ISBN: 978-0-374-53271-0
Tag: Iiterature
Dream of rueing.
Your name is Ruin?: I ask.
No. RueAnne: she replies.
Why did you bring me back here?: I wonder.
I didn’t mean to: I hear her say.
She does not realize that she said this.
I nod anyway.
Certain geographies don’t agree with dream me.
This place rubs me wrong.
Edgy.
RueAnne is staring into nothing.
Her energy has been summoned.
She just lost herself again: I think.
A goat ambles by.
Dream of the Rocky Siege
I dreamt I was under siege last night.
Like Bell Rock.
But ages before.
The rocks were boulders of dingy khaki and earl gray.
Choppy and round, not leveled and smoothed.
But, they too, like the current iteration, remain cool to the touch,
despite constant exposure to the pressure of the sun.
I do no know why I am here, nor why I am being fired upon.
I wear a sleeveless red, knee length dress which renders me a sitting duck visually, per se.
I have on my “clown shoes” as I call them in this reality.
The pair of red, canvas slip ons are not conducive to scaling mountain goat terrain quickly.
Rocks, boulders, are being launched at me by wooden catapults operated by an unseen foe.
I hear them screaming through the air before my eyes can see them.
This is the best advantage I have.
I can look where I am going while feeling assured I will hear the threat.
No need to look for the threat.
I drop to the fetal position under the precipice of a nearby boulder, if available.
I think. If I had an umbrella in the colors of the rocks around me, that might be handy.
Such umbrella appears in my hand.
This is a dream: I think.
I try the umbrella method during the next assault.
They lose me in their scope.
I believe they are hopeful they struck me down and thus can no longer see me.
I leap to feet
too soon,
spoiling the very advantage I just created.
I hear the next rock scream.
Howl. Bad bit of terrain beneath my feet.
This umbrella could deflect the projectile: I imagine.
I open it, crouch down.
My braced arms withstand the pressure of the incoming’s rock momentum.
It bounces off the imagined shield.
I feel like I have won the battle.
Top Quotes from Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco became like a new Hermann Hesse to me, over the last two years.
I have only read Foucault’s Pendulum and On Literature, but these were undertakings filled with amazing rabbit holes.
I recently reread the pages of notes I took from Foucault’s Pendulum. A very hermetic-y work, at least to my unaffiliated eyes.
Here are my favorites.
Believe there is a secret and you will feel like an initiate. It costs nothing…to live as if there were a Plan.
To dismantle the world into two saraband of anagrams.
Le monde est fait pour aboutir a un livre (faux).
Tout se tient.
Books of diabolicals must not innovate.
Yearning for mystery. Initiation is learning never to stop.
The most powerful secret is a secret without content.
Foucault’s Pendulum
Speakeasy Alleys
The fan at the bar who
drank zero drinks for
hours
leaps to his feet
/baby says she’s mine/
/you know she tells me all
the time/
/you know she said so/
He flashed a fiver
and dances up the length
of the bar’s entrance
and back down again.
Pro-offered & finally
accepted.
A silver fox takes his
hand.
Howl they dance.
She dances with him
through the next three
covers.
Not a bad turn around on
investment, in this fool’s eyes.
A girl dances along-side
them and begins waving.
Then, she plays it off.
She did not know to
whom she waved.
But, maybe she will.
Ever-one jumps up and
rushes to dance to CCR.
I say: I like the smell of
your leather.
He says: you’re the girl in
the black dress.
I say: there’s some white
crosshairs on here.
He smiles; and, I walk away.
I espy the Dance Partner
give her number away
while all ages free-dance
I overhear: it is what it is
Howl yes
It is
And, the band howls:
Here it comes
/well nothing I do don’t
seem to work, <howl>, it
only seems to make
matters worse/
The bassist nails the
outro.
Then, on the next song,
the band changes singers.
They break into
Rebel, Rebel. They
miss a line.
They redeem the
recapitulation of
Ziggy Stardust
/gurl, I want to be with
you/
It is funny
Go across an ocean and
they sing southern, u.s. rock.
Come back home and all they wanna sing
is the British invasion.
A breeze blows from
The Sound
as I walk home alone.
On Music: Glass Bead Game: Master Ludi Quote
Music does not consist in those purely intellectual oscillations and figurations which we have abstracted from it.
Its pleasure consists in its sensuous character.
In the outpouring of breath.
In the beating of time.
Certainly, the spirit is the main thing.
The invention of new instruments,
altering old ones.
The introduction of new keys.
New rules, taboos, regarding construction and harmony, are always mere gestures and superficialities, as our the fashions of nations.
-Hermann Hesse
Gertrude; Hermann Hesse, 1910 (quotes)
“Everything that had belonged to me in these earlier years of my life went from me and became alien and lost to me. I suddenly saw how sad and artificial my life had been during this period. For the loves, friends, habits, and pleasures of these years were discarded like badly fitting clothes. I parted from the without pain and all that remained was to wonder that I could have endured them so long.”
“The lives of ordinary people can be boring, but the activities and destinies of idlers are interesting…I remained apart from ordinary life.”
“I was overwhelmed by an astonishing feeling of happiness, for I suddenly knew what love was. It was not a new feeling but a clarification and confirmation of old premonitions, a return to native country.”
“The most lively young people become the best old people; not the ‘wise’ ones from school.”
“I can’t live and I can’t die. Everything seems meaningless and stupid.”
Once around the Block
A swollen ankle following a trip in the forest.
I hurt it dancing.
Curious night.
I espied two bees.
Too quick to capture.
I sat for a few moments
This was the ground below
The yellow wild flowers across the way.
The planted, multi-color behind me.
I curious shape situated in the middle of the across the way.
A heart n the sky.
The sky broad-stroked.
Blooms i have been anticipating.
1st i have sceene.
New from the Forest: Throwing Shade & Sunshine
The high wind shook and shimmied the foliage-heavy forest like a candle flickers the refraction of light on my white door.
Cotton(wood) splays itself across the path like nymphs waiting to be swept up in collection. Spattering of coral-esque moss. Sea foam green.
My spine becomes alit. Some exhalations come out like breath on a cold day.
The first few days of summer in the forest, we see as ampersand from below before we can see from above.
Death of the early summer days. Dead moleskin leathering in the sun. Pecked out banana slugs, the spoils of the war of the early birds.
Snakes sun mid-path, unconcerned with your intrusion.
Ten feet later this sun vanishes. Ten minutes, later on, it returns.
I cross eight and one half bridges. But, there are only five bridges.
Life begins as rabbits run into brambles. Fresh, with ears not fully grown.
(Groan).
Ducklings fatten on the now enshallowed Salmon Ladder pond.
I still espy you, sweet and lovely dummy.
Seated among the tall grass like a forested catacomb.
The first of the summer berries ripen.
Ruddy gold.
Bloody red.
Some
(already em-)purpled.
The serpent’s red eyes open.
Spring Haunches
Leopard Branch grows a summer coat of kudzu,
Not yet claustrophobic
It will not be humid enough.
Not like in Bamaland.
His legs drape mossy of either side of the foreside.
Hips rested just so.
Tail winding round the trunk of his supportive tree.
Head resting.
Possibly but not necessarily asleep.
A Knecht a’kneeled Before Flame
He saw how Joseph was annealed by the fire…[and] felt the ordeal more than Joseph. P241
Sounded overwrought to me. Then I bothered (sic. concerned) myself with actually looking up
/annealed/
I was being educated on several levels. I first read the sentence such that I thought I knew more than I did. I imagined /annealed/ to be some form of a bow or a kneeling position, a kiss the ring, smell the glove. A posture taken when the situation demands you take yourself seriously. If you can imagine such a thing! Or that you undertake to do something trivial quite meticulously. For the sake of the process itself. By your choice. You take part with and in. Or, when ritual, tradition, culture, bestows us a transcendental catharsis by allowing us to take very specific actions with others undertaking them alongside, as well. A hymn sung by a choir. Suddenly, lighting a candle is holy. Yet, lighters and matches abound. Fire is easy to come by but it was not always so.
Blind spot.
Shocking how much meaning we can contain. There are so many pearls that some readers start arguing over the appraising of an irregular pearl. It is all about finding, examining, analyzing, and drawing conclusions about the relative value. Waiting to find that big money shot pearl. A yup.
“awe, more valuable. made of pearl but unique, collectors edition. Gesture, essence. and articulation.”
“Worthless. It’s shape isn’t paradigmatic of the standard pearl. Misinformed. Monstrous, devalues the other pearls to even be in the same bowl with them.”
Who let the pigs out? Who? Hoo hoo?
Too much monkey business for me. We as a species have moved on. Or did I miss the train and am now out of joint?
The Glass Bead Game: Magister Ludi. 1990. First Owl Books Edition. $18.00 USD/$24.95 Canada. That seems really inexpensive as I think back on it now. At five hundred and fifty eight total pages, it is a trek but no death march. As with any trek, though there will be days. But, then there will really be days! Am I right, a hyuck, hyuck.
The length is not the deterrent. The printing of the book intimidates. At least my copy. That is why I bought it. It looked too heavy for a book that size. A thing that is larger than physics allows but your eyes empirically cannot deny. Your brain’s rational processors will fill in the reasons that ‘you can’t trust your eyes.’
A phone booth and doctor.
A House of Leaves.
A ship ever at sail on a foreign sea, the life of the house mouse lost.
S/he loses their position in the home.
You lose something you did not know could go missing. The notion of home? An ending spoiled. Don’t let the little ones hear. Something you cannot unlearn but surely there is room for doubt and maneuver. Doubt suffers where there is little room
Something you took for granted. Because there is so much to see and so many things vying for the pleasure of your (everone’s) attention at all times. We cannot process the amount of information we physically can conceive us. We get by and brains fill in the blanks. The way you discover your new car’s blind spot.
《《 》》
Crash. Ah, hell.
《《 》》
But what was to be done? Can you judge yourself for not knowing that your vehicle is afflicted with a blind spot? Sure, but where that at? If you want me I’ll be in the bar. Speculating on some dreamy nonsense. The thing you did not see in your rearview & side mirrors (electric-adjustable, I’d wager) as you merged lanes, was, by dint of optical physics, unseeable. You cannot adjust for and account for such a variable.
The publishers did not eff around. There is a deliberate concern for both style and balance in the margin setting and lettering layout. There is room to scrawl. If you are into that sort of thing. I am! The luxury of the thick white broadband’s conjunction into right angles about the four verticies gains further dimensionality by its opposing page.
The reflecting pool in the palm. Narcissus finally went mobile. Each page appears with its predecessor and/or successor in symmetry. Consider the leaf of the sheet itself. Two page numbers and each bearing letter matricies yet on but one page. One page in the book holds two pages. Think about that. There ain’t ya’ll entertained? If that is not magic, then ya’ll doin’ it wrong. I see gods contained and present amongst the multiform streams. IHS Bacchus first. Then as Janus. Holding us in the present, pressed fast between the past and the future tense. So the text on each side of the page gives rise to leaf between your fingers as you turn the page.
Let us say, maybe, five hundred and forty pages are geometrically identical in dimension, same squares, same squares. Matrix array with its vectors contained in those critical margins. Two koi ponds reflected about the same axis of symmetry. Simpatico. The more you read, the more the very confined area with unnecessarily tiny pt. font, single spaced. Tight, trim, orderly. And you are drawn in and held fixed in that little space. Rapt. Enraptured.
And then the ratio expands. The page does not seem so small.
The biggest hinderance to the book’s popularity in America was a poor original cipher of the German language. But translating the lyrical prose of Hesse is probably like trying to translate a Japanese character into ‘the English word for it.’ You can pull it off but the English Equivalence is questionable. Americans are poorly positioned to be strong readers of such heavy, often erudite, ultimately, ironic tomes. We do not get the geographical exposure to other cultures.
Hell, we didn’t get the joke.
It fell for it too! The joke of being so dreadfully stoic that the reader would not dare think you were givin’ a ribbin.’ This is a book; An effing long one; I found all these pearls. I’m rich. Made-man. This is a book of power not jokes for blokes.
Sigh. Now, your cracking me up.
The good news is, if you do ever get the joke, it makes you smile and laugh out loud. Then shake your head. Hold on.
Although, states are arguably the same as little countries.
Labyrinthal Laboratory Conditionals
Knecht leapt years ago into the black water of the river.
A leap of faith made in the face of a numinous bemusement.
A mæstro professing the art of conduction.
Cantos ; stanzas ; quatrains ; sections ; headings ; chapters ;
The function of any value such as x wilt result in a set of potential solutions.
f(x) : {set}, {set of the set}
yields Sentence G.
Godel’s lyric.
Taken from a song called Settes.
Cantos: sections dividing long poems.
– ORIGIN C16: from Ital., lit. ‘song’, from L. cantus
Dante sang poems in one hundred cantos.
The infernal first album of nine is the only one that hit the record charts.
Bemusing that he still writes lyrics and songs after his exile from Florence.
The courters and patrons of knightly chivalry frenzied in feigned, immodest outrage at the song of attack (quite poorly executed too, it is said) that
he played his Lady.
But he keeps on playing.
A fine equestrian he would have made.
Socrates and his diatribe will be with Dante shortly
Cursing Odsyyeus again, malifacent Man in Black: agent of injustice to Ajax.
The fellow-temple servants redeemed Parceval just yesterday.
Maestro Virgil’s rock n’ rolling opera
Nine lines feed nine recorders.
Eight channels receive live feed.
Three mixers temper.
A music master architects.
The 1 audits the confluence of the Take Stream.
The 1 who will stop the band,
called And the Band Played On,
only long enough to
allow them to listen.
Players eager to hear themselves.
Impetuous.
Feedback looping.
The impetus of the 1.
The effect of showing the parts their whole.
Any system aware that is under observation is changed by the very act of being observed.
An axiom accepted and admitted to be a theoretical, not practical, concern.
In theory the results may be nullified.
The axiom is ad hoc. Improperly derived.
Invalid even if accurate.
As Wittgenstein’s Mistress, it behooves me to ask this
Question for the Vienna Circle:
Now that you have observed that the act of observation changes the observed,
Do you ever worry for the assured changes in your method, institutions, experiments, results, or selves?
As you observe the knowledge of this observation affecting your observations and that which you observe?
Or is that just another theoretical problem too?
~
Just an observation from this lovesome dummy.
Shiny new Par/z/sifal Reasearch: dictionaried
The above is incorrect. Just my opinion, in light of the below.
Prettification per Parcigal
Parcigal learned the powers of personal appearance, nearly two decades past. She learned its ability to exploit and/or to be exploited, nearly a decade ago. Hell, all gals did where she was from, Alabam, the Dirty South. Personal appearance stood as the primary source of feminine efficacy (next to blood kin).
The place where they raised her never addressed that which she regularly pondered: the long game for pretty lady face.
This type of prettification during youth resulted in an aged-self prettifying to remain relevant, as a new generation of beautiful gals arose.
The true Tao seemed to be finding Beauty unmasked.
Bare face.
No jewelry.
Unadorned.
She started to let her face be as it is. Washed it, moisturized it, but that was all.
She became the appearance of the female she was.
She did this, going about daily public interactions, until she knew her face,
Became the female she is.
Then she wields the power of makeup’s masking properly. Not defensively.
Parcigal lived her dream of Art. She reinterpreted Myshkin anew, unbound to previous ties made.
Allegory.
Of course now, books are more often quoted than read.
The once enumerable is now innumerable.
Hypertextuality.
Parcigal recoils from monastic traditions. It is being one a crowd, faceless.
Initiation required heavy control over the individual’s entire life. Gives very little free will. They seperate sexes, assuming gals are even allowed at all. It imparts a tacit intent to shame the sexual nature of the h. sapien mammal. She does not doubt the resiliency of these traditions. But, her energy does not run properly in their circuits.
She recoils from secret societies and erudite traditions, because she distrusts agendas she agrees to but cannot fully see. It feels, in her mind, like blindly giving away power.
But she is wary. She is also extremely lovesome.
A lovesome nature required diligence.
What was the use of sensualism with a resonant partner?
Why was this primal magic so hidden?
Magnetism and electricity.
Conductors.
Conductive bodies are conducive to utilizing each resonant body.
By nature.
So, in her Fool way, she left her Ewer the note below.
The morning after she spent her first night in the handmade.
Before she snuck out (after two minutes of hard doting on his sky-eyes) without rousing him.
The Problem of Nothingness-Selected Tracks from Jean Paul Sartre
An abstraction is made when something not capable of existing in isolation is thought of as in an isolated state. Consciousness is an abstraction. The concrete can be only the synthetic totality of which consciousness, like the phenomenon, constitutes only moments. Effecting a phenomenological reduction will not succeed in restoring the concrete (of consciousness) by the summation or organization of the elements which we abstracted from it. The relation of the regions of being is an original emergence and is a part of the very structure of these beings. “Is there any conduct which can reveal to me the relation of man with the world?”
We have established a parallelism between the types of conduct man adopts in the face of Being & Non-Being. We’re tempted to consider Being & Non-Being as two complimentary components of the real -like dark and light. Two contemporary notions which would somehow be united in the production of existents and which it would be useless to consider in isolation. Pure Being & pure Non-Being would be two abstractions which could be reunited only on the basis of concrete realities~There is nothing in heaven or on Earth which does not contain in itself Being & Non-Being,
Things in general “are”, but their being consists in manifesting their essence. Being passes into essence. One can express this by saying, ‘Being presupposes essence.’
Being is prior to nothingness and establishes the ground for it. Being has a logical precedence over nothingness and it is from Being that Nothingness derives its efficacy. Nothingness haunts Being. Nothingness can have only a borrowed existence. Non-Being exists only on the surface of Being.
*this is just Sartre’s opinion, yo. Dissent? Thoughts?
Watch “John Irving on why The World According to Garp is more relevant now than he ever imagined” on YouTube
The Confessions-St. Augustine
The One and the Many, Isaiah Berlin 2007
One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the alters of the great historical ideals – the belief that somewhere, in the past or future, in divine revelation or in the mind of the individual thinker, in pronouncements of history or science or in a simple heart, there is a final solution.
If, as l believe, the ends of men are many and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, than possibility of conflict can never wholly be eliminated from either personal or social human life.
Choosing between absolute claims is the inescapable characteristic of thre human condition.
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“No, Meg, don’t hope it was a dream. I don’t understand it anymore than you do. But one thing I have learned is that you don’t have to understand things for them to be…..”
The art of prose exists because the words are not objects but designations for objects.
Prose is an attitude of mind.
Beauty hides in a book; It acts by persuasion like the charm of a voice or a face. It does not coerce; it inclines a person without his suspecting it, and he thinks that he is yielding to arguments when he is really being solicited by a charm he does not see.
The dead are there [in the library]; The only thing they have done is write. They’ve long since been washed clean of the sin of living and their lives are known only through books which other dead men have written about them.
In one sense, it is a possession; The reader lends himself to the dead in order that they might come back to life.
In another sense, it is contact with the beyond.
Literature and Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre
…………gather round the children and elders, as I will tell a tale of Once, Back When We All Lived In The Forest…….
The tale is nothing, if not novel and authentic. I readily admit the probable likelihood of disputes issuing forth once I’ve told my unheard tale.
You’ll say that you have heard this one from somewhere before.
The sensation persuading you to disbelieve me is itself the evidence that I advance in support of the validity of the two assertions I aver of my tale-it is untold and authentic.
For, do you not know that all tales of, Once, When We All Lived In The Forest, are the same tale being told anew in novel forms. The stories endure existence because we never stop wanting to hear them. We never stop wanting to hear them because we’ve always heard them. But, it is not in the way we hear phones ring, cars alarm,or birds chirp.
The sound of a story is the sound of one’s own pulse. Can you really conceive of the sound that your pulse makes? I experience my pulse, more than I hear it-although it certainly is audible. After physical exertion, I hear it loudly, sometimes, even ringing in my ears until my heartbeat begins to still. Fear, complete quiet, and stillness make my own pulse sound the loudest.
The sound of my pulse goes unnoticed by my awareness most of the time. I presume this results from my awareness having been exposed to the constant, continuing sound of my pulse during every single moment of my existence.
Eventually, my brain said, “Enough! Let’s just tune that one out. We’ve got more stimuli in this very second than the sense facilities of this meat bag could ever experience, let just go ahead and not waste energy on perceiving the pulse. That sound will continue until the meat bag dies. I know avoiding death is sort of what my job here is all about, but we don’t need to monitor for the sound of the pulse. With pulse, I’m willing to go on the honor system. Besides, if I always listen for the pulse and the pulse is always audible until ceasing at death, I will never hear it cease because its cessation is the end of my ability to hear. “
So it is with story. The ‘me,”myself,’ and, ‘I’ (used when a self references its own self hood) exist because humans have story as a sense organ. The organ differentiates humans from other mammals.
The story organ creates a self out of the development of a homo sapien. What human can be said to not have self-hood?
What is a self and how is it by which some organisms and not others come to possess self hood? Is it possible to possess self hood but have no awareness of your own self?
“The irony and obsessions of Cioran’s philosophy” (Marius Nica)………a new name to me.
Cheers to the author for this work.
Such an interesting and thoughtful piece on a writer and thinker.
The author discusses Romanian contemplator Emil Cioran and his relationship to atheism, skepticism, and mysticism.
Favorite quote from the author of this paper:
…..then that person has not really read Cioran. Perhaps they have leafed through some pages, read some ideas which they mirrored their own experiences into, their own projections on an existence which is impossible to transcend.
Favorite Cioran quotes included in this work:
If the difference between man and animal is the fact that the animal cannot be but animal, whereas the man can be inhuman, which is something other than himself-in this case I am unhuman.
My experiences became books, as if they had written themselves.
The writing is only valuable when it objectifies a feeling, because beyond the expression there is life, and beyond the form there is content.
Between the passion for ecstacy and the horror of the void the entire mysticism revolves.
WrittenCasey 