Everyday

The frontier has been drawn inwards.

---Robert Hughes on Hopper.

Eutropia, where everyone dreams of living another life, but can't forget the one that is quietly slipping away. So, that other life is only (imagined) slightly different from the present one. On the dark side of the moon other people are living our lives, only where we turned right, they turned left. They live in a glass darkly, and stare and stare, ingazing, their lives more broken for always seeming whole. Or, alternatively, everything and everyone is interchangeable; someone else will take my place and I will think someone else's thoughts. The possibilities remain unchanged this way; there is only a shuffling of the cards: nomos. Then the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty chessboard.

The great difficulty of residing in the modern epoch lies, paradoxically, in the triviality that nothing could be easier.

----Rosenzweig.

'The people keep indoors and stare for hours
at crooked mirrors showing exotic things
among familiar objects on their dressers.

What lives within is near. All else lies far
away. The things within, so busy, overfull
and everyday, stay inexpressible.
It is as if the island were a star

too small and Space, fiercely dispassionate,
had crushed it unaware. It circles on
and unilluminated and unheard
proceeds alone

through darkness in an orbit of its own
intent on making end to all of this,
continuing blindly and outside the course
of other galaxies, of other stars or suns.

-----Rilke.

(p.s. I thought of this picture and typed it into google images. There it was, under 'blacksunpress.com'. Did someone else have these thoughts before me? Are there other black suns out there?)

~~~~

I've grown quite fond of the little wooden box (chest) at the dining centre, and picking a Lipton tea bag out of it, the ritual of adding 'everyday' milk at a specified place. How important the everyday and the ordinary are! Hell is discontinuity!

~

But then I thought: what else is the university but a place for encouraging habitual forms of thought and a hopeless conformity to some weak version of the bourgeoisie's notion of respectability? Second-rate monks!"I'm a theorist". Yes, but of what?

~

To take up Badiou: isn't every situation structured in dominance: the namings, classifications, and divisions that go to make up: the known? The life of the mind is a harsh and stark road. Is it not better for some of us to undo and unlearn this and return to life, to laugh again instead of this pretense, pettiness, and inflated self-importance?