Sorting vs Searching
- Posted: 26.Jan.2006.
"Turning things over at random and hoping to stumble on the sought object usually works when the space to be searched is small. As the search-space gets larger, more and more sophisticated searching procedures become necessary. Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity."
Richard Dawkins, "The Blind Watchmaker"
- Posted: 26.Jan.2006.
"Turning things over at random and hoping to stumble on the sought object usually works when the space to be searched is small. As the search-space gets larger, more and more sophisticated searching procedures become necessary. Effective searching procedures become, when the search-space is sufficiently large, indistinguishable from true creativity."
Richard Dawkins, "The Blind Watchmaker"
Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places (W.B. Yeats)
- Posted: 19.Apr.2006.
Yeats quotes places<
- Posted: 19.Apr.2006.
Yet we never long escape the phantasmagoria nor can long forget that we are among the shape-changers. Sometimes our own minds shape that mysterious substance, which may be life itself, according to desire or constrained by memory, and the dead no longer remembering their own names become the characters in the drama we ourselves have invented. John King, who has delighted melodramatic minds for hundreds of séances with his career on earth as Henry Morgan the buccaneer, will tell more scientific visitors that he is merely a force, while some phantom long accustomed to a decent name, questioned by some pious Catholic, will admit very cheerfully that he is the devil. Nor is it only present minds that perplex the shades with phantasy, for friends of Count Albert de Rochas once wrote out names and incidents but to discover that though the surname of the shade that spoke had been historical, Christian name and incidents were from a romance running at the time in some clerical newspaper no one there had ever opened.text>
Burroughs and the Mayans [What the Academics say]
- Posted: 03.Aug.2007.
(Click for full size)
Jennie Skerl’s 1985 book was one of (if not the) first books in which Burroughs was taken as subject for serious academic study. I have not made up my mind as to what Crystalpunk thinks of it. But here is what she writes about Burroughs’ use of Mayan imagery in ‘The Soft Machine’. The book’s cover has a great picture of Burroughs holding several ancient (mayan?) artefacts.
- Posted: 03.Aug.2007.
(Click for full size)
Jennie Skerl’s 1985 book was one of (if not the) first books in which Burroughs was taken as subject for serious academic study. I have not made up my mind as to what Crystalpunk thinks of it. But here is what she writes about Burroughs’ use of Mayan imagery in ‘The Soft Machine’. The book’s cover has a great picture of Burroughs holding several ancient (mayan?) artefacts.
The priest-rulers are associated with the power imagery Burroughs uses for his Mayan and Minraud fantasies. Puerto Joselito is Burrough’s reinterpretation of Frazier’s ‘The Golden Bough’ and a critique of religion in Reichian terms. It is both an homage to and a reinterpretation of ‘The Waste Land’.
The theme of power is given its most detailed treatment in ‘The Mayan Caper’, a historical fantasy on Mayan civilization (seventh routine). ‘The Mayan Caper’ is the single most significant section of the ‘The Soft Machine’ because of its central placement in the text, because it is the longest sustained narrative, and because it gives the most straightforward exposition of how a control system can be dismantled. The Mayans are presented both as the historical beginning and the epitome of “civilization”: a social order in which a few control the many through manipulation of word and image. Literacy only makes the system more sophisticated. The Mayan priest-ruler class controls the mass of peasants through their calendar, a word-and-image system that orders time, space, and human behaviour. The calendar is the basis for the Mayan’s agricultural economy, their hierarchical system of classes, and their religion. The priests exert total mind control and thus have total mastery over the peasant’s bodies. The power imagery associated with the Mayans is the same as that of the Minraud people in the Nova mythology: religious sacrifice, insects, ants, centipedes, scorpions, crabs, lobsters, claws, white heat, and the city. The first part of the ‘I Sekuin’ routine, which immediately follows ‘The Mayan Caper’, makes the link to Minraud explicit and again emphasizes the importance of the Mayan fantasy as the classic type of all control systems.
The Mayans as the Keepers of Ancient Knowledge from the Cities of the Red Night [History with Burroughs]
- Posted: 02.Aug.2007.
Every Burroughologist knows that the 'Cities of the Red Night' comes from a different word-pile than the earlier cycle of books (roughly from 'Naked Lunch' to 'The Job'). Quoting from an online excerpt it shows that the fascination with Mayan timekeeping was permanent with Burroughs. However, the Mayans are now part of a worldwide plot.
- Posted: 02.Aug.2007.
Every Burroughologist knows that the 'Cities of the Red Night' comes from a different word-pile than the earlier cycle of books (roughly from 'Naked Lunch' to 'The Job'). Quoting from an online excerpt it shows that the fascination with Mayan timekeeping was permanent with Burroughs. However, the Mayans are now part of a worldwide plot.
The Cities of Red Night were six in number: Thamaghis, Ba’dan, Yass-Waddah, Waghdas, Naufana and Ghadis. These cities were located in an area roughly corresponding to the Gobi Desert, a hundred thousand years ago. At that time the desert was dotted with large oases and traversed by a river which emptied into the Caspian Sea.
The largest of these oases contained a lake ten miles long and five miles across, on the shores of which the university town of Waghdas was founded. Pilgrims came from all over the inhabited world to study in the academies of Waghdas, where the arts and sciences reached peaks of attainment that have never been equaled. Much of this ancient knowledge is now lost.
...
The effects of the Red Night on Receptacles and Transmigrants proved to be incalculable and many strange mutants arose as a series of plagues devastated the cities. It is this period of war and pestilence that is covered by the books. The Council had set out to produce a race of supermen for the exploration of space. They produced instead races of ravening idiot vampires.
Finally, the cities were abandoned and the survivors fled in all direction, carrying the plagues with them. Some of these migrants crossed the Bering Strait into the New World, taking the books with them. They settled in the area later occupied by the Mayans and the books eventually fell into the hands of the Mayan priests.
The alert student of this noble experiment will perceive that death was regarded as equivalent not to birth but to conception and go in to infer that conception is the basic trauma. In the moment of death, the dying man’s whole life may flash in front of his eyes back to conception. In the moment of conception, his future life flashes forward to his future death. To reexperience conception is fatal.
Zines [Gutter Butter]
- Posted: 22.Jul.2007.
(Click for full size)
Now here is a zine about which some things should be said. Gutter Butter was send to me by someone I barely knew but who thought I should see it and copied his own copy for me in 2001. Which is still appreciated. It contains the notes made by Okra B. Dingle, found after his dead, inserted in porn magazines stored underneath his mattress, and annotated by his psychiatrist. The ‘story’ is that Okra was incarcerated in bedlam for his entire life, perhaps even being born there. Occasionally he would escape to another ward at the same facility, from which he got his life’s experience. The actual notes are part “I have been hitchhiking here for hours why does nobody want to take me” to hilarious philosophical ruminations. It are those that make Gutter Butter so worthwhile. Like:
The zine contains one rad diagram by Okra, see above.
- Posted: 22.Jul.2007.
(Click for full size)
Now here is a zine about which some things should be said. Gutter Butter was send to me by someone I barely knew but who thought I should see it and copied his own copy for me in 2001. Which is still appreciated. It contains the notes made by Okra B. Dingle, found after his dead, inserted in porn magazines stored underneath his mattress, and annotated by his psychiatrist. The ‘story’ is that Okra was incarcerated in bedlam for his entire life, perhaps even being born there. Occasionally he would escape to another ward at the same facility, from which he got his life’s experience. The actual notes are part “I have been hitchhiking here for hours why does nobody want to take me” to hilarious philosophical ruminations. It are those that make Gutter Butter so worthwhile. Like:
Those glow in the dark skeleton peel-off sticker things sure do remind me of life. The darker it gets, the clearer the skeleton things gets.Or:
Design a pocketknife modelled after the Swiss Army knife, but called an American Army knife, with a fold out T.V. remote, Spam can opener and a .45 automatic pistol with laser sight.Or, my absolute favourite:
You ever hear about how if someone went back in time, and, say, stepped on an ant, or crushed a single blade of grass, that the whole of history would be changed, right? When that person came back to the present they wouldn’t recognize it at all. So did you ever wonder what would happen if someone went back and changed the last word in that old song “I’m leaving, leaving on that midnight train to Georgia” – to “Dusseldorf”?If anybody out there knows something about the maker of this zine please do get in touch.
The zine contains one rad diagram by Okra, see above.
Capablanca [The Cuban Wizz]
- Posted: 12.Jul.2007.
José Raúl Capablanca was the boy wonder of chess. Edward Winter, his biographer, has posted on his website several articles in which Capablanca discusses his genius. To be tagged: psycholudology.
How did he learn to play chess at the age of four? (LINK)
- Posted: 12.Jul.2007.
José Raúl Capablanca was the boy wonder of chess. Edward Winter, his biographer, has posted on his website several articles in which Capablanca discusses his genius. To be tagged: psycholudology.
How did he learn to play chess at the age of four? (LINK)
I approached closer, and obtained my first view of a chess-board.Notice that Wittgenstein used this way of learning chess as an example in one of his books. What made him good? Is Chess an art or a science? (LINK)
Without disturbing the silence that prevailed, I took a position at the table, where I could view the proceedings comfortably. My boyish curiosity soon grew to wonder; and very shortly, after observing how my father was moving those peculiarly shaped figures from square to square of the board, I felt a sudden fascination for the game.
The impression came upon me that this curious game must have a military significance, judging from the interest the two soldiers manifested. I then began to concentrate my mind on discovering how the pieces should be moved; and at the conclusion of the first game I felt sure that I had learned the rules for the movement of chessmen.
A second game was played. By this time the wonder of an “Arabian Nights’” tale could not have held me more. I followed each move eagerly. Having solved the first mystery of chess – the movement of the pieces – I sought to find out the principles that underlie the game.
In a general way the memory of chess experts is like the memory of the great musicians. Just the same as a great pianist, for instance, can sit down and play for hours without looking at the score of any of the works he plays, a chess master can go through endless games and variations which he has unconsciously stored in his mind. The great musicians see the notes in their minds’ eyes as though they were in front of them. In just the same way the chess master sees the moves and positions. If momentarily they forget a note or a move, the previous note or move, as the case may be, will remind them of the one to follow. There is a logical sequence that helps the expert to overcome his difficulties. In fact, it should be noticed that there must be some analogy between the minds of a musician and a chessplayer. I know several eminent musicians who are very fond of chess, and on the other hand nearly all the expert chessplayers are very fond of music.
...
All that can be put forth on my behalf is that I have read and seen a great deal, that I have an open mind, and that I am ready to learn anything on any subject. It might be well to call attention to the fact that chess as generally played by the large majority of players is merely a game more difficult than other games, but when played by the leading masters it ceases to be a game and becomes what might be called a minor scientific art. At its present stage of development it has a great deal of a science, but it has also a great deal of an art. Whether it will ever become an absolute science is only a matter of speculation. With regard to the essential qualities in the make-up of a champion it is difficult to lay down a dictum. It might be possible for a player to attain the highest place through the unusual power of one or two qualities that might be merely normal in another player fully as strong through the development of other qualities, which in their turn are only normal in the first case. There are, however, two qualities which seem to be absolutely essential in order to obtain pre-eminence in chess. They are: unusual powers of concentration and the power to visualize positions which may arise from the position in front of the player.
Gombrich on Animal Art
- Posted: 26.Aug.2007.
In an interview conducted in 1979 by Paul Levinson with Ernst Gombrich, they touch on the subject of the origins of art. Moving from The caves of Lascaux to Animal art. Gombrich is a sceptic about both:
- Posted: 26.Aug.2007.
In an interview conducted in 1979 by Paul Levinson with Ernst Gombrich, they touch on the subject of the origins of art. Moving from The caves of Lascaux to Animal art. Gombrich is a sceptic about both:
The Origins of Art
PL: All right, just shifting the discussion a little bit, I wonder if we could get back for a moment to Popper's role as a philosopher of science, and something you said earlier about having something in common with Popper—that you are both historians. Now many people have commented upon the likelihood that art may really be more primary, historically, than science. And yet so much attention recently has been paid to the philosophy of science, and not that much to the philosophy of art—even though the cave paintings in Lascaux may really be the oldest form of human expression, certainly predating any known science or any
EHG: Most certainly.
PL: So would it be exaggerating things too much to say that in a sense what you're doing by applying Popper—applying some of what Popper has worked out in the philosophy of science to the philosophy of art—is really raising the correct primacy of art as opposed to science?
EHG: I wouldn't see it that way. You see, I have always resisted the category of"Art" with a capital "A." As you may know, what people call art in various civilizations differs enormously. In fact, our notion of art is an eighteenth-century notion—"fine arts," you know. After all, even earlier and even later were the "art" of healing, and the "art" of love, and the "art" of war, and the "art" of who knows what. It really is a term for skill, isn't it?
Now, like Popper, I don't think one should waste a lot of time on definitions; but one must be aware that our grouping of, let us say, Lascaux under "art," and the arrowheads which may be found there not under "art," is our point of view, our categorizing.
About Lascaux, though I have been lucky enough to have seen it, I am very much aware of the depths of our ignorance about these cave paintings. People always enthuse how marvelously naturalistic they are—I have never encountered a bison in my life, and I don't know what they looked like.
PL: Well, there are lots of them in American cowboy-and-Indian movies.
EHG: Ah, yes.
PL: But certainly no bison with four heads superimposed one upon another!
EHG: I don't know. I mean, I think there is a certain amount of wishful thinking in these discussions. Also, I mean, the work is a marvel, what we see in these caves, but we have so little idea of how they were seen to begin with—it was dark, probably, in those caves.
PL: Yes, that's a serious, intriguing problem.
EHG: I just don't know what to say about it.
PL: Are you familiar with the work of Alexander Marshack, who has written a book called The Roots of Civilization [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972]?
EHG: No, I don't know it.
PL: He places tremendous emphasis on what must have been needed to be able to paint those types of paintings, and he has deduced from this that there must have been a fairly complex language system, perhaps even a rudimentary system of science of some sort to mix the pigments.
EHG: I would agree that this is likely. I would also think it likely that these people—these medicine men, or whatever they were, what can we know—may have had something like pattern books. They may have walked around with skins on which there were models of this kind—what do we know? We can't know everything.
PL: Yes. But they are fascinating, because they are, I guess, the earliest expressions of World 3, or the earliest objects of World 3 that have come down to us,
EHG: which have survived, yes, yes. But of course the separation there between human and subhuman is not so clear, particularly now after these works on primates, you know.
PL: Well, I am fairly ignorant in these fields, but I must say that I've never been particularly impressed with those primate examples of"art," or whatever you might call them.
EHG: No, "art?" "Art?" Absolutely not. But technology!
PL: Yes.
EHG: You know, Jane Goodall's chimps who used to fish for termites with blades of grass.
PL: Yes, I would agree with you. But I think you have to differentiate between a primate that gets these skills spontaneously, or out of its own gene pool, and one that's taught the skills through great rigor by human beings. Although tool behavior may occur spontaneously in the wild, the "art" that apes produce always seems to take place under human supervision.
EHG: Oh yes, I quite agree with you—it's an entirely different thing. But we do know that there are astounding abilities of chimps. The most astounding I know is the primate who looks into a mirror, and has a spot on his forehead, and can go on and remove it himself.
PL: Yes, that seems to suggest a sort of awareness of self, a self-image, and that's significant.
EHG: Yes, that goes pretty far.
The Anti-Memoirs of all Memories
- Posted: 22.Aug.2007.
The best (and virtually only) book read in the last few weeks is the Anti-Memoirs of Andre Malraux. It is a massive tome hidden in a paperback, but of course Malraux liked to live large, even when only in his head and in his books. At times this book is dull, at others, when he is writing about India or the Orient it is pure Crystalpunk Manna. The parts where he is evoking ancient Hindu India or Pharaohic Egypt as part of the now are especially unequally superb. The foreword too, in which Malraux discusses the forms and evolution of memoirs and confessions were read with the heightened awareness of recognition. I will now look for a proper biography. Great Book, you should read it too, but how to show its greatness? My favourite quote about the Ellora caves, severed from the chapter hardly does even though it is a classic eulogy for the Little Minds. (It is of course also very Yeatsian/Jungian old-fashioned)
- Posted: 22.Aug.2007.
The best (and virtually only) book read in the last few weeks is the Anti-Memoirs of Andre Malraux. It is a massive tome hidden in a paperback, but of course Malraux liked to live large, even when only in his head and in his books. At times this book is dull, at others, when he is writing about India or the Orient it is pure Crystalpunk Manna. The parts where he is evoking ancient Hindu India or Pharaohic Egypt as part of the now are especially unequally superb. The foreword too, in which Malraux discusses the forms and evolution of memoirs and confessions were read with the heightened awareness of recognition. I will now look for a proper biography. Great Book, you should read it too, but how to show its greatness? My favourite quote about the Ellora caves, severed from the chapter hardly does even though it is a classic eulogy for the Little Minds. (It is of course also very Yeatsian/Jungian old-fashioned)
The greatest sculptors of these caves were seeking to grasp the ungraspable better than or in a different way from their predecessors. ‘O Lord, thou who takest on the forms imagined by thy faithful. …’ But the faithful do not invent the forms of the gods: they recognize them. The prayer which applied here was more disturbing, and it is in fact owed to sculptor ‘O Lord of all the gods, teach me in dreams how to execute the works that are in my mind !. Not that Ellora is any more oneiric than a lot of other temples, but what reigns there, and what the Hindu prayer evokes, is the immemorial world of archetypes and of symbols, which pursue its nocturnal life through generations of sleepers, just as the mind, for those who call upon the gods, pursue its life through their own selves.
…
Nowhere had I been so overwhelmingly aware of how much all sacred art presupposes that those to whom it is addressed take for granted the existence of a secret of the world which art passes on without unveiling, and in which it makes them share. I was in the nocturnal garden of the great dreams of India.
WH Auden on Glossolalia
- Posted: 20.Jan.2007.
It is extraordinary that sects of religious enthusiasts, from the Montanists down to Catholic Apostolics, should have imagined that to make verbal noises which nobody could understand was evidence of Divine Inspiration, a repetition of the miracle of Pentecost. What happened at Pentecost was exactly the opposite, the miracle of instantaneous translation – everybody could understand what everybody else was saying.
In his great book Enthusiasm, Father Ronald Knox gives us two examples of “speaking with tongues”: “Hippo gerosto niparos boorasti farini O fastor sungor boorinas epoopongos menati” and “Hey amei hassan alla do hoc alors lovre has heo massan amor ho ti prov hir aso me”
AH Auden from A Certain World, a commonplace book
- Posted: 20.Jan.2007.
It is extraordinary that sects of religious enthusiasts, from the Montanists down to Catholic Apostolics, should have imagined that to make verbal noises which nobody could understand was evidence of Divine Inspiration, a repetition of the miracle of Pentecost. What happened at Pentecost was exactly the opposite, the miracle of instantaneous translation – everybody could understand what everybody else was saying.
In his great book Enthusiasm, Father Ronald Knox gives us two examples of “speaking with tongues”: “Hippo gerosto niparos boorasti farini O fastor sungor boorinas epoopongos menati” and “Hey amei hassan alla do hoc alors lovre has heo massan amor ho ti prov hir aso me”
AH Auden from A Certain World, a commonplace book
The Earth was Probably Born by Accident
- Posted: 20.Jan.2007.
The Earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediatly made use of and recast into something naturally directed.
Teilhard de Chardin - The Phenomenon of Man
- Posted: 20.Jan.2007.
The Earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediatly made use of and recast into something naturally directed.
Teilhard de Chardin - The Phenomenon of Man
Isaiah Berlin on Romanticism
- Posted: 20.Jan.2007.
The sciences may be of use in practical matters; but no concatenation of concepts will give one an understanding of a man, of a work of art, of what is conveyed by essence, of a human being, a movement, a culture; nor for that matter of the Deity, which speaks to one everywhere if only one has ears to hear and eyes to see. What is real is individual, that is, is what it is in virtue of its uniqueness, its differences from other things, events, thoughts, and not in virtue of what it has in common with them, which is all that the generalising sciences seek to record. 'Feeling alone', said Hamann, 'gives to abstractions hands, feet, wings'; and again 'God speaks to us in poetical words, addressed to the senses, not in abstractions for the learned', and so must anyone who has something to say that matters, who speaks to another person.
Hamann took little interest in theories or speculations about the external world; he cared only for the inner personal life of the individual, and therefore only for art, religious experience, the senses, personal relationships, which the analytic truths of scientific reason seemed to him to reduce to meaningless ciphers. 'God is a poet, not a mathematician', and it is men who, like Kant, suffer from a 'gnostic hatred of matter' that provide us with endless verbal constructions – words that are taken for concepts, and worse still, concepts that are taken for real things.
The most extravagant of the German romantics, Novalis or Tieck, looked on the universe not as a structure that can be studied or described by whatever methods are most appropriate, but as a perpetual activity of the spirit and of nature which is the selfsame spirit in a dormant state; of this constant upward movement the man of genius is the most concious agent, who thus embodies the forward activity that advances the life of the spirit most significantly. While some, like Schelling and Coleridge, conceive this activity as the gradual growth into self-consciousness of the world-spirit that is perpetually moving toward self-perfection, other conceive the cosmic process as having no goal, as a purposeless and meaningless movement, which men, because they cannot face this bleak and despair-inducing truth, seek to hide from themselves by constructing comforting illusions in the form of religions that provide rewards in another life, or metaphysical systems that claim to provide rational justifications both for what there is in the world and for what men do and can do and should do; or scientific systems that perform the task of appearing to give sense to a process that is, in fact, purposeless, a formless flux which is what it is, a brute fact, signifying nothing.
Isaiah Berlin from The Counter-Enlightment (Against the Current, 1979)
- Posted: 20.Jan.2007.
The sciences may be of use in practical matters; but no concatenation of concepts will give one an understanding of a man, of a work of art, of what is conveyed by essence, of a human being, a movement, a culture; nor for that matter of the Deity, which speaks to one everywhere if only one has ears to hear and eyes to see. What is real is individual, that is, is what it is in virtue of its uniqueness, its differences from other things, events, thoughts, and not in virtue of what it has in common with them, which is all that the generalising sciences seek to record. 'Feeling alone', said Hamann, 'gives to abstractions hands, feet, wings'; and again 'God speaks to us in poetical words, addressed to the senses, not in abstractions for the learned', and so must anyone who has something to say that matters, who speaks to another person.
Hamann took little interest in theories or speculations about the external world; he cared only for the inner personal life of the individual, and therefore only for art, religious experience, the senses, personal relationships, which the analytic truths of scientific reason seemed to him to reduce to meaningless ciphers. 'God is a poet, not a mathematician', and it is men who, like Kant, suffer from a 'gnostic hatred of matter' that provide us with endless verbal constructions – words that are taken for concepts, and worse still, concepts that are taken for real things.
The most extravagant of the German romantics, Novalis or Tieck, looked on the universe not as a structure that can be studied or described by whatever methods are most appropriate, but as a perpetual activity of the spirit and of nature which is the selfsame spirit in a dormant state; of this constant upward movement the man of genius is the most concious agent, who thus embodies the forward activity that advances the life of the spirit most significantly. While some, like Schelling and Coleridge, conceive this activity as the gradual growth into self-consciousness of the world-spirit that is perpetually moving toward self-perfection, other conceive the cosmic process as having no goal, as a purposeless and meaningless movement, which men, because they cannot face this bleak and despair-inducing truth, seek to hide from themselves by constructing comforting illusions in the form of religions that provide rewards in another life, or metaphysical systems that claim to provide rational justifications both for what there is in the world and for what men do and can do and should do; or scientific systems that perform the task of appearing to give sense to a process that is, in fact, purposeless, a formless flux which is what it is, a brute fact, signifying nothing.
Isaiah Berlin from The Counter-Enlightment (Against the Current, 1979)
Behavioural Cut-Ups and Magick
- Posted: 20.Jan.2007.
Some people learn very little new tricks. Genesis (breyer) P-Orridge on thee Cut-Up in hees typicyl annoyingk semii-Crowlyan stylee:
- Posted: 20.Jan.2007.
Some people learn very little new tricks. Genesis (breyer) P-Orridge on thee Cut-Up in hees typicyl annoyingk semii-Crowlyan stylee:
History, that which travels thee macrocosm of space and time, lives inside words like an ectoplasmic hermit crab in a stolen shell. Words in turn live inside us too, like more hermit crabs, protecting themselves from discovery of their secret, and words live outside us freeranging in our culture like viruses waiting for an appropriate host. This function has be deeply investigated by W.S. Burroughs in literature, and to a lesser extent through tape and film, and collage works earlier in his career. However, looking back with an overview in 1987, this first layer and its direct symbiotic relationship with all interpretations of control and all thee interactions and permutations it exposes satisfied him and occupied him enough. Brion Gysin, "Thee Master", who largely introduced W.S.B. to this whole scenario, saw further, saw thee other layers, was not satisfied. He studied languages, western and eastern Etymology, had devastating knowledge of European migrations and interactions going back as far as records allowed. He was aware of thee process touched upon earlier. He observed first hand for 23 years thee threads of pulse and frequency generated through Moroccan music. Where thee master musician has certain phrases and sequences of sound that are thee equivalent of a spoken language and guide and instruct thee players as thee music is performed. Music that therefore literally "speaks" of primal roots and impulses of behaviour. That triggers endorphine assisted alpha-wave neurological states that inspire and reveal thee fluidity of occult physics. That all is light, which is nothing more than an idea, and that light is, within that, infinite particles exploding and racing in every direction simultaneously. A quaquaversatility. And that is thee nearest to a key we might get. And from this Brion gave us paintings and drawings which began with thee desert, with desert light. And then seemed at first glance to becoum more abstract, myriad scratchings and markings swirling until he showed you they were thee desert still, thee light itself, thee very particles of sight. And they were thee desert dwellers, thee keepers of thee music, thee speakers of frequency. Thee expressors of magick lore. Thee inhabitants of Pan, drowning in unspoken rituals.
Laplace's Demon
- Posted: 19.Jan.2007.
"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."
Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace
- Posted: 19.Jan.2007.
"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at any given moment knew all of the forces that animate nature and the mutual positions of the beings that compose it, if this intellect were vast enough to submit the data to analysis, could condense into a single formula the movement of the greatest bodies of the universe and that of the lightest atom; for such an intellect nothing could be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."
Marquis Pierre Simon de Laplace
The scholars of hominid history are uncovering a constantly larger past in which the earlier members of our species continually appear to be smarter, more accomplished, more adept, and more complex than we had previously believed.
- Posted: 22.Nov.2007.
Gary Snyder aka 'the Thoreau of the Beat Generation' about time, cave art and human history. Great Stuff! Sample some fragments below. The picture is from the websiteof D.G.Wills Booksellers.
- Posted: 22.Nov.2007.
Gary Snyder aka 'the Thoreau of the Beat Generation' about time, cave art and human history. Great Stuff! Sample some fragments below. The picture is from the websiteof D.G.Wills Booksellers.
One of my neopagan friends, an ethnobotanist and prehistorian, complains about how the Christians have callously appropriated his sacred solstice ceremonies. "Our fir tree of lights and gifts," he says, "has been swept into an orgy of consumerism, no longer remembered as a sign of the return of the sun," and "People have totally forgotten that the gifts brought from the north by Santa Claus are spiritual, not material; and his red clothes, white trim, round body and northern habitat show that he represents the incredibly psychoactive mushroom Amanita muscaria."
My friend is one of several poetscholars I know who study deep history (a term he prefers to "prehistory") - in this case that of Europe - for clues and guides to understanding the creature that we are and how we got here, and better to steer our way into the future. Such studies are especially useful for artists.
...
One important reminder here is that "There is no progress in art." It is either good, or it isn't. Art that moves us today can be from anywhere, from any time.
...
If our ancient rock artists skipped out on painting humans, it just may be that they knew more than enough about themselves and could turn their attention wholeheartedly to the nonhuman other. In any case the range of their art embraces both abstract and unreadable signs and graphs and a richly portrayed world of what today we call "faunal biodiversity". They gave us a picture of their animal environment with as much pride and art as if they were giving us their very selves.
Maybe in some way they speak from a spirit that is in line with Dögen's comment, "We study the self to forget the self. When you forget the self, you can become one with all the other phenomena."
We have no way of knowing what the verbal arts of 35,000 years ago might have been. It is most likely that the languages of that time were in no way inferior in complexity, sophistication or richness to the languages spoken today. I get this opinion in a recent personal communication from the eminent linguist William Bright. It's not far-fetched to think that if the paintings were so good, the poems and songs must have been of equal quality.
One can imagine myths and tales of people, places and animals. In poetry or song, I fancy wild-horse chants, "salutes" (as are sung in some parts of Africa) to each creature, little lyrics that intensify some element in a narrative, a kind of deep song - cante jondo - to go together with deep history, or quick "bison haiku".
A Brave New Game
- Posted: 02.Apr.2007.
- Posted: 02.Apr.2007.
Strange to think that even in Our Ford's day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness. Nowadays the Controllers won't approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.Found at Manqala-wiki. Perhaps I should mention that I read the first book of the Aldous Huxley biography by Sybille Bedford but thought it so drab the second book is still waiting. Huxley himself does not appeal to me much either. Nice quote though. A quick search reveals that "A Brave New World" is also a role-playing game and the title of a Iron Maiden record.
Aldous Huxley in A Brave New World
The Royal Game
- Posted: 29.Mar.2007.
'The Royal Game' is a classic story by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig about the delirious effect of chess poisoning. The psychology it attempts to clarify is the psycholudological one.
- Posted: 29.Mar.2007.
'The Royal Game' is a classic story by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig about the delirious effect of chess poisoning. The psychology it attempts to clarify is the psycholudological one.
But are we not already guilty of an insulting limitation in calling chess a game? Isn't it also an science, an art, hovering between these 2 categories as Muhammed's coffin hovered between heaven and earth? Isn't it a unique bond between every pair of opponents, ancient and yet eternally new; mechanical in its framework yet only functioning through use of the imagination; confine din geometrically fixed space and at the same time released from confinement by its permutations; continuously evolving yet sterile; thoughts that lead nowhere, mathematics that add up to nothing, art without an end product, architecture without substance, and nevertheless demostratably more durable in its true nature and existence than any book or creative work? Isn't it the only game that belongs to all people and all times? And who knows whether God put it on earth to kill boredom, to sharpen the wits or to lift the spirits? Where is it beginnings and where its end?
The Remix Republic
- Posted: 25.Mar.2007.
Rohit Gupta is a writer from Mumbai who has just released a first chapter of a book he is writing called The Remix Republic. After a quick first read of the 23 pages several things about this lovely essay stands out: the lucid style of writing, the richness of the material, but most of all the ingenious way politics, Western theory and Hindu mythology-as-technology are brought together to create and map a world that is decidedly cosmopolitan and local at the same time. Here is a small example that does not do justice to the full text but does give a glimpse of the wicked stuff Rohit is working with:
- Posted: 25.Mar.2007.
Rohit Gupta is a writer from Mumbai who has just released a first chapter of a book he is writing called The Remix Republic. After a quick first read of the 23 pages several things about this lovely essay stands out: the lucid style of writing, the richness of the material, but most of all the ingenious way politics, Western theory and Hindu mythology-as-technology are brought together to create and map a world that is decidedly cosmopolitan and local at the same time. Here is a small example that does not do justice to the full text but does give a glimpse of the wicked stuff Rohit is working with:
In Vedic cosmography, ancient Indian astronomers drew a detailed picture of India within the cosmos, and gave its position on a “plane of existence”. Bharata-varsa, as they called it, was a place where human beings struggled, and depending on their actions (karma), they were granted higher or lower quality rebirths. The southern part of the mythical Jambu-dvipa, under the shadow of Mount Meru, bharata-varsa was also synonymous with the whole of humanity, not just India. They mapped the earth not as a totality of what we could see, but the totality of experience. According to them, human existence could not be mapped on the simplicity of a spherical rock, the earth as it is understood today. This India which involved the sum of humanity was positioned inside a giant disc of planets – the bhu-mandala. This disc rested upon the back of a tortoise, (kurma) – an avatar of Lord Vishnu.
'I have been taught'
- Posted: 22.Mar.2007.
He was the great Orkney poet, his autobiography perhaps the best I have ever read. The first line of this poem is a Crystalpunk credo.
- Posted: 22.Mar.2007.
Edwin Muir, from Selected Poems, 1965.
'I have been taught'
I have been taught by dreams and fantasies
Learned from the friendly and darker phantoms
And we got great knowledge and courtesy from the dead
Kinsmen and kinswoman, ancestors and friends
But from two mainly
Who gave me birth.
Have learned and drunk from that unspending good
These founts whose learned windings keep
My feet from straying
To the deadly path
That leads into the sultry labyrinth
Where all is bright and flare
Consumes and shrivels
The moist fruit
Have drawn at last from time which takes away
And taking leaves all things in their right place
An image of forever
One and whole.
And now that time grows shorter, I perceive
That Plato's is the truest poetry,
And that these shadows
Are cast by the true
He was the great Orkney poet, his autobiography perhaps the best I have ever read. The first line of this poem is a Crystalpunk credo.
Synchronised Swimming
- Posted: 05.Jul.2006.
(Click for full size)
"If cultures of E. coli are grown in a medium containing chemicals evolved in the cell's biochemistry, they will swim together in predictable patterns. Compounds like succinate and fumarate will stimulate them to seek each other out and swim in coordinated arrays. This truly is synchronised swimming on a microscopic scale."
Brian J. Ford - the secret language of life
Picture VIA
- Posted: 05.Jul.2006.
(Click for full size)
"If cultures of E. coli are grown in a medium containing chemicals evolved in the cell's biochemistry, they will swim together in predictable patterns. Compounds like succinate and fumarate will stimulate them to seek each other out and swim in coordinated arrays. This truly is synchronised swimming on a microscopic scale."
Brian J. Ford - the secret language of life
Picture VIA
2 Peter Medawar Quotes
- Posted: 30.Jun.2006.
1:) On Teilhard de Chardin
The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought. French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.
2:) On Learning in Bacteria
bacteriologists have known for years that if bacteria are forced to live upon some new unfamiliar kind of foodstuff or are exposed to the actions of an anti-bacterial drug, they acquire the ability to make use of that new food, or to make the drug harmless to them by breaking it down. The treatment was at one time referred to as the training of bacteria --- with the clear implication that the new food or drug taught the bacteria how to manufacture the new ferments upon which their new behavior depends. But it turns out that the process of training belies its name: it is not instructive. A bacterium can synthesize only those ferments it is genetically entitled to synthesize. The process of training merely brings out or exploits or develops an innate potentiality of the bacterial population, a potentiality underwritten or subsidized by the particular genetic make-up of one or another of its members.
VIA
- Posted: 30.Jun.2006.
1:) On Teilhard de Chardin
The Phenomenon of Man stands square in the tradition of Naturphilosophie, a philosophical indoor pastime of German origin which does not seem even by accident (though there is a great deal of it) to have contributed anything of permanent value to the storehouse of human thought. French is not a language that lends itself naturally to the opaque and ponderous idiom of nature-philosophy, and Teilhard has according resorted to the use of that tipsy, euphoristic prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.
2:) On Learning in Bacteria
bacteriologists have known for years that if bacteria are forced to live upon some new unfamiliar kind of foodstuff or are exposed to the actions of an anti-bacterial drug, they acquire the ability to make use of that new food, or to make the drug harmless to them by breaking it down. The treatment was at one time referred to as the training of bacteria --- with the clear implication that the new food or drug taught the bacteria how to manufacture the new ferments upon which their new behavior depends. But it turns out that the process of training belies its name: it is not instructive. A bacterium can synthesize only those ferments it is genetically entitled to synthesize. The process of training merely brings out or exploits or develops an innate potentiality of the bacterial population, a potentiality underwritten or subsidized by the particular genetic make-up of one or another of its members.
VIA
The Stuff of the Universe
- Posted: 27.Jun.2006.
To push anything back into the past is equivalent to reducing to its simplest elements. Traced as far back as possible in the direction of their origins, the last fibre of the human aggregrate are lost to view and are merged in our eyes with the very stuff of the universe.
Teilhard de Chardin
- Posted: 27.Jun.2006.
To push anything back into the past is equivalent to reducing to its simplest elements. Traced as far back as possible in the direction of their origins, the last fibre of the human aggregrate are lost to view and are merged in our eyes with the very stuff of the universe.
Teilhard de Chardin
The Hidden Span
- Posted: 17.Jan.2008.
Great segment about the native fabulism of China to be found in a larger essay by Elliot Weinberger:
- Posted: 17.Jan.2008.
Great segment about the native fabulism of China to be found in a larger essay by Elliot Weinberger:
The Hidden Span
The Taoist universe is an infinity of nested cycles of time, each revolving at a different pace, and those who are not mere mortals pertain to different cycles. Certain teachings take 400 years to transmit from sage to student; others, 4,000; others, 40,000. It is said that Lao-tzu, the author of the Tao Te Ching, spent 81 years in the womb.
Taoist ritual begins with the construction of an altar that is a calendar and a map of this universe. At its perimeter, twenty-four pickets, the Twenty-Four Energy Nodes, each representing fifteen days, to form a year of 360 days. Within, a proliferation of markers for the Two Principles (yin and yang), the Three Energies, the Three Irrational Powers, the Five Elements, the Five Tones, the Six Rectors, the Eight Trigrams and Sixty-Four Hexagrams of the I Ching, the Nine Palaces and the Nine Halls, the Ten Stems, the Twelve Branches . . . Each is a supernatural being, a gate, a direction, a part of the body, a measurement of time, a philosophical concept, an alchemical substance. As Lao-tzu said, "The Tao created one, one gave birth to two, two to three, and three to the ten thousand things."
Typically of Taoism, this system has an inherent flaw: a hole in time, called the Irrational Opening. If, at a certain moment, which is always changing, one walks backward through the various gates in a certain order, one can escape time and enter the Hidden Span. In this other time beyond all the other times, one finds oneself in the holy mountains; there one can gather healing herbs, magic mushrooms, and elixirs that bring immortality.
The technique was first taught to the Yellow Emperor by the six calendrical Jade Maidens, who in turn learned it from the Mysterious Woman of the Nine Heavens, also known as the Lady of the Ultimate Yin. Its most famous practitioner was a very real military strategist, Chu-ko Liang (181-234). To repel an invading army, he placed hidden markers on an enormous plain to secretly replicate a Taoist altar, and then tricked the troops into entering through a certain symbolic gate. Although the landscape appeared unremarkable, the army found itself trapped in a labyrinth of an alternate time from which it could not escape.
Sortilege [Gods First, Psycholudology Second]
- Posted: 23.Dec.2007.
Julian Jaynes' Breakdown is such hot Crystalpunk property that my fingers burn while reading it. The argument is that the gods were inner voices who left us with the emergence of consciousness, which in turn was a result of the human mind trying to cope with enduring catastrophe and increasing complex of society. It is a remarkably consistent, and truly radical, deep history of the evolution of consciousness which I am reading as a psycho-archeological twin to Popper's Open Society. The following paragraph allies psycholudology with the silencing of the voices.
- Posted: 23.Dec.2007.
Julian Jaynes' Breakdown is such hot Crystalpunk property that my fingers burn while reading it. The argument is that the gods were inner voices who left us with the emergence of consciousness, which in turn was a result of the human mind trying to cope with enduring catastrophe and increasing complex of society. It is a remarkably consistent, and truly radical, deep history of the evolution of consciousness which I am reading as a psycho-archeological twin to Popper's Open Society. The following paragraph allies psycholudology with the silencing of the voices.
Sortilege or the casting of lots differs from omens in that it is active and designed to provoke the gods� answers to specific questions in novel situations. It consisted of throwing marked sticks, stones, bones, or beans upon the ground, or picking one out of a group held in a bowl, or tossing such markers in the lap of a tunic until one fell out. Sometime sit was to answer yes or no, at other times to choose one out of a group of men, plots, or alternatives. But this simplicity � even triviality to us � should not blind us from seeing the profound psychological problem involved, as well as appreciating its remarkable historic importance. We are so used the huge variety of games of chance, of throwing dice, roulette wheels, etc., all of them vestiges of this ancient practise of divination by lots, that we find it difficult to really appreciate the significance of this practice historically. It is a help here to realize that there was no concept of chance whatever until very recent times. Therefore, the discovery (how odd to think of it as a discovery!) of deciding an issue by throwing sticks or beans on the ground was an extremely momentous one for the future of mankind. For, because the was no chance, the result had to be caused by the gods whose intentions were being divided.
As to the psychology of sortilege, I would call your attention to two points of interest. First, this practise is very specifically invented in culture to supplement right hemisphere function when that function, following the breakdown of the bicameral mind, is no longer as accessible as when it was coded linguistically in the voices of gods. We know from laboratory studies that it is the right hemisphere that predominately processes spatial and pattern information. It is better at fitting parts of things into patterns as in Koh�s Block Test, at perceiving the location and quantity of dots in a pattern or of patterns of sounds such as melodies. Now the problem that sortilege is trying to solve is something of the same kind, that of ordering parts of the pattern, of choosing who is to do what, or what piece of land goes to which person. Original, I suggest, in simpler societies, such decisions were easily made by the hallucinated voices called gods, which were involved primarily with the right hemisphere. And when the gods no longer accomplished this function, perhaps because of the increasing complexity of such decisions, sortilege came into history as a substitute for this right hemisphere function.
Brion Gysin and the Dream Machine [Plans Included]
- Posted: 18.Oct.2006.
(Click for full size)
"I have made a simple flicker machine. You look at it with your eyes shut and the flicker plays over your eyelids. Visions start with a kaleidoscope of colors on a plane in front of the eyes and gradually become more complex and beautiful, breaking like surf on a shore until whole patterns of color are pounding to get in. After awhile the visions were permanently behind my eyelids and I was in the middle of the whole scene with limitless patterns being generated around me. There was an almost unbearable feeling of spatial movement for a while but It was well worth getting through for I found that when it stopped I was high above the earth in a universal blaze of glory. Afterwards I found that my perception of the world around me had increased very notably. All conceptions of being dragged or tired had dropped away..."
VIA
- Posted: 18.Oct.2006.
(Click for full size)
"I have made a simple flicker machine. You look at it with your eyes shut and the flicker plays over your eyelids. Visions start with a kaleidoscope of colors on a plane in front of the eyes and gradually become more complex and beautiful, breaking like surf on a shore until whole patterns of color are pounding to get in. After awhile the visions were permanently behind my eyelids and I was in the middle of the whole scene with limitless patterns being generated around me. There was an almost unbearable feeling of spatial movement for a while but It was well worth getting through for I found that when it stopped I was high above the earth in a universal blaze of glory. Afterwards I found that my perception of the world around me had increased very notably. All conceptions of being dragged or tired had dropped away..."
VIA
Games and Language
- Posted: 11.Oct.2006.
Some dreamed of a new alphabet, a new language of symbols through which they could formulate and exchange their new intellectual experiences. He invented for the Glass Bead Game the principles of a new language, a language of symbols and formulas, in which mathematics and music played an equal part, so that it became possible to combine astronomical and musical formulas, to reduce mathematics and music to a common denominator, as it were.
These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines.
VIA
- Posted: 11.Oct.2006.
Some dreamed of a new alphabet, a new language of symbols through which they could formulate and exchange their new intellectual experiences. He invented for the Glass Bead Game the principles of a new language, a language of symbols and formulas, in which mathematics and music played an equal part, so that it became possible to combine astronomical and musical formulas, to reduce mathematics and music to a common denominator, as it were.
These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines.
VIA
Thee Great Beast of Chess
- Posted: 10.Oct.2006.
I was to find very shortly that the most innocent personal relations could be taken by filthy minds as the basis for their malicious imagination. The story of how this came about dominates my third year at the university, as will appear. It seems as if my destiny were preparing me for my appointed work by clearing inessential factors out of the way. My one serious worldly ambition had been to become the champion of the world at chess.
...
I had been to St. Petersburg to learn Russian for the Diplomatic Service in the long vacation of 1897, and on my way back broke the journey in Berlin to attend the Chess Congress. But I had hardly entered the room where the masters were playing when I was seized with what may justly be described as a mystical experience. I seemed to be looking on at the tournament from outside myself. I saw the masters --- one, shabby, snuffy and blear-eyed; another, in badly fitting would-be respectable shoddy; a third, a mere parody of humanity, and so on for the rest. These were the people to whose ranks I was seeking admission. "There, but for the grace of God, goes Aleister Crowley," I exclaimed to myself with disgust, and there and then I registered a vow never to play another serious game of chess. I perceived with praeternatural lucidity that I had not alighted on this planet with the object of playing chess.
VIA
For more quotes on chess and magic see this
- Posted: 10.Oct.2006.
I was to find very shortly that the most innocent personal relations could be taken by filthy minds as the basis for their malicious imagination. The story of how this came about dominates my third year at the university, as will appear. It seems as if my destiny were preparing me for my appointed work by clearing inessential factors out of the way. My one serious worldly ambition had been to become the champion of the world at chess.
...
I had been to St. Petersburg to learn Russian for the Diplomatic Service in the long vacation of 1897, and on my way back broke the journey in Berlin to attend the Chess Congress. But I had hardly entered the room where the masters were playing when I was seized with what may justly be described as a mystical experience. I seemed to be looking on at the tournament from outside myself. I saw the masters --- one, shabby, snuffy and blear-eyed; another, in badly fitting would-be respectable shoddy; a third, a mere parody of humanity, and so on for the rest. These were the people to whose ranks I was seeking admission. "There, but for the grace of God, goes Aleister Crowley," I exclaimed to myself with disgust, and there and then I registered a vow never to play another serious game of chess. I perceived with praeternatural lucidity that I had not alighted on this planet with the object of playing chess.
VIA
For more quotes on chess and magic see this
Some years ago I put a question to CONTROL
- Posted: 04.Oct.2006.
William Burroughs in the Retreat Diaries.
- Posted: 04.Oct.2006.
William Burroughs in the Retreat Diaries.
“Some years ago I put a question to CONTROL, a mysterious computer in London which purports to be from Venus and will answer any question.
Question: Would rubbing out the word result in immediate exteriorisation from the body?
Answer: Yes.
Question: How can this be accomplished?
Answer: At first automatic exercise.
I took this to mean that once words talk on their own, they rub themselves out."
most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process
- Posted: 26.Sep.2006.
Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that and keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity — most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.
Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow.
VIA
- Posted: 26.Sep.2006.
Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that and keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity — most of the World, animal, vegetable and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which sooner or later must crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life.
Thomas Pynchon. Gravity's Rainbow.
VIA
Dipping in Descartes
- Posted: 17.Aug.2006.
Seeveral years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation, if I desired to establish a firm and abiding superstructure in the sciences. But as this enterprise appeared to me to be one of great magnitude, I waited until I had attained an age so mature as to leave me no hope that at any stage of life more advanced I should be better able to execute my design. On this account, I have delayed so long that I should henceforth consider I was doing wrong were I still to consume in deliberation any of the time that now remains for action. To-day, then, since I have opportunely freed my mind from all cares and am happily disturbed by no passions], and since I am in the secure possession of leisure in a peaceable retirement, I will at length apply myself earnestly and freely to the general overthrow of all my former opinions.
VIA
- Posted: 17.Aug.2006.
Seeveral years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation, if I desired to establish a firm and abiding superstructure in the sciences. But as this enterprise appeared to me to be one of great magnitude, I waited until I had attained an age so mature as to leave me no hope that at any stage of life more advanced I should be better able to execute my design. On this account, I have delayed so long that I should henceforth consider I was doing wrong were I still to consume in deliberation any of the time that now remains for action. To-day, then, since I have opportunely freed my mind from all cares and am happily disturbed by no passions], and since I am in the secure possession of leisure in a peaceable retirement, I will at length apply myself earnestly and freely to the general overthrow of all my former opinions.
VIA
The Power to Make Mistakes
- Posted: 14.Aug.2006.
This is one of the criteria of life as we commonly think of it. If oxygen could go wrong and mistake some other gas for hydrogen and thus learn not to mistake it anymore, we should say oxygen was alive. The older life is, the more unerring it becomes in respect of things about which it is conversant-the more like, in fact, it becomes to such a thing as the force of gravity, both as regards unerringness and unconsciousness.
Is life such a force as gravity in process of formation, and was gravity once-or rather, were things once liable to make mistakes on such a subject as gravity?
If any one will tell me what life is I will tell him whether the inorganic is alive or not.
William Butler
- Posted: 14.Aug.2006.
This is one of the criteria of life as we commonly think of it. If oxygen could go wrong and mistake some other gas for hydrogen and thus learn not to mistake it anymore, we should say oxygen was alive. The older life is, the more unerring it becomes in respect of things about which it is conversant-the more like, in fact, it becomes to such a thing as the force of gravity, both as regards unerringness and unconsciousness.
Is life such a force as gravity in process of formation, and was gravity once-or rather, were things once liable to make mistakes on such a subject as gravity?
If any one will tell me what life is I will tell him whether the inorganic is alive or not.
William Butler
Language itself is poetry
- Posted: 15.May.2006.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) - Defence of Poetry, 1819
- Posted: 15.May.2006.
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) - Defence of Poetry, 1819
In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry; and to be a poet is to apprehend the true and the beautiful, in a word, the good which exists in the relation, subsisting, first between existence and perception, and secondly between perception and expression. Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem: the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age, and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry.
I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night
- Posted: 08.May.2006.
The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes &c. were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night, nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.
[Edward Sackville-West, ed., Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, together with Selections from the Autobiography of Thomas De Quincey]
- Posted: 08.May.2006.
The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes &c. were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night, nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience.
[Edward Sackville-West, ed., Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, together with Selections from the Autobiography of Thomas De Quincey]
The Palimsest by Hakim Bey
- Posted: 08.May.2006.
A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been re-used by writing over the original writing, often at right angles to it, and sometimes more than once. Frequently it's impossible to say which layer was first inscribed; and in any case any "development" (except in orthography) from layer to layer would be sheer accident. The connections between layers are not sequential in time but juxtapositional in space. Letters of layer B might blot out letters in layer A, or vice versa, or might leave blank areas with no markings at all, but one cannot say that layer A "developed" into layer B (we're not even sure which came first).
And yet the juxtapositions may not be purely "random" or "meaningless". One possible connection might lie in the realm of surrealist bibliomancy, or "synchronicities" (and as the oldtime Cabalists said, the blank spaces between letters may "mean" more than the letters themselves). Even "development" can provide a possible model for reading -- diachronicities can be hypothesized, a "history" can be composed for the manuscript, layers can be dated as in archeological digs. So long as we don't worship "development" we can still use it as one possible structure for our theorizing.
The difference between a manuscript palimpsest and a theory-palimpsest is that the latter remains unfixed. It can be re-written -- re-inscribed -- with each new layer of accretion. And all the layers are transparent, translucent, except where clusters of inscription block the cabalistic light -- (sort of like a stack of animation gels). All the layers are "present" on the surface of the palimpsest -- but their development (including dialectical development) has become "invisible" and perhaps "meaningless".
FULL TEXT
- Posted: 08.May.2006.
A palimpsest is a manuscript that has been re-used by writing over the original writing, often at right angles to it, and sometimes more than once. Frequently it's impossible to say which layer was first inscribed; and in any case any "development" (except in orthography) from layer to layer would be sheer accident. The connections between layers are not sequential in time but juxtapositional in space. Letters of layer B might blot out letters in layer A, or vice versa, or might leave blank areas with no markings at all, but one cannot say that layer A "developed" into layer B (we're not even sure which came first).
And yet the juxtapositions may not be purely "random" or "meaningless". One possible connection might lie in the realm of surrealist bibliomancy, or "synchronicities" (and as the oldtime Cabalists said, the blank spaces between letters may "mean" more than the letters themselves). Even "development" can provide a possible model for reading -- diachronicities can be hypothesized, a "history" can be composed for the manuscript, layers can be dated as in archeological digs. So long as we don't worship "development" we can still use it as one possible structure for our theorizing.
The difference between a manuscript palimpsest and a theory-palimpsest is that the latter remains unfixed. It can be re-written -- re-inscribed -- with each new layer of accretion. And all the layers are transparent, translucent, except where clusters of inscription block the cabalistic light -- (sort of like a stack of animation gels). All the layers are "present" on the surface of the palimpsest -- but their development (including dialectical development) has become "invisible" and perhaps "meaningless".
FULL TEXT
Making Mistakes
- Posted: 04.Jan.2006.
"If I ever conceive any original idea, it will be because I have been abnormally prone to confuse ideas.. and have thus found remote analogies and realtions which others have not considered! Others rarely make these confusions, and proceed by precise analysis"
- Posted: 04.Jan.2006.
"If I ever conceive any original idea, it will be because I have been abnormally prone to confuse ideas.. and have thus found remote analogies and realtions which others have not considered! Others rarely make these confusions, and proceed by precise analysis"
Kenneth J.W. Craik, 1943
chains on chains
- Posted: 30.Dec.2005.
Many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of earth, who have no inherent form but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them. You cannot lift your hand with influencing and being influenced by hoards. The visible world is merely their skin.
- Posted: 30.Dec.2005.
Many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of earth, who have no inherent form but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them. You cannot lift your hand with influencing and being influenced by hoards. The visible world is merely their skin.
William Butler Yeats - 1888
The Heavenly Machine
- Posted: 29.Dec.2005.
"My aim is to show that the heavenly machine is not a kind of divine, live being, but a kind of clockwork (and he who believes that a clock has soul attributes the maker's glory to the work), insofar as nearly all the manifold motions are caused by a most simple and material force, just as all motions of the clock are caused by a single weight."
- Posted: 29.Dec.2005.
"My aim is to show that the heavenly machine is not a kind of divine, live being, but a kind of clockwork (and he who believes that a clock has soul attributes the maker's glory to the work), insofar as nearly all the manifold motions are caused by a most simple and material force, just as all motions of the clock are caused by a single weight."
Johannes Kepler (letter to Herwart von Hohenburg, 1605)
Who Finds What
- Posted: 21.Dec.2005.
"When Wu Daozi first saw the painting of Zhang Sengyou, he thought that Zhang's reputation was undeserved. But after sitting beneath the painting for 3 days Wu found that he was unable to leave it!". - Inscribed on the Sengyou painting
- Posted: 21.Dec.2005.
"When Wu Daozi first saw the painting of Zhang Sengyou, he thought that Zhang's reputation was undeserved. But after sitting beneath the painting for 3 days Wu found that he was unable to leave it!". - Inscribed on the Sengyou painting
Maxwells Little mind
- Posted: 10.Nov.2006.
(Click for full size)
... if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform, though the mean velocity of any great number of them, arbitrarily selected, is almost exactly uniform. Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics.
MAXWELL
LAPLACE
PICTURE
- Posted: 10.Nov.2006.
(Click for full size)
... if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform, though the mean velocity of any great number of them, arbitrarily selected, is almost exactly uniform. Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics.
MAXWELL
LAPLACE
PICTURE
A Barbarian of the Highest Level
- Posted: 02.Sep.2009.
Richard Huelsenbeck About Tristan Tzara:
- Posted: 02.Sep.2009.
Richard Huelsenbeck About Tristan Tzara:
It was easier for Tzara to carry out the work of destruction than for Ball, Arp, or myself, because Tzara had never experienced the preconditions of a whole mass of false values that we so greatly opposed. Tzara drew part of his admirable energy from a nonexistent reservoir. Unlike us Ball, Arp, and myself he had not grown up in the shadow of German humanism. No Schiller and no Goethe had ever told him in his tiny native town that the beautiful, the noble, the good should or could rule the world. Tzara never suffered from a conflict with the fear that if culture were destroyed, something essential could be destroyed along with it, something irreplaceable, precious, mysterious, that might possibly never rise again out of the ruins. In his uninhibited (and justified) feelings against culture, he never felt the need to bow with his torch for the basic ontological problem of man and society. As a native of the Balkans, he couldn’t feel this need, and he lived and rode on like the leader of an invisible army of Langobards who are indifferent to the good things that might be wiped out with the bad. Tzara was a barbarian of the highest mental and aesthetic level, a genius with qualms.
A Diabolical Caricature of Ourselves
- Posted: 18.Apr.2008.
Konrad Lorenz on us and the chimpanzee. (pic)
- Posted: 18.Apr.2008.
Konrad Lorenz on us and the chimpanzee. (pic)
An inexorable law of perception prevents us from seeing in the ape, particularly in the chimpanzee, an animal like other animals, and makes us see in its face the human physiognomy. From this point of view, measured by human standards, the chimpanzee of course appears as something horrible, a diabolical caricature of ourselves. In looking at the gorilla or the orang-utan, which are less closely related to us, our judgement is correspondingly less distorted. The heads of the old males may look to us like bizarre devils' masks, impressive and even aesthetically appealing. However, we cannot feel like this about the chimpanzee: he is irresistibly funny and at the same time as common, as vulgar, as no other animal but a debased human being can ever be. This subjective impression is not altogether wrong: there are reasons for supposing that the common ancestor of man and the chimpanzee stood not lower but considerably higher than the chimpanzee does today. Absurd though the contemptuous attitude of man to the chimpanzee may be in itself, its strong emotional content has nevertheless misled several scientists into building up entirely unfounded theories about the origin of man: his evolution from animals is not disputed, but his close relationship to the repulsive chimpanzee is either passed over in a few logical skips or circumvented by sophistic detours.
The chimpanzee, however, is irresistibly funny just because he is so similar to us. What is worse is that in the narrow confinement of zoological gardens, adult chimpanzees degenerate much in the same way as human beings would under comparable circumstances, and give an impression of real dissoluteness and depravity. Even the normal chimp observed in perfect health gives the impression not of an extremely highly evolved animal but rather of a desperate and debased human being.
Yeats and the Little Minds [the true strory]
- Posted: 29.Apr.2007.
The story behind the automatic writing of Georgiana Hyde-Lees (Mrs. Yeats) is a Crystalpunk Classic (We Have Come To Give you Little Minds), but in a short article by Mr Ellmann, who has at least written 2 books about Yeats, I found the real chain of events behind this anecdote:
- Posted: 29.Apr.2007.
The story behind the automatic writing of Georgiana Hyde-Lees (Mrs. Yeats) is a Crystalpunk Classic (We Have Come To Give you Little Minds), but in a short article by Mr Ellmann, who has at least written 2 books about Yeats, I found the real chain of events behind this anecdote:
'A Vision' had begun in 1917 when, during their honeymoon, Mrs. Yeats sought to divert her husband from disquieting thought about having married the wrong woman by attempting automatic writing. Originally a marital stratagem, the automatic writing suddenly took of in startling new directions. It offered, in fragments, a symbology far more complicated than Yeats had come to on his own, and yet it roughly jibed with his previous ideas. The manner of this revelation was somewhat embarrassing: it was one thing to be a mystic, and another to be mystic's consort. Mrs Yeats had no wish to be presented to the world as a pythoness, and her husband could hardly claim to be his own oracle. Moreover, he felt that his readers would be put off by the idea of spooky communicators. So when he first brought out the book, instead of claiming authorship, he offered a little facade of mystery. The title page of the 1926 Vision read: A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus Cambrensis and upon certain theories attributed to Kusta Ben Luka. Needles to say, neither of these worthies has anything to do with the book. Yet it would have been hard for a reader to know for certain whether Yeats was fooling or not, or why should wish to dissimulate.
For the second edition he resolved to tell the true story of how the book came into being. Mrs. Yeats said to me that this decision provoked the most painful quarrel, perhaps the only serious one, of their marriage. She wanted him to publish the book straight-forwardly, without explanation or preliminaries. But Yeats evidently felt that do do so would be to promulgate the Tables of the Law without the necessary preliminary of ascending Mount Sinai. Besides the actual origin of the book was as fabulous as any concocted claim of Giraldus's or Kusta's help.
So in the 1937 edition Yeats owned up publicly to his domestic Delphi. The fact that the book had developed out of his marriage bed gave it that blend of love, beauty, and wisdom which he had always sought.
Richard Ellmann – Four Dubliners (Wilde, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett), Cardinal, 1982.
Glamour so characteristic of our own forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings...
- Posted: 16.Oct.2007.
Me am no Lovecraftian but 'Supernatural Horror in Literature'
(1927, 1933 - 1935) is a historically sound overview of writing that deals with "fear for the unknown", and a convincing artistic statement about the psychology of such emotions and the deep memories they represent. And what style!
- Posted: 16.Oct.2007.
Me am no Lovecraftian but 'Supernatural Horror in Literature'
(1927, 1933 - 1935) is a historically sound overview of writing that deals with "fear for the unknown", and a convincing artistic statement about the psychology of such emotions and the deep memories they represent. And what style!
Much of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers whose strange customs -- descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural times when a squat race of Mongoloids roved over Europe with their flocks and herds -- were rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of immemorial antiquity. Ibis secret religion, stealthily handed down amongst peasants for thousands of years despite the outward reign of the Druidic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian faiths in the regions involved, was marked by wild "Witches' Sabbaths" in lonely woods and atop distant hills on Walpurgis-Night and Hallowe'en, the traditional breeding-seasons of the goats and sheep and cattle; and became the source of vast riches of sorcery-legend, besides provoking extensive witchcraft -- prosecutions of which the Salem affair forms the chief American example. Akin to it in essence, and perhaps connected with it in fact, was the frightful secret system of inverted theology or Satan-worship which produced such horrors as the famous "Black Mass"; whilst operating toward the same end we may note the activities of those whose aims were somewhat more scientific or philosophical -- the astrologers, cabalists, and alchemists of the Albertus Magnus or Ramond Lully type, with whom such rude ages invariably abound. The prevalence and depth of the mediæval horror-spirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair which waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gauged by the grotesque carvings slyly introduced into much of the finest later Gothic ecclesiastical work of the time; the dæmoniac gargoyles of Notre Dame and Mont St. Michel being among the most famous specimens. And throughout the period, it must be remembered, there existed amongst educated and uneducated alike a most unquestioning faith in every form of the supernatural; from the gentlest doctrines of Christianity to the most monstrous morbidities of witchcraft and black magic. It was from no empty background that the Renaissance magicians and alchemists -- Nostradamus, Trithemius, Dr. John Dee, Robert Fludd, and the like -- were born.
One is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece or medium of an almighty power!!
- Posted: 09.Oct.2007.
In her preface to the Zarathustra, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, writes about how it was written. The word automatic writing comes to mind and the last sentence is my favourite:
- Posted: 09.Oct.2007.
In her preface to the Zarathustra, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, writes about how it was written. The word automatic writing comes to mind and the last sentence is my favourite:
He often used to speak of the ecstatic mood in which he wrote "Zarathustra"; how in his walks over hill and dale the ideas would crowd into his mind, and how he would note them down hastily in a note-book from which he would transcribe them on his return, sometimes working till midnight. He says in a letter to me: "You can have no idea of the vehemence of such composition," and in "Ecce Homo" (autumn 1888) he describes as follows with passionate enthusiasm the incomparable mood in which he created Zarathustra:--
"--Has any one at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration? If not, I will describe it. If one had the smallest vestige of superstition in one, it would hardly be possible to set aside completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece or medium of an almighty power. The idea of revelation in the sense that something becomes suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy, which profoundly convulses and upsets one--describes simply the matter of fact. One hears--one does not seek; one takes--one does not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes with necessity, unhesitatingly--I have never had any choice in the matter. There is an ecstasy such that the immense strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears, along with which one's steps either rush or involuntarily lag, alternately. There is the feeling that one is completely out of hand, with the very distinct consciousness of an endless number of fine thrills and quiverings to the very toes;--there is a depth of happiness in which the painfullest and gloomiest do not operate as antitheses, but as conditioned, as demanded in the sense of necessary shades of colour in such an overflow of light. There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces wide areas of forms (length, the need of a wide-embracing rhythm, is almost the measure of the force of an inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and tension). Everything happens quite involuntarily, as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom, of absoluteness, of power and divinity. The involuntariness of the figures and similes is the most remarkable thing; one loses all perception of what constitutes the figure and what constitutes the simile; everything seems to present itself as the readiest, the correctest and the simplest means of expression. It actually seems, to use one of Zarathustra's own phrases, as if all things came unto one, and would fain be similes: 'Here do all things come caressingly to thy talk and flatter thee, for they want to ride upon thy back. On every simile dost thou here ride to every truth. Here fly open unto thee all being's words and word-cabinets; here all being wanteth to become words, here all becoming wanteth to learn of thee how to talk.' This is MY experience of inspiration. I do not doubt but that one would have to go back thousands of years in order to find some one who could say to me: It is mine also!--"
The Poet and the Cybernetician
- Posted: 08.Oct.2007.
Fascinating intersection between worlds. T.S. Elliot and Norbert Wiener met by accident in London during the Great War. They did not really get on well (imagine Wiener dining with Pound?!) but they discussed philosophy over Christmas dinner:
- Posted: 08.Oct.2007.
Fascinating intersection between worlds. T.S. Elliot and Norbert Wiener met by accident in London during the Great War. They did not really get on well (imagine Wiener dining with Pound?!) but they discussed philosophy over Christmas dinner:
Elliot was a devout realist, but that Christmas he was frustrated with sputtering debates between the old idealism and the new realism – indeed with philosophy itself. “In a sense of course, the philosophizing is a perversion of reality … an attempt to organize the confused and contradictory world of common sense … which invariably meets with partial failure … and … partial success,” he told Wiener. “Almost every philosophy seems to begin as a revolt of common sense against some other theory, and end … by itself becoming equally preposterous to everyone but its author.”
Wiener had a better idea. He had already begun to reframe his philosophical beliefs in scientific terms, using principles from the new physics which he had first learned about from Russell. Elliot was exploring an alternative path to truth through poetry.
"I am quite ready to admit that the lesson of relativity is: to avoid philosophy and devote oneself to *real* art or *real* science," he said. "There is art, and there is science. And there are works of art, and perhaps of science, which would soon have occurred had not many people been under the impression that there was philosophy."
From: Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener The Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman
I ran into pagodas: and was fixed
- Posted: 01.Oct.2007.
Thomas de Quincey hated China, or rather cathay, how Un-Crystalpunk, but what language, what LANGUAGE!! Qoute come from here with added mania about the anti-sinoid.
- Posted: 01.Oct.2007.
Thomas de Quincey hated China, or rather cathay, how Un-Crystalpunk, but what language, what LANGUAGE!! Qoute come from here with added mania about the anti-sinoid.
I know not whether others share in my feelings on this point; but I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China . . . I should go mad. The causes of my horror lie deep; and some of them must be common to others. Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful images and associations. As the cradle of the human race, it would alone have a dim and reverential feeling connected with it. But there are other reasons. No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and capricious superstitions of Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel and elaborate religions of Indostan, etc. The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, etc., is so impressive, that to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed . . . nor can any man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges, or the Euphrates. It contributes much to these feelings, that southern Asia is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life; the great officina gentian Man is a weed in these regions. The vast empires also, into which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all Oriental names or images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence, and want of sympathy, placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyze. I could sooner live with lunatics, or brute animals. All this, and much more than I can say, or have time to say, the reader must enter into, before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of Oriental imagery, and mythological tortures, impressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions and assembled them together in China or Indostan. From kindred feelings, I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms.... I fled from the wrath of Brahma through all the forests of Asia. Vishnu hated me: Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud. I thus give the reader some slight abstraction of my Oriental dreams, which always filled me with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, that horror seemed absorbed, for a while, in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later came a reflux of feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and left me, not so much in terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and infinity that drove me into an oppression as of madness. . . . [And] many times the very same dream was broken up in the very same way: I heard gentle voices speaking to me . . . and instantly I awoke: it was broad noon; and my children were standing, hand in hand, at my bedside; come to show me their colored shoes, or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for going out. I protest that so awful was the transition from the damned crocodile, and the other unutterable monsters and abortions of my dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures and of infancy, that, in the mighty and sudden revulsion of mind, I wept, and could not forbear it, as I kissed their faces.(Picture)
How the ideogram was Won
- Posted: 21.Sep.2007.
In 'The Advancement of Learning' by Francis Bacon (1605) we find one of the first references to the Chinese writing system in European literature. It is here where the misunderstanding about the presumed ideograms begins:
- Posted: 21.Sep.2007.
In 'The Advancement of Learning' by Francis Bacon (1605) we find one of the first references to the Chinese writing system in European literature. It is here where the misunderstanding about the presumed ideograms begins:
For the organ of tradition, it is either speech or writing; for Aristotle saith well, "Words are the images of cogitations, and letters are the images of words." But yet it is not of necessity that cogitations be expressed by the medium of words. For whatsoever is capable of sufficient differences, and those perceptible by the sense, is in nature competent to express cogitations. And, therefore, we see in the commerce of barbarous people that understand not one another’s language, and in the practice of divers that are dumb and deaf, that men’s minds are expressed in gestures, though not exactly, yet to serve the turn. And we understand further, that it is the use of China and the kingdoms of the High Levant to write in characters real, which express neither letters nor words in gross, but things or notions; insomuch as countries and provinces which understand not one another’s language can nevertheless read one another’s writings, because the characters are accepted more generally than the languages do extend; and, therefore, they have a vast multitude of characters, as many, I suppose, as radical words.
...
These notes of cogitations are of two sorts: the one when the note hath some similitude or congruity with the notion; the other ad placitum, having force only by contract or acceptation. Of the former sort are hieroglyphics and gestures. For as to hieroglyphics (things of ancient use and embraced chiefly by the Egyptians, one of the most ancient nations), they are but as continued impresses and emblems. And as for gestures, they are as transitory hieroglyphics, and are to hieroglyphics as words spoken are to words written, in that they abide not; but they have evermore, as well as the other, an affinity with the things signified.
Poetry and the Primitive
- Posted: 09.Mar.2008.
Some quotes from Gary Snyder's "Poetry and the Primitive" which I like even though he is wrong.
- Posted: 09.Mar.2008.
Some quotes from Gary Snyder's "Poetry and the Primitive" which I like even though he is wrong.
Poetry and the Primitive [Notes on poetry as an Ecological Survival Technique] 1967
“Poetry” as the skilled and inspired use of the voice and language to embody rare and powerful states of mind that are in immediate origin personal to the singer, but at deep levels common to all man who listen. “Primitive as those societies which have remained non-literate and non-political while necessarily exploring and developing in directions that civilized societies tended to ignore. Having fewer tools, no concerns with history, a living oral tradition rather than an accumulated library, no overriding social goals, and considerable freedom of sexual and inner life, such people live vastly in the present. Their daily reality is a fabric of friends and family, the field of feeling and energy that one’s own body is, the earth they stand on and the wind that wraps around it; and various area’s of consciousness.
…
Man is a beautiful animal. We know this because other animals admire us and love us. Almost all animals are beautiful and Palaeolithic hunters were deeply moved by it. To hunt means to use your body and senses to the fullest: to strain your consciousness to feel what the deer are thinking today, this moment; to sit still and let yourself go into the birds and wind while waiting by a game trail. Hunting magic is designed to bring the game to you – the creature who has heard your song, witnessed your sincerity, and out of compassion comes within your range. Hunting magic is not only aimed at bringing beasts to their death, but to assist in their birth – to promote their fertility. Thus the great Iberian cave paintings are not of hunting alone – but of animals mating and giving birth. A Spanish farmer who saw some reproductions from Altamira is reported to have said, “How beautiful this cow gives birth to a calve!”
…
We all know what primitive culture’s don’t have. What they do have is this knowledge of connection and responsibility which amounts to a spiritual ascesis for the whole community. Monks of Christianity or Buddhism, “leaving the world” (which means the games of society) are trying, in a decadent way, to achieve what whole primitive communities – men, woman, and children – live by daily; and with more wholeness.
…
The human race, as it immediately concerns us, has a vertical axis of about 40,000 years and as of 1900 AD a horizontal spread of roughly 3000 different languages and 1000 different cultures. Every living culture and language is the result of countless cross-fertilizations - not a “rise and fall” of civilizations, but more a flowerlike periodic absorbing – blooming – bursting and scattering of seed.
The Search for the Primitive is as Old as Civilization.
- Posted: 12.Feb.2008.
Stanley Diamond (not Jared) is the anthropologist from whom Jerome Rothenberg and Gary Snyder learned the most. Based on this excerpt this is very understandable.
- Posted: 12.Feb.2008.
Stanley Diamond (not Jared) is the anthropologist from whom Jerome Rothenberg and Gary Snyder learned the most. Based on this excerpt this is very understandable.
Primitive society may be regarded as a system in equilibrium, spinning kaleidoscopically on its axis but at a relatively fixed point. Civilization may be regarded as a system in internal disequilibrium; technology or ideology or social organization are always out of joint with each other--that is what propels the system along a given track. Our sense of movement, of incompleteness, contributes to the idea of progress. Hence, the idea of progress is generic to civilization. And our idea of primitive society as existing in a state of dynamic equilibrium and as expressive of human and natural rhythms is a logical projection of civilized societies and is in opposition to civilization's actual state. But it also coincides with the real historical condition of primitive societies. The longing for a primitive mode of existence is no mere fantasy or sentimental whim; it is consonant with fundamental human needs, the fulfillment of which (although in different form) is a precondition for our survival.(img)
There are more invisible creatures in the universe than visible ones.
- Posted: 19.Mar.2007.
- Posted: 19.Mar.2007.
I can easily believe that there are more invisible creatures in the universe than visible ones. But who will tell us what family each belongs to, what their rank and relationships are, and what their respective distinguishing characters may be? What do they do? Where do they live? Human wit has always circled around a knowledge of these things without ever attaining it. But I do not doubt that is beneficial to contemplate in the mind, as in a picture, the image of a grander and better world; for if the mind grows used to the trivia of daily life, it may dwindle too much and decline altogether into worthless thoughts. Meanwhile, however, we must be on the watch for the truth, keeping a sense of proportions so that we can tell what is certain from what is uncertain and day from night.Thomas Burnet quoted by Coleridge.
Completely Bonkers [Chess and Psychoanalysis]
- Posted: 13.Mar.2007.
'The Unconscious Motives of Interest in Chess' (1937) by H. Coriat. Did the Greeks believe in their own mythology? Did/do psychoanalysists believe in their own hysteria??
- Posted: 13.Mar.2007.
'The Unconscious Motives of Interest in Chess' (1937) by H. Coriat. Did the Greeks believe in their own mythology? Did/do psychoanalysists believe in their own hysteria??
The unconscious motive which actuates chess players is not the pugnacity which characterizes competitive games, but the grimmer one of father-murder. The King is not actually captured, as was customary in the original purpose of earlier games, but the goal of modern chess is “sterilizing him into immobility.” The game is pre-eminently of an anal-sadistic nature and so gratifies the aggressive aspects of the antagonism between father and son; its unconscious motivation is the symbolic expression of a “wish to overcome the father in an acceptable way.”
It seems from the material cited that the chief symbolic feature of chess can be compared with the aggressive aspect of the Oedipus complex. The capture of the King by checkmate eliminates him from the combat, it ends the game, the King is dead or castrated into immobility, an end result which corresponds with what Oliver Wendell Homes terms “the brutality of an actual checkmate.” The English word “checkmate” is derived from the Persian or Arabic and means literally that the “King is dead,” paralyzed, helpless and defeated, which is synonymous with murder or castration.
Pound on Chinese Abbreviations
- Posted: 12.Mar.2007.
Taken from Ezra Pound's 'ABC of Reading, the line breaks are as in the original:
- Posted: 12.Mar.2007.
Taken from Ezra Pound's 'ABC of Reading, the line breaks are as in the original:
'Science does not exist in inventing a number of more or less abstract entities corresponding to a number of things you wish to find out', says a French commentator on Einstein. I don't know whether that clumsy translation of a long French sentence is clear to the general reader.
The first definite assertion of the applicability of scientific method to literary criticism is found in Ernest Fenollosa's 'Essay on the Chinese Written Character'.
The complete despicability of official philosophic thought, and, if the reader will really think carefully of what I am trying to tell him, the most stinging insult and at the same time convincing proof of the general nullity and incompetence of organized intellectual life in America, England, their universities in general, and their learned publications at large, could be indicated by a narrative of the difficulties I encountered in getting Fenellosa's essay printed at all.
A text-book is no place for anything that could be interpreted or even misinterpreted as a personal grievance.
Let us say that the editorial minds, and those of men in power in the literary and educational bureaucracy for the fifty years preceding 1934, have not always differed very greatly from that tailor Blodgett who prophesied that: 'sewing machines will never come into general use'.
...
In Europe, if you ask a man to define anything, his definition always moves away from the simple things that he knows perfectly well, it recedes into an unknown region, that is a region of remoter and progressively remoter abstractions.
Thus if you ask him what red is, he says it is a 'colour'.
If you ask him what colour is, he tells you it is a vibration or a refraction of light, or a division of the spectrum.
And if you ask him what vibration is, he tells you it is a mode of energy, or something of that sort, until you arrive at a modality of being, or non-being, or at any rate you get in beyond your depths, and beyond his depth.
....
The most useful living member of the Huxley family has emphasised the fact that the telescope wasn't merely an idea, but that it was very definitely a technical achievement.
By contrast to the method of abstraction, or of defining things in more and still more general terms, Fenollosa emphasizes the method of science, 'which is a method of poetry', as distinct from that of 'philosophic discussion', and in the way the Chinese go about it in their ideograph or abbreviated picture writing.
To go back to the beginning of history, you probably know that there is spoken language and written language, and that there are two kinds of written language, one based on sound and the other on sight.
You speak to an animal with a few simple noises and gestures. Levy-Bruhl's account of primitive language in Africa records languages that are still bound up with mimicry and gesture.
The Egyptians finally used abbreviated pictures to represent sounds, but the Chinese still use abbreviated pictures as pictures, that is to say, Chinese ideogram does not try to be picture of a sound, or to be written sign recalling a sound, but is is still the picture of a thing; of a thing in a given position or relation, or of a combination of things. It means the thing or the action or situation, or quality germane to the several things that it pictures.
....
He [the Chinaman] is to define red. How can he do it in a picture that isn't painted in red paint?
He puts (or his ancestor put) together the abbreviated pictures of
ROSE
CHERRY
IRON BUST
FLAMINGO
That, you see, is very much the kind of thing a biologist does (in a very much more complicated way) when he gets together a few hundred or thousand slides, and picks out what is necessary for his general statement. Something that fits the case, that applies in all of the cases.
The Chinese 'word' or ideogram for red is based on something everyone KNOWS.
(If ideogram had developed in England, the writers would possibly have substituted the front side of a robin, or something less exotic than a flamingo.)
Fenellosa was telling how and why a language written in this way simply HAD TO STAY POETIC; simply couldn't help being and staying poetic in a way that a column of English type might very well not stay poetic.
He died before getting round to publishing and proclaiming a 'method'.
This is nevertheless the RIGHT WAY to study poetry, or literature, or painting. It is in fact the way the more intelligent member of the general public DO study painting. If you want to find out something about painting you go the National Gallery, or the Salon Carré, or the Brera, or the Prado, and LOOK at pictures.
For every reader of books on art, 1,000 people go to LOOK at the painting. Thank Heaven!
A short story by Liu Ji
- Posted: 09.Mar.2007.
Liu Ji or liu Bowen was a writer and a strategist in the armies that founded the Ming Dynasty. His small satires predate those of Kafka. This story is not the best one in my small collection of them, but it does mention chess. However this might be a Western mistranslation for Go or Xiangqi:
from Poetry and Prose of the Ming and Qing, Panda Books 1986.
- Posted: 09.Mar.2007.
Liu Ji or liu Bowen was a writer and a strategist in the armies that founded the Ming Dynasty. His small satires predate those of Kafka. This story is not the best one in my small collection of them, but it does mention chess. However this might be a Western mistranslation for Go or Xiangqi:
An Impetuous Person
An Impetuous person lived somewhere between the Kingdom of Jin and the Kingdom of Zheng during the Warring States period. If he missed the target while shooting, he smashed it. If he lost a chess game, he gnawed the pieces. Someone told him, “it's not the fault of the target or the chess pieces. What about blaming yourself?” He did not pay attention to this and finally died of anger. Yu Li Zi commented, “One should consider this. People are like a target which can only be hit in a certain way; soldiers are like chess pieces which can only led to win a battle in an appropriate way. When one handles matters badly, feels humiliated and resents what one should not resent, how can one avoid one's end?”
Liu Ji (1311-1375)
from Poetry and Prose of the Ming and Qing, Panda Books 1986.
What William Burroughs was like.
- Posted: 07.Mar.2007.
- Posted: 07.Mar.2007.
Bill had pinned a sign on the bookshop noticeboard some weeks before offering free Scientology auditing sessions to anyone who wanted them in order to improve his own auditing techniques – even giving his home address and telephone number, which I thought was very trusting of him as he usually wanted that kept very much a secret. I was tempted to give it a try myself. Much as I despised Scientology, the idea of having Burroughs audit me was an intriguing one. He told me that he had a number of responses to his notice and was pleased with the results.From In the Sixties by Barry Miles
'Well, a merry Christmas everyone,' he said, raising his hat. He looked as implacable and unfriendly as ever, with no trace of a smile or feeling of goodwill upon his visage. When he left, those assembled discussed whether he had been joking. It was typical with Bill that even the most mundane, polite utterance was examined for hidden meaning, instead of being taken at face value. Perhaps it was a Sixties thing, when every line of Bob Dylan's amphetamine babble was examined microscopically and Beatles records were even played backwards to look for secret meanings. Bill was revered as a guru, in much the same way Ginsberg and Kerouac had looked up to him as an elder stateman and teacher back in the Forties and Fifties. His every utterance was regarded with the greatest respect, something which, I suspect, paralysed with self-concsiousness and was in part responsible for his icy public demeanour.
The Game of the Utopians
- Posted: 03.Mar.2007.
(Click for full size)
From Utopia by Thomas Moore first published in 1516. One game is believed to refer to rithmomachy.
- Posted: 03.Mar.2007.
(Click for full size)
From Utopia by Thomas Moore first published in 1516. One game is believed to refer to rithmomachy.
After supper they spend an hour in some diversion, in summer in their gardens, and in winter in the halls where they eat, where they entertain each other either with music or discourse. They do not so much as know dice, or any such foolish and mischievous games. They have, however, two sorts of games not unlike our chess; the one is between several numbers, in which one number, as it were, consumes another; the other resembles a battle between the virtues and the vices, in which the enmity in the vices among themselves, and their agreement against virtue, is not unpleasantly represented; together with the special opposition between the particular virtues and vices; as also the methods by which vice either openly assaults or secretly undermines virtue; and virtue, on the other hand, resists it.The picture is a map of the island and their alphabet.
Italo Calvino about Marco Polo and the Khan Playing Chess
- Posted: 03.Mar.2007.
From Invisible Cities:
- Posted: 03.Mar.2007.
From Invisible Cities:
From the foot of the Great Khan's throne a majolica pavement extended. Marco Polo, mute informant, spread out on it the samples of the wares he had brought back from his journeys to the ends of the empire: a helmet, a seashell, a coconut, a fan. Arranging the objects in a certain order on the black and white tiles, and occasionally shifting them with studied moves, the ambassador tried to depict for the monarch's eyes the vicissitudes of his travels, the conditions of the empire, the prerogatives of the distant provincial seats.Parts of it resemble Wittgenstein others parts remind of Herman Hesse
Kublai was a keen chess player; following Marco's movements, he observed that certain pieces implied or excluded the vicinity of other pieces and were shifted along certain lines. Ignoring the objects' variety of form, he could grasp the system of arranging one with respect to the others on the majolica floor. He thought: "If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains."
Actually, it was useless for Marco's speeches to employ all this bric-a-brac: a chessboard would have sufficed, with its specific pieces. To each piece, in turn, they could give an appropriate meaning: a knight could stand for a real horseman, or for a procession of coaches, an army on the march, an equestrian monument; a queen could be a lady looking down from her balcony, a fountain, a church with a pointed dome, a quince tree.
Returning from his last mission, Marco Polo found the Khan awaiting him, seated at a chessboard. With a gesture he invited the Venetian to sit opposite him and describe, with the help only of the chessmen, the cities he had visited. Marco did not lose heart. The Great Khan's chessmen were huge pieces of polished ivory: arranging on the board looming rooks and sulky knights, assembling swarms of pawns, drawing straight or oblique avenues like a queen's progress, Marco recreated the perspectives and the spaces of black and white cities on moonlit nights.
Contemplating these essential landscapes, Kublai reflected on the invisible order that sustains cities, on the rules that decreed how they rise, take shape and prosper, adapting themselves to the seasons, and then how they sadden and fall in ruins. At times he thought he was on the verge of discovering a coherent, harmonious system underlying the infinite deformities and discords, but no model could stand up to comparison with the game of chess. Perhaps, instead of racking one's brain to suggest with the ivory pieces' scant help visions which were anyway destined to oblivion, it would suffice to play a game according to the rules, and to consider each successive state of the board as one of the countless forms that the system of forms assembles and destroys.
Now Kublai Khan no longer had to send Marco Polo on distant expeditions: he kept him playing endless games of chess. Knowledge of the empire was hidden in the pattern drawn by the angular shifts of the knight, by the diagonal passages opened by the bishop's incursions, by the lumbering, cautious tread of the king and the humble pawn, by the inexorable ups and downs of every game.
The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game's purpose that eluded him. Each game ends in a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the true stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner's hand, a black or a white square remains. By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire's multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes. It was reduced to a square of planed wood: nothingness . . .
. . . The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game's reason that eluded him. The end of every game is a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner's hand, nothingness remains: a black square, or a white one. By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire's multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes; it was reduced to a square of planed wood.
Then Marco Polo spoke: "Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid with two woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze is fixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought: you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be made out: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night's frost forced it to desist."
Until then the Great Khan had not realized that the foreigner knew how to express himself fluently in his language, but it was not this fluency that amazed him.
"Here is a thicker pore: perhaps it was a larvum's nest; not a woodworm, because, once born, it would have begun to dig, but a caterpillar that gnawed the leaves and was the cause of the tree's being chosen for chopping down . . . This edge was scored by the wood carver with his gouge so that it would adhere to the next square, more protruding . . . "
The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo was already talking about ebony forests, about rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers, of docks, of women at the windows . . .
Robert Graves on Ezra Pound's Chinese
- Posted: 01.Mar.2007.
- Posted: 01.Mar.2007.
Pound's bravado paid in the long run. He knew little Latin, yet he translated Propertius; and less Greek, but he translated Alcaeus; and little Anglo-Saxon, yet he translated The Seafarer. I once asked Arthur Waley how much Chinese Pound knew; Waley shook his head despondently. And I don't claim to be an authority on Provencal, but Majorcan, which my children talk most of the time, and which I understand, is closely related to it. When my thirteen-year-old boy was asked to compare a Pronencal text with Pound's translation, he laughed and laughed and laughed.Robert Graves, in These be Our Gods, O Israel!, (The Crowing Privilege, pelican 1955)
Pound's admirers explain that his translations should not be read as such; that his free treatment of the original has supplied him with many interesting new ideas. Well I don't know.... It is true that Michelangelo advised young painters to seek inspiration (when at a loss) from the damp patches and cracks on their bedroom walls. But the corresponding source of poetic inspiration would, I suppose, be the litter left behind by foreign students in a Bloomsbury hostel; it seems unfair to Alcaeus and Li Po and Propertius to treat them so cavalierly.
...
It is an extraordinary paradox that Pound's sprawling, ignorant, indecent, unmelodious, seldom metrical Cantos, embellished with esoteric Chinese ideograms – for all I know, they may have been traced from the nearest tea-chest – and with illiterate Greek, Latin, Spanish, and Provencal snippets (the Italian and French read all right to me, but I may be mistaken) are now compulsory reading in many ancient centers of learning.
Savages lack Self-Consciousness
- Posted: 08.Jun.2008.
Clive Bell (the art critic who was married to Virginia Woolf's sister) on Negro Sculpture (in 'Since Cezanne', 1922) is a horrific time-piece of colonial stupidity. And then to imagine that Bell is supposed to be part of some of the most progressive forces in England at the time!
- Posted: 08.Jun.2008.
Clive Bell (the art critic who was married to Virginia Woolf's sister) on Negro Sculpture (in 'Since Cezanne', 1922) is a horrific time-piece of colonial stupidity. And then to imagine that Bell is supposed to be part of some of the most progressive forces in England at the time!
Already the Chelsea show of African and Oceanian sculpture is sending the cultivated public to the ethnographical collections in the British Museum, just as, last autumn, the show organized in Paris by M. Paul Guillaume filled the Trocadero. Fine ladies, young painters, and exquisite amateurs are now to be seen in those long dreary rooms that once were abandoned to missionaries, anthropologists, and colonial soldiers, enhancing their prestige by pointing out to stay-at-home cousins the relics of a civilization they helped to destroy. For my part I like the change. I congratulate the galleries and admire the visitors, though the young painters, I cannot help thinking, have been a little slow.
All I want to say is that, though the capital achievements of the greatest schools do seem to me to have an absolute superiority over anything Negro I have seen, yet the finest black sculpture is so rich in artistic qualities that it is entitled to a place beside them.
I write, thinking mainly of sculpture, because it was an exhibition of sculpture that set me off. It should be remembered, however, that perhaps the most perfect achievements of these savages are to be found amongst their textiles and basket-work. Here, their exquisite taste and sense of quality and their unsurpassed gift for filling a space are seen to
greatest advantage, while their shortcomings lie almost hid. But it is their sculpture which, at the moment, excites us most, and by it they may fairly be judged. Exquisiteness of quality is its most attractive characteristic. Touch one of these African figures and it will remind you of the rarest Chinese porcelain. What delicacy in the artist's sense of relief and modeling is here implied! What tireless industry and patience! Run your hand over a limb, or a torso, or, better still, over some wooden vessel ; there is no flaw, no break in the continuity of the surface ; the thing is alive from end to end. And this extraordinary sense of quality seems to be universal amongst them. I think I never saw a genuine nigger object that was vulgar except, of course, things made quite recently under European direction. This is a delicious virtue, but it is a precarious one. It is precarious because it is not self-conscious : because it has not been reached by the intelligent understanding of an artist, but springs from the instinctive taste of primitive people. I have seen an Oxfordshire labourer work himself beautifully a handle for his hoe, in the true spirit of a savage and an artist, admiring and envying all the time the lifeless machine-made article hanging, out of his reach, in the village shop. The savage gift is precarious because it is unconscious. Once let the black or the peasant become acquainted with the showy utensils of industrialism, or with cheap, realistic painting and sculpture, and, having no critical sense wherewith to protect himself, he will be bowled over for a certainty. He will admire ; he will imitate ; he will be undone.
At the root of this lack of artistic selfconsciousness lies the defect which accounts for the essential inferiority of Negro to the very greatest art. Savages lack self-consciousness and the critical sense because they lack intelligence. And because they lack intelligence they are incapable of profound conceptions. Beauty, taste, quality, and skill, all are here ; but profundity of vision is not. And because they cannot grasp complicated ideas they fail generally to create organic wholes. One of the chief characteristics of the very greatest artists is this power of creating wholes which, as wholes, are of infinitely greater value than the sum of their parts. That, it seems to me, is what savage artists generally fail to do.
Also, they lack originality. I do not forget that Negro sculptors have had to work in a very strict convention. They have been making figures of tribal gods and fetishes, and have been obliged meticulously to respect the tradition. But were not European Primitives and Buddhists similarly bound, and did they not contrive to circumvent their doctrinal limitations ? That the African artists seem hardly to have attempted to conceive the figure afresh for themselves and realize in wood a personal vision does, I think, imply a definite want of creative imagination . Just how serious a defect you will hold this to be will depend on the degree of importance you attach to complete self-expression. Savage artists seem to express themselves in details. You must seek their personality in the quality of their relief, their modulation of surface, their handling of material, and their choice of ornament. Seek, and you will be handsomely rewarded ; in these things the niggers have never been surpassed.
We do not see
- Posted: 19.Sep.2008.
We do not see things as they are,
we see them as we are.
Anais Nin
- Posted: 19.Sep.2008.
We do not see things as they are,
we see them as we are.
Anais Nin
The Sinews of Individual Memory are Weakened.
- Posted: 15.Feb.2007.
George Steiner in Real Presences. Faber and Faber, 1989.
- Posted: 15.Feb.2007.
“In our own licensed social systems, learning by heart has been largely erased from secondary schooling and the habits of literacy. The electronic volume and fidelity of the computerised data bank and of processes of automatic retrieval will further weaken the sinews of individual memory. Stimulus and suggestion are of an increasingly mechanical and collective quantity. Encountered in easy resort to electronic media of representation, much of music and of literature remains purely external. The distinction is that between 'consumption' and 'ingestion'. The danger is that the text of music will lose what physics calls its 'critical mass', its implosive powers within the echo chambers of the self.”
George Steiner in Real Presences. Faber and Faber, 1989.
Reason cannot be subject to mere chance.
- Posted: 06.Feb.2007.
Lasker's Manual of Chess is famous for its philosophical approach, and it does a great deal of explaining how chess-play evolved through the time. The following passage (composed from 3 fragments) about the revolution in chess brought about by Steinitz is remarkable. It brings together logic, evolution and endophysics. The second and longest fragment could also be read as a description of a neural network.
- Posted: 06.Feb.2007.
Lasker's Manual of Chess is famous for its philosophical approach, and it does a great deal of explaining how chess-play evolved through the time. The following passage (composed from 3 fragments) about the revolution in chess brought about by Steinitz is remarkable. It brings together logic, evolution and endophysics. The second and longest fragment could also be read as a description of a neural network.
Reason by force of its meaning and power, cannot be subject to mere chance.
The big plus arising by accumulation is discharged in a combination. This fact is upheld by experience. Why this should be so cannot be deduced by mere reasoning, but in chess one may state the law: no combination without a considerable plus, no considerable plus without a combination. This accumulated advantage brings about a tension and this tension, discharging itself like an electric current, produces the conditions for a combination. One cannot deduce that logically, but the fact is far from astonishing. In Life a tension within Society always leads to revolutionary act, a great tension in the sentiments conduces to a revualation of established values, and it cannot surprise us if in chess a tension brings about a combination.
...
Steinitz saw this clearly. Therefore his maxim: In the beginning of the game ignore the search for combinations, abstain from violent moves, aim for small advantages, accumulate them, and only after having attained these ends search for the combination – and then with all the power of will and intellect, because then the combination must exist, however deeply hidden.
Quotes about Chinese Literature
- Posted: 01.Feb.2007.
There are no real translations of Chinese poems, because no acoustic interpretation can convey a direct image from the eye to the brain as the ideogram does. Only a Chinese character can reveal sudden glimpses of poetic visions (sometimes clear and luminous, sometimes bathed in a mysterious obscurity), which makes a conclusive interpretation of an individual concept possible. A chord is struck only in the mind of on who is able to appreciate. Knowing how to appreciate is everything, if by that we mean the ability to recognise, to judge and to enjoy a sensation. For the Chinese this is the measurement of civilisation. Following in the wake of Confucius, they believe firmly that it is not possible to appreciate without understanding. And understanding demands Knowledge – knowledge derived from culture. To Chinese ears the cut-and-dry statement that 'it is not what is beautiful that is beautiful, what pleases, is beautiful' seems nothing but a revelation of crass ignorance.
(p. 25)
For the Chinese, superficial knowledge is a very dangerous thing and the conception of universal culture as absurd as would be that of universal virtuosity. A complete knowledge of Chinese characters and how to write them is in itself an unparalleled tour de force of erudition.
(p. 28)
The range of arguments to be found in the Chinese classics is enormous, and although in the 'classic books' attributed to Confucius and his disciples philosophy and the art of government have the chief place, they may be said to comprise the greater part of all human conciousness. Even the works classified as 'Philosophy' and catalogued by the emperor Chien Lung deal with such themes as boxing, palmistry, interior-decoration, gastronomy and the art of war. Huge masses of volumes formed encyclopaedias a thousand years before the idea first occurred to Diderot and his friends. Some of these assumed such proportions that the emperors who had commissioned them either died or ran short of funds before they were completed, but others reached their mastodontic conclusion.
(p. 30)
Mario Prodan – An Introduction to Chinese Art. 1966 Spring Books, London.
- Posted: 01.Feb.2007.
There are no real translations of Chinese poems, because no acoustic interpretation can convey a direct image from the eye to the brain as the ideogram does. Only a Chinese character can reveal sudden glimpses of poetic visions (sometimes clear and luminous, sometimes bathed in a mysterious obscurity), which makes a conclusive interpretation of an individual concept possible. A chord is struck only in the mind of on who is able to appreciate. Knowing how to appreciate is everything, if by that we mean the ability to recognise, to judge and to enjoy a sensation. For the Chinese this is the measurement of civilisation. Following in the wake of Confucius, they believe firmly that it is not possible to appreciate without understanding. And understanding demands Knowledge – knowledge derived from culture. To Chinese ears the cut-and-dry statement that 'it is not what is beautiful that is beautiful, what pleases, is beautiful' seems nothing but a revelation of crass ignorance.
(p. 25)
For the Chinese, superficial knowledge is a very dangerous thing and the conception of universal culture as absurd as would be that of universal virtuosity. A complete knowledge of Chinese characters and how to write them is in itself an unparalleled tour de force of erudition.
(p. 28)
The range of arguments to be found in the Chinese classics is enormous, and although in the 'classic books' attributed to Confucius and his disciples philosophy and the art of government have the chief place, they may be said to comprise the greater part of all human conciousness. Even the works classified as 'Philosophy' and catalogued by the emperor Chien Lung deal with such themes as boxing, palmistry, interior-decoration, gastronomy and the art of war. Huge masses of volumes formed encyclopaedias a thousand years before the idea first occurred to Diderot and his friends. Some of these assumed such proportions that the emperors who had commissioned them either died or ran short of funds before they were completed, but others reached their mastodontic conclusion.
(p. 30)
Mario Prodan – An Introduction to Chinese Art. 1966 Spring Books, London.
Robert Rosen
- Posted: 30.Jan.2007.
During the summer of 2006, happy enough to stumble on a copy in a shop, I twice read "Life Itself" by theoretical biologist Robert Rosen in half-awe and half-puzzlement. In attempting to answer the question 'what is life' Rosen takes the reader on a sideway journey through Newtonian Physics and the philosophy of modeling to end up with his definitions, built up during a long career of thinking about it, of what life is (not). I found I was too stupid to get it, but in between I did found lots of useful bits.
Another theory of his that attracts me is his work on Anticipatory Systems (Otto Rossler, who was best friends with Rosen, was also involved with this somewhere, but I never managed to find out from exactly). That is systems that behave accroding to a model of the future. And even systems that can predict their own death.
A fragment from an interviewwith Robert Rosen (RR) by his daughter Julia (JR) gives a sense of his way of thinking:
- Posted: 30.Jan.2007.
During the summer of 2006, happy enough to stumble on a copy in a shop, I twice read "Life Itself" by theoretical biologist Robert Rosen in half-awe and half-puzzlement. In attempting to answer the question 'what is life' Rosen takes the reader on a sideway journey through Newtonian Physics and the philosophy of modeling to end up with his definitions, built up during a long career of thinking about it, of what life is (not). I found I was too stupid to get it, but in between I did found lots of useful bits.
Another theory of his that attracts me is his work on Anticipatory Systems (Otto Rossler, who was best friends with Rosen, was also involved with this somewhere, but I never managed to find out from exactly). That is systems that behave accroding to a model of the future. And even systems that can predict their own death.
A fragment from an interviewwith Robert Rosen (RR) by his daughter Julia (JR) gives a sense of his way of thinking:
JR: In your book, Life Itself, you talked about synthesis, but you stopped short of describing in detail what you meant. Is there a reason why?
RR: Well I worry about that. It has an unpleasant technological side to it... And many people over the last certainly 30 or 40 years have worried about biotechnologies. I don't think that many of the things they worried about-- like genetic engineering, broadly-- were really radical things, but they were real enough to panic a lot of people. I don't know if you remember.. Well, you wouldn't remember, but... 30 years ago, 40 years ago, there were panics about genetic engineering, or biotechnologies, the invocation of, uh, well, machine-like principles... if you want to change the nature of species. Actually this panic goes back even further, to H.G. Wells book, The Island of Doctor Moreau. The monkeying of.. they blame the biologists for the tinkering or tampering with biology, with the biological basis of what it means to be human. It provoked very strong reactions.
JR: And so what is your concern with publishing your ideas, your theories on synthesis of living systems?
RR: Well, I have a fundamental lack of trust in my species. Now, as long as biologists are approaching organisms from the point of simplicity, they can do relatively little harm. None of these concerns arise. But I think it starts to cut close to the bone if you begin to approach them from ideas of complexity. In a certain sense, I feel that as long as, you know, biology stays the way it is: "The main concern of biology is to try to turn organisms into machines" (which they aren't), uh, they can't do any harm. Ifs just not possible for them to do damage any more than it was for, say, Luther Burbank to create a moral or ethical conundrum in biology by hybridizing flowers. He was very limited, so limited, in the techniques he was using that he couldn't do any harm.
JR: But you feel that if somebody were to embrace the theories that you've developed about living systems and then use those to synthesize...
RR: Yeah, I really feel that's dangerous. That's far more dangerous in the long run than, for instance, the development of atomic fission, even though it could have destroyed the planet. It was a dangerous technology for us to get into, especially with the lack of sophistication we had around 1950... But if you did the same sort of thing in biology; use the narrowness of the models that were available in 1950, and have the capacity to really fundamentally change the nature and characteristics of organisms... uh, I feel that is... I wouldn't want to take the responsibility for that. Put it that way.
JR: You think there is a lack of wisdom inherent in our...
RR: MASSIVE.
JR:... species and our society?
RR: A massive lack.
JR: So, you'll never publish the ideas that you've developed on...
RR: Probably not. I may leave them somewhere... You know, like Leonardo da Vinci, write it in code backward in the mirror... in some kind of cipher...
The Balloon of the Mind
- Posted: 28.Jan.2007.
Hands, do what you’re bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.
William Butler Yeats in Wild Swans 1919
- Posted: 28.Jan.2007.
Hands, do what you’re bid:
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.
William Butler Yeats in Wild Swans 1919
Gratitude To The Unknown Instructors
- Posted: 28.Jan.2007.
What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.
William Butler Yeats from The Winding Stair (1933)
- Posted: 28.Jan.2007.
What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass.
William Butler Yeats from The Winding Stair (1933)
Profanation [Andre Breton on Chess]
- Posted: 24.Jan.2007.
- Posted: 24.Jan.2007.
Chess is hand-to-hand combat between two labyrinths.Andre Breton and Nicolas Calas quoted from “The Imagery of Chess Revisited”
An integral weakness of chess is that it does not lend itself to divination (there is no checkomancy).
The Christian Church has never banned the game of chess, though it did ban dice and cards.
In oder to be a good chess player, one should not b overtly intelligent – Jean Jacques Rousseau: Diderot did not play very well and readily acknowledge the superiority of Rousseau, who never failed to beat him.
Modern warfare is an advanced form of chess, but most of its pieces are obsolete.
The “queen” in chess is a suspicious character. (cf. Marcel Duchamp, Joueurs d'echecs, 1911.) The real Queen, which we still await – in chess as in elsewhere – is one foreseen by Barthelemy Prosper Enfantin, the head of the Saint-Simonian religion (1796-1864).
The only legitimate game is on that would never allow, for either player, only those combinations of moves that have never been played before.
Philosophical freedom is an illusion. In chess as in all other games, each move is loaded with the indefinite past of the universe.
So as to eschew any sense of greatness in competition, one would do well to acknowledge being a part of a pyramid of monkey heads.
One element of ancient wisdom me might hold in mind is that deprecatory voice that the triumphant general in his chariot kept hearing.
Only inspiration is in control, day and night: All in all, not every calculation is an analysis: a chess player, for instance, does the one very well without doing the other. - Baudelaire
The real Napoleon (the killer) was a mediocre chess player. In Lenin's tomb on the Red Square, you will find a chessboard (is it the beginning of a game or one left unfinished?) and fishing floats. On the other hand (it is only fair to mention it), two great artistic innovators – Marcel Duchamp and Raymond Roussel – brought new solutions to chess problems.
The game of chess is not enough of a game; it is too serious an entertainment – Montaigne.
What must be changed is the game itself, not the pieces.
Obsessed by The Game
- Posted: 22.Jan.2007.
Our researches into psycholudology has as aim to find out how the unintentional intelligence of abstract games lures it's players into playing like an drug addict takes drugs. Chess as an art played at grandmaster level is one of extreme refinement, an art of which amateur and novice can not expect to comprehend. The game baffles and seduced, turn the player into a gnosticist.
Tim Krabbe once joined Kasparov for a walk, what he witnessed was a man possessed. This long fragment read like a short story by Robert Walser or a first draft by Virginia Woolf.
- Posted: 22.Jan.2007.
Our researches into psycholudology has as aim to find out how the unintentional intelligence of abstract games lures it's players into playing like an drug addict takes drugs. Chess as an art played at grandmaster level is one of extreme refinement, an art of which amateur and novice can not expect to comprehend. The game baffles and seduced, turn the player into a gnosticist.
Tim Krabbe once joined Kasparov for a walk, what he witnessed was a man possessed. This long fragment read like a short story by Robert Walser or a first draft by Virginia Woolf.
He's not the kind of man to point out interesting buildings to, or the unbelievably beautiful light shining in the streets, at least not under these circumstances. He seems to have forgotten me, doesn't speak a word to me, except for one moment in the middle of a square when he stops me and says: 'f6. It draws, maybe. f6, instead of h5.'
I know that whenever I will pass that spot in the future, I will think 'f6' for an instant, and remember this strange walk. He's obviously grieving, and in that grief, boyishly vulnerable. What does this king want, taking a total stranger to see his secrets in this dark hour in his life? He knows I'm a writer, that I will do the tournament book - that this walk will be in that book.
In his hotel, we head straight for Dokhoyan's room, a broom closet next to Kasparov's suite. On a table there is a chessboard with an abandoned position, clearly the remains of a Kings Indian. Kasparov throws his raincoat on a chair, slumps down on a settee, and I sit beside him. Without a word, he opens his notebook, types his password, leaves Norton Commander, goes to ChessBase, navigates the Grünfeld tree to the variation he has been playing this afternoon, for the first time since he played it against Karpov in Seville, eight years ago.
Moves, positions flash by at incredible speed. Occasionally, Kasparov glances, judges, remembers something, stops for a millionth of a second. I can't believe what I'm seeing - no games, just raw analysis, prepared for the World Championship match in '87, variations branching off on and after move 19 - the vaults of wisdom. A name, Ivanych, often appears in brackets with the leading moves of subvariations. Never heard of - an analyst for Kasparov at that time?
Kasparov seems oblivious to the fact that I am seeing all these Grünfeld secrets, perhaps rightly assuming that I will not be able to remember anything. But can this really be the same person who, a few days before, told me that he will never use the Internet to send his analyses, for fear they might be intercepted by his enemies?
I feel overwhelmed, nauseated almost, by the sheer amount of this knowledge, the amount of work that goes into World Championship level chess. All these myriads of variations that have been invented, evaluated, discussed, memorized, in the vague hope of ever improving a score by half a point - but probably to be played never at all. And these are only the sublines in a subline of a line in the Grünfeld. On d4, Kasparov also plays the Kings Indian, the Queens Indian, the Nimzo Indian, the Slav, the Queens Gambit, the Benoni. Not to speak of 1.e4. With White, he plays 1.d4 and 1.e4.
He is desolated, but he cannot find 19.Na4, let alone 19...Re4. He's absolutely sure Na4 is in one of his computers somewhere, but it doesn't seem to be in this one. He gives up - his curiosity about 19.Na4 will have to wait, and so will mine. He switches off the notebook, shakes my hand - the audience is over. Doesn't show me to the door, doesn't say another word. Without looking at me again, he sits down at the table with the chessboard, and Dokhoyan and he start to analyse.
Nabokov on Chess
- Posted: 21.Jan.2007.
Vladimir Nabokov in Speak Memory
Nabokov also wrote The Luzhin Defence a book about a crazy chess player turned into a movie that I will have to read... the book not the film.... obviously.
- Posted: 21.Jan.2007.
“it is one thing to conceive the main play of a composition and another to construct it. The strain on the mind is formidable; the element of time drops out of one’s consciousness altogether: the building hand gropes for a pawn in the box, holds it, while the mind still ponders the need for a foil or a stopgap, and while the fist opens, a whole hour, perhaps, has gone by, has burned to ashes in the incandescent cerebration of the schemer. The chessboard before him is a magnetic field, a system of stresses and abysses, a starry firmament. The bishops move over it like searchlights. This or that knight is a lever adjusted and tried, and readjusted and tried again, till the problem is tuned up to the necessary level of beauty and surprise. How often have I struggled to bind the terrible force of White’s queen so as to avoid a dual solution! It should be understood that competition in chess problems is not really between White and Black but between the composer and the hypothetical solver (just as in a first-rate work of fiction the real clash is not between the characters but between the author and the world), so that a great part of a problem’s value is due to the number of ‘tries’—delusive opening moves, false scents, specious lines of play, astutely and lovingly prepared to lead the would-be solver astray. But whatever I can say about this matter of problem composing, I don not seem to convey sufficiently the ecstatic core of the process and its points of connection with various other, more overt and fruitful, operations of the creative mind, from the charting of dangerous seas to the writing of one of those incredible novels where the author, in a fit of lucid madness, has set himself certain unique rules that he observes, certain nightmare obstacles that he surmounts, with the zest of a deity building a live world from the most unlikely ingredients—rocks and carbon, and blind throbbings”
Vladimir Nabokov in Speak Memory
Nabokov also wrote The Luzhin Defence a book about a crazy chess player turned into a movie that I will have to read... the book not the film.... obviously.
Edgar Allen Poe and Vladimir Nabokov on Chess
- Posted: 21.Jan.2007.
E.A. Poe from Murders in the Rue Morgue
Vladimi Nabokov in The Defence
Both quotes from Exeter chess club and the Picture .
- Posted: 21.Jan.2007.
"Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers."
E.A. Poe from Murders in the Rue Morgue
"Luzhin, preparing an attack for which it was first necessary to explore a maze of variations, where his every step aroused a perilous echo, begain a long meditation: he needed, it seemed, to make one last prodigious effort and whe would find the secret move leading to victory. Suddenly, something occurred outside his being, a scorching pain - and he let out a loud cry, shaking his hand stung by the flame of a match, which he had lit and forgotten to apply to his cigarette. The pain immediately passed, but in the fiery gap he had seen something unbearably awesome, the full horror of the abysmal depths of chess. He glanced at the chessboard and his brain wilted from hitherto unprecedented weariness. But the chessmen were pitiless, they held and absorbed him. There was horror in this, but in this also was the sole harmony, for what else exists in the world besides chess?"
Vladimi Nabokov in The Defence
Both quotes from Exeter chess club and the Picture .
To see a Fish Think
- Posted: 05.Jul.2007.
Konrad Lorenz gives an anecdote about thinking (the ability of a fish to keep 2 abstract things it in its head simultaneous:
- Posted: 05.Jul.2007.
Konrad Lorenz gives an anecdote about thinking (the ability of a fish to keep 2 abstract things it in its head simultaneous:
"I once saw a jewel fish... perform a deed which absolutely astonished me. I came, late one evening, into the laboratory. It was already dusk and I wished hurriedly to feed a few fishes which had not received anything to eat that day; amongst them was a pair of jewel fishes who were tending their young. As I approached the container, I saw that most of of the young were already in the nesting hollow over which the mother was hovering. She refused to come for the food when I threw pieces of earthworm into the tank. The father, however, who, in great excitement, was dashing backwards and forwards searching for truants, allowed himself to be diverted from his duty by a nice hind-end of earthworm (for some unknown reason this end is preferred by all worm-eaters to the front one). He swam up and seized the worm, but, owing to its size, was unable to swallow it. As he was in the act of chewing this mouthful, he saw a baby fish swimming by itself across the tank; he started as though stung, raced after the baby and took it into his already filled mouth. It was a thrilling moment. The fish had in its mouth two different things of which one must go into the stomach and the other into the nest. What would he do?
I must confess that, at that moment, I would not have given twopence for the life of that tiny jewel fish. But wonderful what really happened! The fish stood stock still with full cheeks, but he did not chew. If ever I have seen a fish think, it was in that moment! What a truly remarkable thing that a fish can find itself in a genuine conflicting situation and, in this case, behave exactly as a human would; that is to say, it stops, blocked in all directions, and can go neither forward nor backward. For many seconds the father jewel fish stood riveted and one could almost see how his feeling were working. Then he solved the conflict in a way for which one was bound to feel admiration: he spat out the whole contents of his mouth: the worm fell to the bottom, and the little jewel fish [due to the reflex that contracts its swim-bladder] did the same. Then the father turned resolutely to the worm and ate it up, without haste but all the time with one eye on the child which 'obediently' lay on the bottom beneath him. When he had finished, he inhaled the baby and carried it home to its mother.
Some students, who had witnessed the whole scene, started as one man to applaud."
The wonders of Nabokov
- Posted: 01.Jul.2007.
‘The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’ was Vladimir Nabokov’s first English novel, published in 1941. I have read and re-read Pale Fire (but never managing to read it in full, like everybody else) and Speak Memory (a Crystalpunk classic of total recall) an this one is feels to belong somewhere between these two. Even though I already knew Nabokov to be a genius based on these two, for some reason this book drives it home: that language, the wonderful evocative strangeness of the metaphors. Who else but Nabokov can describe as face as ‘sawdusty’? A random quote:
- Posted: 01.Jul.2007.
‘The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’ was Vladimir Nabokov’s first English novel, published in 1941. I have read and re-read Pale Fire (but never managing to read it in full, like everybody else) and Speak Memory (a Crystalpunk classic of total recall) an this one is feels to belong somewhere between these two. Even though I already knew Nabokov to be a genius based on these two, for some reason this book drives it home: that language, the wonderful evocative strangeness of the metaphors. Who else but Nabokov can describe as face as ‘sawdusty’? A random quote:
She entered his life without knocking, as one might step into the wrong room because of its vague resemblance to one’s own. She stayed there forgetting the way out and quickly getting used to the strange creatures she found there and petted despite their amazing shapes. She had no special attention of being happy or making Sebastian happy, nor had she the slightest misgivings as to what might come next; it was merely a matter of naturally accepting life with Sebastian because life without him was less imaginable than a tellurian’s camping-tent on a mountain in the moon. Most probably, if she had born him a child they would have slipped into marriage since that would have been the simplest thing for all three; but that not being the case it did not enter their heads to submit those white and wholesome formalities which very possibly both would have enjoyed had they given them the necessary thoughts.
Henry Miller on Chess
- Posted: 14.Jun.2007.
I can fully understand if people consider Henry Miller their favorite writer. He is not mine, not anywhere close, but there is always something of interest in anything that Miller wrote. The cover design of this book is how book covers should be designed. The following qoute in on chess and is one of the most fabulous of qoutations on the subject. It mentions Duchamp, it passes through Cathay, all to describe the way of life and the way of playing of some friend of Miller:
- Posted: 14.Jun.2007.
I can fully understand if people consider Henry Miller their favorite writer. He is not mine, not anywhere close, but there is always something of interest in anything that Miller wrote. The cover design of this book is how book covers should be designed. The following qoute in on chess and is one of the most fabulous of qoutations on the subject. It mentions Duchamp, it passes through Cathay, all to describe the way of life and the way of playing of some friend of Miller:
To be sure, I was not then, nor am I now, a good player. Probably not even as good as Napoleon. When, for instance, Marcel Duchamp once invited me to play a game with him, I forgot everything I knew about the game because of my unholy respect for his knowledge of it. With Lou Jacobs it was worse. I could never arrive at any conclusion about his knowledge of the game. What defeated me with him was his utter nonchalance. “Would you like me to give you a queen or two rooks or a knight and two bishops?” He never uttered these words but they were implied by his manner. He would open in any old fashion, as though out of contempt for my ability, though it was never that; he had contempt for no one. No, he did it merely to enjoy himself, to see what liberties he could take, to see how far he could stretch a point. It seemed to make no difference to him whether he was winning or losing a game; he played with the ease and the assurance of a wizard, enjoying the false moves as well as the brilliant ones. Besides, what could it possibly mean to a man like him to lose a game of chess, or ten, or a hundred? “I’ll be playing it in paradise,” He seemed to be saying. “Come on, let’s have fun! Make a bold move , a rash move!” Of course the more rashly he played the more cautious I grew. I suspected him of being a genius. And was he not a genius to thus bewilder and confuse me?
The way he played chess was the way he played the game of life. Only the “old dogs” can do it. Lao-tse was one of those gay old dogs. Sometimes, when the image of Lao-tse seated on the back of a water buffalo crossed my mind, when I think of that steady, patient, kindly, penetrating grin of his, that wisdom so fluid and benevolent, I think of Lou Jacobs sitting before me at the chessboard. Ready to play the game every way you liked. Ready to rejoice over his ignorance or to beam with pleasure at his own tomfoolery. Never malicious, never petty, never envious, never jealous. A great comforter, yet remote as the dog star. Always bowing himself out of the picture, yet the farther he retreated the closer he was to you.
Henry Miller in The Book in My Life, Village Press, 1952/1974.
Even the Patzer feels the Daemonic Attraction
- Posted: 09.Jun.2007.
The madness over chess theme is about to become predictable, but few people can say it better than George Steiner:
- Posted: 09.Jun.2007.
The madness over chess theme is about to become predictable, but few people can say it better than George Steiner:
The power of mathematics to devise actions for reason as subtle, witty, manifold as any offered by sensory experience and to move forward in an endless unfolding of self-creating life is one of the strangest, deep marks man leaves on the world. Chess, on the other hand, is a game in which thirty-two bits of ivory, horn, wood, metal, or (in stalags) sawdust stuck together with shoe polish, are pushed around on sixty-four alternately coloured squares. To the addict, such a description is blasphemy. The origins of chess are shrouded in mists of controversy, but unquestionably this very ancient, trivial pastime has seemed to many exceptionally intelligent human beings of many races and centuries to constitute a reality, a focus for the emotions, as substantial as, often more substantial than, reality itself. Cards can come to mean the same absolute. But their magnetism is impure. A mania for whist or poker hooks into the obvious, universal magic of money. The financial element in chess, where it exists at all, has always been small or accidental.
To a true chess player, the pushing about of thirty-two counters on 8 x 8 squares is an end in itself, a whole world next to which that of a mere biological or political or social life seems messy, stale, and contingent. Even the patzer, the wretched amateur who charges out with his knight pawn when the opponent’s bishop decamps to R4, feels this deamonic spell. There are siren moments when quite normal creatures otherwise engaged, men such as Lenin and myself, feel like giving up everything – marriage, mortgages, careers, the Russian Revolution – in order to spend their days and nights moving little carved objects up and down a quadrate board. At the sight of a set, even the tawdriest of plastic pocket sets, one’s fingers arch and a coldness as in a light sleep steals over one’s spine. Not for gain, not for knowledge or reknown, but in some autistic enchantment, pure as one of Bach’s inverted canons or Euler’s formula for polyhedra.
George Steiner in ‘A Death of Kings’, Extraterritorial, 1968
Once the Doors of Perception are Cleansed!
- Posted: 07.Jun.2007.
Totally and utterly I despise the entire Huxley clan. There is something about the arrogance in the way they assume to be always top-of-the-class, the self-evidence with which they claim their position as technocrats among the technocrats that revolts me. Everything a Huxley does will eventually be common sense! It speaks from everything they wrote or said. To fill an obvious gap in my Crystalpunk education I had to read Aldous Huxley’s ‘The Doors of Perception’ and sure enough it lives up to the Huxley-elitism of world-improvement from the pedestal. Here Huxley assumes the role of the artist-scientist mapping the invisible world of the mystic. But the world of Huxley and the world of Blake and Swedenborg mix like oil and water. The common-sense with which mescalin is promoted as the drugs most suited to be incorporated by the Christian Church is so ludicrous is becomes funny. But it is not funny: he was assuming that the world always comes round to the Huxley view. Aaaghhh! The best thing I found in it was a quote from Goethe:
- Posted: 07.Jun.2007.
Totally and utterly I despise the entire Huxley clan. There is something about the arrogance in the way they assume to be always top-of-the-class, the self-evidence with which they claim their position as technocrats among the technocrats that revolts me. Everything a Huxley does will eventually be common sense! It speaks from everything they wrote or said. To fill an obvious gap in my Crystalpunk education I had to read Aldous Huxley’s ‘The Doors of Perception’ and sure enough it lives up to the Huxley-elitism of world-improvement from the pedestal. Here Huxley assumes the role of the artist-scientist mapping the invisible world of the mystic. But the world of Huxley and the world of Blake and Swedenborg mix like oil and water. The common-sense with which mescalin is promoted as the drugs most suited to be incorporated by the Christian Church is so ludicrous is becomes funny. But it is not funny: he was assuming that the world always comes round to the Huxley view. Aaaghhh! The best thing I found in it was a quote from Goethe:
We talk far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future – all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and he silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of ancient hills.
Gilles Deleuze on Chess and Go
- Posted: 05.Jun.2007.
In horror I quote from larvalsubjects what D&G had to say:
Pic
- Posted: 05.Jun.2007.
In horror I quote from larvalsubjects what D&G had to say:
Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: ‘It’ makes a move. ‘It’ could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only. (A Thousand Plateaus, 352)
Pic
Lend your Books to Coleridge
- Posted: 28.May.2007.
- Posted: 28.May.2007.
Reader, if haply thou art blessed with a moderate collection, by shy of showing it; or if thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend thy books; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C [Samuel Taylor Coleridge] - he will return them (generally ancticipating the time appointed) with usury; enriched with annotations, tripling their value. I have had experience. Many of these are precious MMS. of his - (in matter oftentimes, ald almost in quantity not unfrequently, vying with the originals) - in no clerkly had - legible in my Daniel; in old Burton; in Sir Thomas Browne; and those abtruser cogitations of the Greville, now, alas! wandering in pagan lands. - I counsil thee, shut not thy heart, nor thy library, against S. T. C.
Charles Lamb in The Two Races of Men.
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