"Even humans withdraw into a dark reality that is never fully understood, while also being present to observers from the outside."

-- Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object

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Twin Peaks - Sycamore Trees, Black Lodge:

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The car is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows

The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn

We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death

The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles

It went like this:

The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies
Picked through the rubble
And pulled out their hair

The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze

I said, "Kiss me, you're beautiful -
These are truly the last days"

You grabbed my hand
And we fell into it
Like a daydream
Or a fever

We woke up one morning and fell a little further down
For sure it's the valley of death

I open up my wallet
And it's full of blood

-- The Dead Flag Blues, by Godspeed You! Black Emperor

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"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire."

-- Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments.



"The God of love and the God of anger are required in order to have an Idea."

-- Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 191.

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"It is true that Plato employs this question [i.e., What is X?] in order to refute those who content themselves with offering empirical responses, and to oppose essence and appearance. His aim, however, is to silence the empirical responses in order to open up the indeterminate horizon of a transcendental problem [...]."

-- Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 188.

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Sturgill Simpson - Time After All


Sturgill Simpson - In Bloom

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Ojkanje singing
(a style of singing from Croatia)

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David Thomas Broughton - live

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Maggie sits in the old tavern, amongst friends. The only spirits in the place, in the place with the endless celebration, are those that swirl around them, little tornadoes of light, laughter, love and grace. She reaches out and touches one, is lit up, feels her littlebigwomandaughter/mother and knows the love by heart. The sensation is one of satiation: full and fed. With the same light, laughter, love and grace. She was peaceful the moment she left. She is at peace when she touches the spirit she knows is in Bernice. Her girl is rich, rich with possibility and lifeforce. It fills Maggie and the room and everyone is awed for a moment while it passes through and over them. Her girl is filled with feelings that Maggie only gets to feel now, in this place.

She feelhears clatter and clapping as someone enters the bar. It's Kokhom, dressed for ceremony. With some red heels on, to boot.

And, ready to dance.

-- from Birdie, debut novel by Tracey Lindberg, Prologue ("Where She Is Now -- When She Made Two Journeys: It starts from here"), p. 1

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Bob Dylan - Spanish is the Loving Tongue

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[W]e are never fixed at a moment or in a given state but always fixed by an [i]dea as though in the glimmer of a look, always fixed in a movement that is under way.

-- from Difference & Repetition, Gilles Deleuze, p. 219.

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An interesting article (in Quanta Magazine) on string theory, theoretical physics, and the philosophy of science:

A Fight for the Soul of Science

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The imagination is defined here as a contractile power: like a sensitive plate, it retains one case when the other appears. It contracts cases, elements, agitations or homogeneous instants and grounds these in an internal qualitative impression endowed with a certain weight. When A appears, we expect B with a force corresponding to the qualitative impression of all the contracted ABs. This is by no means a memory, nor indeed an operation of the understanding: contraction is not a matter of reflection. Properly speaking, it forms a synthesis of time. [...] In any case, this synthesis must be given a name: passive synthesis. [...]

The question is whether or not the self itself is a contemplation, whether it is not in itself a contemplation, and whether we can learn, form behaviour and form ourselves other than through contemplation.

Habit draws something new from repetition -- namely, difference (in the first instance understood as generality). In essence, habit is contraction. [...] [C]ontraction [...] refers to the fusion of successive tick-tocks [i.e., AB] in a contemplative soul. Passive synthesis is of [this] kind: it constitutes our habit of living, our expectation that 'it' will continue, that one of the two elements will appear after the other, thereby assuring the perpetuation of our case. [...]

-- from Difference & Repetition, Gilles Deleuze, p. 70-1, 73-4.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

[P]erceptual syntheses refer back to organic syntheses which are like the sensibility of the senses; they refer back to a primary sensibility that we are. We are made of contracted water, earth, light and air [...]. Every organism, in its receptive and perceptual elements, but also in its viscera, is a sum of contractions, of retentions and expectations. [...]

What we call wheat is a contraction of earth and humidity, and this contraction is both a contemplation and the auto-satisfaction of that contemplation. By its existence alone, the lily of the field sings the glory of the heavens, the goddesses and gods -- in other words, the elements that it contemplates in contracting. [...]

Moreover, in order to integrate actions within a more complex action, the primary actions must in turn play the role of elements of repetition within a 'case', but always in relation to a contemplative soul adjacent to the subject of the compound action. Underneath the self which acts are little selves which contemplate and which render possible both the action and the active subject. We speak of our 'self' only in virtue of these thousands of little witnesses which contemplate within us: it is always a third party who says 'me'. These contemplative souls must be assigned even to the rat in the labyrinth and to each muscle of the rat. Given that contemplation never appears at any moment during the action -- since it is always hidden, and since it 'does' nothing [...] -- it is easy to forget it and to interpret the entire process of excitation and reaction without any reference to repetition [...].

-- from Difference & Repetition, Gilles Deleuze, p. 73, 75-6.

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An interesting article (on Artspace) on Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), and Speculative Realism, in the art world:

What Is Object-Oriented Ontology? A Quick-and-Dirty Guide to the Philosophical Movement Sweeping the Art World

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An interesting article with a philosopher (Lee Braver) that touches on the continental-analytic divide:

On Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida

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Many of the glossary words are, like ungive, memorably vivid. They function as topograms – tiny landscape poems, folded up inside verbs and nouns. I think of the Northamptonshire dialect verb to crizzle, for instance, a verb for the freezing of water that evokes the sound of a natural activity too slow for human hearing to detect (“And the white frost ’gins crizzle pond and brook”, wrote John Clare in 1821). When Gerard Manley Hopkins didn’t have a word for a natural phenomenon, he would simply – wonderfully – make one up: shivelight, for “the lances of sunshine that pierce the canopy of a wood”, or goldfoil for a sky lit by lightning in “zigzag dints and creasings”. Hopkins, like Clare, sought to forge a language that could register the participatory dramas of our relations with nature and landscape.

-- Robert Macfarlane, The word-hoard: Robert Macfarlane on rewilding our language of landscape (found here)

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The moonlight behind the tall branches
The poets all say is more
Than the moonlight behind the tall branches.

But for me, who do not know what I think---
What the moonlight behind the tall branches
Is, beyond its being
The moonlight behind the tall branches,
Is its not being more
Than the moonlight behind the tall branches.

-- XXXV. "The moonlight behind the tall branches" from The Keeper of Sheep, by Fernando Pessoa

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'He has shot like an arrow from the room,' said Bernard. 'He has left me his poem. [...] O friendship, how piercing are your darts -- there, there, again there. He looked at me, turning to face me; he gave me his poem. All mists curl off the roof of my being. That confidence I shall keep to my dying day. Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he went over me, his devastating presence -- dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul. It was humiliating; I was turned to small stones. All semblances were rolled up. "You are not [Lord] Byron; you are your self." To be contracted by another person into a single being -- how strange.

'[...] But now, how comfortable, how reassuring to feel that alien presence removed, that scrutiny darkened and hooded over! How grateful to draw the blinds, and admit no other presence; to feel returning from the dark corners in which they took refuge, those shabby inmates, those familiars, whom, with his superior force, he drove into hiding. The mocking, the observant spirits who, even in the crisis and stab of the moment, watched on my behalf now come flocking home again. With their addition, I am Bernard; I am Byron; I am this, that and the other. They darken the air and enrich me, as of old, with their antics, their comments, and cloud the fine simplicity of my moment of emotion. For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. [...]'

-- from The Waves, Virginia Woolf, p. 66

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'Through the chink in the hedge,' said Susan 'I saw her kiss him. I raised my head from my flower-pot and looked through a chink in the hedge. I saw her kiss him. I saw them, Jinny and Louis, kissing. Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. [...]'

-- from The Waves, Virginia Woolf, p. 8

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The Trees That Miss The Mammoths

"Trees that once depended on animals like the wooly mammoth for survival have managed to adapt and survive in the modern world."

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The Trillion Dollar “Death Economy”: You Will Definitely Participate

"American consumers currently spend $20 billion/year on funerals, $195 billion/year on trusts and estates, $294 billion/year on elder care, and $616 billion/year on life/health insurance premiums — that’s over a trillion dollars in the US total."

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Bob Dylan - Tangled up in Blue, live, 07/06/78



Bob Dylan - Shelter from the Storm, live, 1976



Bob Dylan - Just Like a Woman, Knockin On Heaven's Door, live, 1975

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Jean held her head in her hands.
Lucjan sighed. He pulled her toward him.
- Everything we do is false consolation, said Lucjan. Or to put it another way, any consolation is true.

-- Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault, p. 235.

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the living haunt us in ways the dead cannot

-- Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault, p. 159.

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Some Colombian art:


Holy Trinity by Gregorio Vázquez de Arce y Ceballos, oil on canvas, 17th century [!]



Painting of a Contrabass by Alvaro Valbuena, 1970

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Teachers already know that errors or falsehoods are rarely found in homework (except in those exercises where a fixed result must be produced, or propositions must be translated one by one). Rather, what is more frequently found -- and worse -- are nonsensical sentences, remarks without interest or importance, banalities mistaken for profundities, ordinary 'points' confused with singular points, badly posed or distorted problems -- all heavy with dangers, yet the fate of us all.

-- from Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze, p 153

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