he did. He spent moments with her that were very few and far between. He stopped sleeping and eating. One day, he threw himself out of his window. People thought at first that despair at never getting close to his lady friend had filled him with the resolve to die. They learnt that, on the contrary, he had just had a long conversation with her: she had been extremely nice to him. Then people supposed that he had renounced the insipid days he still had to live, after this intoxication that he might never be able to experience again. Frequent remarks he had previously made to one of his friends finally led people to deduce that he was filled with disappointment every time he saw the sovereign lady of his dreams; but as soon as she had left, his fertile imagination restored all her power to the absent girl, and he would start to long for her again. Each time, he would try to find an accidental reason for his disappointment in the imperfect nature of the circumstances. After that final interview in which he had, in his already active and inventive fantasy, raised his lady friend to the high perfection of which her nature was capable, and been filled with despair when he compared that imperfect perfection to the absolute perfection on which he lived and from which he was dying, he threw himself out of the window. Subsequently, having been reduced to idiocy, he lived for a long time, since his fall had left him with no memory of his soul, his mind, or of the words of his lady friend, whom he now met without seeing her. In spite of supplications and threats, she married him, and died several years later, without having managed to make him recognise her.
Life is like this girl. We dream of it, and we love what we have dreamt up. We must not try to live it: we throw ourselves, like that boy, into a state of stupidity – but not all at once: everything in life deteriorates by imperceptible degrees. Within ten years, we do not recognise our dreams, we deny them, we live, like an ox, for the grass we graze on moment by moment. And from our marriage with death, who knows of when we will arise as conscious, immortal beings?”
— Marcel Proust, ‘Pleasures and Days’.
We are still in the era of the Post-.
Post-War,
Post-Communism,
Post-Modernism,
Post-Anarchism,
Post-Humanism,
Post-Romanticism,
Post-Materialism,
Post-Feminism,
Post-Structuralism…
Post-postmodernism
“There is another world, but it is inside this one”
— Paul Éluard
The evolution of the appearance of the progresses of Capitalist thinking is visually translated as an entire city in a perpetual state of unfinished construction.
A detailed radicalisation of the grandiose that equals, not the awful but, the awfully sublime fantasy of our own demise.
“In the same manner as rain falls to the earth, as clouds form in the sky, 54 columns of rain have been erected, beams placed across them, and the resulting structure strung with 2,808 threads of cloud. The result: a highly transparent building that seems to dissolve into the air. I find myself irresistibly drawn to this transparent quality, because architectural space is essentially transparent. […] by doing so, we might be able to create through architecture the kind of transparency found in nature that until now, architecture has been unable to provide. […] Such transparency, we surmised, could extinguish the boundary between ‘space as void’ in which there appears to be nothing, and ‘structure as frame’, in which a clear presence is perceivable. We have endeavoured to think of architecture as something akin to the air that surrounds us, filling space into infinity.”
Architecture as a non-object, architecture as an incident of its own carefully curated existence.
“What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed in order to sleep.
How? Where? When? Why?
Describe your street. Describe another. Compare.”
― Georges Perec, L’Infra-ordinaire.
Representation without substance
— on the value of the temporal digital image using a digital copy of Jackson Pollocks ‘No 5′, 1948, which sold for a record $156 million in 2006.
Though there is a clear, distinguishable, dichotomy between “image” vs. “artefact” and the “temporal” vs. “material”, each is hung in the balance against each other. “Image” is close in meaning to a representation, and the “artefact” an object that is its tangible opposite; the “temporal” is without substance and the “material” is substance.
Endeavouring to discover a value in the “temporal image” in the digital world leads us to discover valuation in further relationships: is the sender close to you/are they famous or popular, are they someone you know, are you the only recipient, is it personal, was a substantial amount of time spent creating it, and so on. Answering yes to all of these questions would lead to the assumption that the “temporal image” is of its highest possible personal valuation. These are much the same kinds of values one might put on the receipt of a hand-written post-card measured against, say, a piece of junk mail addressed to you – clearly, in this case, the material artefact is of less than equal value than the temporal digital image sent by someone you know and with you in mind when they sent it.
Walter Benjamin wrote of the loss of aura through the mechanical reproduction of art, and ‘aura’ for Benjamin represents the originality and authenticity of a work of art that has not been reproduced. Containing an aura, in other words, bestows upon a piece of work the highest valuation. What happens to ‘aura’ when originality and authenticity become redundant, and reproduction immeasurable? In the digital world with its infinite reproductions, duplication, and copies without loss of quality, we sit as impotent witnesses to this loss, inadequately questioning the (re)discovery of the hidden, or lost, value in the temporal digital image, the representation without substance, and its online methods of propagation that subtract the need for originality, authenticity, and reproduction from the description of its contents – a digitally reproducible representation with substance. An aura for the digitally reproducible.
— ’The Value of Things: Material Artefacts in a Digital World’, image by Lola Halifa leGrand. ‘The Loss of Aura’, edited from the original text by Zaynab Dena Ziari, May 2011. Published in ‘The Final Word’, by the RCA CA&AD, July 2011.
a hand repeatedly attempting to catch a falling piece of lead is sometimes nothing more than a hand repeatedly attempting to catch a falling piece of lead
— Richard Serra, ‘Hand Catching Lead’, 1968.
zeitgeist
— The spirit of the moment, describing the intellectual, cultural, ethical, and political climate of an era. There is no such word in the English language for this.
l’esprit de l’escalier
— That feeling you get when you leave a conversation and think of all the things you could have, and should have, said. There is no such word in the English language for this.
“Degradation followed display. Reified and emptied, the image was treated like the lowliest of things. Images were broken, burned, toppled, beheaded and hanged. They were spat, pissed and shat on, tossed into toilets, sewers, fountains, canals, rivers, rubble heaps, garbage dumps, pigsties and charnel houses, and lewdly handled in brothels and inns. Stone statues were used as cobblestones, keystones and infill, or were modified to represent something new.
It takes two to make a thing go right. With famous books the first time is already the second, since we approach them already knowing them. The cautious, common, saying of ‘re-reading the classics’ turns out to be an innocent voracity. We are always, somehow, re-reading a classic because we have encountered some previous incarnation of it. A refraction in other stories, texts, or versions.”
— Everything Has Been Photoshopped, Oliver Laric
— Versions, by Oliver Laric, 2010.
— Ballet Méchanique, by Fernand Leger, 1924.
“All of life in its complexity and beauty is forever minted in the gold of words.”
— Yevgeny Zamyatin
“Why do we need theatre at all? (…) By all accounts, theatre should be dead.”
— Elizabeth Diller, ‘Scanning: The Aberrant Architectures of Diller + Scofidio’.
— Gareth Pugh, by Ruth Hogben, 2011.
“Historical does not mean retaining or repeating what is old, for this would destroy history. To act in a historical manner means to introduce something new that at the same time continues history.”
— Karl Friedrich Schinkel
“A man’s face is his autobiography”
— Quote edited from the original by Oscar Wilde.
— Robert De Niro photographed by Hedi Slimane.
They were the children of Marx and Coca-Cola. We are just the children of Coca-Cola.
Architecture? It’s like a language, of sorts, a language of matter used to fill the empty space between the self and the other.
“There is only one dream worth having: to live while you are alive and die only when you are dead … To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.”
— Arundhati Roy, Come September.
“Radio Host: What’s your latest obsession?
Hank Moody: Just the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber. You know, I mean, we have all this amazing technology, and yet, computers have turned into basically four-figure wank-machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but-but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24-hour day access to kiddie porn. People – they don’t write anymore; they blog. Instead of talking, they text – no punctuation, no grammer – “LOL” this and “LMAO” that. You know, it just seems to me that it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.”
— Hank Moody, Californication.
“The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.”
— Frank Lloyd Wright
She lives. She breathes.
In this city, which is loosely mine, loosely his, and loosely yours, life moves at 16 miles per hour.
— London, I sometimes think of you.
“The buildings were packaged objects, just as much as album covers or cologne bottles, and the name was the label that signaled how to read the rest of the accoutrements.”
— Author Unknown
“We discovered painfully how to see with a million eyes at once, how to feel the texture of the atmosphere with a million wings.”
— Olaf Stapledon
Time itself is a measuring system where we perceive changes and events within its construct. We may call this event in time a moment in time, or of time, and within it we perceive an event in its entirety. It is a changing and amalgamated body that is composed of colours, smells, sounds, movements, textures, communication, attached to memory, detached from memory. This moment has neither beginning nor end but rather crescendoes as a sensory and psychological experience of note to the person who is experiencing it. But we take note of it, or we do not, and it still happens. I will even go so far as to term an object an event, a stationary moment. If we can imagine that time is a by-product of the awareness of this moment and its simultaneous attachment to that which has passed, it will be where we see the colours, hear the sounds, and feel the textures, a culmination of all of the senses together, changing, morphing, joining, rupturing, disappearing, appearing. There is a moment where it is present, and a moment when it passes on to the next. Here it becomes a fragment of the past, relegated to the psyche where it is just another part of an amorphous body of memories.
We are back and hope you all have had a good summer.
“The construction of situations begins beyond the ruins of the modern spectacle. It is easy to see how much the very principle of the spectacle — nonintervention — is linked to the alienation of the old world. Conversely, the most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators’ psychological identification with the hero so as to draw them into activity. …The situation is thus designed to be lived by its constructors. The role played by a passive or merely bit-part playing ‘public’ must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new sense of the term, ‘livers,’ must steadily increase.”
— Guy Debord
Your face is the sound of her dry palm brushing over your skin, moving in waves crashing in and fading away
Her hair is the crackling of fire blazing, trailing, between your fingers
That dims until silent as the bright morning approaches
Her body ablaze in morning light, she burns
Slowly
Sensing, helplessly, acutely
Marvelling, in this moment
“Tu as tout à apprendre, tout ce qui ne s’apprend pas: la solitude, l’indifférence, la patience, le silence. Tu dois te déshabituer de tout: d’aller à la rencontre de ceux que si longtemps tu as côtoyés, de prendre tes repas, tes cafés à la place que chaque jour d’autres ont retenue pour toi, ont parfois défendue pour toi, de traîner dans la complicité fade des amitiés qui n’en finissent pas de se survivre, dans la rancoeur opportuniste et lâche des liaisons qui s’effilochent.”
— Georges Perec, Un homme qui dort.
However long or short, however socially constrained or erotically desiring, a kiss is the coming together of two similar but not identical surfaces, the geometry of which softens and flexes when in contact perhaps to deform, a performance of temporary singularities, a union of bedazzling convergence and identification during which time separation is inconceivable yet inevitable. Kissing confounds the division between two bodies, pouring them together temporarily to create new definitions of boundary, loosening the fixity of form and structure, and updating the metric of time. Further, one cannot speak when kissing and hence, while often charged with significance, kissing interrupts how faces and facades communicate, substituting affect and force for representation and meaning. Kissing is the end of faciality.
Process negates the article when the article is the process.
I am all that is not me.
The mask is in a perpetual state of becoming the countenance of your being.
Your face, half tangible, illuminated.
Dully awakening my senses in a vision of skin like fatigued satin reflecting the sun, with eyes that allow the affected to almost perceive itself.
The light.
The light casts a shadow and there my senses become new born thoughts and unaware meaning.
So dark, I cannot see.
So light, I cannot see.
My dull senses, an untiring awakening.
On devrait rêver.
Ricordo un angolo di cielo
Dove ti stavo ad aspettar
Ricordo il volto tanto amato
E la tua bocca da baciar
— Dalida Yolanda Cristina Gigliotti Morisse
The sea was sometimes in love with the sand.
Let me tell you a secret about my sister.
Really, she likes birds because she is one.
She forgot to tell you that she has wings. They hide underneath her heavy dark blue coat with the wide sleeves, and flutter softly whenever she gets the urge to fly away.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
— Oscar Wilde
― Tim Walker
Gravity won’t forget you.
“Behind the smooth surface lake there are no illusory poplars but the intense life of water. Behind the mirror lies the metal with its particular properties. If it is possible to compare our mind with this mirror, this is because its silver coating is represented by the red flow of our desire. In any case, in this unfamiliar apparatus the variation of the images is a far from gratuitous indication of the first phase in the transformation”
— Pierre Mabille, Mirror of the Marvellous
“The mirror acts as a metaphor for a love affair of such intensity that one’s own Self vanishes in the mirror of one’s lover: ‘I am lost, truly lost, to the reality of a mirror which does not reflect my appearance. Lost to its desires. I view myself as prey. Without a yesterday, without a tomorrow. This pure face starts anew. The most important day of my life, forever’.”
— Paul Éluard
“Like ivy, we grow where there is room for us”
Now utilising mybox.zaynabdenaziari.com (thanks to RM at DIN476)
Turn me to gold in your sun light.
A vessel into which characters and personalities run like phantoms.
“The skin disappoints …
… Clearly the only thing he possesses weighs upon him. It is superfluous since possession and being do not coincide. Possessing it is the cause of misunderstanding in human relations. I have an angel’s skin, but I am a jackal; a crocodile skin, but I am a puppy; I have black skin, but I am white; a woman’s skin, but I am a man. I never have the skin of what I really am. There is no exception to the rule, because I am never what I have.”
— (Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni, ‘La Robe’)
“In the hour of adversity be not without hope, For crystal rain falls from black clouds”
“Without memory there would be no recognition – no value systems – no sense of time – and finally, no expectations”
Iran, our thoughts and hearts are with you.
ما بت شکنیم، شیشه شکن نیستسم
Everything is connected.
Through every layer, side, and dimension;
Between light and dark, sound and silence, all that is left to do is connect the dots.
The real is that which is outside language, that which resists absolute symbolisation. It is itself. The real is an object of anxiety in that it lacks a form of symbolic mediation. It is (im)possibly (un)attainable.
— Jacques Lacan, ‘The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis’, 1954–1955.
The rorschach test is a method of psychological evaluation in which the subjects perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analysed using intuitive insight, and complex scientifically derived algorithms. (What do you see?)
“Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible, exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication.”
— Jean Baudrillard
“When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.”
— Antonin Artaud, “To Have Done with the Judgment of God” in ‘Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings’, Susan Sontag (ed). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976, p. 571.
The façade constitutes a part of reality, though often playing the role of concealment.
Cause an inversion.
Turn it all inside out so there is no outside.
There is nothing to be concealed anymore.
The line is the defining of a dichotomy. There is no dichotomy. If there is no dichotomy, there can be no delineation. There is no line. Without a line, there can be no outside. With no outside there is only the void. The void is the void.
Step into the mirror.
Make the walls speak, remove the walls.
Expose the processes of your r/evolutions on your skin, remove the skin.
You are the projector of your closed little universe.
A million veils fall.
There you are.
In favour of the formulation of patterns that can be broken.
“Hyperreality, which characterises the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy, especially in technologically advanced postmodern cultures. Hyperreality characterises the way consciousness defines what is actually “real” in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter the original event or experience being depicted.”
― Jean Baudrillard.
i am real
“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more, it is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world — in order to set up a shadow world of ‘meanings’.”
— Susan Sontag
Dichotomy is an illusion; chaos does not exist.
Every breaking of a habit produces a change in the machine (keep breaking).
As our minds attain non-linear associative powers, that do away with the static mold of analog information, we will finally break through the speed barrier of thought.
“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the universe.”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
Man made structures and mythologies. They are always perfectly matched.
..and every word is like an unnecessary stain on reticence.
I have dreams that bring me closer
No skin
No outside to this inside
No membrane, layers of fabric and skin,
Separating me, dividing me, falsifying me
I am a mass of void, imploding, exploding
We have our masks and our mirrors.
Concealing no faces, alluding no reflections.
“There is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience. In most cases these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as “signs” that recall to us former images.”
“There are three processes [in memory formation]: pure memory, memory-image and perception, of which none of them in fact, occurs apart from the others. Perception is never a mere contact of the mind with the object present; i is impregnated with memory-images which complete it as they interpret it. The memory-image, in its turn, partakes of the “pure memory”, which it begins to materialise, and of the perception in which it tends to embody itself: regarded from the latter point of view, it might be defined as a nascent perception.
Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we become conscious of the unique act by which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first, in the past in general, then, in a certain region of the past – a work of adjustment, something like the focusing of a camera. But our recollection still remains virtual; we simply prepare ourselves to receive it by adopting the appropriate attitude. Little by little it comes into view like a condensing cloud; from the virtual state it passes into the actual; and as its outlines become more distinct and its surface takes on colour, it tends to imitate perception. But it remains attached to the past by its deepest roots, and if, when once realised, it did not retain something of its original virtuality, if, being a present state, it were not also something which stands out distinct from the present, we should never know it for memory.”
— Bergson, ‘The Definition of Images’ and ‘Matter and Memory’
There is nothing beneath.
In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the pace of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign ‘a secret’, and ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text) liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law.
(The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes)
“Heidegger said that if you were to experience your own being to the full, you would be experiencing the decay of that being toward death as part of your experience.”
(Wallace to Andre, in ‘My Dinner With Andre’)
Is it true? Or would you find yourself, in the pure clarity of each moment, always fixed in the fluidity of the present? There is memory. There is no past, there is no future; there is only now. According to Bergson’s explanations, our intelligence retains a series of positions as to a question of movement: first one point reached, then another, then still another. But should something happen between these points, immediately the understanding intercalates new positions, and so on indefinitely. It refuses to consider transition. He insists that it is not the “states”, simple snapshots we have taken once again along the course of change, that are real; on the contrary, it is flux, the continuity of transition, it is change itself that is real. This change is indivisible, it is even substantial. Everything is in a state of undeniable flux.
‘Time and Free Will’
Poetry.
“But we might ask ourselves whether nature is beautiful otherwise than through meeting by chance certain processes of our art, and whether, in a certain sense, art is not prior to nature. … If musical sounds affect us more powerfully than the sounds of nature, the reason is that nature confines itself to expressing feelings, whereas music suggests them to us. … The poet is he with whom feelings develop into images, and the images themselves into words which translate them while obeying the laws of rhythm. … but we should never realise these images so strongly without the regular movements of the rhythm by which our soul is lulled into self-forgetfulness, and, as in a dream, thinks and sees with the poet.”
Space.
“We find in architecture, in the very midst of this startling immobility, certain effects analogous to those of rhythm. The symmetry of form, the indefinite repetition of the same architectural motive. … Thus art aims at impressing feelings on us rather than expressing them; it suggests them to us, and willingly dispenses with the imitation of nature when it finds some more efficacious means. … the feeling of the beautiful is no specific feelings, but that every feeling experienced by us will assume an aesthetic character, provided that it has been suggested, and not caused.”
Time.
“…in order to perceive a line as a line, it is necessary to take up a position outside it, to take account of the void which surrounds it, and consequently to think a space of three dimensions? … In a word, pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalise themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number: it would be pure heterogeneity. … when you attribute the least homogeneity to duration, you surreptitiously introduce space. … time at first seems to us to be a measurable magnitude, just like space. … If I picture these sixty oscillations to myself all at once by a single mental perception, I exclude by hypothesis the idea of a succession. I do not think of sixty strokes which succeed one another, but of sixty points on a fixed line, each one of which symbolises, so to speak, an oscillation of the pendulum. …without altering the way they are produced in space, I shall be compelled to think of each oscillation to the exclusion of the recollection of the preceding one, for space has preserved no trace of it; but by doing so I shall condemn myself to remain forever in the present; I shall give up the attempt to think a succession or a duration.”
Inside becomes outside.
Outside becomes everything.
From the Crystalline Foot (a computer generated poem)
Slowly happiness shifts on that hairless, heirless sea.
While happiness was away, the rampant spiders played
and her hair radiated around them like darting flames.
Born at Cleopatra’s feet, a girl, a child.
Listless, never.
Helpless, never.
But most certainly dreaming,
Most certainly being.
The light flopped in violent circles –
Her anguish exposed.
She kneels, a young woman, a child,
Watching Cleopatra from the crystalline foot.
It crumbles over her face.
Happiness is on it’s way
(It’s on it’s way)
(adapted from a piece of text created by a random generator).
I am a girl
Made of dreams
Made of bones.
I am memory
Pure memory in form.
Forgotten my beginning.
Do not know the end.
Work with urgency, begin again, reconstruct meaning, seek to give simple explanations to complex thoughts, and unravel the beauty of simplicity with apparent randomness and mystery.
Lightning flashes that “open a void, a moment of silence, a question without an answer, provoke a breach without reconciliation where the world is forced to question itself.” 1 We work around a de-centering. This de-centering implies that what we are speaking of is something that has no clear definition. The center is the void, and what exists is around it. It is twofold.
So how does one go about delineating, and then make an actualisation with ourselves as the mediator, through text, 2D imagery, or 3D simulation, of the void?
What is the void?
Where does the void stop, and that which is its antithesis begin? Does it even have an antithesis?
“How do we touch a line?”
Is there a line?
The line is the defining of a dichotomy. There is no dichotomy. If there is no dichotomy, there can be no delineation. There is no line
― 1. The Archaeology of Knowledge, by Michel Foucault
Let the right ones in wherever they come knocking.
Politely guide the wrong ones to the door.
(cut out the noise)
an excerpt from my dinner with andre.
Imagine a broken glass. In your memory, it was once a complete form that embodied some kind of function, practical or aesthetic. But it hits a hard surface and shatters – it is shattered by a destructive act. The broken glass is no longer an object in its previous state or form. It has assumed a transitory state of being with a potentiality to become a new object, or objects. Right now, right in this very moment, in its shattered and fragmented state, it is a new object. From one state of being to transposing itself into another. This potentiality was previously only an embodied potential before it was shattered and was, seemingly, destroyed. Fragmented pieces are gathered, reconfigured, and stuck back together again. Now a new form comes into being through a creative act rendered possible only by destruction. The opposite of destruction. So an apparently ‘static’ object, in its current state, always embodies the potential to be or to become something else through a recomposition that rests on the pivot of destruction.
Creation can come about through the process of destruction. Destruction is a form of creation. They just want to see what will happen when they tear the world apart…
“Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china. The dining-room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the seriousness of creators – and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become.” (Graham Greene, ‘The Destructors’)
Unravel
Where is my beginning?
Where is my beginning?
What beginning?
With words I continuously try to move backwards, while willing them to carry me forwards.
I am confronted with the limitations of speech.
The translations, the words and what they merely represent, become lost in a nowhere somewhere between my mind and my tongue.
I wish you could understand me silently,
My beginning, the pulse that begins in me just before the spring. Just before my birth.
I am nothing. Not even a memory.
Yet here I am. Neither beginning nor end.
Lost in a nowhere somewhere between my mind and my tongue.
Suspend the play of causality, vacate the factory
And let her hang in peace,
Where she has nothing to decide. Nothing to communicate.
She is a piece of machinery operating by itself,
And all she has to do is be here, as a deliberate figure, a form.
Responsibility imposed upon her, and communication goes back and forth.
Without will.
She blinks.
She is.
Without will.
0
Zero. It was invented so that we could count and measure unthinkably large, unwieldy numbers It was then that we began to measure space and so time.. Zero (0). Nothingness. It represents from itself, as the source, the vast and endless state of nothing, but the implication of a beginning.
Branches are bare with a pulse underneath,
Flowering slowly inside.
The Individual/Universal As Expressed Through Words
‘When we express ourselves, we say more than we want to
We think we express the individual,
but we express the universal.
I am cold,
It is I who says “I am cold”
But it is not I who is heard
I disappeared between these two moments of speech.
All that remains of me is the man who is cold
and this man belongs to everywhere.
Where do you live?
In language, and I cannot keep quiet.
In speaking, I throw myself into an unknown place
a foreign land.
And suddenly I become in charge of it.
I have to become universal.
To realise, with humility, with caution
by means of my own flesh
the universality I carelessly threw myself into out of thoughtlessness
that is my sole possibility,
that is my sole commandment.
I said that I love.
That is the promise.
I said that I love.’
(JLG/JLG)
Memory (Part I)
Memory. The Mind. Attached. Imaginary space.
Photographs. Films. Memory. Detached. Detachable. Imaginary space. Back to the mind again.
Memory. It’s cheap, and continuously getting cheaper. Detachable memory forms have brought a new dimension to an otherwise dimensionless space. But, I believe, thats a whole other story (so expect something on this soon)..
Within the context of cheap memory forms meaning gets reduced to nothing, memory is reduced to nothing when everything is recorded. Memory becomes valueless because every damn single thing has a place for documentation – something I am guilty of myself when you put me in an event and slap a camera in my hand. Perhaps this could even mean that events in our lives become valueless when everything is presented upon the same plane. A call for some serious editing in the future, I think. But when every last mediocre piece of our lives can be saved, frozen in time on an external medium – is it simply to remind us that we exist, and to remind them that we existed.
Some more thoughts on the unity of London
Stereotypes are essentially what keep us ‘safe’ from one another; they set up boundaries between the ‘us’ and ‘them’. They create imaginary borders based solely upon our ideas of other people. We have this inane desire to put people into boxes, and never cease to be surprised when people play up to our expectations, but are even more stupefied when they don’t. I don’t understand. The cultural set-up of a divided-united city exposes a real lack of social, cultural, and class based integration projected upon NYC. London is certainly starting to sparkle with the familiar dream that continues to inspire Manhattan. An American Dream, perhaps?
Leading to a ghetto-isation of the city through the inclusion of mental stereotypes.
In the first moment maybe nothing was said.
Or maybe it was everything.
It was love
It was a reconciliation with the old man
With his breath that you have not yet breathed.
You united your tongue with your voice and you found yourself in one that no longer exists.
Silent. Quiet. Disquiet.
Refusal of time.
Silent. Quiet. Serene.
Reconciliation with time.
In that moment there was only Yes. The source that gave way to another Yes.
Yes
Yes
It is everything
“..One snapshot leads to another.
Hiding from one another, each is
A dandified center of its own universe.
And each is accompanied by its own time. ..”
(Shuntaro Tanikawa)
I could move from here, from this place that I find that I have sat myself while I write. I could be anywhere, but I do not suspect that it would make much difference to where my physical self is positioned when I am always in the same place within my nonphysical self. Here I am centered. The goddess of my household, of my body, the central point of my universe, is all and nothing in one instance.
We are revolving around one another. We are the ebb and flow of this tide.
If I am part of the universe, then the universe is also part of me. If I am the all then I am also the nothing. There is no line, here, between existing and not existing, between being and not being. They kindly hold one another’s hand. They are the night and the day to one another, the gradient in between, flowing between one another. Never separated. They are the perfectly matched lovers. And with the constant ebb and flow, they make one what the other is not.
Fluxus Poetry
Visual poetry. Visual poetry that has flux. That’s what Fluxus is, in a nutshell. The visual distinctions, in the first example I saw, were set apart through the use of words that were scattered, and moved around, in a very simplified form, reminiscent of the old commercial used when BBC television would go to sleep for the night. The video is usually created during a performance. It wasn’t exactly using moving images as poetic representations, as the limitations of my understanding permitted, but was of a more graphic design nature. Dispersal of broken words with interesting fonts to an irregular beat, did not necessarily match the soundtrack, though were somehow symbiotic in nature. There was no expression of poetic structures and destructions to embody a sense of depth and form. Perhaps the architect in me needed it (or wanted it) to be more spatial, to derive more and more meaning from the poetry itself, its rhythms, structures, formations, the semantics of words used, and use strategic positioning and forms of the words themselves to illustrate, or emphasize, the meaning. Here though it is essentially a montage, a rigid symbiosis of words and images, without depth or form, to pleasing effect. But I definitely need to understand more..
(from the fluxus heidelberg center)
Serenity is confronted by the moribund dominance of these corpses of solid skin.
Confronted by the constant noise from transient objects.
You do not see.
Confronted by dirt.
You very almost coalesce.
Silent. You have found your niche.
― (somewhere in Marseille; somewhere under the Waterloo Bridge)
Surrender reason to the heart.
Here, I fall away
And in my falling, in my rest, I reveal the secrets composed by my body
That existence that limits the world
That ends my sentences before they have begun, that is
The division in the indivisible, but
The rhythm in the stanza
The art in the word
The poetry in the image.
The contradiction.
Surrender. The heart in my voice. The reason in my heart. Surrendered.
And as I fall away from my silent yielding that speaks in rhythms,
In sentences without end, I am lost in the passing breath of the eternal repose of our bodies.
And I compose for you images through the word.
Decomposed.
Revealed.
Ending.
Just beginning.
Always beginning.
my Religion, my Trinity
After a short but thought provoking conversation with a new friend at an old friends birthday dinner it was brought to light, with the slightest hint of disbelief in his choice of words, that the Austrian church requests a mandatory tax from all working Christians. It got me thinking about religion, and why I said “no” to being of a religion.
Religion, in linguistic terms, could either be understood as faith, hopefulness, or optimism for a higher being; or it (they) could fall into being construed in real terms as ideology, which simply makes it a theorisation in the differing guises of Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Taoist, Zoroastrian, etc. So, I was of course somewhat surprised to hear that it was mandatory for all Christian residents of the country to pay this tax. Being under the assumption, within the confines of the restrictions of my own way of thinking, that to give is to give of choice, and to give of your heart – not necessarily of your bank balance. Not to mention, should you be one who does not pay, you may then potentially be outcast in the heretic nature of not following the mass. The beauty of giving of oneself, or ones numbers, lies in the choice of giving as in the choice to receive. Of course, it followed that I was then asked if I had a religion, a natural progression of a nature that I have grown accustomed, and completely understand. My reply was a plain and simple “no”, though I was not against religion per se, and do believe that if pure it could be an intrinsic part of society as long as it goes hand in hand with mutual respect for one anothers life choices, based on a policy of ‘live, and let live’. But I digress. Maybe my answer was too finite. No. It is definitely too finite, the fabricated world is not black and white, therein existing a whole spectrum from either extreme. It puts an end where one may discover that there may not, or should not, be one – like ending a sentence before its completion. So my thoughts begin like this…
My religion is in here (pointing to my head), in here (pointing to my heart), in life wanting life – in ‘my’ trinity, not that of the Christian Godhead. My religion is in my movement, in my actions, in my thoughts, and interactions; in the sun that gives life to me, and the darkness that takes it away. I am the light and the dark, the good and the bad, I am the choice. My religion comes from my roots, from my soul, the root and only root, and it is with a liquidity that travels forward reforming forms and significance, and like the wind it cannot be caught. It has no physical embodiment save the moments that my speechless soul speaks with another soul. And this has no name.
I do not pass through the doors of a Church to kneel before the image of Christ, or to worship a God of linguistic fabrication. To give God a name, is to create in the unphysical a physicality. Words fail us again, and will continue to fail here. So, if I pass through any doors it will be the doors of my own soul, where I am to kneel before the nothing that exists within me with the highest of respect. The nothing of the all. Of which you, and I, him and her, are one.
The Limitations of Language
…’What is an object?..
Perhaps it is a link enabling us to pass from one subject to another, therefore to live together. But since social relations are always ambiguous. Since thought divides as much as it unites. Since words unite or isolate by what they express or omit. Since an immense gulf separates my subjective awareness from the objective truth I represent for others. Since I constantly blame myself, though I feel innocent. Since every event transforms my daily life. Since I constantly fail to communicate. Since each failure makes me aware of solitude … since … Since I cannot escape crushing objectivity or isolating subjectivity. Since I cannot rise to the state of being, or fall into nothingness, I must listen, I must look around more than ever. The world … my kin … my twin.
The world alone today when revolutions are impossible and wars threaten me. When capitalism is unsure of its rights and the working class retreats when the lightning progress of science brings the future terribly near. When the future is closer than the present. When the distant galaxies are at my door … my kin, my twin …
Where is the beginning?
But what beginning?
‘God created heaven and earth’. But one should be able to put it better. To say the limits of language, of my language are those of the world, of my world, and that in speaking I limit the world, I end it. And when mysterious, logical death abolishes these limits there will be no question, no answer, just vagueness. But if things come into focus again this can only be through the rebirth of conscience. Everything follows from this’…
To talk is to create images that are not objects but evocations of memory to form a transitory series of frames in ones mind. Always in a state of fluidity. To talk is to recreate, a recreation that forms for itself a subjective representative of an otherwise objective existence. Words, for this reason, can never really say what one is really trying to say.
(in reference to two or three things i know about her)
these words pass through you before they reach your ears
history goes, breathing it’s life through me
through you
through love
through laughter and fading ink, finger tips, and the seasons that fade in and out of one another in a straight line and perpetual breath
it dances through the leaves of trees
and kisses the heads of the sleeping and awake
these are not my words
they have been inked onto my body
as each curve that wraps itself endlessly
around me
thin threads weaving a web connecting me to other life,
another stanza,
yet another breath
you tell your story through me, and i through you
through each salty tear, smile, touch
each bend in the road that dances freely,
creating forms and patterns it will never know it makes
each glance
each bonding of the void between our bodies, and the weaving web
connecting you to all in thin threads
you continue your slow, determined, tale
and the leaves quiver in time with the gentleness of your enduring movements.
On Space and Inner Space
“perhaps it will be necessary to formulate the idea of a precision instrument, concretely visualizing it, in order to undertake a rigorous inner analysis. and it will surely be necessary to reduce the mind to some kind of real matter with a space for it to exist in. all of this depends on an extreme refinement of our inner sensations, which, when taken as far as they can go, will doubtless reveal or create in us a space just as real as the space that is occupied by material things and that, come to think of it, has no reality.
for all I know, this inner space may just be a new dimension of the other one. perhaps scientific research will eventually discover that everything is dimensions of the same space, which is neither physical nor spiritual, so that in one dimension we live as bodies and in another as souls.”
i am the trembling heart of a bird
the unsure voice of its song
i am the nervous movement towards an intimate kiss
the moment lips touch with a determined softness
you, of rejection
you destroy me so that they can no longer remember
you break me down because you think they will forget
you resent this humble earth that covers my remains
and wish to submerge our untold secrets with your tainted intent
drowning of our secrets, drowning of our name
the life of me runs through them
a life always routing itself towards tomorrow
they will hold the sun within their mouths to shed light on everything unknown
on everything untold
will be told
will be told with each tomorrow
our sun will dry your drowning waters
to bring back the day
to bring back the land
the light within their mouths will kiss the flame onto tomorrow
so that they will always remember
so that they will never forget
so she goes to embrace her parents
and this is why she embraces her name
they tell the secret, the secret story of where she came
with each memory
each connection to our beginning
each bond of the light within our mouths
we become heirs to the light
we, of the light
Note: Pasargad, Iran, home to the ancient tomb of Cyrus the Great – the founding father of the first known Declaration of Human Rights – is under threat by the flooding of the Sivand Dam by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hundreds of unexcavated archealogical sites in the Bolaghi Gorg (Tang-e Bolaghi) will be completely emersed by water from the dam, set to flood that whole area. It is also thought that the change in moisture levels in the air will damage the ruins of Persepolis, the palace of the ancient Iranian Empire, by speeding up the decomposition of the limestone that it is made from. These are important living pieces of history for the whole world and both Pasargad and Persepolis are world heritage sites. Please show your support against the filling of Sivand Dam and the flooding of these places of antiquity by signing the online petition. See below for more information on the dam, the effects, and the committee organised to put a stop to this. Remember the beautiful Buddhas of Bamyan…
[this poem was completed on the 8th of december, 2005. it was written for a documentary to be shown on an LA based iranian tv channel (channel 1) about the construction of the sivand dam. click here to sign the petition]
…farsi translation at save pasargad
…english at save pasargad
Debate London: is London a United City?
on june 22nd, 2007, i attended one of a series of debates, being held in the turbine hall at the tate modern, as part of the global cities exhibition, to discuss the future of london. that nights debate asked the question ‘is london a united city?’. it was the usual set up, a chairman (the very witty hardeep singh kohli), the panel, an audience, and the floor, who were sat – some lying – on cushions on the floor of the giant concrete slope of the turbine hall. it set a relaxed scene, and illustrated one of the many uses for the massive void that makes the hall. a place for assemblage, discussion, connections, over art. but, on to the debate itself..
the panel was highly opinionated when it came to the subjects of the economy and the state of housing, and these as driving forces for the economic and class polarization that they believed to be an imminent future for london. this type of polarization is definitely occuring in the borough of tower hamlets, where we have one of the poorest boroughs in the country, with some of the poorest people, living on the doorstep of canary wharf (one of the fastest growing economic centres) and a new portion of wealthy people. this certainly dealt with ’cause and effect’. cause being the disparity in class and economics, and the effect being that the two sides live on one anothers door-steps but understand very little about one another. the panelists did not tackle the current state of unity, or what could be done about the future state of unity if things continue down the road that they are on, which was slightly disappointing. but the general feeling from the floor was that london does not have enough platforms to encourage social integration. rich people were ‘arrogant’ and the poor their target, and there are ‘not enough green spaces’. (this was the generalised opinion; however true it may be would need properly researching).
but arrogant or modest, green spaces or not, would you say it is united? as a whole? can we permeate any portion of the cities many parts if we so wish? or is it simply disparate groups of people unified in their own peculiar similarities, permeable only if we embody a similar peculiarity? if there is unity, where and how does it occur? are we unified in difference? .. culture, origins, class, fashion, accent, locality, appearance, age, gender, sexuality, income .. does all this make a difference to your experience of london and how you fit into it as a unified organism… ?
thats if it is a unified organism.
after living here all my life, though my childhood idealism of an urban utopia would probably have a differing opinion, i would be inclined to say that the new reality of london (but not necessarily ‘londoners’ like myself) is one comprised of a set of ‘disparate groups unified under their own peculiar similarities’. these groups seem to live side-by-side in relative harmony, and if you smile at a person they will smile back. but we tend to join forces because we “have something in common”. though if there is nothing or nowhere to bring us together (i.e. places of social gathering, schools, community centres, green spaces, etc.), to encourage us to break invisible boundaries, too institutionalised in our nature to be broken by a smile, then we are left standing only amongst those with qualities that we recognise in ourselves. oh how boring. and what an alarming glimpse of future.
(favela morumbi, sao paulo, brazil)
Inamorato
lovers cannot lay down the desire for dreaming in an embrace;
brings back the longing days of lying in soft grass, staring at clouds,
longing for them to be something different,
turning them into something different
inamorato
nature forming you, transforming itself
always remembering warmth,
remembering him in a smile,
and her hand in yours
and the dreaming
the dreaming.
dreams transforming you.
forming themselves.
The amazing roar of nothingness when you close your eyes
Where there, there, is some kind of greatness to being
To touching the raw surfaces shrouding silence in a fury of beauty and confusion
You, surrounded by thousands of mouths and movements expelling various expressions forming veils like stirring clouds, an expanse of rousing silk,
Layer upon layer until there is form,
The hint of a shape.
An object.
A body.
Another shroud.
The amazing roar of nothingness when you close your eyes
You, an accessory to nothingness.
You, the ornamented mantle of quiet.
Spark the sun
The sun within my mouth
Steeped in burning colours
Drowning in you
Drowning in your colour
Finally we are no-one
Rags of ash
To wear us
The Moving Body of the City
“by tattooing walls you free them from architecture and turn them once again into living social matter, into the moving body of the city before it has been branded with functions and institutions”
the solidity of a piece of architecture becomes fluid, it is concealed by a fabric which can be removed (by some kind of chemical agent) and then replaced, added to, or amended. like a piece of clothing covering the body, the significance of the exterior membrane of this architecture is determined by time, by its fluidity, by its ability to change and be changed.
have they passed themselves tonight?
illusive beauty and its enchanting face consumes the air with darkened fog
in your minds you are fragmented, split between your enchantment and what your eyes cannot see
beyond your facade
through the fog
through the night
you do not know if you have passed you
you do not even know if you exist beyond the illusive beauty of this bodies enchantment
if you are fragmented, split between you and you?
you consume pallid lovers
within the mouth of starvation
fainting to the image of your face
never knowing if what you hungered for was ever satisfying your poor and empty body.
the soft sigh of the rising sun echoes to and from you
as it goes to, we melt into one in the dream of the eternal day
if you can catch the light
we could melt into one in its reality
so we will fade into the shadow
and the soft sigh of the setting sun echoes, fades
the light you caught will keep us
in hope
we melt
the day goes on forever and the night never ends
remember me as the moment when the sun arises
forget me in the moment that it sets
i am left without covering
the sun sighing from my naked body
and i stand for a lifetime
without knowing that each sigh is tied to the heart of a bird
each thread breaking as its wings touch the night.
Her
her
carried on the wings of winter winds
and her slowly yielding belly is heaving with life
the weight of her time bears down on the branch of the naked apple tree
winter
you read the same story into the next lifetime
next, it reads you
The wind will carry you
To a place where small hands paint pictures of dreams
In the vivid colours of the wings of birds in flight, flying present
Flying present,
Coming ahead to a place to carry you to the unfamiliar
To a dream you have never seen
Where your feet draw the warmth of the soft papery sand, with eyes intent upon the ground
Wishing to become a sheet of paper,
Wishing to become the ground,
So you can write yourself upon your own sandy body
Then the wind comes to carry you away
Until there is nothing left but a blank sheet of paper
And no pen to write with
Shelter
I saw a man sat in the hollow of a doorway about 30cm deep, near my home. It was daytime. I was going out. I thought no more of him.
9 months later, it was night time. I was coming home. The man was still sat there, in the hollow of the doorway. It was as if he had not moved, frozen in one position with his head resting on his knees, his hands hugging his legs that face the door frame, and the subtle hunch of his back almost, but not quite, resting on the frame to the other side.
