presence.

i was thinking about human presence, and how everything you put into a conversation with someone you know never stands alone, except, perhaps the first time (and i am not even sure of that). you are always coiled up into the Werdegang of the entire relationship from time immemorial. you weigh words, intonations, gestures, traces, absences, you even weigh presence.

so intangible, yet so material. it is in looking back briefly at skype conversations that i realise that an ontology of human life based on energetic flow, as silly as it may sound at first reading, is pretty plausible. for how else can you possibly describe the kinds of threads that connect us? those magnetic fields that we navigate and that we find pretty constant with people, even though they may be disregarded in case of behaviours etc – how do we account for the stuff we feel?

i still circle the old, unanswerable questions. the moth and the light? the bird which knows its south (ma boussole)? i do it perhaps out of habit, perhaps out of lingering curiosity, perhaps in the vain glory of glimpsing at the answer in the midst of the fog for a second – unexpected, it would shake me for a fortnight! i do it perhaps because i am still trying to cope with the shattering co-existence of presence and absence. and untimeliness. not lucid eternity, but zähflüssige untimeliness.

and this is not just a first to third person incommensurability problem.

saturday afternoon musings.

“[S]ome evolutionists will protest that we are caricaturing their view of adaptation. After all, do they not admit genetic drift, allometry, and a variety of reasons for nonadaptive evolution? They do, to be sure, but we make a different point. In natural history, all possible things happen sometimes; you generally do not support your favored phenomenon by declaring rivals impossible in theory. Rather, you acknowledge the rival but circumscribe its domain of action so narrowly that it cannot have any importance in the affairs of nature. Then, you often congratulate yourself for being such an undogmatic and ecumenical chap. We maintain that alternatives to selection for best overall design have generally been relegated to unimportance by this mode of argument.”

— The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 205 (1161): 585.

Came across Stephen Jay Gould in my wanderings on biology and evolution. Great stuff, but how on earth can I incorporate it into the article. Hope to figure that out next week.

The article will be something on history and anthropology…

Stay tuned for exciting developments. Muhahahaha.

when in doubt, turn to him.

When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Sonnet 24, William Shakespeare

lines on your face.

came across the following reading catherine ingraham…

The ethnologist Robert Ferris Thompson on the power of ‘uprightness’ that the line enacts through its material power. Speaking about linearity as it figures in what he calls the ‘artistic criticism’ of sub-Saharan Africa, Thompson notes that this criticism uses a sophisticated lexicon of the line to judge the degree of ‘visibility’ in African figurative sculpture. ‘Visibility’, Thompson remarks, ‘refers to both clarity of form and clarity of line’. Clarity of line refers to an array of artistic performances that include incising, grooving, and ‘lining’ the eyes, mouths, fingers, ears, and toes of the sculpture. The eye of the face is ‘opened’ by lining it – giving it an inner and outer lining. ‘Linear connoisseurship’ in Yoruba culture is linked with the ritual of cicatrisation – the actual cutting of the face to produce ornamental scars. ‘Since antiquity, Yoruba have adorned their cheeks with lines’, Thompson remarks. ‘They associate lines with civilization. ‘This country has become civilised’ literally means in Yoruba ‘This earth has lines upon its face’. The same verb that refers to marking the face with lines also refers to clearing the bush and establishing civilisation, that is, the uprighting of culture. ‘The basic verb to cicatrise (la)… has multiple associations with the imposing of human pattern upon the disorder of nature: chunks of wood, the human face, and the forest are all ‘opened’, like the human eye, allowing the inner quality of the substance to shine forth’.
This passage articulates rather pointedly how linearity brings with it the mythical power of opening, grooving, and incising, that gives ‘civilised life’ – form, shape, visibility and stature – to land, art, and the human face.

generative potential

I got really interested in generative potential again, this idea that a person, or a thing is full of potency, in waiting, like a seed germinating, but not having to grown fully into some more permanent (adult) state of being that possibly does not allow, to the same degree, unfolding and permanent learning and becoming. This strikes me as one possible reason why children are so beautiful. They have not yet had to narrow down their life course by all kinds of pragmatic decisions and are sheer potential. Just a thought.
Very stimulated today by all kinds of new thoughts. I am glad it still happens from time to time. I hope it never stops entirely, even if there may be prioritising and a degree of plateau to be achieved because of the coming into relief of other life stages.

neruda take 2.

well if this is not romantic, then i don’t know… ;o) the blue flower seems to crop up every few months in this weblog… mysterious! this is from ‘ode to an azure flower’ – crappy title but the poem is looovely.

Walking to the sea,
through the grasslands
— today is November —
everything has already experienced birth,
everything has attained stature,
wave, and fragrance.
Blade of grass, by blade of grass,
I will learn the earth,
footstep by footstep,
until I reach the ocean’s
wild frontier.

Suddenly, a wave of
air shakes the wild barley
into crests and ripples.
At my feet,
a bird leaps into flight.
The Earth is teeming
with golden threads
and anonymous petals.
It shines like a sudden green rose,
wreathed with spines, revealing
its enemy coral,
slim stems, starry
canes.
Each messenger of vegetation that greets
me is infinitely different,
sometimes with rapid prickly sparks,
of fresh, fine, and bitter
pulsations of perfume.

Walking toward the Pacific’s
foamy waves,
I pass with rough steps
through the low grasses
of undiscovered springtime.
It seems
that before the land ends,
a hundred meters before the greatest ocean,
everything has whirled into delirium
germination, and song.
Diminutive grasses
have crowned themselves with gold;
sand plants
emit purple rays,
and each small leaf of forgetfulness
arrives at its destination of moon or fire.

Close to the sea, I am walking
through the month of November.
Between brambles blessed
with light, fire and sea salts,
I discover an azure flower,
child of the rough meadow.
From where, from what source
do you extract your brilliant blue ray?
Do your quivering underground silks
communicate with the deep sea?
I raise the azure flower in my hands,
and look at it;
it seems the sea now exists
in a single drop,
and in the tense encounter between
earth and water,
a flower raises
a small flag of blue fire, of irresistible peace,
of invincible pureness.

the bumblebee.

talking to her about love was not exactly easy. she liked to play games with words as she walked along the sand, grimacing and screaming, at times. she was a little high strung and could be flippant. there was a definite disjuncture between how she felt, at times, and how she chose to act. she did a lot of walking away, in that year because she felt like she could not make happen all the stuff-in-between it takes to go towards all at ease friendship. she also knew that the number of people she would let into that space was restricted.

she could be very much caught up in her work-thought-space, and in dream-space, too – to the point it became her favourite place to be, along with the beach at dawn. playfulness was important to her and she laughed at propositional logic a lot. she enjoyed people’s company and tried to make enough space to remain open to them and for her to catch a glimpse of their spirit.

one day, so the story goes, though, she realised what a recent feeling of doubt had been all about. one morning at the beach a bumblebee as large as a pig came buzzing with a lot of noise and landed in front of her stunned body. It shook its legs, revealing a purple substance that enveloped her almost instantaneously. only after a while could she feel the heat and the panic in her belly.

suddenly all molecules and constituents of matter in motion around her were revealed to her and while she had always thought she knew all about transience, she only really got it now. she could feel the past and the present pressing into her being, and she knew that she would be, actually, fine.

she suddenly realised quite how much, in love, she had felt like fixing everything so she would not lose it. she had liked transience as an aesthetic, stylised away and exteriorised so it would not hurt her. instead of hiding in bursts of avoidance or performances of denial, she took the fear seriously asked it where it came from. and it told her everything.

that pretty much changed everything. yes, reader, everything. ask the bumblebee.

spectrum of light.

nutshell encourages the reading of poetry.

Ultimatum for Man

Now the frontiers are all closed.

There is no other country we can run away to.

There is no ocean we can cross over.

At last we must turn and live with one another.

We cannot escape any longer.

We cannot continue to choose between good and evil

(the good for ourselves, the evil for neighbors);

We must all bear the equal burden.

At last we who have been running away must turn and face it

There is no room for hate left in the world we must live in.

Now we must learn love. We can no longer escape it.

We can no longer escape from one another.

Love is no longer a theme for eloquence, or a way of life for a few to choose whose hearts can decide it.

It is the sternest necessity; the unequivocal ultimatum.

There is no other way out; there is no country we can flee to.

There is no man on earth who must not face this task now.

Copyright © 1976 by Peggy Pond Church

i was led to this while reading rach’s thesis. picture by danielita.

time-pieces-ink.

i can still be unrecognisable among the pupils of high school who gathered, along with me, on the bus stop called charliesgare. in their faces pride shone, they were unencumbered by time and i really wanted to get into their heads just for a second. what kinds of song, fetzen of poetry makes them tick? i discover i still listen to the same music, and i hid one useless tear behind my london hat and extra-large sunglasses.

when i walk around in luxembourg, nothing has changed. i am catapulted back to who i used to be, i still live at home, i remember bascharage215, i am caught in the teenagergroundhogday once again. it twists my brain, because this is not what has happened. i know it, but luxembourg makes it irrelevant. refractions make my life choices broken and irregular, like some stranger without documents arriving just because something pulled her back there.

what are you doing here? they ask. how do you live? why have you not returned?

i need to leave again. been here much too long.and it’s not doing me good.

für meine seele: komm ’s wird zeit

lass uns ziehn in den sog der antwortlosigkeiten und der überdrehten akademickspricksprack

es ist nicht unser zuhause – doch uns fehlt das dokument

das nicht mehr glänzt jedoch jetzt angefertigt gestempelt werden soll muss kann darf.

unser tinten-flecken-geschmiere machte spass-  kinderlachen gefangen mittendrin im spiel

so könnte uns celan er-aufmuntern zum achtgeben und mahlzahn-zwitschern und

vielleicht wacht der glaube damit auf.

komm, wir machen tintenlärm, meine seele!