Humans are tuned for relationship. The eyes, the skin, the tongue, ears, and nostrils---all are gates where our body receives the nourishment of otherness. This landscape of shadowed voices, these feathered bodies and antlers and tumbling streams---these breathing shapes are our family, the beings with whom we are engaged, with whom we struggle and suffer and celebrate. For the largest part of our species' existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every flapping form, with each textured surface and shivering entity that we happened to focus upon. All could speak, articulating in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanings that we felt on our skin or inhaled through our nostrils or focused with our listening ears, and to which we replied---whether with sounds, or through movements, or minute shifts of mood. The color of the sky, the rush of waves---every aspect of the earthly sensuous could draw us into a relationship fed with curiosity and spiced with danger. Every sound was a voice, every scrape or blunder was a meeting---with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly. And from all of these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished.
-- from The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
Friday, December 21, 2012
Thursday, December 6, 2012
Out Walking, Thinking About the Sound of the Viol:
It's a blue sky today, ice
on the step. In the woods,
the beech tree is turning: two branches,
the rest still green. Its leaves
are stiff and supple, a fine
starched leather, more burnt
than tanned. What amazes most,
though, is the colour: its evenness
uncanny; shy, sinewy, a shade
our mothers might deem
serviceable in a shirt or coat, in isolation
unremarkable. Yet leaf against leaf,
branch on branch, that spare bronze
flares: voiceless
and articulate, clean
spoken through.
- Jan Zwicky
It's a blue sky today, ice
on the step. In the woods,
the beech tree is turning: two branches,
the rest still green. Its leaves
are stiff and supple, a fine
starched leather, more burnt
than tanned. What amazes most,
though, is the colour: its evenness
uncanny; shy, sinewy, a shade
our mothers might deem
serviceable in a shirt or coat, in isolation
unremarkable. Yet leaf against leaf,
branch on branch, that spare bronze
flares: voiceless
and articulate, clean
spoken through.
- Jan Zwicky
Initial:
Out of infinite desires rises
finite deeds like weak fountains
that fall back in early trembling arcs.
But those, which otherwise in us
keep hidden, our happy strengths---
they come forth in these dancing tears.
- Rilke
Oh shit.
Yo La Tengo - Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind
"Yo La Tengo"'s name:
The name came from a baseball anecdote. During the 1962 season, New York Mets center fielder Richie Ashburn and Venezuelan shortstop Elio Chacón found themselves colliding in the outfield. When Ashburn went for a catch, he would scream, "I got it! I got it!" only to run into Chacón, who spoke only Spanish. Ashburn learned to yell, "¡Yo la tengo! ¡Yo la tengo!" instead. In a later game, Ashburn happily saw Chacón backing off. He relaxed, positioned himself to catch the ball, and was instead run over by left fielder Frank Thomas, who understood no Spanish and had missed a team meeting that proposed using the words "¡Yo la tengo!" as a way to avoid outfield collisions. After getting up, Thomas asked Ashburn, "What the heck is a Yellow Tango?".
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_La_Tengo
Out of infinite desires rises
finite deeds like weak fountains
that fall back in early trembling arcs.
But those, which otherwise in us
keep hidden, our happy strengths---
they come forth in these dancing tears.
- Rilke
Oh shit.
Yo La Tengo - Pass the Hatchet, I Think I'm Goodkind
"Yo La Tengo"'s name:
The name came from a baseball anecdote. During the 1962 season, New York Mets center fielder Richie Ashburn and Venezuelan shortstop Elio Chacón found themselves colliding in the outfield. When Ashburn went for a catch, he would scream, "I got it! I got it!" only to run into Chacón, who spoke only Spanish. Ashburn learned to yell, "¡Yo la tengo! ¡Yo la tengo!" instead. In a later game, Ashburn happily saw Chacón backing off. He relaxed, positioned himself to catch the ball, and was instead run over by left fielder Frank Thomas, who understood no Spanish and had missed a team meeting that proposed using the words "¡Yo la tengo!" as a way to avoid outfield collisions. After getting up, Thomas asked Ashburn, "What the heck is a Yellow Tango?".
source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_La_Tengo
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Entrance:
Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go...
- Rilke
Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go...
- Rilke
Closing the Cabin:
You can see how it will be:
the stillness in the light,
the vacant squares it makes on the kitchen floor
now the leaves are gone.
The way it gathers the room
into itself: the cups, the empty cuphooks,
the dent in the breadbox --- an eloquence
we'll never manage, language
without tense.
Not ours: we speak
and then our lungs fill up with air again.
We're only passing through.
- Jan Zwicky
Light:
Light's on
now
in three
sided balcony
window mid-
building, a floor
up from street.
Wait.
Watch it.
What light
on drab earth,
place on earth---
Continue?
Where to go so
far away
from here?
Friends?
Forgotten?
Movement?
A hand just
flesh, fingers?
White---
Who threads fantastic tapestry
just for me, for me?
- Robert Creeley
Sound of raindrops falling from eaves
I
and a spider are speechless half the day
- Ko Un
You can see how it will be:
the stillness in the light,
the vacant squares it makes on the kitchen floor
now the leaves are gone.
The way it gathers the room
into itself: the cups, the empty cuphooks,
the dent in the breadbox --- an eloquence
we'll never manage, language
without tense.
Not ours: we speak
and then our lungs fill up with air again.
We're only passing through.
- Jan Zwicky
Light:
Light's on
now
in three
sided balcony
window mid-
building, a floor
up from street.
Wait.
Watch it.
What light
on drab earth,
place on earth---
Continue?
Where to go so
far away
from here?
Friends?
Forgotten?
Movement?
A hand just
flesh, fingers?
White---
Who threads fantastic tapestry
just for me, for me?
- Robert Creeley
Sound of raindrops falling from eaves
I
and a spider are speechless half the day
- Ko Un
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
History
-- after J.S. Bach, Concerto in D Minor, BMV 1052
Someone is running
fingers through their hair.
The fingers
are like fish, they flicker
upstream while the current
purls around their backs
and falls away.
The fish
resemble wind inside a field
of wheat, resemble
solar flares, the fish
are water
that is trying to flow
up itself, the gravity
that hauls and tumbles it
deaf as the grief
inside perfection.
Do not ask.
You are running fingers
through your hair. This
is what you do sometimes
because you cannot put your hands
around your heart.
- Jan Zwicky
-- after J.S. Bach, Concerto in D Minor, BMV 1052
Someone is running
fingers through their hair.
The fingers
are like fish, they flicker
upstream while the current
purls around their backs
and falls away.
The fish
resemble wind inside a field
of wheat, resemble
solar flares, the fish
are water
that is trying to flow
up itself, the gravity
that hauls and tumbles it
deaf as the grief
inside perfection.
Do not ask.
You are running fingers
through your hair. This
is what you do sometimes
because you cannot put your hands
around your heart.
- Jan Zwicky
Monday, December 3, 2012
People
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
They are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures.
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?
Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?
We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.
They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.
And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
They are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures.
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?
Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?
We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.
They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.
And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Monday, November 12, 2012
Since Plato there has been a fatal relocation of truth away from concrete things themselves as they naturally show and reveal themselves in the richness of our vernaculars toward the idea of the exchange of equivalents. To be established, however, equivalence, as the word implies, requires a general notion of value, a common denominator by which the equality of the exchange is to be measured. In exchange, formal identity is preserved over material change. Something remains the same and self-identical, while in all other respects it is replaced by something entirely different from itself. Now, this commensuration can only take place by means of abstraction, generalization, and reduction to what is held in common. To advert to Aristotle again, exchange, whether in commerce or in theoretical representation, implies the notion of a general equivalent, a standard measure "which by making things commensurable, renders it possible to make them equal" [The Nichomachean Ethics]. The truth of theory, being truth as adequation, is thus the abstract, one-sided, and fragmented truth of general equivalence. The genesis of the general equivalent is no more than the invention by the Greeks of conceptual thinking, in which thought sloughs off what is fortuitous, separating essential from inessential in the phenomenon, thereby creating an abstract representation of it. Whereas in intuition we stand in immediate relation to the whole, rich but undifferentiated, thought sunders, allowing us to mediate between many different things, thus bringing them into relation with one another by means of universal representations. The development of the concept is a rising movement from the singular to the particular and, thence, from the particular to the universal as general equivalent.
-- from "Heidegger on the Art of Teaching", excerpt from transcript of the Deposition of Professor Dr. Martin Heidegger, submitted before the Committee on De-Nazification, 1945.
-- from "Heidegger on the Art of Teaching", excerpt from transcript of the Deposition of Professor Dr. Martin Heidegger, submitted before the Committee on De-Nazification, 1945.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
In some sense, the debate initiated by Kant [with regards to education] has continued ever since. Johann Friedrich Herbart's reformulation of the issue, outlining that philosophy should give us the aims, and psychology the means, to achieve them, reconceived the place of empirical facts, but left the over-all design almost untouched. It will become radicalized in the positivistic blend where a science of education is seen as only able to deal with the means in relation to achieving certain ends, not with the ends themselves. Such an empirical approach, which finds itself within the idea that we can control reality, is strikingly argued for by Wolfgang Brezinka in his Von der Padagogik zur Erziehungswissenschaft [From Educational Theory to the Science of Education] published in 1972. In this kind of positivism, educational science is defined as that approach in which one looks for general laws and thus tries to explain, predict, and use technology. Hypotheses are seen as only temporarily valid and are carried by intersubjective repeated observations. He accepts that it is not possible to discover "real" laws, that one has to content oneself with statistical regularities; but value judgments can never be scientific, as they involve, in his opinion, subjective decisions. His idea of education is well known: the educator exerts influence on the child with the aim for him to achieve certain mental dispositions. The main problem for an educational science is therefore to work out which conditions have to be fulfilled in order to reach particular aims. It is therefore a teleological, statistical (or casual), analytically-oriented science. Brezinka's idea about education is the paradigmatic way in which activities in the context of education and child-rearing are conceived. Indeed, teacher as well as parent often infer their successfulness from the effect of their investigations, and so does society in its preoccupation with output, performativity, and effectiveness, and thus do educational sciences in general as well.
Though the Kantian rationalist presuppositions would soon have to be given up, the development of the natural sciences, and of social sciences mimicking the methods of the natural sciences, will radicalize the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori on the one hand and between facts and values on the other. Among other reasons, this too contributed to the emergence of a wider crisis of rationality. The question of whether reason, and reason alone, can decide what should be done, and if, moreover, rational thinking is even possible at all, are at the heart of the matter. This can be made clear particularly with the use of two key ideas: performativity and nihilism. The quest for efficient solutions to problems is characteristic of modernity[...]. Under performativity, deliberation over ends is eclipsed and all kinds of business and activity are measured and ranked against each other, with ever less concern for the rationale for doing so. Thus performativity obscures differences, requiring everything to be commensurable with everything else, so that things can be ranked on the same scale and everyone can be "accountable" against the same standards. This in turn entails the devaluing, and perhaps the eradication, of what cannot be ranked[...]. Education nowadays is characterized by a [...] nihilism, by a lack of commitment which we conceal with the reduction of complex educational aims and purposes and with this a positive refusal to devote real thought to questions of the aims and purposes of education. The only sure value of education lies in the maintenance and extension of the system itself, in "efficiency" and "effectiveness," the service of government in the quest for "what works" [...].
-- from "The Origin: Education, Philosophy, and a Work of Art" by Paul Smeyer
Though the Kantian rationalist presuppositions would soon have to be given up, the development of the natural sciences, and of social sciences mimicking the methods of the natural sciences, will radicalize the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori on the one hand and between facts and values on the other. Among other reasons, this too contributed to the emergence of a wider crisis of rationality. The question of whether reason, and reason alone, can decide what should be done, and if, moreover, rational thinking is even possible at all, are at the heart of the matter. This can be made clear particularly with the use of two key ideas: performativity and nihilism. The quest for efficient solutions to problems is characteristic of modernity[...]. Under performativity, deliberation over ends is eclipsed and all kinds of business and activity are measured and ranked against each other, with ever less concern for the rationale for doing so. Thus performativity obscures differences, requiring everything to be commensurable with everything else, so that things can be ranked on the same scale and everyone can be "accountable" against the same standards. This in turn entails the devaluing, and perhaps the eradication, of what cannot be ranked[...]. Education nowadays is characterized by a [...] nihilism, by a lack of commitment which we conceal with the reduction of complex educational aims and purposes and with this a positive refusal to devote real thought to questions of the aims and purposes of education. The only sure value of education lies in the maintenance and extension of the system itself, in "efficiency" and "effectiveness," the service of government in the quest for "what works" [...].
-- from "The Origin: Education, Philosophy, and a Work of Art" by Paul Smeyer
In more than one aspect, education is an Enlightenment notion. It is the result of the modern idea that man and society to some extend can be "made"[...]. For Kant education was seen as the "means" to become human, for example, rational; the person is nothing but what education makes him. This was itself a reaction to an earlier period, characterized by the inculcation of values, the uncritical learning of facts or bodies of information, and a concern with discipline understood as obedience to (persons in) authority. With the Enlightenment, rationality becomes the proper end of what a human being is. This does not result in a means-end reasoning: in becoming free from one's inclinations and passions, one realises one's true nature, for example, to put oneself under the guidance of reason. Because of his freedom, man is a task to himself: he has to realize himself at a rational level which implies the need for a morality. Man has to realize himself as a subject of practical reason, and he can do that in as far as he binds his acting to the law of his powers of judgment, for example, his rationality. As the ultimate aim is to become moral, education is shaped according to moral understanding. Thus, liberal education is concerned with the initiation of the learner into forms of thought and understanding which are part of the cultural heritage. In the German tradition, where at least initially this academic endeavor particularly flourished, the concept of education also encompasses child-rearing as well as more formal schooling.
The primary aim of the educational relationship between the adult and the child undergoing education is for the child to become an adult. The influence adults exert on children will bring them to the point where they can take up for themselves what is called a dignified life-project. Adults, supposedly being a representation, though certainly not the ultimate embodiment, of what is objectively good, are in a position to educate, since they themselves have already achieved adulthood. Responsibility for realizing one's life-project is dictated by reason. Adulthood shows itself by being in command of oneself, able to bind oneself to a law of one's choosing, to maintain steady relationships both morally and practically and not being reliant upon the judgments of others; to put this more positively, having personal access to objective standards of value and being able to place oneself under a higher moral authority. This will show itself in the adult's taking part in societal life in a constructive manner. The child, on the other hand, is helpless in a moral sense. He does not know what is good and therefore cannot take responsibility for his own actions. He cries out for guidance, and only if such guidance is offered, if adults (first the parents, and subsequently the teachers) make the necessary decisions in relation to the child, will he be able to reach adulthood. Central to this traditional concept of education is this intention on the part of the educator, and it is that which makes an activity educational. What the educator undertakes can only be justified as education in so far as it aims and contributes to adulthood and to the autonomy of the young person. The educator is, thus, responsible by proxy, and his relationship with the child is based on trust. This is no simplistic reasoning of a manipulative kind. The adult decides on behalf of the not-yet-rational child and in his best interests. By confronting the child with rationality in this way, the adult seeks to awaken the child's potentialities to become a rational human being. Such a view of the justification of parental authority belonged to the conception of a just, well-ordered society.
As indicated, the Enlightenment tradition is being concerned with the initiation of the learner into forms of thought and understanding which are part of a critical cultural heritage. Here, discipline is primarily an attuning of the mind to the inherent norms of these forms of understanding. The learner is initiated into forms of thought which are public but as yet beyond the child's understanding. In their strongest formulation these norms of rationality were thought to be stable and valid for all cultures. Such a view necessarily implies a transmission model of education and upbringing. The child may be conceived of as a passive recipient of rationality and culture or as recalcitrant material to be molded and inscribed. Alternatively, he must, like the barbarian outside the citadel, be lured in and skillfully initiated into the stock of worthwhile knowledge, sentiment, and inherently valuable activities and practices of civilized life.
-- from "The Origin: Education, Philosophy, and a Work of Art" by Paul Smeyer
The primary aim of the educational relationship between the adult and the child undergoing education is for the child to become an adult. The influence adults exert on children will bring them to the point where they can take up for themselves what is called a dignified life-project. Adults, supposedly being a representation, though certainly not the ultimate embodiment, of what is objectively good, are in a position to educate, since they themselves have already achieved adulthood. Responsibility for realizing one's life-project is dictated by reason. Adulthood shows itself by being in command of oneself, able to bind oneself to a law of one's choosing, to maintain steady relationships both morally and practically and not being reliant upon the judgments of others; to put this more positively, having personal access to objective standards of value and being able to place oneself under a higher moral authority. This will show itself in the adult's taking part in societal life in a constructive manner. The child, on the other hand, is helpless in a moral sense. He does not know what is good and therefore cannot take responsibility for his own actions. He cries out for guidance, and only if such guidance is offered, if adults (first the parents, and subsequently the teachers) make the necessary decisions in relation to the child, will he be able to reach adulthood. Central to this traditional concept of education is this intention on the part of the educator, and it is that which makes an activity educational. What the educator undertakes can only be justified as education in so far as it aims and contributes to adulthood and to the autonomy of the young person. The educator is, thus, responsible by proxy, and his relationship with the child is based on trust. This is no simplistic reasoning of a manipulative kind. The adult decides on behalf of the not-yet-rational child and in his best interests. By confronting the child with rationality in this way, the adult seeks to awaken the child's potentialities to become a rational human being. Such a view of the justification of parental authority belonged to the conception of a just, well-ordered society.
As indicated, the Enlightenment tradition is being concerned with the initiation of the learner into forms of thought and understanding which are part of a critical cultural heritage. Here, discipline is primarily an attuning of the mind to the inherent norms of these forms of understanding. The learner is initiated into forms of thought which are public but as yet beyond the child's understanding. In their strongest formulation these norms of rationality were thought to be stable and valid for all cultures. Such a view necessarily implies a transmission model of education and upbringing. The child may be conceived of as a passive recipient of rationality and culture or as recalcitrant material to be molded and inscribed. Alternatively, he must, like the barbarian outside the citadel, be lured in and skillfully initiated into the stock of worthwhile knowledge, sentiment, and inherently valuable activities and practices of civilized life.
-- from "The Origin: Education, Philosophy, and a Work of Art" by Paul Smeyer
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Normalizing education has many faces. At its best it is power realizing its responsibility for the efficient subjectification of the subject and its pleasures. Within the process of subjectification it produces the "I." In the course of its production, the "I" is constituted as a focus of selfhood in a manner that ensures the identification of the subject with the present order of things, reinforces its justifications, and makes possible the invisibility of the violence which construct and represent it as "reality." Normalizing education guarantees efficient orientation in the given order of things, perfects competence in its classification and representation, and allows communication and functional behavior, success, security, pleasure, and social progress. It distributes these competences, knowledge, and powers in a socially uneven manner, creating or reproducing social and cultural asymmetries and violences within the system. It not only permits human social life and its normalities, it even constitutes its telos. This success, however, has its price: it opens the gate to reflection, resistance, alternative orders, and unexpected new versions of normalization and standardization. Even in such situations, not solely in situations of stability, it must ensure the constitution of the normalized subject as a false not-yet-"I"; as an unproblematic product of the subjectification processes. As long as normalizing education is unchallenged, the human comes upon her relation to the Other, to the world, and to herself while imprisoned in the framework of never-fully-deciphered representation apparatuses. Even if unconsciously, she faces the full toll of the efficiency of the representation apparatuses in the form of "the given" limitations and possibilities. As existential, political, and theoretical "realities," these horizons actually manifest her very existence as a constant downfall. This is so since "reality" and her own self are constructed by the manipulations, traditions, structures, and powers that she can reflect on or challenge only through the ways, tools, and manner imposed on her by the very system whose logic and "vocabulary" are to be questioned, resisted, and overcome. Normalizing education does not "influence" or "limit" the self: it actually produces the "I" and the self-evidence of the self. In this respect, normalizing education produces the human subject as some-thing and prevents her from becoming some-one, a true subject. Normalizing in education achieves this by internalizing in the subject from "outside" the conceptual apparatus, the moral yardsticks and ideals, the consciousness, and the main actual possibilities for reflectivity and social behavior. It governs even the human possibilities for encountering the otherness of the Other and knowledge about knowledge. Even knowledge and evidence about the otherness of the "I" are fabricated by normalizing education. The annihilation of the subject's otherness is a bona fide manifestation that the human subject is more than the product of the powers that fabricate and control her, that reduce her to an object of care, education, salvation, and oppression. She is much more than what she was directed to become.
-- from "Heidegger, Transcendence, and the Possibility of Counter-Education," by Ilan Gur-Ze'ev
-- from "Heidegger, Transcendence, and the Possibility of Counter-Education," by Ilan Gur-Ze'ev
Sunday, October 21, 2012
The teacher's role in the pedagogic exchange is to represent the general equivalent, administering equivalences among the students, who participate in his [or her] unity by subsuming themselves under his [or her] generality. Before the teacher, there is formal equality within the collective of students. Instruction is thus modeled on exchange: to teach, the teacher disregards the differences and distinctions within the concrete student manifold and addresses [her or] himself to the faceless, abstract student that is [her or] his counterpart. Likewise, to learn, the student abandons the idiosyncratic expressions of his [or her] life for a generic way of thinking that raises him [or her] to the level of the teacher.
-- from "Heidegger on the Art of Teaching", excerpt from transcript of the Deposition of Professor Dr. Martin Heidegger, submitted before the Committee on De-Nazification, 1945.
-- from "Heidegger on the Art of Teaching", excerpt from transcript of the Deposition of Professor Dr. Martin Heidegger, submitted before the Committee on De-Nazification, 1945.
Saturday, October 6, 2012
And of moose, speak no more the brawn,
the blunder, the old oaf-of-the-woods
with the glum dumb glare and oversized rack
galumphing through the swamp toward his supposed telos ---
to be fixed in final moositude above some fireplace.
Not that.
Write instead this delicate huge
reticulated hind leg lifted---sandhill crane
crossed with industrial crane---over the fallen
log, held there like a hieroglyph then,
knee and hip unlevering, slowly
lowered. All the while his head, five yards away,
browses the bottom:
adrift, paddle in the air:
nearby
among the reeds a she-moose
feeding:
droplets---this,
this, this, this---
ellipses
dripping into no-name lake.
-- from The Muskwa Assemblage, by Don McKay.
the blunder, the old oaf-of-the-woods
with the glum dumb glare and oversized rack
galumphing through the swamp toward his supposed telos ---
to be fixed in final moositude above some fireplace.
Not that.
Write instead this delicate huge
reticulated hind leg lifted---sandhill crane
crossed with industrial crane---over the fallen
log, held there like a hieroglyph then,
knee and hip unlevering, slowly
lowered. All the while his head, five yards away,
browses the bottom:
adrift, paddle in the air:
nearby
among the reeds a she-moose
feeding:
droplets---this,
this, this, this---
ellipses
dripping into no-name lake.
-- from The Muskwa Assemblage, by Don McKay.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Friday, September 7, 2012
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Monday, August 27, 2012
Song Premiere: Bob Dylan, 'Duquesne Whistle'
(With Early Roman Kings -- see below -- this is the second new Dylan song.)
(With Early Roman Kings -- see below -- this is the second new Dylan song.)
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Marx, Augustine and early Buddhism: diagnosis vs. prognosis
(including discussion of Scott Walker in Wisconsin)
"What the poor prognoses of Marx, Augustine and the Pali suttas all share, indeed, is hope, optimism."
(including discussion of Scott Walker in Wisconsin)
"What the poor prognoses of Marx, Augustine and the Pali suttas all share, indeed, is hope, optimism."
Friday, August 10, 2012
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
We can thus differentiate between the imaginary, the symbolic and the real status of the couples of opposites. In the imaginary relation, the two poles of opposition are complementary; together they build a harmonious totality; each gives the other what the other lacks -- each fills out the lack in the other (the fantasy of the fully realized sexual relationship, for example, where man and woman form a harmonious whole). The symbolic relation is, on the contrary, differential: the identity of each of the moments consists in its difference to the opposite moment. A given element does not fill in the lack in the other, it is not complementary to the other but, on the contrary, takes the place of the lack in the other, embodies what is lacking in the other: its positive presence is nothing but an objectification of a lack in its opposite element. The opposites, the poles of the symbolic relation, each in a way returns to the other its own lack; they are united on the basis of their common lack.
That would also be the definition of symbolic communication: what circulates between the subjects is above all a certain void; the subjects pass to each other a common lack. In this perspective a woman is not complementary to a man, but she embodies his lack (which is why Lacan can say that a beautiful woman is a perfect incarnation of man's castration). Finally, the Real is defined as a point of the immediate coincidence of the opposite poles: each pole passes immediately into its opposite; each is already in itself its own opposite.
- from The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek.
That would also be the definition of symbolic communication: what circulates between the subjects is above all a certain void; the subjects pass to each other a common lack. In this perspective a woman is not complementary to a man, but she embodies his lack (which is why Lacan can say that a beautiful woman is a perfect incarnation of man's castration). Finally, the Real is defined as a point of the immediate coincidence of the opposite poles: each pole passes immediately into its opposite; each is already in itself its own opposite.
- from The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek.
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Saturday, April 28, 2012
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Why Anti-Authoritarians are Diagnosed as Mentally Ill
In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians, and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.
Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.
[...]
Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.
[...]
Many anti-authoritarians who earlier in their lives were diagnosed with mental illness tell me that once they were labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis, they got caught in a dilemma. Authoritarians, by definition, demand unquestioning obedience, and so any resistance to their diagnosis and treatment created enormous anxiety for authoritarian mental health professionals; and professionals, feeling out of control, labeled them “noncompliant with treatment,” increased the severity of their diagnosis, and jacked up their medications. This was enraging for these anti-authoritarians, sometimes so much so that they reacted in ways that made them appear even more frightening to their families.
There are anti-authoritarians who use psychiatric drugs to help them function, but they often reject psychiatric authorities’ explanations for why they have difficulty functioning. So, for example, they may take Adderall (an amphetamine prescribed for ADHD), but they know that their attentional problem is not a result of a biochemical brain imbalance but rather caused by a boring job. And similarly, many anti-authoritarians in highly stressful environments will occasionally take prescribed benzodiazepines such as Xanax even though they believe it would be safer to occasionally use marijuana but can’t because of drug testing on their job[.]
It has been my experience that many anti-authoritarians labeled with psychiatric diagnoses usually don’t reject all authorities, simply those they’ve assessed to be illegitimate ones, which just happens to be a great deal of society’s authorities.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream" - Lorca
In my career as a psychologist, I have talked with hundreds of people previously diagnosed by other professionals with oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder, anxiety disorder and other psychiatric illnesses, and I am struck by (1) how many of those diagnosed are essentially anti-authoritarians, and (2) how those professionals who have diagnosed them are not.
Anti-authoritarians question whether an authority is a legitimate one before taking that authority seriously. Evaluating the legitimacy of authorities includes assessing whether or not authorities actually know what they are talking about, are honest, and care about those people who are respecting their authority. And when anti-authoritarians assess an authority to be illegitimate, they challenge and resist that authority—sometimes aggressively and sometimes passive-aggressively, sometimes wisely and sometimes not.
[...]
Many people with severe anxiety and/or depression are also anti-authoritarians. Often a major pain of their lives that fuels their anxiety and/or depression is fear that their contempt for illegitimate authorities will cause them to be financially and socially marginalized; but they fear that compliance with such illegitimate authorities will cause them existential death.
[...]
Many anti-authoritarians who earlier in their lives were diagnosed with mental illness tell me that once they were labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis, they got caught in a dilemma. Authoritarians, by definition, demand unquestioning obedience, and so any resistance to their diagnosis and treatment created enormous anxiety for authoritarian mental health professionals; and professionals, feeling out of control, labeled them “noncompliant with treatment,” increased the severity of their diagnosis, and jacked up their medications. This was enraging for these anti-authoritarians, sometimes so much so that they reacted in ways that made them appear even more frightening to their families.
There are anti-authoritarians who use psychiatric drugs to help them function, but they often reject psychiatric authorities’ explanations for why they have difficulty functioning. So, for example, they may take Adderall (an amphetamine prescribed for ADHD), but they know that their attentional problem is not a result of a biochemical brain imbalance but rather caused by a boring job. And similarly, many anti-authoritarians in highly stressful environments will occasionally take prescribed benzodiazepines such as Xanax even though they believe it would be safer to occasionally use marijuana but can’t because of drug testing on their job[.]
It has been my experience that many anti-authoritarians labeled with psychiatric diagnoses usually don’t reject all authorities, simply those they’ve assessed to be illegitimate ones, which just happens to be a great deal of society’s authorities.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream" - Lorca
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Insane art formed by carving books with surgical tools
Using knives, tweezers and surgical tools, Brian Dettmer carves one page at a time. Nothing inside the out-of-date encyclopedias, medical journals, illustration books, or dictionaries is relocated or implanted, only removed.
Dettmer manipulates the pages and spines to form the shape of his sculptures. He also folds, bends, rolls, and stacks multiple books to create completely original sculptural forms.
"My work is a collaboration with the existing material and its past creators and the completed pieces expose new relationships of the book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception," he says.
"The richness and depth of the book is universally respected yet often undiscovered as the monopoly of the form and relevance of the information fades over time. The book’s intended function has decreased and the form remains linear in a non-linear world. By altering physical forms of information and shifting preconceived functions, new and unexpected roles emerge."
Dettmer is originally from Chicago, where he studied at Columbia College. He currently lives and works in Atlanta, GA.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Ear on Arm
(from blog: If You Only Knew)
The EAR ON ARM has required 2 surgeries thus far. An extra ear is presently being constructed on my forearm: A left ear on a left arm. An ear that not only hears but also transmits. A facial feature has been replicated, relocated and will now be rewired for alternate capabilities. Excess skin was created with an implanted skin expander in the forearm. By injecting saline solution into a subcutaneous port, the kidney shaped silicon implant stretched the skin, forming a pocket of excess skin that could be used in surgically constructing the ear.
I have always been intrigued about engineering a soft prosthesis using my own skin, as a permanent modification of the body architecture. The assumption being that if the body was altered it might mean adjusting its awareness. Engineering an alternate anatomical architecture, one that also performs telematically. Certainly what becomes important now is not merely the body’s identity, but its connectivity- not its mobility or location, but its interface. In these projects and performances, a prosthesis is not seen as a sign of lack but rather as a symptom of excess. As technology proliferates and microminiaturizes it becomes biocompatible in both scale and substance and is incorporated as a component of the body.
(from blog: If You Only Knew)
The EAR ON ARM has required 2 surgeries thus far. An extra ear is presently being constructed on my forearm: A left ear on a left arm. An ear that not only hears but also transmits. A facial feature has been replicated, relocated and will now be rewired for alternate capabilities. Excess skin was created with an implanted skin expander in the forearm. By injecting saline solution into a subcutaneous port, the kidney shaped silicon implant stretched the skin, forming a pocket of excess skin that could be used in surgically constructing the ear.
I have always been intrigued about engineering a soft prosthesis using my own skin, as a permanent modification of the body architecture. The assumption being that if the body was altered it might mean adjusting its awareness. Engineering an alternate anatomical architecture, one that also performs telematically. Certainly what becomes important now is not merely the body’s identity, but its connectivity- not its mobility or location, but its interface. In these projects and performances, a prosthesis is not seen as a sign of lack but rather as a symptom of excess. As technology proliferates and microminiaturizes it becomes biocompatible in both scale and substance and is incorporated as a component of the body.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
The video has a constant drop out of the sound every few seconds; unfortunately, this is the best I could find. Bob Dylan accepting the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award from Jack Nicholson. I post this mainly for his acceptance speech near the end of the video.
"Well," he said, "my daddy, he didn't leave me much, you know he was a very simple man,
but what he did tell me was this, he did say, son, he said"
- there was a long pause, nervous laughter from the crowd -
"he say, you know it's possible to become so defiled in this world
that your own father and mother will abandon you and if that happens,
God will always believe in your ability to mend your ways."
Then he walked off. He had managed to get in and out without thanking anybody,
and this night it really did seem as if he owed nobody anything.
from Bob Dylan's Grammy speech 1991.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Come Healing, by Leonard Cohen, from Old Ideas (2012)
Saturday, February 4, 2012
Phil Rockstroh: A Journey To The End Of Empire: It Is Always Darkest Right Before It Goes Completely Black (Occupy Wall Street website)
I'm not completely on board with this piece, but nice to see poetry and politics brought together.
Therefore, to those who demand this of poets: that all ideas, notions, flights of imagination, revelries, swoons of intuition, Rabelaisian rancor, metaphysical overreach, unnerving apprehensions, and inspired misapprehensions be tamed, rendered practical, and only considered fit to be broached in reputable company when these things bring "concrete" answers to polite dialog--I ask you this, if the defining aspects of our existence were constructed of concrete, would not the world be made of the material of a prison?
I'm not completely on board with this piece, but nice to see poetry and politics brought together.
Therefore, to those who demand this of poets: that all ideas, notions, flights of imagination, revelries, swoons of intuition, Rabelaisian rancor, metaphysical overreach, unnerving apprehensions, and inspired misapprehensions be tamed, rendered practical, and only considered fit to be broached in reputable company when these things bring "concrete" answers to polite dialog--I ask you this, if the defining aspects of our existence were constructed of concrete, would not the world be made of the material of a prison?
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Q: How should dogs be defined under the law, if you could write it?
A: The way the Common Law is structured there are really only two options. You are either a person, or you’re property, and that’s how we define things.
- Maneesha Deckha, Q & A: Should your pet dog get legal status? (National Post)
A: The way the Common Law is structured there are really only two options. You are either a person, or you’re property, and that’s how we define things.
- Maneesha Deckha, Q & A: Should your pet dog get legal status? (National Post)
Monday, January 30, 2012
Yesnaby:
Not one of us will live forever --
the world is far too beautiful for that.
When my children ask about the War, I'll say:
'I once watched as columns of retreating cloud
burned in a haar of gulls and dust, off Yesnaby;
and I survived.'
Epitaph:
Father, forgive this man.
He never listened to your song
till it was all but done
then found he couldn't sing the words
so he spoke the tune.
For Lucie:
born 5 December 2005
How apt it was we named you
for the light: no more than a small light, mind
-- a spunk; a spill; a stub of tallow
cradled against the draft
while our stooped shadows lengthen
and fall away behind.
Here's to you, then, and to us,
to your world and to ours.
We raise you towards the dark.
May you make of it something else.
Grain:
What was his name again -- that fisher lad
dragged under with his fankled nets --
him that the fishes hooked and filleted?
I often wonder if the irony of it all amused him
as he left off from kicking against the dark, and drowned:
not, (as his Mother always feared) to be lost at sea, but found.
Tell me you've never seen a hangman hung,
nor laughed at the dying tenor, topped by his own song;
nor stumbled across a baker's corpse, rising like dough;
nor wept with the weeping ferryman while Charon
gummed his coin. Friends, we're all done for by the things we do.
If I were a farmer, I'd shrink from the ripening grain.
- John Glenday
Not one of us will live forever --
the world is far too beautiful for that.
When my children ask about the War, I'll say:
'I once watched as columns of retreating cloud
burned in a haar of gulls and dust, off Yesnaby;
and I survived.'
Epitaph:
Father, forgive this man.
He never listened to your song
till it was all but done
then found he couldn't sing the words
so he spoke the tune.
For Lucie:
born 5 December 2005
How apt it was we named you
for the light: no more than a small light, mind
-- a spunk; a spill; a stub of tallow
cradled against the draft
while our stooped shadows lengthen
and fall away behind.
Here's to you, then, and to us,
to your world and to ours.
We raise you towards the dark.
May you make of it something else.
Grain:
What was his name again -- that fisher lad
dragged under with his fankled nets --
him that the fishes hooked and filleted?
I often wonder if the irony of it all amused him
as he left off from kicking against the dark, and drowned:
not, (as his Mother always feared) to be lost at sea, but found.
Tell me you've never seen a hangman hung,
nor laughed at the dying tenor, topped by his own song;
nor stumbled across a baker's corpse, rising like dough;
nor wept with the weeping ferryman while Charon
gummed his coin. Friends, we're all done for by the things we do.
If I were a farmer, I'd shrink from the ripening grain.
- John Glenday
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Academic papers get poetic - in University Affairs, by Anita Lahey; on lyric scholarship, influenced by Jan Zwicky.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
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