Time is of the essence
Who is still free today to maintain what is certain and to doubt what is not?
Before, Tokyo, Berlin, were an infinite distance away. And now? They still are, but I have an image of that distance.
To live for the day. Only a saint could accomplish that. But now the slow accumulation of experiences can be undone in a brief, swooping change of key or a sudden reversal of fate. In a shape-shifting world there is no continuity and they eye is dazzled and bewitched by the sparkling glitter of change, until it, too, accustoms itself-to the extent that that is possible-to the ceaseless flux. The mode of its doing so is world-weariness.
We struggle to register the notes of our disillusionment.
Technology is the solution to the problem of technology we are told, without the faintest whiff of irony.
What has happened?
Time used to measure the space between me and you. Now there is no time for that.
What counts as intelligence? That which cannot be counted.
'But how could we possibly develop a style-that is, how would it be possible to acquire any consistent form..(which are always simply the fruits of fairly long experience and of a certain continuity in taste, needs, and methods) when impatience, rapid execution and sudden changes in technique beset all our works, and when novelty has for the past century been required of every production of every genre?'
'We are witnessing the dying out of the man who would be complete.'
---Valery.
For so long we have looked out of time for some meaning, unable or unwilling to look within. Our religious, theoretical or aesthetic impulses drew us out of ourselves in the hope that we could arrest time (love, too..an afterthought).
Our first thought: I am not the space that I occupy. I am unreconciled to the times that I live in. Second thoughts: one must find oneself again in the time one has, the time that is given. Both, together: the broken circle of our lives.
We must move on; we must rest, compose ourselves. In the breathless pursuit of change we haven't actually gone anywhere. All that energy dissipated for an end that, in the final analysis, proved to be a phantom life.
'analysis'= to break down, undone.
We see things one thing at a time. There is something to be thankful about that, about having limited understanding. To always reach out for perfection-without humility-can result in hubris. To 'get out of oneself' by false means, Simone's false infinity (universality).
There is no sense, now, of looking back and seeing a complete life, of actually living a life with that sense of wholeness. Instead, we concentrate on a small arc of experience, like shallow experts, and take that for the sum of intelligence. To think, today, of what constitutes a good life, is to speak in a very peculiar way.
One wonders about Yourcenar's Hadrian and how very distant that sensibility is to ours.
Hans Jonas: modernity begins with a radical sense of 'finitude,' of the danse macabre. J.K. and Holbein's 'Dead Christ': the end of transcendence. J.G.A. Pocock: The Machiavelli Moment: from now on how to deal with chance, contingency, when there are no more models of cosmos or natural order (or Eliade's mythology of eternal return) to aborb the chaos?
With linear time there is 'newness' but also forgetting. The past cannot be recovered by individual effort (at best it is 'staged' and warped behind a screen and packaged as an 'event', a 'summer blockbuster' for the galleries and museums and the hordes of tourists and their selfie sticks).
To find oneself here, again.
~
You grew up with a sense of people always looking out for you. Through some awkward accumulation of chances you tend to look inward. This is partly due to not belonging or wanting to belong to any social formation (tribe, nation, religion). Kashmiri, yes, but that is so unquestionable it is not worth even discussing.
Not that it really exists.
What is true, perhaps, is that what we often value what doesn't exist (in some sense) and what might fail to exist. Which is why we look out, are on the look-out, I suppose.
The white object of our lives, the second spaces.
Pause. Take a step back and try and find the path back home.
Who is still free today to maintain what is certain and to doubt what is not?
Before, Tokyo, Berlin, were an infinite distance away. And now? They still are, but I have an image of that distance.
To live for the day. Only a saint could accomplish that. But now the slow accumulation of experiences can be undone in a brief, swooping change of key or a sudden reversal of fate. In a shape-shifting world there is no continuity and they eye is dazzled and bewitched by the sparkling glitter of change, until it, too, accustoms itself-to the extent that that is possible-to the ceaseless flux. The mode of its doing so is world-weariness.
We struggle to register the notes of our disillusionment.
Technology is the solution to the problem of technology we are told, without the faintest whiff of irony.
What has happened?
Time used to measure the space between me and you. Now there is no time for that.
What counts as intelligence? That which cannot be counted.
'But how could we possibly develop a style-that is, how would it be possible to acquire any consistent form..(which are always simply the fruits of fairly long experience and of a certain continuity in taste, needs, and methods) when impatience, rapid execution and sudden changes in technique beset all our works, and when novelty has for the past century been required of every production of every genre?'
'We are witnessing the dying out of the man who would be complete.'
---Valery.
For so long we have looked out of time for some meaning, unable or unwilling to look within. Our religious, theoretical or aesthetic impulses drew us out of ourselves in the hope that we could arrest time (love, too..an afterthought).
Our first thought: I am not the space that I occupy. I am unreconciled to the times that I live in. Second thoughts: one must find oneself again in the time one has, the time that is given. Both, together: the broken circle of our lives.
We must move on; we must rest, compose ourselves. In the breathless pursuit of change we haven't actually gone anywhere. All that energy dissipated for an end that, in the final analysis, proved to be a phantom life.
'analysis'= to break down, undone.
We see things one thing at a time. There is something to be thankful about that, about having limited understanding. To always reach out for perfection-without humility-can result in hubris. To 'get out of oneself' by false means, Simone's false infinity (universality).
There is no sense, now, of looking back and seeing a complete life, of actually living a life with that sense of wholeness. Instead, we concentrate on a small arc of experience, like shallow experts, and take that for the sum of intelligence. To think, today, of what constitutes a good life, is to speak in a very peculiar way.
One wonders about Yourcenar's Hadrian and how very distant that sensibility is to ours.
Hans Jonas: modernity begins with a radical sense of 'finitude,' of the danse macabre. J.K. and Holbein's 'Dead Christ': the end of transcendence. J.G.A. Pocock: The Machiavelli Moment: from now on how to deal with chance, contingency, when there are no more models of cosmos or natural order (or Eliade's mythology of eternal return) to aborb the chaos?
With linear time there is 'newness' but also forgetting. The past cannot be recovered by individual effort (at best it is 'staged' and warped behind a screen and packaged as an 'event', a 'summer blockbuster' for the galleries and museums and the hordes of tourists and their selfie sticks).
To find oneself here, again.
~
You grew up with a sense of people always looking out for you. Through some awkward accumulation of chances you tend to look inward. This is partly due to not belonging or wanting to belong to any social formation (tribe, nation, religion). Kashmiri, yes, but that is so unquestionable it is not worth even discussing.
Not that it really exists.
What is true, perhaps, is that what we often value what doesn't exist (in some sense) and what might fail to exist. Which is why we look out, are on the look-out, I suppose.
The white object of our lives, the second spaces.
Pause. Take a step back and try and find the path back home.
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