"The federal government responded [to increased labour hostility in Canada due to the 1975 wage controls imposed by the government] by abandoning the idea of generalized wage controls, substituting instead changes in monetary policy that would drive up unemployment. A policy document prepared for cabinet by the Department of Finance in late 1980 argued that a policy of higher unemployment would reduce the bargaining power and militancy of unions and workers, driving down the rate of increase in money wages and eventually inflation."
- Building a Better World: An Introduction to Trade Unionism in Canada, by Errol Black & Jim Silver
If anyone can provide me with further information on the policy document mentioned above, I would much appreciate it.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Friday, December 9, 2011
"In most films, the setting or background of each framed scene augments the main action, which involves a plot or story concerning human beings. One aspect of the perspective implied by such a construction bears on the centrality of human beings—and especially of certain human beings: the ones we call the stars—in relation to their environment or setting. Beginning with [Days of] Heaven, Malick presents human action as if it were indistinct from its setting. Frequently his camera enters in the middle of conversations between characters; the “story” is interrupted by mysterious strangers or the taking flight of birds; crucial plot developments are elided for features of landscape or light. Commentators have tended to describe the non-narrative aspects of Malick’s art in familiar ways—as metaphors for inner states or the conflicts between his characters. But one senses in his films an imagery that resists being reduced to metaphor; it is through this imagery that Malick introduces us to a variety of significance that exists independent of man’s ability to discern or even to destroy it."
- from The Perspective of Terrence Malick
- from The Perspective of Terrence Malick
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Friday, December 2, 2011
"Are you not afraid that the poor man put into the dock for snatching a piece of bread from a baker's stall will not, one day, become so enraged that stone by stone he will demolish the Stock Exchange, a wild den where the treasure of the state and the fortune of families are stolen with impunity?"
- La Ruche populaire, November 1842,
quoted in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, by Michel Foucault.
- La Ruche populaire, November 1842,
quoted in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, by Michel Foucault.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
I kind of wonder whether or not anyone would contribute to an Internet database of dreams? User-contributed, this database would be searchable for recurrent themes, etc. And by dreams, I do not mean hopes for the future, wishes for such and such, I mean actual sleeping dreams. You would come on the site, input your dream, and it would somehow be searchable. Would there be any interest in such a project?
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Self-immolations on the rise in Tibet (Aljazeera)
A Tibetan monk set himself on fire last week while shouting slogans calling for the Dalai Lama's return to Tibet during a religious ritual watched by hundreds, the advocacy group International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) reported last week.
[...]
The most recent immolation has become the tenth this year. Nine others have set themselves on fire since March in Sichuan's Aba prefecture [...].
At least five have died of their wounds, including Tenzin Wangmo, a 20-year-old nun, who set herself alight last month while reportedly calling out for the end of Chinese rule and the return of the exiled Dalai Lama to Tibet.
China, which has asserted its jurisdiction over Tibet since occupying the Himalayan region in the 1950s, claims that the immolations are "terrorism in disguise" propagated by the Dalai Lama and outside Tibetan independence groups.
[...]
A Tibetan monk set himself on fire last week while shouting slogans calling for the Dalai Lama's return to Tibet during a religious ritual watched by hundreds, the advocacy group International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) reported last week.
[...]
The most recent immolation has become the tenth this year. Nine others have set themselves on fire since March in Sichuan's Aba prefecture [...].
At least five have died of their wounds, including Tenzin Wangmo, a 20-year-old nun, who set herself alight last month while reportedly calling out for the end of Chinese rule and the return of the exiled Dalai Lama to Tibet.
China, which has asserted its jurisdiction over Tibet since occupying the Himalayan region in the 1950s, claims that the immolations are "terrorism in disguise" propagated by the Dalai Lama and outside Tibetan independence groups.
[...]
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Excerpts from Slavoj Zizek's speech, October 9, at Occupy Wall Street, Liberty Plaza, New York City:
In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times.
A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors. So he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me is written in blue ink ,it is true what I said. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.
This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom war and terrorism and so on falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.
[...]
So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostalgically remembering what a nice time we had here. Promise ourselves that this will not be the case.
We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much!
from Today Liberty Plaza had a visit from Slavoj Zizek (occupywallst.org)
In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times.
A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors. So he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me is written in blue ink ,it is true what I said. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.
This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom war and terrorism and so on falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.
[...]
So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostalgically remembering what a nice time we had here. Promise ourselves that this will not be the case.
We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much!
from Today Liberty Plaza had a visit from Slavoj Zizek (occupywallst.org)
Monday, September 26, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
Be Drunk:
You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."
- Charles Baudelaire
You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."
- Charles Baudelaire
Friday, September 16, 2011
Taken separately, any of the lines that make up the drawing of the face would "mean" nothing---they would simply be "squiggles," simply examples of different sorts of curves or line segments. Taken together, however, the sense of each resonates with the sense of all the others, answers to the expectations the others set, and through each the "rhythm" of the face is communicated. For the vision that takes them together, they are the compelling presentation of a form.
At the basic level, then, these are all examples of ways in which particular aspects of sense call for a resolution or response---a fulfillment---in another aspect of sense. The body's grasp of one such aspect of sense sets up in that body a felt need for---a propulsion toward---the other. The dots impel me to notice their regular pairing, and the music propels me to dance. In other settings, a doorknob calls me to grasp and turn it, an open highway urges me to drive quickly, and the smooth, repetitive undulations of sand dunes invite me to wander aimlessly. It is in this way that the body senses as a propulsion to fulfillment in further sense that I will call "rhythm." What we can see here is that sense and action are not separable: perception is a kind of acting, a bodily answering to a call that allows something to be realized.
- John Russon, "Bearing Witness to Epiphany: Persons, Things, and the Nature of Erotic Life," p. 14.
At the basic level, then, these are all examples of ways in which particular aspects of sense call for a resolution or response---a fulfillment---in another aspect of sense. The body's grasp of one such aspect of sense sets up in that body a felt need for---a propulsion toward---the other. The dots impel me to notice their regular pairing, and the music propels me to dance. In other settings, a doorknob calls me to grasp and turn it, an open highway urges me to drive quickly, and the smooth, repetitive undulations of sand dunes invite me to wander aimlessly. It is in this way that the body senses as a propulsion to fulfillment in further sense that I will call "rhythm." What we can see here is that sense and action are not separable: perception is a kind of acting, a bodily answering to a call that allows something to be realized.
- John Russon, "Bearing Witness to Epiphany: Persons, Things, and the Nature of Erotic Life," p. 14.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Damastes (Also Known As Procrustes) Speaks:
My movable empire between Athens and Megara
I ruled alone over forests ravines precipices
without the advice of old men foolish insignia with a simple club
dressed only in the shadow of a wolf
and terror caused by the sound of the word Damastes
I lacked subjects that is I had them briefly
they didn't live as long as dawn however it is slander
to say I was a bandit as the falsifiers of history claim
in reality I was a scholar and social reformer
my real passion was anthropometry
I invented a bed with the measurements of a perfect man
I compared the travelers I caught with this bed
it was hard to avoid---I admit---stretching limbs cutting legs
the patients died but the more there were who perished
the more I was certain my research was right
the goal was noble progress demands victims
I longed to abolish the difference between the high and the low
I wanted to give a single form to disgustingly varied humanity
I never stopped in my efforts to make people equal
my life was taken by Theseus the murderer of the innocent Minotaur
the one who went through the labyrinth with a woman's ball of yarn
an imposter full of tricks without principles or a vision of the future
I have the well-grounded hope others will continue my labor
and bring the task so boldly begun to its end
By Zbigniew Herbert.
My movable empire between Athens and Megara
I ruled alone over forests ravines precipices
without the advice of old men foolish insignia with a simple club
dressed only in the shadow of a wolf
and terror caused by the sound of the word Damastes
I lacked subjects that is I had them briefly
they didn't live as long as dawn however it is slander
to say I was a bandit as the falsifiers of history claim
in reality I was a scholar and social reformer
my real passion was anthropometry
I invented a bed with the measurements of a perfect man
I compared the travelers I caught with this bed
it was hard to avoid---I admit---stretching limbs cutting legs
the patients died but the more there were who perished
the more I was certain my research was right
the goal was noble progress demands victims
I longed to abolish the difference between the high and the low
I wanted to give a single form to disgustingly varied humanity
I never stopped in my efforts to make people equal
my life was taken by Theseus the murderer of the innocent Minotaur
the one who went through the labyrinth with a woman's ball of yarn
an imposter full of tricks without principles or a vision of the future
I have the well-grounded hope others will continue my labor
and bring the task so boldly begun to its end
By Zbigniew Herbert.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
The Hallelujah-Chorus perception of the sun makes it a far more real sun than the guinea-sun, because more imagination has gone into perceiving it. Why, then, should intelligent men reject its reality? Because they hope that in the guinea-sun they will find their least common denominator and arrive at a common agreement which will point the way to a reality about the sun independent of their perception of it. The guinea-sun is a sensation assimilated to a general, impersonal, abstract idea. Blake can see it if he wants to, but when he sees the angels, he is not seeing more "in" the sun but more of it. He does not see it "emotionally": there is a greater emotional intensity in his perception; but it is not an emotional perception: such a thing is impossible, and to the extent that it is possible it would produce only a confused and maudlin blur---which is exactly what the guinea-sun of "common sense" is. He sees all that he can see of all that he wants to see; the perceivers of the guinea-sun see all that they want to see of all that they can see.
- Northrop Frye, from Fearful Symmetry
- Northrop Frye, from Fearful Symmetry
Monday, September 12, 2011
Sunday, September 11, 2011
And, to return for a moment specifically to dreams, we should note that there are cultures other than our own in which dreams are understood very much as ours understands poems -- as harbringers of growing wisdom or sound reasons to change one's life -- and in which they -- dreams -- don't stand in need of the explications we require. ...
And indeed, if a roughly Freudian model of dream interpretation is correct, then it seems we should at least entertain the possibility of the dream not merely as interpretand but as interpretiens. -- The dream as, in some cases, a re-structuring or translation of its own: as a raid on the articulate -- language, logic, kidnapped by connectedness, a dense protean vision of the world. Proof that you've understood such expressions is not that you can translate them, or translate them back, into secondary process, but that you are left breathless with the shock of meaning -- with the recognition of 'having been gone up to,' as Wittgenstein would put it, with the sense of "several things dovetailed in [the] mind," as Keats would say.
- Jan Zwicky, from "Dream Logic and the Politics of Interpretation."
And indeed, if a roughly Freudian model of dream interpretation is correct, then it seems we should at least entertain the possibility of the dream not merely as interpretand but as interpretiens. -- The dream as, in some cases, a re-structuring or translation of its own: as a raid on the articulate -- language, logic, kidnapped by connectedness, a dense protean vision of the world. Proof that you've understood such expressions is not that you can translate them, or translate them back, into secondary process, but that you are left breathless with the shock of meaning -- with the recognition of 'having been gone up to,' as Wittgenstein would put it, with the sense of "several things dovetailed in [the] mind," as Keats would say.
- Jan Zwicky, from "Dream Logic and the Politics of Interpretation."
Saturday, September 10, 2011
"I want to restrict the term 'name' to what cannot occur in the combination 'X exists'. -- And so one cannot say 'Red exists', because if there were no red, it could not be spoken of at all." -- More correctly: If "X exists" amounts to no more than "X" has a meaning -- then it is not a sentence which treats of X, but a sentence about our use of language, that is, about the use of the word "X".
- Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations, from §58.
For a large class of cases of the employment of the word "meaning" -- though not for all -- this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
- from §43.
- Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations, from §58.
For a large class of cases of the employment of the word "meaning" -- though not for all -- this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.
- from §43.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Don't let it bother you that languages (2) and (8) [these are examples Wittgenstein had previously given in the text: 'thought-experiments' concerning languages] consist only of orders. If you want to say that they are therefore incomplete, ask yourself whether our own language is complete -- whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in to it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.
- Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations, §18.
- Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations, §18.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
"Violin Phase by Steve Reich. Performed at Concert 13 of Music08 June 21, 2008 by Matthew Albert, Nick Naegele, Yei-in Jin, and Chi-Fan Tai."
Saturday, September 3, 2011
The Other Village:
Sometimes I take a moment off and I remember the village and the people I used to know. I remember how we read each other's thoughts. Then I say to myself: What is the use of remembering. I long for them and the sweet taste of their company. No longing can raise the stones on each other again or pull back the sea from the orchards. I live near a different part of the sea. The hawks present their wings to the sky straight and muscled. Close by, my baby daughter, crying, sounds like the child of another people.
The Other Village:
When it comes to lamentations
I prefer Aretha Franklin
to, let's say, Leonard Cohen
Needless to add, he hears a different drum
- from Leonard Cohen's Death Of A Lady's Man
Sometimes I take a moment off and I remember the village and the people I used to know. I remember how we read each other's thoughts. Then I say to myself: What is the use of remembering. I long for them and the sweet taste of their company. No longing can raise the stones on each other again or pull back the sea from the orchards. I live near a different part of the sea. The hawks present their wings to the sky straight and muscled. Close by, my baby daughter, crying, sounds like the child of another people.
The Other Village:
When it comes to lamentations
I prefer Aretha Franklin
to, let's say, Leonard Cohen
Needless to add, he hears a different drum
- from Leonard Cohen's Death Of A Lady's Man
Thursday, September 1, 2011
Post #300:
Like the primitive Indian musical systems, deep song is a stammer, a wavering emission of the voice, a marvelous buccal undulation that smashes the resonant cells of our tempered scale, eludes the cold, rigid staves of modern music, and makes the tightly closed flowers of the semi-tones blossom into a thousand petals.
Flamenco does not proceed by undulation but by leaps. Its rhythm is as sure as that of our own music, and it was born centuries after Guido of Arezzo had named the notes.
Deep song is akin to the trilling of birds, the crowing of the rooster, and the natural music of forest and fountain.
- Federico GarcÃa Lorca, from "Deep Song", in "In Search of Duende"
Like the primitive Indian musical systems, deep song is a stammer, a wavering emission of the voice, a marvelous buccal undulation that smashes the resonant cells of our tempered scale, eludes the cold, rigid staves of modern music, and makes the tightly closed flowers of the semi-tones blossom into a thousand petals.
Flamenco does not proceed by undulation but by leaps. Its rhythm is as sure as that of our own music, and it was born centuries after Guido of Arezzo had named the notes.
Deep song is akin to the trilling of birds, the crowing of the rooster, and the natural music of forest and fountain.
- Federico GarcÃa Lorca, from "Deep Song", in "In Search of Duende"
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Jan Zwicky, from Introduction to Hard Choices: Climate Change in Canada (edited by Harold Coward and Andrew J. Weaver).
Climate change is only one of several human-induced environmental---what?....crises? difficulties? challenges? Any noun I might choose has political spin, defines allegiances, presupposes a point of view. Robert Bringhurst puts the point succinctly:
Being will be here.
Beauty will be here.
But this beauty that visits us now will be gone.
---(1995, p. 200)
It is hubris to imagine our species can destroy everything, or even everything that matters to it, just as it is hubris to imagine we are what evolution is "for," or that human interests are distinct from and ontologically superior to all others.
"Why is there something rather than nothing?"---A question that has no answer, but one that is rooted in a fact that has absorbed and moved great thinkers from Lao Tzu to Heidegger. Which is not to say that you have to be a philosophical genius to experience astonishment that things exist: it's a common experience among the naturalists and poets of my acquaintance. [...] Our astonishment is the mark of our mortality. Is-ness is, always; but what is, this, is here only now. The love we feel for concrete particulars---a stand of birch, a stretch of river, no less than other human beings---is as biologically basic as our sexual mode of reproduction. We must love what dies and we must love because we die. Plato, like other religious thinkers in other traditions, sought to ease the pain attendant on this inheritance by encouraging us to fix our erotic gaze on eternity, on the non-particularized being that informs everything that is. But me, I'm with Herakleitos: "The things of which there is seeing, hearing, and perception, these do I prefer" (Diels, 1934, Fr. 55). I would be the last to deny the power of universal, atemporal being; it's just that because I'm human---that is, because I love and die---it's only half the story. "Nameless:" says the Tao Te Ching, "the origin of heaven and earth./ Naming: the mother of ten thousand things" (1993, chap. 1). Those ten thousand things are the other half of the story. They are the manifestations through which the mystery flows, without which it would be invisible, of which we are one. We hope because, quite apart from the philosophers, we have good reason to believe that beauty will be here: there will be trees and grass and rivers and, unless we are staggeringly stupid, a few humans around to appreciate them. We grieve because we also have reason to believe that this beauty---at least some among these copses, these grasslands, these shorelines---will not survive. That is what this book is about: the grounds for that hope, and that grief.
Climate change is only one of several human-induced environmental---what?....crises? difficulties? challenges? Any noun I might choose has political spin, defines allegiances, presupposes a point of view. Robert Bringhurst puts the point succinctly:
Being will be here.
Beauty will be here.
But this beauty that visits us now will be gone.
---(1995, p. 200)
It is hubris to imagine our species can destroy everything, or even everything that matters to it, just as it is hubris to imagine we are what evolution is "for," or that human interests are distinct from and ontologically superior to all others.
"Why is there something rather than nothing?"---A question that has no answer, but one that is rooted in a fact that has absorbed and moved great thinkers from Lao Tzu to Heidegger. Which is not to say that you have to be a philosophical genius to experience astonishment that things exist: it's a common experience among the naturalists and poets of my acquaintance. [...] Our astonishment is the mark of our mortality. Is-ness is, always; but what is, this, is here only now. The love we feel for concrete particulars---a stand of birch, a stretch of river, no less than other human beings---is as biologically basic as our sexual mode of reproduction. We must love what dies and we must love because we die. Plato, like other religious thinkers in other traditions, sought to ease the pain attendant on this inheritance by encouraging us to fix our erotic gaze on eternity, on the non-particularized being that informs everything that is. But me, I'm with Herakleitos: "The things of which there is seeing, hearing, and perception, these do I prefer" (Diels, 1934, Fr. 55). I would be the last to deny the power of universal, atemporal being; it's just that because I'm human---that is, because I love and die---it's only half the story. "Nameless:" says the Tao Te Ching, "the origin of heaven and earth./ Naming: the mother of ten thousand things" (1993, chap. 1). Those ten thousand things are the other half of the story. They are the manifestations through which the mystery flows, without which it would be invisible, of which we are one. We hope because, quite apart from the philosophers, we have good reason to believe that beauty will be here: there will be trees and grass and rivers and, unless we are staggeringly stupid, a few humans around to appreciate them. We grieve because we also have reason to believe that this beauty---at least some among these copses, these grasslands, these shorelines---will not survive. That is what this book is about: the grounds for that hope, and that grief.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Friday, August 19, 2011
How The Late Autumn Night Novel Begins:
The ferryboat smells of oil and something rattles all the time like an obsession. The spotlight's turned on. We're pulling in to the jetty. I'm the only one who wants off here. "Need the gangway?" No. I take a long tottering stride right into the night and stand on the jetty, on the island. I feel wet and unwieldy, a butterfly just crept out of its cocoon, the plastic bags in each hand are misshapen wings. I turn round and see the boat gliding away with its shining windows, then grope my way towards the familiar house which has been empty for so long. There's no one in any of the houses round about.... It's good to fall asleep here. I lie on my back and don't know if I'm asleep or awake. Some books I've read pass by like old sailing ships on their way to the Bermuda triangle to vanish without a trace.... I hear a hollow sound, an absentminded drumming. An object the wind keeps knocking against something the earth holds still. If the night is not just an absence of light, if the night really is something, then it's that sound. Stethoscope noises from a slow heart, it beats, goes silent for a time, comes back. As if the creature were moving in a zigzag across the Frontier. Or someone knocking in a wall, someone who belongs to the other world but was left behind here, knocking, wanting back. Too late. Couldn't get down there, couldn't get up there, couldn't get aboard.... The other world is this world too. Next morning I see a sizzling golden-brown branch. A crawling stack of roots. Stones with faces. The forest is full of abandoned monsters which I love.
- Tomas Tranströmer
The ferryboat smells of oil and something rattles all the time like an obsession. The spotlight's turned on. We're pulling in to the jetty. I'm the only one who wants off here. "Need the gangway?" No. I take a long tottering stride right into the night and stand on the jetty, on the island. I feel wet and unwieldy, a butterfly just crept out of its cocoon, the plastic bags in each hand are misshapen wings. I turn round and see the boat gliding away with its shining windows, then grope my way towards the familiar house which has been empty for so long. There's no one in any of the houses round about.... It's good to fall asleep here. I lie on my back and don't know if I'm asleep or awake. Some books I've read pass by like old sailing ships on their way to the Bermuda triangle to vanish without a trace.... I hear a hollow sound, an absentminded drumming. An object the wind keeps knocking against something the earth holds still. If the night is not just an absence of light, if the night really is something, then it's that sound. Stethoscope noises from a slow heart, it beats, goes silent for a time, comes back. As if the creature were moving in a zigzag across the Frontier. Or someone knocking in a wall, someone who belongs to the other world but was left behind here, knocking, wanting back. Too late. Couldn't get down there, couldn't get up there, couldn't get aboard.... The other world is this world too. Next morning I see a sizzling golden-brown branch. A crawling stack of roots. Stones with faces. The forest is full of abandoned monsters which I love.
- Tomas Tranströmer
Thursday, August 18, 2011
A Story About The Body:
The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity---like music---withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl---she must have swept them from the corners of her studio---was full of dead bees.
- Robert Hass, from Human Wishes.
The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity---like music---withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl---she must have swept them from the corners of her studio---was full of dead bees.
- Robert Hass, from Human Wishes.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Monday, August 8, 2011
L68:
A live metaphor is a linguistic short-circuit. Non-metaphorical ways of speaking conduct meaning, in insulated carriers, to certain ends and purposes. Metaphors shave off the insulation and meaning arcs across the gap.
A dead metaphor is one in which this arcing between gestalts no longer occurs. Its energy has been diverted into and contained by the culture’s linguistic grid.
- from Jan Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor.
A live metaphor is a linguistic short-circuit. Non-metaphorical ways of speaking conduct meaning, in insulated carriers, to certain ends and purposes. Metaphors shave off the insulation and meaning arcs across the gap.
A dead metaphor is one in which this arcing between gestalts no longer occurs. Its energy has been diverted into and contained by the culture’s linguistic grid.
- from Jan Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
What it will be Questiond When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight I look thro it & not with it.
- William Blake, from "[A Vision of the Last Judgment]," The Poetry and Prose of William Blake.
- William Blake, from "[A Vision of the Last Judgment]," The Poetry and Prose of William Blake.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Ballaké Sissoko & Vincent Segal: Oscarine
Timber Timbre: Trouble Comes Knocking
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, a furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war.
If the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it's as if this life had never been.
And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition.
- Viktor Shklovsky, from "Art as Device" in Theory of Prose.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Sunday, July 24, 2011
L89:
Loss is perhaps the ultimate philosophical problem --- and death, only incidentally and to the extent it is experienced as loss by those who remain alive. The great absolute architectonics of systematic thought are intended to secure the world against loss. Maturity is achieved when things are let go, left to be on their own, allowed their specificity; for although they become then most fully themselves, they become then most fully losable. To abandon classical system is to accept, in the sense of comprehend, the ontological necessity of loss. The more precious a thing is, the greater becomes its power to hurt us by simply being absent. We end up 'leaving each thing as it is' in two senses of the word 'leave'.
- from Jan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy.
Loss is perhaps the ultimate philosophical problem --- and death, only incidentally and to the extent it is experienced as loss by those who remain alive. The great absolute architectonics of systematic thought are intended to secure the world against loss. Maturity is achieved when things are let go, left to be on their own, allowed their specificity; for although they become then most fully themselves, they become then most fully losable. To abandon classical system is to accept, in the sense of comprehend, the ontological necessity of loss. The more precious a thing is, the greater becomes its power to hurt us by simply being absent. We end up 'leaving each thing as it is' in two senses of the word 'leave'.
- from Jan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
Deer come out of the poplars just as day becomes night; they move in the blue air. Dropped grain near the house glistens in the hollow they've licked and stamped over the weeks into snow. Their bodies are dense with strangeness and are weightless, brief electric arcs on the eye, eloquent, two does faring well this winter, bow-sided, v-faced, coming down the slope through low willow and wild rose that holds the last of light. They stop repeatedly, their coloratura caution; their bodies seem the constant, quavering afterglow of this strained attention. Yet the gold of the grain pulls the goldenness of them. They come the last steps quickly along a path notched with their prints from nights before and bend to eat. Shadow soaks into them. One of them jerks up a look, then the other. They see me standing by the woodpile. They stare. I stare.
Consciousness walks across the land bridge of the deer's stare into the world of things. This is knowing. It tastes of sorrow and towering appetite. Their look seems a bestowal; I feel more substantial, less apologetic as a physical thing from having been seen. The traded look goes on in the building dark. There is no intention here, nothing of fairy tale of hagiography, animals lying down with the solitary, animals bearing messages, scrolls caught in the clefts of their hoofs. There is only wild seeing, the feel of it unimaginable: I am seen straight through (of that, no doubt) but cannot say how I am seen. Travelling back through the conductor of this gaze, something of me, a slant I'd never guess, enters them. Their look has a particularity, an inexpressibility, so highpitched it attracts myths. No wonder some say the darkness of the forest is a god.
When consciousness crosses the divide into the wilderness of what is there, it expects to find a point of noetic privilege: at last a clear view into the heart of things. But what it does find on the other side is further peculiarity, a new version of distance. The deer bend again to eat, then again nod up a stare. The world is a collection of oddnesses, things so gathered into themselves, so ruthlessly at home and separate, they seem to shine with difference --- poplar, these does, wild roses. The weirdness, unreachability of things, is not abolished by any sudden aberration of intimacy, fluked into being by a deer's look, but is intensified by it. The desire to feel otherness as selfhood, to be the deer seeing yourself, remains; for me it never leaves, the old residue of Paradise, that amicable common life desire seems to remember, the old bone it never quits gnawing. Nor does language's impulse to shrug off their distance vanish. Yet both are qualified by the unyielding unlikeness of specific things.
Looked at by the does in the falling light, I am "seen home", attended closer to the centre of what is, deked from a stance of noetic propriety, an heirloom of spirit soberly passed on to me, the mind's fine aloofness from bodies. The long stare is the occasion of a loss of cognitive rectitude, a debauch in the low life of objects. But at home through the other's look, the things of home seem even more deeply themselves, "known" are further enclaustered in idiosyncracy. The opposite of objective removal from the world is not subjective union but an intensely felt differentiation. The deer show out from around the word "deer" and they have no name.
The world is its names plus their cancellations, what we call it and the undermining of our identifications by an ungraspable residue in objects. To see it otherwise, to imagine it caught in our phrases, is to know it without courtesy, and this perhaps is not to know it at all. To see with presumption is only to note the effects of one's bright looks, the glimmering classifications, the metaphors, is merely to watch oneself confidently gazing. The Franciscan John Duns Scotus said individuality was intrinsically intelligible, though perhaps not to us in our present state --- in the body, after the Fall. Perhaps never, perhaps to no one. Perhaps individuality is not to be known, only lived with, each haecceitas helping to shape the other by its proximity. The desire to belong to what the deer belongs to, the wildness, the thereness, is mortified but remains true. You crane forward into the world in appetite and enter it in sorrow knowing that this good desire that casts you out of yourself is right and must not be lost but is necessarily and sharply frustrated.
- Tim Lilburn, from "How To Be Here?", in Living In The World As If It Were Home.
Consciousness walks across the land bridge of the deer's stare into the world of things. This is knowing. It tastes of sorrow and towering appetite. Their look seems a bestowal; I feel more substantial, less apologetic as a physical thing from having been seen. The traded look goes on in the building dark. There is no intention here, nothing of fairy tale of hagiography, animals lying down with the solitary, animals bearing messages, scrolls caught in the clefts of their hoofs. There is only wild seeing, the feel of it unimaginable: I am seen straight through (of that, no doubt) but cannot say how I am seen. Travelling back through the conductor of this gaze, something of me, a slant I'd never guess, enters them. Their look has a particularity, an inexpressibility, so highpitched it attracts myths. No wonder some say the darkness of the forest is a god.
When consciousness crosses the divide into the wilderness of what is there, it expects to find a point of noetic privilege: at last a clear view into the heart of things. But what it does find on the other side is further peculiarity, a new version of distance. The deer bend again to eat, then again nod up a stare. The world is a collection of oddnesses, things so gathered into themselves, so ruthlessly at home and separate, they seem to shine with difference --- poplar, these does, wild roses. The weirdness, unreachability of things, is not abolished by any sudden aberration of intimacy, fluked into being by a deer's look, but is intensified by it. The desire to feel otherness as selfhood, to be the deer seeing yourself, remains; for me it never leaves, the old residue of Paradise, that amicable common life desire seems to remember, the old bone it never quits gnawing. Nor does language's impulse to shrug off their distance vanish. Yet both are qualified by the unyielding unlikeness of specific things.
Looked at by the does in the falling light, I am "seen home", attended closer to the centre of what is, deked from a stance of noetic propriety, an heirloom of spirit soberly passed on to me, the mind's fine aloofness from bodies. The long stare is the occasion of a loss of cognitive rectitude, a debauch in the low life of objects. But at home through the other's look, the things of home seem even more deeply themselves, "known" are further enclaustered in idiosyncracy. The opposite of objective removal from the world is not subjective union but an intensely felt differentiation. The deer show out from around the word "deer" and they have no name.
The world is its names plus their cancellations, what we call it and the undermining of our identifications by an ungraspable residue in objects. To see it otherwise, to imagine it caught in our phrases, is to know it without courtesy, and this perhaps is not to know it at all. To see with presumption is only to note the effects of one's bright looks, the glimmering classifications, the metaphors, is merely to watch oneself confidently gazing. The Franciscan John Duns Scotus said individuality was intrinsically intelligible, though perhaps not to us in our present state --- in the body, after the Fall. Perhaps never, perhaps to no one. Perhaps individuality is not to be known, only lived with, each haecceitas helping to shape the other by its proximity. The desire to belong to what the deer belongs to, the wildness, the thereness, is mortified but remains true. You crane forward into the world in appetite and enter it in sorrow knowing that this good desire that casts you out of yourself is right and must not be lost but is necessarily and sharply frustrated.
- Tim Lilburn, from "How To Be Here?", in Living In The World As If It Were Home.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
L75:
In a metaphor, a gesture that takes its life from one context is suddenly manifest as a gesture in a context in which we had not noticed its possibility before.
That is: there is what Wittgenstein would have called an internal relation between the two contexts.
L76:
The metaphor does not establish new internal relations; it shows us ones that were already there.
"The eyes are windows." What is created here is not a resemblance; rather, noticing the resemblance creates (among other things) a deeper appreciation of the peculiar relation of certain types of beings to their bodies. In understanding the metaphor, we see the body (mammalian, only?---avian, too, certainly; amphibian? reptilian?---icthyic? insectival?) as both transparent, and as an enclosure (a prison; a house). To say "window" invokes simultaneously intimacy and separation; to see, but not to touch. To say the eyes are windows explains the peculiar kind of emotional shock we can get when we meet another being's eyes. (This shock is perhaps less shocking if we are thoroughgoing dualists but, of course, such experiences may be among the reasons we incline to such an odd and notoriously problematic view.) The metaphor explains the shock, in part, because it leaves its mystery intact. For, clearly, the eyes aren't windows, they're eyes; the body isn't a house or a prison---there's no real estate market in incarnations, no wardens with offices and keys. The metaphor thus echoes the experience of struggling with illness: we are, and are not, our bodies. It moves us to the extent that in it we confront and allow ourselves to be puzzled by the shape of our mortality.
L77:
"The eyes are windows." This changes, among other things, the way we understand houses.
- from Jan Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor.
In a metaphor, a gesture that takes its life from one context is suddenly manifest as a gesture in a context in which we had not noticed its possibility before.
That is: there is what Wittgenstein would have called an internal relation between the two contexts.
L76:
The metaphor does not establish new internal relations; it shows us ones that were already there.
"The eyes are windows." What is created here is not a resemblance; rather, noticing the resemblance creates (among other things) a deeper appreciation of the peculiar relation of certain types of beings to their bodies. In understanding the metaphor, we see the body (mammalian, only?---avian, too, certainly; amphibian? reptilian?---icthyic? insectival?) as both transparent, and as an enclosure (a prison; a house). To say "window" invokes simultaneously intimacy and separation; to see, but not to touch. To say the eyes are windows explains the peculiar kind of emotional shock we can get when we meet another being's eyes. (This shock is perhaps less shocking if we are thoroughgoing dualists but, of course, such experiences may be among the reasons we incline to such an odd and notoriously problematic view.) The metaphor explains the shock, in part, because it leaves its mystery intact. For, clearly, the eyes aren't windows, they're eyes; the body isn't a house or a prison---there's no real estate market in incarnations, no wardens with offices and keys. The metaphor thus echoes the experience of struggling with illness: we are, and are not, our bodies. It moves us to the extent that in it we confront and allow ourselves to be puzzled by the shape of our mortality.
L77:
"The eyes are windows." This changes, among other things, the way we understand houses.
- from Jan Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
On Parables:
Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: "Go over," he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something that he cannot designate more precisely either, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.
Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You have won.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.
By Franz Kafka.
Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: "Go over," he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something that he cannot designate more precisely either, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.
Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You have won.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.
By Franz Kafka.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
From "Notes on Poetry and Philosophy"
in Wonderful Words, Silent Truth, by Charles Simic,
quoted in Wisdom & Metaphor, by Jan Zwicky:
My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc.... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear....
in Wonderful Words, Silent Truth, by Charles Simic,
quoted in Wisdom & Metaphor, by Jan Zwicky:
My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc.... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear....
Monday, June 20, 2011
The Seer Letter #2, or Lettre de Rimbaud à Paul Demeny - 15 mai 1871:
excerpts:
All ancient poetry ended in Greek poetry, harmonious life. -- From Greece to the romantic movement--Middle Ages--there are writers and versifiers. From Ennius to Theroldus, from Theroldus to Casimir Delavigne, it is all rhymed prose, a game, degradation and glory of countless idiotic generations: Racine is pure, strong and great. -- If his rhymes had been blown out and his hemistichs mixed up, the Divine Fool would today be as unknown as any old author of Origins. -- After Racine, the game get [sic] moldy. It lasted two thousand years!
Neither joke nor paradox. Reason inspires me with more enthusiasm on the subject than a Young France would have with rage. Moreover, newcomers are free to condemn the ancestors. We are at home and we have the time.
Romanticism has never been carefully judged. Who would have judged it? The critics! The Romantics? who prove so obviously that a song is so seldom a work, that is to say, a thought sung and understood by the singer.
For I is someone else [Car Je est un autre: I is an other]. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. This is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes its stir in the depths, or comes on to the stage in a leap.
If old imbeciles had not discovered only the false meaning of the Ego, we would not have to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, for times immemorial, have accumulated the results of their one-eyed intellects by claiming to be the authors!
In Greece, as I have said, verses and lyres give rhythm to Action. After that, music and rhymes are games and pastimes. The study of this past delights the curious: several rejoice in reviving those antiquities--it is for them. Universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas naturally; men picked up a part of these fruits of the mind: people acted through them and wrote books about them. Things continued thus: man not working on himself, not yet being awake, or not yet in the fullness of the great dream. Civil servants, writers: author, creator, poet, that man never existed!
The first study of the man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it! It seems simple: in every mind a natural development takes place; so many egoists call themselves authors, there are many others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! -- But the soul must be made monstrous: in the fashion of the comprachicos [kidnappers of children who mutilate them in order to exhibit them as monsters], if you will! Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face.
I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.
The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his super-human strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed--and the supreme Scholar!--Because he reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other collapsed!
from The Seer Letter #2
(French: Lettre de Rimbaud à Paul Demeny - 15 mai 1871)
excerpts:
All ancient poetry ended in Greek poetry, harmonious life. -- From Greece to the romantic movement--Middle Ages--there are writers and versifiers. From Ennius to Theroldus, from Theroldus to Casimir Delavigne, it is all rhymed prose, a game, degradation and glory of countless idiotic generations: Racine is pure, strong and great. -- If his rhymes had been blown out and his hemistichs mixed up, the Divine Fool would today be as unknown as any old author of Origins. -- After Racine, the game get [sic] moldy. It lasted two thousand years!
Neither joke nor paradox. Reason inspires me with more enthusiasm on the subject than a Young France would have with rage. Moreover, newcomers are free to condemn the ancestors. We are at home and we have the time.
Romanticism has never been carefully judged. Who would have judged it? The critics! The Romantics? who prove so obviously that a song is so seldom a work, that is to say, a thought sung and understood by the singer.
For I is someone else [Car Je est un autre: I is an other]. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. This is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes its stir in the depths, or comes on to the stage in a leap.
If old imbeciles had not discovered only the false meaning of the Ego, we would not have to sweep away those millions of skeletons which, for times immemorial, have accumulated the results of their one-eyed intellects by claiming to be the authors!
In Greece, as I have said, verses and lyres give rhythm to Action. After that, music and rhymes are games and pastimes. The study of this past delights the curious: several rejoice in reviving those antiquities--it is for them. Universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas naturally; men picked up a part of these fruits of the mind: people acted through them and wrote books about them. Things continued thus: man not working on himself, not yet being awake, or not yet in the fullness of the great dream. Civil servants, writers: author, creator, poet, that man never existed!
The first study of the man who wants to be a poet is the knowledge of himself, complete. He looks for his soul, inspects it, tests it, learns it. As soon as he knows it, he must cultivate it! It seems simple: in every mind a natural development takes place; so many egoists call themselves authors, there are many others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves! -- But the soul must be made monstrous: in the fashion of the comprachicos [kidnappers of children who mutilate them in order to exhibit them as monsters], if you will! Imagine a man implanting and cultivating warts on his face.
I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer.
The Poet makes himself a seer by a long, gigantic and rational derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness. He searches himself. He exhausts all poisons in himself and keeps only their quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he needs all his faith, all his super-human strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the one accursed--and the supreme Scholar!--Because he reaches the unknown! Since he cultivated his soul, rich already, more than any man! He reaches the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them. Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other collapsed!
from The Seer Letter #2
(French: Lettre de Rimbaud à Paul Demeny - 15 mai 1871)
Monday, June 6, 2011
Globe and Mail: Four-year-old opens art exhibition in New York; paintings sell for $9,900
Aelita Andre:
Marla Olmstead:
Kieron Williamson:
Aelita Andre:
Marla Olmstead:
Kieron Williamson:
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