Archive for July, 2009

III. Dreaming of NowHere

or
Row, Row, Row Your Boat

A. Avidya

Perhaps my history of ignorance says more about me than my history of understanding. The former, after all, has many volumes, while the latter is a vanishing pamphlet.

Happiness depends less on what one knows than on how one doesn’t know.

Everything I know I have come to know accidentally. (My ignorance too has been as unintended as my understanding.)

I have seen no evidence that understanding grows as one grows older.

Only the ignorant are proud of what they know.

Understanding comes sporadically. There are long stretches of ignorance.

Tell me your desire, and I will tell you your delusion.

Just because I know something now is no guarantee I’ll know it later.

The alchemy of understanding—it makes the old new.

In school one imbibes as much ignorance as knowledge, usually confounded with each other. Even now I’m still unlearning what I’ve learned there. (May all my students forgive me.)

Many desire a teacher more than understanding.

The fantastic discrepancy between what one knows and what one thinks one knows.

Filmography

Almodóvar, Pedro. Volver.
Amenabar, Alejandro. Open Your Eyes.
Anderson, Paul Thomas. Magnolia.
Buñuel, Luis. Belle du Jour.
Iñárritu, Alejandro González. Babel.
Kaurismäki, Aki. The Man Without a Past.
Kieslowski, Krzysztof. Decalogue VI.
Kim, Ki-duk. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring.
Kore-Eda, Hirokazu. Wandâfuru Raifu.
Lee, Chang-Dong. Peppermint Candy.
Lynch, David. Mulholland Drive.
Milestone, Lewis. All Quiet on the Western Front.
Ozu, Yasujiro. Tokyo Story.
Pasolini, Pier Paolo. Oedipus Rex.
Ray, Satyajit. The World of Apu.
Salles, Walter. Central Station.
Takahata, Isao. Only Yesterday.
Wachowski, Andy and Larry. The Matrix.
Weir, Peter. Dead Poets Society.
Welles, Orson. The Trial.
Zwigoff, Terry. Ghost World.

B. Samskara

When I don’t know what I want, it’s easy to want what I don’t know.

Wanting to be, I become.

Some are ruled by what they want, others by what they don’t want. Most are torn apart by two masters.

Dialogue between two desires:
    : How can I want something I don’t know?
    : How can I want something I know?

Desire’s greatest desires: to desire and to not desire.

Everchanging, desire desires what never changes.

For those who dream without knowing that they dream, the death of desire is the birth of desire. (We are all dreamers.)

If I want, it’s because I don’t know.

Desire’s advantage—understanding needs desire, but desire doesn’t need understanding.

Once desire was strange to me; now it is becoming strange again.

Where does your desire end and mine begin?

What is desire a mirror of?

Discography

Bach, Johann Sebastian. Goldberg Variations.
Bartók, Béla. The Miraculous Mandarin.
Berg, Alban. Wozzeck.
Berio, Luciano. Chemins IV.
Boulez, Pierre. Pli selon Pli.
Cage, John. Atlas Eclipticalis.
Crumb, George. Ancient Voices of Children.
Debussy, Claude. Nuages.
Glass, Philip. Satyagraha.
Gubaidulina, Sofia. Stimmen… Verstummen…
Kurtág, György. …quasi una fantasia…
Ligeti, György. Lontano.
Messiaen, Olivier. Catalogue d’oiseaux.
Pärt, Arvo. Tabula Rasa.
Ravel, Maurice. Miroirs.
Saariaho, Kaija. L’Aile du Songe.
Schnittke, Alfred. Quasi una Sonata.
Strauss, Richard. Also Sprach Zarathustra.
Stravinsky, Igor. Agon.
Tippett, Michael. King Priam.
Varèse, Edgard. Poème électronique.

C. Vijñana

The mind’s seismic geology—the buckling strata of what I’ve wanted, what I want, what I am going to want.

Past and future nothing but figments of desire.

The mind an anti-Theseus willfully losing itself in the labyrinth of desire, honey-tongued Minotaur.

…I want therefore I think… I think therefore I want…

Before I even know what I want, I already know I want more of it.

In the splitting of the mind and the body, the big winner is desire.

The past’s abandoned cities littered with the ruins of desire.

Skirting both ignorance and knowledge winds the tortuous path of desire.

Consciousness’ predicament—it lives in the body without feeling at home in it.

Passing through the mind, time defies physics, becomes reversible.

If the past and the future were not present in the present, time would stand still. (Is the past the future’s mother or its child?)

If the body knows more than the mind, it’s because it doesn’t think.

Pictography

Anonymous. Lindisfarne Gospels.
Anonymous. Novgorod Codex.
Boccioni, Umberto. The City Rises.
Bruegel, Pieter (The Elder). Netherlandish Proverbs.
Dali, Salvador. Corpus Hypercubus.
De Chirico, Giorgio. Ariadne.
Delaunay, Sonia. Chanteur Flamenco.
Duchamp, Marcel. Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.
Dürer, Albrecht. Adam and Eve.
Fontana, Lucio. Concetto Spaziale.
Gaugin, Paul. Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
Hokusai, Katsushika. Red Fuji.
Klee, Paul. The Highway.
Magritte, René. The Eternally Obvious.
Matisse, Henri. Two Dancers (Study for Rouge et Noir).
Muybridge, Eadweard. Animal Locomotion.
Pollock, Jackson. One (Number 31, 1950).
Ray, Man. Precision Optics.
Rodin, Auguste. The Gates of Hell.
Rothko, Mark. No. 61 (Rust and Blue).
Velázquez, Diego. Las Meninas.

D. Nama Rupa

Ever folding together, past and future touch—the unfolding present, time’s mobile crease.

Unlike time, life goes forward and backward—usually at the same time.

Because the mind turns, it returns.

All thinking is devious—there are no straight paths in the mind.

The mind an orphan with 10,000 mothers. (Tell me about your mothers…)

The mind has always resented the body for coming first.

Because the body is the mother of the mind, the mind tries to be the father of the body. (The mind’s greatest wish—to be its own mother.)

In the marriage of mind and body, the mind is always suing for divorce.

The body wisely excretes what it doesn’t need.

Before my mother’s body gave birth to my body, her mind had already given birth to my mind. (Thirty-eight years ago, I gave birth to my mother…)

Why is the mind so proud of itself when it is nothing but a leak in the body?

In the body’s immemorial odyssey, the mind is just an accident. We do not know yet if it is a happy or an unhappy one.

Hagiography

Anonymous. Patron Saint of Possessionless Egolessness.
Artaud, Antonin. Patron Saint of Schizoid Heroes.
Basilides. Patron Saint of Heresy.
Bausch, Pina. Patron Saint of Dancing to Catastrophes.
Beckett, Samuel. Patron Saint of the Unnamable.
Bergson, Henri. Patron Saint of Forgetting.
Borges, Jorge Luis. Patron Saint of Mazes.
Carson, Anne. Patron Saint of Wandering Fragments.
Da Vinci, Leonardo. Patron Saint of Sweet Asymmetries.
Dali, Salvador. Patron Saint of Swallowtail Singularities.
Darwin, Charles. Patron Saint of Random Mutations.
De Cepeda y Ahumada, Teresa. Patron Saint of Inscrutable Ecstasies.
Deleuze, Gilles. Patron Saint of Rhizomes.
Di Bernardone, Francesco. Patron Saint of Delirium.
Dōgen, Eihei. Patron Saint of Tactile Paradoxes.
Dürer, Albrecht. Patron Saint of Green.
Faulkner, William. Patron Saint of Turning Points.
Freud, Sigmund. Patron Saint of Perverts.
Gautama, Siddhartha. Patron Saint of Just-Breathing.
Heraclitus. Patron Saint of Creative Flux.
Hitchcock, Alfred. Patron Saint of Thrillseekers.
Homer. Patron Saint of Aimlessness.
Joyce, James. Patron Saint of Punsters.
Kazantzakis, Nikos. Patron Saint of Bon Vivants.
Lobachevsky, Nikolai. Patron Saint of Hyperbole.
Messiaen, Olivier. Patron Saint of Twittering Machines.
Michaux, Henri. Patron Saint of Hallucinations.
Mitchell, David. Patron Saint of Russian Dolls.
Moore, Alan. Patron Saint of Shifters.
Nāgārjuna. Patron Saint of Vanishing.
Pessoa, Fernando. Patron Saint of Multiplying Personalities.
Plato. Patron Saint of Confabulation.
Preljocaj, Angelin. Patron Saint of Dancing Fools.
Proust, Marcel. Patron Saint of Fugitives.
Rabelais, Francois. Patron Saint of Ass-Wiping.
Riemann, Bernhard. Patron Saint of the Infinitesimal.
Schreber, Daniel Paul. Patron Saint of Becoming-Other.
Shakespeare, William. Patron Saint of Playing.
Sherman, Cindy. Patron Saint of Masquerades.
Sogyal Rinpoche. Patron Saint of Transitions.
Spinoza, Baruch. Patron Saint of Crossings.
Stein, Gertrude. Patron Saint of Furry Buttons.
Sterne, Laurence. Patron Saint of Before-the-Beginning.
Stockhausen, Karlheinz. Patron Saint of Chaos-and-Control.
Śūnyatā. Patron Saint of Zeroing.
Von Bingen, Hildegard. Patron Saint of Conlangers.
Whistler, James McNeill. Patron Saint of the Clear-Obscure.
Woolf, Virginia. Patron Saint of the In-Between.
Zoroaster. Patron Saint of YinYang.

E. Ayatanas

You are what you sense. (You sense what you are.)

To see, to hear, to feel is to become.

The sense of self the blind spot of every sense.

The eye does not remember or imagine; the ear does not hope or fear; time has no meaning for the nose—this is the freedom of the senses. The grasping mind, on the other hand, cannot think without remembering and imagining, hoping and fearing; for the mind, nothing has meaning without time—this is the bondage of the mind.

The eye sees this here, the ears hear this here, the body feels this here; the mind, however, thinks that there.

Unlike the mind, the senses seek nothing. This is their freedom—they do not pick and choose.

Why is so much of the mind’s anxious labor directed at falsifying the evidence of the senses?

Bare sensation being too raw for the mind, it has to cook it first.

Always scheming, the avid mind gets embroiled in its own plots.

The wisdom of the senses—they do not—they cannot—grasp sensation.

The bondage of the mind—it chains itself to residues.

The eye sees, the ear hears, the mind repeats. (The mind, a simulacrum, sees again, hears again. This is called thinking.) The eye never sees the same thing twice. For the mind, however, a thought is not real until it has been repeated.

Iconography

The allegory of the cave.
The artful dodger.
Camera obscura.
Chain reaction.
A child could do that.
Cogito ergo.
Disneyland.
The inverted double.
Enlightenment under a tree.
Escher’s stairs.
The eternal return.
Le Faux Miroir.
Foucault’s pendulum.
Ghost in the machine.
GIGO.
Great chain of being.
Harmony of the spheres.
The hunger artist.
The invisible hand.
Kant’s walks.
Karma Chameleon.
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
Madeleine dipped in tisane.
Master and servant.
Maxwell’s demon and Schrödinger’s cat.
Mise-en-abîme.
Möbius strip.
Mugen puchipuchi.
Necker cube.
The Odyssey.
Ouroboros.
Parallel universes.
Perfect symmetry.
Persistence of vision.
The prisoner’s dilemma.
Prometheus bound.
The Raw and the Cooked.
Rorschach blots.
Sub specie aeternitatis.
There is no there there.
The third eye.
Through the Looking Glass.
Time’s arrow.
Vesuvius and Pompeii.
You are what you eat.
Zeno’s paradoxes.

F. Sparsha

Words are the eyes of the mind. Also the feet.

How far is the other? Are words bridges or barricades?

The hunger for words. The hunger of words. (The writer lives in the belly of the word.) Eating and speaking—twin compulsions. The less I speak, the less I eat; the greedier I am, the more garrulous.

Faster than the speed of words.

Words have become our second skin—like skin, they function as an organ of sensation, as a defensive armor, and often both at once.

Language a clessing or a burse?

Words are only as credible as thoughts. (Is there anything more incredible than thinking?)

Words as transport. (Vehicle, rapture, exile,…)

The primordial disjunction of knowing and saying.

“Let’s play master and servant.” The hidden—or not-so-hidden—teleology of words.

Before words, there were no fictions. (Fictions—the mind’s favorite food.)

Which came first—the mind or the word?

Verbography

Be.
Know.
Do.
Become.
Can.
Desire.
Sense.
Write.
Want.
Have.
Love.
Live.
Will.
Feel.
Think.
Say.
Circle.
Come.
Remember.
Return.
Die.

G. Vedana

Where there is life, there is rhythm. (What is rhythm but the feeling of living?)

Between one wave of feeling and another—an oceanic pause.

Fascinating rhythms: Because every feeling has a characteristic vibration, every moment—a wave of feelings—has its characteristic rhythm—the rise and fall of feelings composing the music of the body in time.

All music returns to the silence that made it possible.

Before there was meaning, there was rhythm. After the disappearance of meaning, the persistence of rhythm. (Older and newer than the meaning of words vibrates an ineffable rhythm.)

To write is to risk everything for feeling.

What interests me in words is not their meaning but their vibration. (Writing a machine for creating sympathetic vibrations.)

There is no such thing as sadness or happiness, only sadnesses and happinesses—each one distinct from the others.

Surmounting the dichotomy of consonance and dissonance—the embrace of resonance.

The mind struggles to fathom the identity of one and many, a paradox feeling embraces effortlessly.

No I, no you—just waves of feeling traversing an ocean of events.

For every nameable vibration of the body, ten thousand unnameable vibrations—the subtle overtones and undertones of feeling.

Zoography

Blue whales.
Bulgarian voices.
Bird-voiced tree frogs.
Concave-eared torrent frogs.
Crickets.
Dwarf Minke Whales.
Grasshoppers.
Humpback whales.
Indris.
Jussi Björling.
Linnets.
Loons.
Mice.
Mockingbirds.
Plain-tailed wrens.
Sac-winged bats.
Sirens.
Starlings.
Tarsiers.
Titis.
White-handed gibbons.
Zebra finches.

H. Trishna

Love’s paradox: The more intense the love, the more superfluous the beloved.

Love is, perhaps, the greatest work of art humanity has created.

For the unrequited lover, the greatest disappointment (fr. déception) is to be requited.

Instead of saying “I love you,” the lover should say, “My hypothalamus fell in love with your thyroid.” (Without this hand, this tongue, this spleen, this love would not be this love.)

In love, the nose is more trustworthy than the eyes, and the gut more trustworthy than either.

There can be no love where there is nothing left to the imagination.

Like all cravings of the mind, love can only be satisfied by things of the mind. Question is, is there any real satisfaction in things of the mind?

Love must have been invented by a sado-masochist.

Love’s perversity—its satisfaction is its extinction.

The beloved vanishes whenever the mind blinks. (Unlike the mind, the body knows better than to fall in love.)

From the mindfoam rose Aphrodite.

Though the beloved cannot give us what he doesn’t have, this is the only thing we want from him.

Mythography

Apollo and Cassandra.
Arthur and Morgana.
Being and Time.
Chang and Eng.
Cleopatra and the asp.
David and Jonathan.
The Ego and the Id.
Ernie and Bert.
Flies and shit.
Frida and Diego.
Gaia and Uranus.
Hades and Persephone.
Helen and Troy.
Isis and Osiris.
Jesus and John.
Jirka and Karel Bartók.
Leda and the swan.
Lot and his daughters.
Luke and Leia.
Midas and gold.
Nietzsche and Salomé and John the Baptist.
Orpheus and Eurydice.
Pasiphaë and the white bull.
Petrarch and Laura and Hugues de Sade.
The Romans and the Sabines.
Scheherazade and Shahryar.
Seven Wives for Seven Brothers.
Shiva and Parvati.
Siegmund and Sieglinde.
Socrates and Alcibiades.
Sodom and Gomorrah.
Swann and Odette.
The and a.
Tristan and Isolde.
Venus and Mars.
Vishnu and the cowgirls.
Xochiquetzal and Tlaloc and Tezcatlipoca and Centeotl and Mixcoatl.

I. Upadana

Inconstancy desire’s only constancy. (Sooner or later, haiku will be written.)

Just this once is the lie desire is always telling itself.

Who knows desire more—the one who surrenders or the one who renounces?

Ultimately, desire desires itself—and therefore nothing.

In the gap between knowing and ignorance—in the credulous crapulous imagination—desire is born.

When humanity was born, it was language that both blessed and cursed it with desire.

What I cannot imagine, I cannot fear or hope for. (Another name for the fearless is the hopeless or “the ones who have seen through the ruses of hope.”)

The spacious clarity of expectationlessness.

And the gods chained humans to them with hope.

Not just to tolerate reality, but to revel in it.

Of all falling bodies, humans are the only ones that fall for hope.

Desire’s primordial passion—to grasp the ungraspable.

Phantasmatography

Abracadabra! Open Sesame! Presto!
All you need is love.
Desiring-machines.
The dream-king.
The family romance. (You are not my father!)
The genius—misunderstood, mad, posthumously celebrated.
Ghosts.
God.
Hell.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand.
The libertine sage, the saintly libertine.
Meaning and time.
Movie star, rock star, porn star.
L’objet a, that obscure object of desire, the exterminating angel.
Older is truer. Newer is cooler.
Secret identities.
Unforgettable.
Why I am so wise.
Your name here.
Zen is more beautiful than you.

J. Bhava

The thirst for stories rooted in the hunger for becoming.

The unutterable freedom of having no stories left to tell.

The meaning of time is desire.

If I tell unstories it’s in order to unbecome myself.

Homo histor: The ones who, with their incessant storytelling, compel themselves to become.

Our stories, our selves.

In the gaps between our imagined selves—a counterstory. (What is this terror? what is this ecstasy?)

Aimless, plotless, endless…

What is the self but an explanation? What the Buddha realized is, no explanation is necessary.

The history of the self nothing but a history of ideas.

Outside the becoming of story there are other becomings, ones that escape the mind’s small explanations.

Autonomography: At first I couldn’t choose my joys or my sufferings. Then I learned I could choose my joys. It wasn’t till much later that I discovered I could choose my sufferings as well.

Storiography (Homage to Propp)

Someone leaves home.
Thou shalt not.
And evil.
In search of.
Something is discovered.
A trick!
Who is my enemy?
Wounded.
The voice of pain.
Counterattack.
Again a departure.
A trial.
There will be a friend.
A talisman inspires confidence.
This is the place.
Agon…ekstasis…
The mark of X.
Somebody wins, somebody loses.
Back to the beginning.
Nostalgia is my home.
The fugitive also desires his pursuer.
Escaped!
Everyone having become someone else, no-one recognizes anybody.
If you are me, who am I?
Another and another make three.
Resolving, dissolving.
It’s you!
There’s always an underneath.
Metamorphosis variations, transformation fantasia.
Debt=Guilt. Someone must be punished.
Who needs a hero?

K. Jati

Every story is searching for The End.

Every memory is composed of many forgettings, every forgetting composed of many (dis)memberings.

I know I cannot begin to write until I’m free enough to give up writing.

Every time I pick up a pencil, I pick up the search for lost time. Will I stop writing when I’ve stopped searching?

The first word I wrote was a miracle, a disaster—and so was every word I’ve written since.

Like other fateful disasters that have befallen me, writing is a catastrophe I can no longer live without.

Ever since I learned to write, I’ve been trying to unlearn myself.

Words have helped me see, I know. But I also know many things can only be seen without words. This may be the most valuable thing I’ve learned from writing.

When there’s nothing left to say, things will speak for themselves again. (Do you remember the grammar of silence, our mother tongue?)

We are all travelers on the way to _______.

Perhaps one day, time will become innocent again. (When the time comes, will I be writing or not?)

I do not know yet if writing can take me to silence.

Catalography

Catalography.
Discography.
Erotemography.
Filmography.
Hagiography.
Iconography.
Mythography.
Phantasmatography.
Pictography.
Storiography.
Thanatography.
Verbography.
Zoography.

L. Jaramarana

If you want to choose how you’ll die, choose how you breathe.

Most prefer to die without knowing death.

Slow learner:
Though I’ve died ten thousand times, I still don’t know how to die.

Writing to be forgotten by.

Death’s singularity: Every death is unique, yet bears all deaths within it.

The metamorphic optics of death—Everything is transfigured.

Our imaginary selves get in the way of death as much as they get in the way of life.

If there were no death, would there be time? If there were no time, would there be writing?

How many deaths in every beginning? How many beginnings in every death? (Is there any beginning that does not begin with death?)

Writing an exorcism of death or a conjuration?

Will I die with a pencil in my hand, or will I be brave enough to go open-handed?

Is there anything vainer than writing’s attempt to repeat the unrepeatable?

What strange flowers will grow in my death’s exotic soil?

Thanatography

Artaud, Antonin. March 4, 1948. Intestinal cancer, chloral overdose.
Borges, Jorge Luis. June 14, 1986. Liver cancer.
Cage, John. August 12, 1992. Stroke.
Darwin, Charles. April 19, 1882. Heart failure, panic disorder, Chagras disease.
Eisenstein, Sergei. February 11, 1948. Heart failure.
Freud, Sigmund. September 23, 1939. Throat cancer, assisted suicide (morphine overdose).
Gauguin, Paul. May 8, 1903. Stroke.
Hitchcock, Alfred. April 29, 1980. Renal failure.
Imamura, Shōhei. May 30, 2006. Liver cancer.
Joyce, James. January 13, 1941. Perforated ulcer (syphilis?).
Kieslowski, Krzysztof. March 13, 1996. Heart failure.
Lobachevsky, Nikolai. February 24, 1856. Arteriosclerosis, blindness.
Magritte, René. August 15, 1967. Pancreatic cancer.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. August 25, 1900. Pneumonia, stroke (syphilis?).
Ozu, Yasujirō. December 12, 1960. Throat cancer.
Pessoa, Fernando. November 30, 1935. Cirrhosis.
Quảng Đức, Thích. June 11, 1963. Self-immolation.
Rothko, Mark. February 25, 1970. Aneurysm, suicide by bleeding and drug overdose.
Spinoza, Baruch. February 21, 1667. Tuberculosis or silicosis.
Tesla, Nikola. January 7, 1943. Heart failure.
Utamaro, Kitagawa. October 31, 1806. Sadness.
Varèse. Edgard. November 6, 1965. Intestinal surgery.
Woolf, Virginia. March 28, 1941. Suicide by drowning.
Xenakis, Iannis. February 4, 2001. Unspecified.
Yeats, William Butler. January 28, 1939. Heart failure.
Zeno. 425 B.C.E. Torture.

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