white space

The most beautiful is the object
which does not exist....
neither blindness
nor death can take away the object
which does not exist.
mark the place
where stood the object
which does not exist
it will be a simple dirge
for the beautiful absence...



Now all space swells like an ocean
a hurricane beats
on the black sail..
now you have empty space
more beautiful than the object
more beautiful than the place it leaves
it is the pre-world
a white paradise
of all possibilities
you may enter there
cry out vertical-horizontal
perpendicular lightning strikes the naked horizon....



Obey the counsels
of the inner eye
do not yield
to murmurs mutterings smackings
it is the uncreated world
crowding before the gates of your canvas
obey the counsels of the inner eye
admit no-one
extract
from the shadows of the object
which does not exist
from polar space
from the stern reveries of the inner eye
a chair.
beautiful and useless
like a cathedral in the wilderness



Place on the chair a crumpled tablecloth
add to the idea of order
the idea of adventure
let it be a confession of faith
before the vertical struggling with the horizontal
let it be quieter than angels
prouder than kings
more substantial than a whale
let it have the face of lost things.
we ask reveal o chair
the depths of the inner eye
the iris of necessity
the pupil of death



---Z.Herbert.

There is a place. Like a person. You know the name. But that is all you know. Knowing is not everything.

On a rainy day your friend asks you: but does this place exist, is it real for instance, and you just stare, then shrug your shoulders. Is this a question?

Nothing matters-except the secret. Hold it close to your breast.Say the name with your eyes closed and in time, out of time, the door will open. It exists, if at all, for you.

the ham sandwich theorem

Distinctions! Distinctions! ,she said.
Or was it: distinctions, distinctions? I forget.

After serious and profound meditation I have come to the conclusion that there are only two types of people in the world: those who like Cinnamon rolls and those who don't. That is fundamental. Okay, there's also the supremely important: those who like hats and those who don't. And, oh yes, those who are Muslims and those who are infidels. Well, also: the red and the blue. How many does that make? (Yikes! Help me here, Nabs).

Okay, the ham sandwich theorem....later, got to watch the Double Life of Veronique first.

So, here goes. It's like this.

A friend is talking on the phone about "existential questions"

I ask: "what are they?"

He laughs: "It's nothing like Camus or Sartre, it's more like..."

Drum roll, please....

The Ham Sandwich Theorem.

Take a piece of plane paper readers. On it draw six red dots. Done? Okay, now draw six blue crosses (making sure that no three things -dots or crosses- are on a straight line) Now, the idea is that there exists a line that divides the paper so that there are three dots and three crosses on either side of it. [Have you found it?]

Why is that? I've only got some of the intuition and no idea of the implications. But it was cool and it extends to areas and more than two things/objects (I think).

So, if you're cutting a ham sandwich and there's lettuce, ham, and tomatoes then if you have a sharp knife you can cut it so that there's equal amounts of the things for both of us..even if you put the tomato in the corner. Anyway, it wouldn't work because I'd have to swap you my ham for some tomatoes or mustard.

days of our lives

When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one

Was there a day, a specific date when it began, when it ended? You can't get over it:we are strangers to one another now, perhaps because we were always estranged from ourselves. The hand that reached out, the outstreaming soul..this burning of our small fate blackened our faces, stung our eyes; it was like the light from a candle:a trembling nothing, a black mark before the vast destiny of the sun. It is not space that separates us, but time itself.

Yearning makes the heart grow deeper, said the Saint. But I am not a saint. We do not suffer in time. It is time herself...

As Lines so Loves oblique may well

Themselves in every Angle greet:

But ours so truly Paralel,

Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which doth us bind,

But Fate so enviously debarrs,

Is the Conjunction of the Mind,

And Opposition of Stars.

-- Andrew Marvell (courtesy of anton)

Solid Lines never meet. This much you know (unless one learns to fold paper). But the small rubbings out sometimes intermingle when the thing is done, join and rest with one another, as luck would have it. It is totally unscripted. The blank piece of paper is once again full of ways, once again a place of possibilities, stolen glances...like a white room.

Traces of erased grey lines. The lives the pencil would not write.

For a while the turning of the circle has,like compasses,

separated us and again brought us together

This is one of my favourite places, there in the far corner of the world, and this is how I will always remember it; I'm not sure if it still exists and even though I will never look for it or return there, it will always be there for me-like the faded letters I keep or the old, yellowing photographs. True places never exist on maps; never did, never do.

I can't remember what it was..it was some sort of building on the pier (some things are best left mysterious, unsayable) but there were no 'amusements' or games there. All I remember was the declining sun...'fires fragment' Akhmatova would say...and the shadows in the stones and late, late summer evenings, when one wrapped up warm or held the hands of a loved one tighter to keep the chill away.
~
Piers are universally the saddest places on earth, preserving the old ways: music no-one listens to any more, childish entertainments, a particular type of laughter...all worn-out forms in a shape-shifter's world.

It is always reassuring when one is young to come across something so old, so familiar. But that was when the child was a child...I look back now and sometimes wonder if I didn't die in the seventies, if all that followed is only a kind of dream-life. How strange to think that there were already old people then, brushing past us on that creaking platform. No arc of being intersected with another, no worlds collided, no dissolving of time's mysteries either; no, instead, just the inescapable strangeness of two remote individuals occupying the same space and time. The opaqueness of other people like a baby sleeping that one doesn't disturb, or a flower that grows by the side of a great tree but only knows its shade.

There was a time when I, in my red bow tie and white cardigan, surrounded by grown-ups, cut a chocolate birthday cake and yet you were just a thought with God, unbeknown to me. There can be no recovery of lost time. And there will be a time when you sing to your grandchildren and I shall be nothing but a dead branch of the future, a future that never was and never could be.

You, a child amongst sad blue flowers. I kept a petal or two in my pocket for you, just in case you found your way here by mistake.

Let us be grateful for what we had.

I too made mistakes, lost my way, lost count.

The era rang like a golden sphere,

Cast hollow, supported by no-one

Touched, it answered yes and no,

As a child will say:

I'll give you an apple, or: I won't give you one,

It's face an exact copy of the voice that pronounces these words

The sound is still ringing although its source has ceased

The horse foams in the dust

But the acute curve of his neck

Preserves the memory of the race with outstretched legs

When there were not four

But as many as the stones on the road,

Renewed in four shifts

As blazing hooves pushed off the ground

So,

Whoever finds a horseshoe

Blows away the dust,

Rubs it with wool till it shines,

Then

Hangs it over the threshold

To rest

So that it will no longer have to strike sparks from flint

Human lips

which have nothing more to say

Preserve the form of the last word said

And the arm retains the sense of weight

Though the jug

splashes half-empty on the way home...

Time pares me down like a coin,

And there is no longer enough of me for myself.

---M, 1923

Never Tear Us Apart - INXS

Well I remember, I remember don't worry
How could I ever forget, its the first time, the last time we ever met
But I know the reason why you keep your silence up, no you don't fool me
The hurt doesn't show; but the pain still grows
Its no stranger to you or me

the restaurant at the end of the universe

The lion restaurant...

The pair, named in media reports as Leo Gao and Cara Young, could hardly believe their luck when they checked their account at Westpac bank on 5 May, hoping to find their request for a NZ$10,900 (£4,000) overdraft had been accepted.

Instead, the bank had deposited 1,000 times that amount: NZ$10m, or around £4m. With so many borrowers around the world constantly being told "no" by their creditors, here, finally, was a bank that liked to say "yes".

~~~~~~~~~~~

A serial killer:

Mahin, a heavy-built track and field athlete and mother of two [The Herald Sun] in her confessions has said that she has been taking patterns from Agatha Christie books and has been trying not to leave any trace of herself...

---The Guardian.

Not to leave any trace of herself...what a story!

CERN, Mice, and the Fundamental Questions

Well, this is it. CERN will be switched on tonight. The physicist said that it would help answer our "fundamental questions": who am I ? (amnesia?), what am I doing here ? (which is what my students say in my class!); where am I ? (the tourist) ; how did I get here?

She smiled at the questions, as if to say: 'And if I answered you, would you know me then?'
----Courtesy of Rinku

Apart from Bulleh and Augustine I don't know anyone who asks such questions. If you are such a person I'd like to hear from you.

Okay, okay, I'm sceptical that science can even answer these questions (you knew that, didn't you!) but you've got to say that this is absolutely exhilarating..just the quest, the hunger to know. Nope, not the lilies in the fields, the sun or the moon..nowhere else is there such doubt, such incredible inquisitiveness. And isn't fundamentalism really just a rejection of this openness?

I'm a bit worried though. Having lived in London I know that rats and mice love tunnels. How will they deal with the photons? You know, every time I mention the word rat I see one (well, it's happened twice-and so I'm not saying the word again). I know some of you (Z, for instance) think that's because there's a mystic correspondence between my rat nature and theirs. But still...

You must remember this

A kiss is still a kiss,

a sigh is just a sigh.

The fundamental things apply

As time goes by.

As Time Goes By - Ibrahim Ferrer - Jaxxs Latin Collectionz

Zaid Hamid and the delusionals

One thing I've noticed over the last year is the alarming growth of conspiracy theories and the proliferation of half-baked crackpots. If that monkey, Zakir Naik, wasn't enough to put up with, there's now this ridiculous cartoon character that is 'wowing' the semi-educated urbanites with his nonsense on stilts.

Last week he came here and harped on with his delusional rhetoric: World War I was started to protect 'the Jews'; the Federal Reserve system was dominated by the Jewish Rothschilds, the first Israeli Prime Minister explicitly stated (back in the '50's) that the real threat to the State of Israel was Pakistan, how nearly everyone here is a CIA "asset" -except, of course, the army! What a fucking joke! Then the usual 'global conspiracy' by the media, run by the "liberal" elites. How many times I've heard that over the last year!

And this charlatan is now the darling of the masses. I rest my case. This country is sliding, sliding fast...

Last week graduating students celebrated their last day with a silly and mainly harmless riot in which they dressed up as dacoits ('dakus') and took money from the facutly.

One outraged faculty member wrote this:

I would request Mufti Kamaluddin Sahib and Dr. Zeeshan Ahmed Sahib to please share their views with BSc 2009 on the "permissibility" of money "collected" by them on Daku day. Also their opinion on the "consequences" of food consumed through such "income" in this world and the hereafter.

That's the level of discussion. Not what's happening in Swat, not the gross social and economic injustices, the power crisis, political instability..none of that moves our little friend to indignation. These are all "worldly"-and therefore lowly-matters for him. Far too lowly, in fact, to be the object of thought.

the wandering third

The crows are tossing themselves

recklessly in the random winds

of spring.

One friend has died, one disappeared

(for now, at least) leaving no address;

I've lost the whereabouts

of a wandering third. That seems to be,

this year, the nature of this season.

Is it a message about relinquishment?

--Denise Levertov.

Crow, who knew the colours, imagined blue to be the distance of the soul. Crow, wise to the seasons, thought of space as the absence of time.

A restless god had created crow restless in the idle hours. With His fingers he folded her destiny into that darkness, whispered her name, gently smoothing her feathers down with the blackest of Indian inks as he sharpened her tongue. The Kajol around her eyes would often smudge when she remembered.

Odd, even. She has large eyes, marked in black. And take her mouth. A wide mouth as pale as wax. It seems I am seeing everything more clearly. The details of a whole world are being opened up to me.

(--after James Salter).

But on the day of her departure a small fragment of blue glass fell into crow's eyes. And it was as if there was a whole world in that small speck of coloured dust. How crow loved to live in that blue world of hers!

But as time passed crow began to realise that her friends were disappearing one by one, and this began to weigh heavily on her heart. Many a man had tried to ensnare such a wondrous, strange creature-unique in all the world- capture her secret, but each time she would escape their nets -even if she sometimes enjoyed being bound, sometimes rested her head on their shoulders for human warmth, and even though she occasionally clawed her way into their hearts, softly craa'ed "now!" or "again !" into their ears in the early hours

out of mind

From time out of mind I have known you. Even when out of time, out of mind. Listen. The darkened conversation of the crows in the early morning light. Look out, and out, from your window. There. Perfectly framed by your gaze, but the wrong side of your eyes. The harem of your mind.

Crow, Platonic crow, said: It is the object of desire that makes that which is desired desirable. It magnetically draws you to itself, like a carrion crow is drawn to death.

But that cannot be, said crow, Romantic crow. It is the desire of the lover that makes the loved one the beloved. It is like the raven that is compelled to find his place, his rookery; at once origin and destiny, Spring and Winter.

Even when drunk you were never lost; even when sober, never found. The blurred image of the unfaithful one comes to you in sad times. Paint her image on silk. Still it fades. In this wisp of a life what else can you see but a burning, quivering flame? The puzzle, the enigma of her being, are nothing but pieces of your mind.

For there’s a limit to gazing.
And the gazed-at world
Wants to blossom in love.
---Rilke.

Glastonbury Avenue

One wonders how the central themes of their existence are resolved in such elegant forms, destined to repeat the same pattern, following the lines of some ancient lineage through some dark inner compulsion. No matter how far each diverged from this original plan nothing could be grafted on to this ancient stock of possibilities."------Saul Bellow, The Dean's December

Our Holy Grail: the search to identify, to define oneself, to delimit a destiny, takes place when one is already lost. It is to close the door on certain possibilities of being. Do we choose what we are or do we only try to understand the range of possibilities, keep them open?Is our lack of free choice, our finitude, such a mis-fortune and why is the singualr road such a bitter-sweet one? (Bi-location:the ability to be in two places at once) .

Merlin, my namesake, is a liminal, ambiguous figure. Someone between the stable, illuminated and familiar world of the court and its rituals, the world of the king and ceremony, and the world of nature, the wilderness and contemplation. A trickster, a stranger, who cannot decide between the city and the desert, between love and the mind.

The poet could say:
"But if I had the choice again
and stood on the headland
I would leap from heaven or hell
with a whole spirit and heart."

I sit here, at five in the morning, still with stars in my head, the last dreams in the fingertips. Outside, the tangled thoughts of the tree, the curled-up being of the snail quietly unfolding itself, the slow falling back of the shadows into hiding, the world "thirsty for wine's deep mysteries". A black bird of no particular description stomps himself to wakefulness and I throw off the last coat of the night's intoxication.

In the morning I pass the squirrels, the Kashmiris of the animal world, with their timorous souls, their tree-ascent but the aspiration to become an angel, to escape the world of choice. I see a workman, diligently gathering then sweeping sand from one pile to another;inconsequential one would have thought, until one notices the utter self-absorption on his brow, the deep intelligence that comes from knowing one's place in the world, the steadfastness of his hands, the assuredness of his movements. As if here was someone, in the diamond of the day,who was conscious of the fact that each act means something in the scheme of things, the totality of events and the showings and evasions, the meanderings and tarrying and the flashes of direct revelations that go up to make the world. There is no grace in the movements, no formal eloquence, just a thousand years of English pragmatism concentrated in those square shoulders. All extravagance, all flamboyance has been whittled away by the repetition of the essential.

On the way back, after the deluge, the sun's last rays linger on amidst the lengthening, deepening shadows, like some unwanted guest whose time has come. The train cuts through a forest about to enter a dream and the dazzling,fluttering leaves sparkle despite the evening chill, like so many emerald gems that vibrate with the sun's gold. The day's final glint of understanding hangs on them precariously,like dew drops. The earth is expectant.

And then I make my way home, my brisk walk disturbing the courtship of two pigeons. In itself of no significance, but in a previous age that could have resulted in the unborn pigeon not carrying a message to the northern king,averting the massacre of the innocents, the birth of so many Mozarts. But then, as it is now, each step is still fateful, over- brimming and fraught with consequences that span out,forming numerous causal chains in a far-flung net that catches the most unlikely of collaborators . Had my indecisive feet stepped but the other way the universe would have been remarkably different...perhaps.Infinite futures canceled out at Glastonbury Avenue. One pile of sand grows, and not the other....

are friends electric?

are friends electric? In the world of the internet, liquid modernity, and 'instant messaging' what of the weight that binds one human being to another? Can common interests, for example, survive without a common place, without the slow accumulation of time together?

He was free but in an infinite way, so that he felt weightless above the earth. He lacked that weight of human relationships that inhibits free movements, those tears and farewells, those reproaches and those joys, everything that a man strokes or tears apart every time he forms a gesture, those thousand chains that bind him to others and make him heavy.

-----Exupery.

the grey or the blue

When the forests have been burned their darkness remains.
--W.S. Merwin.

With all my thoughts I went right out of the world:
there you were,
you my gentle one,
you my open one

The reason to remember. The necessity of remembering. Lest this slant of radiant colours is taken for reality. The reason to forget. The necessity of it. Or else the silver inherits the black.

And yet each grey face is unaware of its own withering glances, the layers of ash, just as hands are innocent of their cruelty. Time in the world exists. A bare fact. Some things can be recovered, and sometimes capstones shift. But who can say? Who amongst us has the strength to imagine such things?

I must remember to forget you.
~~~~

You sit on a cold slab of concrete in the cool night, the early hours of the morning, waiting... It is good to be under the open skies, see clouds and moon and stars mingle with reflected lights. And you don't ask any more: what is real? Only the philosopher or the dead ask such questions. No thought comes to you in this city. Just the waiting, and the detached observation of other people's lives. Departures and arrivals; simple, inexhaustible huddled existence.

The dark blue lightens, softens. The re-entry of light into the world. Some old men in ragged clothes are still praying as newly married couples talk to each other tenderly, full of longing. A few people wake from their slumber, yawn like lions, then stretch and unwind as if they'd been kept in a box for an age or just been resurrected.

"Soon it will be day", you mumble to yourself, your lips uttering the unscripted. And this is enough to bring assurance. Soon it will be day.

addio

"Don't worry, my friend, I've got you as firmly as if you were a sack of turnips. But you, make sure that you do your guide's work properly... Don't send me walking into cow-shit."

the wedge

Saddened yellow came to me in a dream-in the shape of a star, not a flower. Nestling in the stillness of my heart. And words and image and colour were one. But still not the thing! In the dead of night a storm starts up, the door rattles (fixed by a slipper-come-wedge). Some ghost of the dead wants me to wake, sit up, and scribble her words down. But they're gone. Just a dream within a dream within a dream...

In the morning my eye becomes alert, fixes on everything that is yellow in the world-the soap, the plastic top, the strip of cardboard on the pack of shaving blades, the flowers strewn across the paths-as if I was seeing the colour for the first time today, fresh, quivering, vibrant, newly created. (In the same way, there is a green thread running through Bellow's Herzog-that wise fool!).

~~~~

Childhood: To be at the centre of a circle, a maze, and not know it, not be amazed by it. There is only the centre. One simply finds oneself there.

Adulthood: to renounce centre, long for boundaries, the periphery. Walk on! , said the Buddha. To wander, aimlessly.The 'knight's move'. The leap into the blue, the walk in the wild. To slow down, wait. Dream a lot. To become someone else.

Life: A broken circle.

A path is a prior interpretation..and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation or to stalk your predecessor on it..To walk the same way is to re-iterate something deep; to move through the same space the same way is a means of becoming the same person, thinking the same thoughts. It's a form of spatial theatre, but also spiritual theatre..in the hope of coming closer to them oneself.
--Rebecca Solnit.

The dream where you are always to be found

Love, oh my love, it will come
Sure enough. A storm
Broods over the dry earth all day

You are outside, lost somewhere
I find myself
Devouring verses of stranger passion
And exile. The exact words
Are fed into my blank hunger for you.
---G. Hill

Redemption Songs

I loved the music and this scene. Somehow reminded me of something by Verdi (Triumphal March?) . Don't read many biographies-but Peter Brook's was a memorable one and I can't imagine many better (if anyone has a favourite, please do mention it). Peter Brown's Augustine, of course. I was given Lee Iaccoca (whatever) when I was a kid for some strange reason. Who reads such tosh, I wonder? Americans maybe, or perhaps the same people who read stuff like 'How to be Successful' or 'How to Make Friends'. Bizarre, utterly bizarre. Oh well, takes all sorts, I guess.

When the Taleban march in is this what they'll be singing as well? Hmm. At 'the lounge' today for breakfast. Last year they used to play good stuff-like Julie London's 'Cry me a river'. Today, it was just naats (religious songs-like choir songs, sort of).

I see.

art without boundaries

Shitao: The brush is for saving things from chaos.

All the heaped-up knowledge of modern science, all the energy of modern commerce, all the depth and spirituality of modern thought cannot reproduce so much as the handwork of an ignorant, superstitious Berkshire peasant of the 14 th century.
---William Morris.

That's too extreme, of course. But: handwork.

Christine wanted to talk about art (artefacts) in terms of the question: national or universal. Who do great works belong to? But, for me, this misses the point of how culture is related to consumption in late capitalism, how these 'things' are themselves staged as the spectacular, how they become things isolated from any living culture and practices. And yet, at the same time, they're supposed to be an antidote to the crassness of popular culture and a world governed by technology and utilitarian values. Wonderfully free from instrumentality of the market, from the authority of the political and the religious-art for art's sake or something that can exist in the mind alone. But isn't that itself synonymous with the mindset of modernity, one that is inextricably linked with capitalism? Why this need to shore up the fragments? Why now? Isn't this just another sign of worldlessness ?(Hannah)

Fragmentation as a way of subversion. But isn't that what you're doing yourself, taking quotes out of context, adding to the already disappearing world? Franzen: who reads linearly any more?

To be an escape artists without talent contradicts the meaning of art, installs things that are ugly as equal with anything beautiful and smashes up those structures of conformity from which alone art can emerge.
--P. Rieff.

Smash! Yes, how important that was for the century! (the Russians, the 'cultural revolution', the taleban). As if to say: in an age of the proliferation of the image the only response could be to destroy it. Isn't ridicule another form of this? Doesn't late capitalism itself encourage this flippant attitude to the image: the shock of the new? What does it mean to say something is an 'iconic image' today?

[Art without boundaries. Need to go back to Ouspensky/Lossky here. Blunt.]

The image without boundaries:

In fact, the necessity of postulating that an image referred to any original would be taken to be largely due to an anachronistic lack of culture and concealed metaphysical obscurity; it is precisely the image released by contemporary techniques that liberates itself...Today, the image covers the surface of the earth only insofar ..as it expands without restriction or reference.


Now appearances are volatile. Technological innovation has made it easy to separate the apparent from the existent. And this is precisely what the present system's mythology continually needs to exploit. It turns appearances into refractions, like mirages: refractions not of light but appetite, in fact a single appetite, the appetite for more.


In the televisual order, the principal caesura between the image and reality has disappeared: the time of representation. Around the clock, 24/7, not a particular time set apart for the staging.

The unending flow of time: the irreality thus competes with the temporality of reality.

The space that instantaneously crosses the televisual flow of images gives not a single possible world but rather discord-a blur.

Is this a natural consequence of the dissolution of boundaries? Who or what can govern such a de-contextualised image but the gaze of the viewer!

A "viewer": this is defined as the one who, under the most neutral names of "spectator" or "consumer" undergoes, governs, and defines the image-all under the pretexts of access to information, the opening of the world, and "connecting"..the sole pleasure of seeing, to succumb without limit or restriction to the fascination of the libido vivendi, the pleasure of seeing without being seen. [bloggers, anons, voyeurs]


Augustine: curiositas: the "lust of the eyes" . Illich: the restraint of the gaze. Right-looking.

The image is nothing in itself (nihilism) and can only be validated by the viewers, the consensus of desire. If one abolishes reality does one abolish appearance as well?

It is better to appear than be, since to be is not to appear. An idol: the image of desire. Ex-posure, just express yourself. One must live life aesthetically. From now on, as Roth says, there is only the surface. (the Eloi).

Every perception of the world is reduced to to an expression of the monad itself...the libido vivendi, which satisfies itself with the solitary pleasure of the screen, does away with love by forbidding sight of the other face-invisible and real...We live in a relation through what we see to what we don't see.

(quotations from John Berger and Jean-Luc Marion).

The Black and the Blue

Multitude of the skies,
golden riddle of millions of stars,
cold, distant, lustrous, beautiful,
silent, unfeeling, unwelcoming.
Fulness of knowledge is their course,
emptiness of chartless ignorance,
a universe moving in silence,
a mind alone in its bounds.
Not they moved my thoughts,
not the marvel of their chill course;
to us there is no miracle but love,
lighting of a universe in the kindling of your face.

----Sorley Maclean, Multitude.

The blue entering the black; you entering the void. One does not become the other. The blue light that falls all around you, never in you. The blue time of your eyes, abstract and distant. The blue of your soul, still, like a soul unborn, a name with God from the black land. Vague, unredeemed, untrue. Blue, the mind that does not know, the hand that will slip, the heart that will lose the red.

the melancholy angel

This really is well worth a read.

Enjoy! :-)

"The quotations in my works are like robbers lying in ambush on the highway to attack the passerby with weapons drawn and rob him of his conviction." Walter Benjamin, the author of this statement, was perhaps the first European intellectual to recognize the fundamental change that had taken place in the transmissibility of culture and in the new relation to the past that constituted the inevitable consequence of this change. The particular power of quotations arises, according to Benjamin, not from their ability to transmit that past and allow the reader to relive it but, on the contrary, from their capacity to "make a clean sweep, to expel from the context, to destroy."

Alienating by force a fragment of the past from its historical context, the quotation at once makes it lose its character of authentic testimony and invests it with an alienating power that constitutes its unmistakable aggressive force Benjamin, who for his entire life pursued the idea of writing a work made up exclusively of quotations, had understood that the authority invoked by the quotation is founded precisely on the destruction of the authority that is attributed to a certain text by its situation in the history of culture. Its truth content is a function of the uniqueness of its appearance, alienated from its living context in what Benjamin, in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," defines as "une citation à l'ordre du jour" ("a quotation on the order of the day.") on the day of the Last Judgment. The past can only be fixed in the image that appears once and for all in the instant of its alienation, just as a memory appears suddenly, as in a flash, in a moment of danger.

This particular way of entering into a relation with the past also constitutes the foundation of the activity of a figure with which Benjamin felt an instinctive affinity: that of the collector. The collector also "quotes" the object outside its context and in this way destroys the order inside which it finds its value and meaning. Whether it is a work of art or any simple commodity that he, with an arbitrary gesture, elevates to the object of his passion, the collector takes on the task of transfiguring things, suddenly depriving them both of their use value and of the ethical-social significance with which tradition had endowed them.

The collector frees things from the "slavery of usefulness" in the name of their authenticity, which alone legitimates their inclusion in the collection; yet this authenticity presupposes in turn the alienation through which this act of freeing was able to take place, by which the value for the connoisseur took the place of the use value. In other words, the authenticity of the object measures its alienation value, and this is in turn the only space in which the collection can sustain itself.

Precisely because he makes alienation from the past into a value, the figure of the collector is in some way related to that of the revolutionary, for whom the new can appear only through the destruction of the old. And it is certainly not an accident that the great collector figures flourish precisely in times of break from tradition and exaltation of renewal: in a traditional society neither the quotation nor the collection is conceivable, since it is not possible to break at any point the links of the chain of tradition by which the transmission of the past takes place.

It is peculiar that although Benjamin had observed the phenomenon through which the authority and the traditional value of the work of art had begun to become unsteady, he nonetheless did not notice that the "decline of the aura," as he sums up this process, did not in any way effect the "freeing of the object from its cultural sheath" and the subsequent founding of the object on political praxis, but rather caused the reconstitution of a new "aura." Through this new aura, the object, re-creating and exalting to the utmost its authenticity on another level, became charged with a new value perfectly analogous to that alienation value that we have already observed with regard to the collection. Far from freeing the object from its authenticity, its technical reproducibility (which Benjamin identified as the main corrosive agent of the traditional authority of the work of art) carries authenticity to extremes: technical reproducibility is the moment when authenticity, by way of the multiplication of the original, becomes the very cipher of elusiveness.

This is to say: the work of art loses the authority and the guarantees it derived from belonging to a tradition for which it built the places and objects that incessantly weld past and present together. However, far from giving up its authenticity in order to become reproducible (thus fulfilling Hölderlin's wish that poetry might again become something that one could calculate and teach), the work of art instead becomes the locus of the most ineffable of mysteries, the epiphany of aesthetic beauty.

This phenomenon is particularly evident in Baudelaire, even though Benjamin considered him the poet in whom the decay of aura found its most typical expression. Baudelaire was the poet who had to face the dissolution of the authority of tradition in the new industrial society and therefore had to invent a new authority. He fulfilled this task by making the very intransmissibility of culture a new value and putting the experience of shock at the center of his artistic labor. The shock is the jolt power acquired by things when they lose their transmissibility and their comprehensibility within a given cultural order. Baudelaire understood that for art to survive the ruin of tradition, the artist had to attempt to reproduce in his work that very destruction of transmissibility that was at the origin of the experience of shock: in this way he would succeed in turning the work into the very vehicle of the intransmissible. Through the theorization of the beautiful as instantaneous and elusive epiphany (un éclair . . . puis la nuit! ["a flash . . . then night!"]), Baudelaire made of aesthetic beauty the cipher of the impossibil ity of transmission.

We are now able to state more precisely what constitutes the alienation value that we have seen to be at the basis both of the quotation and of the activity of the collector, the alienation value whose production has become the specific task of the modern artist: it is nothing other than the destruction of the transmissibility of culture.

The reproduction of the dissolution of transmissibility in the experience of shock becomes, then, the last possible source of meaning and value for things themselves, and art becomes the last tie connecting man to his past. The survival of the past in the imponderable instant of aesthetic epiphany is, in the final analysis, the alienation effected by the work of art, and this alienation is in its turn nothing other than the measure of the destruction of its transmissibility, that is, of tradition.

In a traditional system, culture exists only in the act of its transmission, that is, in the living act of its tradition. There is no discontinuity between past and present, between old and new, because every object transmits at every moment, without residue, the system of beliefs and notions that has found expression in it. To be more precise, in a system of this type it is not possible to speak of a culture independently of its transmission, because there is no accumulated treasure of ideas and precepts that constitute the separate object of transmission and whose reality is in itself a value. In a mythical-traditional system, an absolute identity exists between the act of transmission and the thing transmitted, in the sense that there is no other ethical, religious, or aesthetic value outside the act itself of transmission.

An inadequation, a gap between the act of transmission and the thing to be transmitted, and a valuing of the latter independently of the former appear only when tradition loses its vital force, and constitute the foundation of a characteristic phenomenon of nontraditional societies: the accumulation of culture. For, contrary to what one might think at first sight, the breaking of tradition does not at all mean the loss or devaluation of the past: it is, rather, likely that only now the past can reveal itself with a weight and an influence it never had before. Loss of tradition means that the past has lost its transmissibility, and so long as no new way has been found to enter into a relation with it, it can only be the object of accumulation from now on.

In this situation, then, man keeps his cultural heritage in its totality, and in fact the value of this heritage multiplies vertiginously. However, he loses the possibility of drawing from this heritage the criterion of his actions and his welfare and thus the only concrete place in which he is able, by asking about his origins and his destiny, to found the present as the relationship between past and future. For it is the transmissibility of culture that, by endowing culture with an immediately perceptible meaning and value, allows man to move freely toward the future without being hindered by the burden of the past. But when a culture loses its means of transmission, man is deprived of reference points and finds himself wedged between, on the one hand, a past that incessantly accumulates behind him and oppresses him with the multiplicity of its now-indecipherable contents, and on the other hand a future that he does not yet possess and that does not throw any light on his struggle with the past.

The interruption of tradition, which is for us now a fait accompli, opens an era in which no link is possible between old and new, if not the infinite accumulation of the old in a sort of monstrous archive or the alienation effected by the very means that is supposed to help with the transmission of the old. Like the castle in Kafka's novel, which burdens the village with the obscurity of its decrees and the multiplicity of its offices, the accumulated culture has lost its living meaning and hangs over man like a threat in which he can in no way recognize himself. Suspended in the void between old and new, past and future, man is projected into time as into something alien that incessantly eludes him and still drags him forward, but without allowing him to find his ground in it.

In the "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin employs a particularly felicitous image to describe this situation of the man who has lost his link with his past and is no longer able to find himself in history:

A Klee painting named " Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

There is a well-known engraving by Diirer that presents some analogies with Benjamin's interpretation of Klee's painting. It represents a winged creature in a sitting position, in the act of meditating while looking ahead with an absorbed expression. Next to it, abandoned, the utensils of active life lie on the ground: a grindstone, a plane, nails, a hammer, a framing square, a pair of pincers, and a saw. The beautiful face of the angel is in the shadow; the light is reflected only by his long robe and a sphere set in front of his feet. Behind him we see an hourglass (the sand is flowing), a bell, a set of scales, and a magic square, and then, over the sea in the background, a comet shining without any brightness. A twilight atmosphere is diffused over the entire scene; it deprives every detail of materiality.

If Klee Angelus Novus is the angel of history, nothing could represent the angel of art better than the winged creature in Diirer's engraving. While the angel of history looks toward the past, yet cannot stop his incessant flight backward toward the future, so the melancholy angel in Dürer's engraving gazes unmovingly ahead. The storm of progress that has gotten caught in that angel's wings has subsided here, and the angel of art appears immersed in an atemporal dimension, as though something, interrupting the con tinuum of history, had frozen the surrounding reality in a kind of messianic arrest. However, just as the events of the past appear to the angel of history as a pile of indecipherable ruins, so the utensils of active life and the other objects scattered around the melancholy angel have lost the significance that their daily usefulness endowed them with and have become charged with a potential for alienation that transforms them into the cipher for something endlessly elusive.

The past that the angel of history is no longer able to comprehend reconstitutes its form in front of the angel of art; but this form is the alienated image in which the past finds its truth again only on condition of negating it, and knowledge of the new is possible only in the nontruth of the old. The redemption that the angel of art offers to the past, summoning it to appear outside its real context on the day of aesthetic Last Judgment, is, then, nothing other than its death (or rather, its inability to die) in the museum of aesthetics. And the angel's melancholy is the consciousness that he has adopted alienation as his world; it is the nostalgia of a reality that he can possess only by making it unreal.

Aesthetics, then, in a way performs the same task that tradition performed before its interruption: knotting up again the broken thread in the plot of the past, it resolves the conflict between old and new without whose settlement man, this being that has lost himself in time and must find himself again, and for whom therefore at every instant his past and future are at stake, is unable to live. By destroying the transmissibility of the past, aesthetics recuperates it negatively and makes intransmissibility a value in itself in the image of aesthetic beauty, in this way opening for man a space between past and future in which he can found his action and his knowledge.

This space is the aesthetic space, but what is transmitted in it is precisely the impossibility of transmission, and its truth is the negation of the truth of its contents. A culture that in losing its transmissibility has lost the sole guarantee of its truth and become threatened by the incessant accumulation of its nonsense now relies on art for its guarantee; art is thus forced to guarantee something that can only be guaranteed if art itself loses its guarantees in turn.

The humble activity of the τεχνίτης who, by opening for man the space of work, built the places and objects in which tradition accomplished its incessant process of welding past to present, now leaves its place to the creative activity of the genius who is burdened with the imperative to produce beauty. In this sense one can say that on the one hand, kitsch, which considers beauty as the immediate goal of the work of art, is the specific product of aesthetics, while on the other hand, the ghost of beauty that kitsch evokes in the work of art is nothing but the destruction of the transmissibility of culture, in which aesthetics is founded.

If the work of art is the place in which the old and the new have to resolve their conflict in the present space of truth, the problem of the work of art and of its destiny in our time is not simply a problem among the others that trouble our culture: not because art occupies an elevated station in the (disintegrating) hierarchy of cultural values, but because what is at stake here is the very survival of culture, a culture split by a past and present conflict that has found its extreme and precarious settlement in our society in the form of aesthetic alienation.

Only the work of art ensures a phantasmagoric survival for the accumulated culture, just as only the indefatigable demystifying action of the land surveyor K. ensures for Count West-West's castle the sole appearance of reality it can lay claim to. But the castle of culture has now become a museum in which, on the one hand, the wealth of the past, in which man can in no way recognize himself, is accumulated to be offered to the aesthetic enjoyment of the members of the community, and, on the other, this enjoyment is possible only through the alienation that deprives it of its immediate meaning and of its poietic capacity to open its space to man's action and knowledge.

Thus aesthetics is not simply the privileged dimension that progress in the sensibility of Western man has reserved for the work of art as his most proper place; it is, rather, the very destiny of art in the era in which, with tradition now severed, man is no longer able to find, between past and future, the space of the present, and gets lost in the linear time of history. The angel of history, whose wings became caught in the storm of progress, and the angel of aesthetics, who stares in an atemporal dimension at the ruins of the past, are inseparable. And so long as man has not found another way to settle individually and collectively the conflict between old and new, thus appropriating his historicity, a surpassing of aesthetics that would not be limited to exaggerating the split that traverses it appears unlikely.

There is a note in Kafka's notebooks in which this inability of man to recover his space in the tension between past and future history is expressed with particular precision in the image of

. . . travelers in a train that has met with an accident in a tunnel, and this at a place where the light of the beginning can no longer be seen, and the light of the end is so very small a glimmer that the gaze must continually search for it and is always losing it again, and, furthermore, it is not even certain whether it is the beginning or the end of the tunnel.

At the time of Greek tragedy, when the traditional mythic system had begun to decline under the impulse of the new moral world that was being born, art had already assumed the task of settling the conflict between old and new, and had responded to this task with the figure of the guilty innocent, of the tragic hero who expresses in all his greatness and misery the precarious significance of human action in the interval between what is no longer and what is not yet.

Kafka is the author of our time who has most coherently assumed this task. Faced with man's inability to appropriate his own historical presuppositions, he tried to turn this impossibility into the very soil on which man might recover himself. In order to realize this project, Kafka reversed Benjamin's image of the angel of history: the angel has already arrived in Paradise--in fact he was there from the start, and the storm and his subsequent flight along the linear time of progress are nothing but an illusion he creates in the attempt to falsify his knowledge and to transform his perennial condition into an aim still to be attained.

It is in this sense that the apparently paradoxical thought expressed in the "Reflections on Sin, Pain, Hope, and the True Way" should be understood: "There is a goal, but no path; what we call the path is only wavering," and "Only our concept of Time makes it possible for us to call the day of the Last Judgment by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session [ Standrechty]." For man it is always already the day of the Last Judgment: the Last Judgment is his normal historical condition, and only his fear of facing it creates the illusion that it is still to come. Kafka thus replaces the idea of a history infinitely unfolding along an empty, linear time (this is the history that compels the Angelus Novus to his unstoppable run) with the paradoxical image of a state of history in which the fundamental event of the human condition is perpetually taking place; the continuum of linear time is interrupted, but does not create an opening beyond itself. The goal is inaccessible not because it is too far in the future but because it is present here in front of us; but its presence is constitutive of man's historicity, of his perennial lingering along a nonexistent path, and of his inability to appropriate his own historical situation.

This is why Kafka can say that the revolutionary movements that declare null and void everything that has happened before are right, because in reality nothing has happened yet. The condition of man who has gotten lost in history ends up looking like that of the southern Chinese in the story told in The Great Wall of China: "There is also involved a certain feebleness of faith and imaginative power on the part of the people, that prevents them from raising the empire out of its stagnation in Peking and clasping it in all its palpable living reality to their own breasts, which yet desire nothing better than but once to feel that touch and then to die." And yet "this very weakness should seem to be one of the greatest unifying influences among our people; indeed, if one may dare to use the expression, the very ground on which we live."

In the face of this paradoxical situation, asking about art's task is the equivalent of asking what could be its task on the day of the Last Judgment, that is, in a condition (which for Kafka is man's very historical status) in which the angel of history has stopped and, in the interval between past and future, man has to face his own responsibility. Kafka answered this question by asking whether art could become transmission of the act of transmission: whether, that is, it could take as its content the task of transmission itself, independently of the thing to be transmitted. As Benjamin understood, Kafka's genius before the unprecedented historical situation of which he had become aware was that he "sacrificed truth for the sake of transmissibility."

Since the goal is already present and thus no path exists that could lead there, only the perennially late stubbornness of a messenger whose message is nothing other than the task of transmission can give back to man, who has lost his ability to appropriate his historical space, the concrete space of his action and knowledge.

In this way, at the limit of its aesthetic itinerary, art abolishes the gap between the thing to be transmitted and the act of transmission and again comes closer to the mythic-traditional system, in which a perfect identity existed between the two terms. In this "attack on the last earthly frontier," art transcends the aesthetic dimension and thus, with the construction of a totally abstract moral system, eludes the fate that destined it to kitsch. Yet, although it can reach the threshold of myth, it cannot cross it. If man could appropriate his historical condition, and if, seeing through the illusion of the storm that perennially pushes him along the infinite rail of linear time, he could exit his paradoxical situation, he would at the same time gain access to the total knowledge capable of giving life to a new cosmogony and to turn history into myth. But art alone cannot do this, since it is precisely in order to reconcile the historical conflict between past and future that it has emancipated itself from myth and linked itself to history.

By transforming the principle of man's delay before truth into a poetic process and renouncing the guarantees of truth for love of transmissibility, art succeeds once again in transforming man's inability to exit his historical status, perennially suspended in the inter-world between old and new, past and future, into the very space in which he can take the original measure of his dwelling in the present and recover each time the meaning of his action.

According to the principle by which it is only in the burning house that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time, art, at the furthest point of its destiny, makes visible its original project.

unbknown

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined – just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew –
Fresh from his Wessex home –
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellation reign
His stars eternally.

--Hardy.

Unreconciled, unredeemed, unbeknown and unraveled. No words-plain or otherwise- will explain it. There's no saying of it, no swaying from it. Literature, music, as a consolation for lost time. Already, by saying time you show how far you've slipped. To yourself, at least. Why, is there an other? But not a return to life, either. Tell me, gentle one, is there a way out that is not a way out? And shall you always be gentle or will you grey, become wiser, keep my yellowing picture stored away, as one does with the dead? One's fate, another's freedom, like steps that never rhyme.

Estranged. But not deeply, madly so. It will pass. Again. You and I know it. And everything shall be as it was before. Except it won't. Things will happen, stars will tic over, the metaphor fade, the song go unsung and you shall ask me once again, me the bungling fool, to unbreak my heart for you.

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