T e l e p a t h y o f t h e P a s t a n d P r e s e n t

 And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as

 predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring

 blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time.

 — Rainer Maria Rilke —

The First Born                                  W.Bertola

Wallace Stevens

The paramount relatiom between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation  for what has been lost.  Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith:  the reigning prince.  Consequently their interest in the imagination and its work is to be reagarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital self-assertion in a world in which nothing but the self remains, if that remains.

Friedrich Nietzche - ECCE HOMO

 . . . Speaking theologically - pay heed, for I rarely speak as a theologian - it was God himself who at the end of his labour lay down as a serpent under the Tree of Knowledge:  it was thus he recuperated from being God . . . He had made everything beautiful . . . The Devil is merely the Idleness of God on the seventh day . . . 

Yukio Mishima

Nothing, in fact, is so strange as the glorification of the verbal arts.  Seeming at first glance to strive after universality, in fact they concern themselves with subtle ways of betraying the fundamental function of words, which is to be universally applicable.  The glorification of individual style in literature signifies precisely that.  The epic poems of ancient times are, perhaps, an exception, but every literary work with its author's name standing at its head is no more than a beautiful "perversion of words."

Edgar Saltus

The Orient is asleep in the ashes of her gods. The star of Ormuzd has burned out in the skies. On the banks of her sacred seas, Greece, hushed for evermore, rests on the divine limbs of her white immortals. In the sepulcher of the pale Nazarene, humanity guards its last divinity. Every promise is unfulfilled. There is no light save perchance in death. One torture more, one more throb of the heart, and after it nothing.  The grave opens, a little flesh falls in, and the weeds of forgetfulness which soon hide the tomb grow eternally above its vanities.  And still the voice of the living, of the just and of the unjust, of  kings, of felons and of beasts, will be raised unsilenced, until humanity, unsatisfied as before and yet impatient for the peace which life has disturbed, is tossed at last, with its shattered globe and forgotten gods, to fertilize the furrows of space where worlds ferment.

On this vista the curtain may be drawn. Neither poet nor seer can look beyond. Nature, who is unconscious in her immorality, entrancing in her beauty, savage in her cruelty, imperial in her prodigality, and appalling in her convulsions, is not only deaf, but dumb. There is no answer to any appeal. The best we can do, the best that has ever been done, is to recognize the implacability of the laws that rule the universe, and contemplate as calmly as we can the nothingness from which we are come and into which we shall all disappear. The one consolation that we hold, though it is one which may be illusory too, consists in the belief that when death comes, fear and hope are at an end. Then wonder ceases; the insoluble no longer perplexes; space is lost; the infinite is blank; the farce is done.

Edgar Saltus - The Anatomy of Negation

from On Humor

  "Life is a continual flux which we try to stop, to fix in stable and determined forms, both inside and outside ourselves . . . The forms in which we seek to stop, to fix in ourselves this constant flux are the concepts, the ideals with which we would like consistently to comply, all the fictions we create for ourselves, the conditions, the state in which we tend to stabilize ourselves.  But within ourselves, in what we call the soul and is the life in us, the flux continues."  Luigi Pirandello







The inevitable hope of man in the face of hopelessness:  the fact that he must continue to seek though he is irredeemably lost...

Vanitas

"We begin to live authentically only where philosophy ends, at its wreck, when we have understood its terrible nullity, when we have understood that it was futile to resort to it, that it is no help."

E.M. Cioran

experimental science

 


The sciences have two ends which meet. The first is the ignorance
in which man finds himself at birth. The second is that attained
by great minds. They have been through everything men may
know, find they know all, and meet in that same ignorance whence
They departed. It is a learned ignorance, which knows itself.

Isidore Ducasse

I am not interested in illustrating my time.  A man's "time" limits him, it does not truly liberate him.  Our age - it is one of science, of mechanism, of power and death.  I see no point in adding to its mechanism of power and death.  I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogrance the compliment of a graphic homage. 

Clyfford Still  

Giacomo Leopardi (cont.)

 
  What is life?  The journey of a sick cripple who walks, with a heavy
burden on his back, over steep mountains and places incredibly
rugged, wearisome, and difficult, in snow, ice, rain, in wind and
burning sun, without ever resting night or day for a space of many
days, only to arrive at a precipice or pit, and there inevitably fall
(Bologna, January 17, 1826).

  Time is not a thing, but rather an accident of things, and
independently of the existence of things it is nothing.  It is an
accident of this existence, an idea of ours, a word.  Time is the
duration of things that are - just as 72000 tickings of a clock
pendulum are one hour, but that hour is an offspring of our mind
and does not exist, either in itself or as a section in time, any
more than it existed before the invention of the clock.  In short,
the essence of time is nothing else than a way - for considering
that we lead an existence made up of things that are, or may
be, or can be supposed to be.  The same with space. . . .
  The conclusion is that time and space are essentially  only ideas
or words.  And those countless great debates about time and
space stirred up from the birth of  metaphysics onwards by the
prime philosophers of every century are simply word games,
born of misunderstandings, little clarity in handling ideas, and
inadequate analysis of our intellect.  And that intellect itself is
the only place where time, space, and so many other
abstractions actually exist and amount to anything (Recanati,
December 14, 1826).

  Death is no evil, for it frees man from all evils and takes
away desire as well as the good things of life.  Old age is the
greatest evil, for it strips man of all pleasures leaves him his
appetites, and brings with it all pains.  Nonetheless, men fear
death and desire old age (VI).  The Reflections

We act in order to flee the void, to imply direction
or purpose by the "act" of fleeing.

from: Oswald Spengler

A Culture is born in the moment when a great soul awakens
out of the proto-spirituality of ever-childish humanity, and
detaches itself, a form from the formless, a bounded and
mortal thing from the boundless and enduring.  It blooms
on the soil of an exactly-definable landscape, to which
plant-wise it remains bound. It dies when the soul has
actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of
peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences, and
reverts into the proto-soul. But its living existence, that
sequence of great epochs which define and display the
stages of fulfillment, is an inner passionate struggle to
maintain the Idea against the powers of Chaos without
and the unconscious muttering deep-down within. It is not
only the artist who struggles against the resistance of the
material and the stifling of the idea within him.  Every
Culture stands in a deeply-symbolical, almost in a mystical,
relation to the Extended, the space, in which and through
which it strives to actualize itself. The aim once attained --
the idea, the entire content of inner possibilities, fulfilled
and made externally actual -- the Culture suddenly hardens,
it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down.
. . . This -- the inward and outward fulfillment, the finality,
that awaits every living Culture -- is the purport of all
the historic "declines".

LEV SHESTOV from: Apotheosis of Groundlessness (cont.)

The so-called ultimate questions troubled mankind in the world's dawn as badly as they trouble us now. Adam and Eve wanted "to know," and they plucked the fruit at their risk. Cain, whose sacrifice did not please God, raised his hand against his brother: and it seemed to him he committed murder in the name of justice, in vindication of his own injured rights. Nobody has ever been able to understand why God preferred Abel's sacrifice to that of Cain. In our own day Salieri repeats Cain's vengeance and poisons his friend and benefactor Mozart, according to the poem of Pushkin. "All say, there is no justice on earth; but there is no justice up above: this is as clear to me as a simple scale of music." No man on earth can fail to recognise in these words his own tormenting doubts. The outcome is creative tragedy, which for some mysterious reason has been considered up till now as the highest form of human creation. Everything is being unriddled and explained. If we compare our knowledge with that of the ancients, we appear very wise. But we are no nearer to solving the riddle of eternal justice than Cain was. Progress, civilisation, all the conquests of the human mind have brought us nothing new here. Like our ancestors, we stand still with fright and perplexity before ugliness, disease, misery, senility, death. All that the wise men have been able to do so far is to turn the earthly horrors into problems. We are told that perhaps all that is horrible only appears horrible, that perhaps at the end of the long journey something new awaits us. Perhaps! But the modern educated man, with the wisdom of all the centuries of mankind at his command, knows no more about it than the old singer who solved universal problems at his own risk. We, the children of a moribund civilisation, we, old men from our birth, in this respect are as young as the first man. To escape from the grasp of contemporary ruling ideas, one should study history. The lives of other men in other lands in other ages teach us to realise that our "eternal laws" and infallible ideas are just abortions. Take a step further, imagine mankind living elsewhere than on this earth, and all our terrestrial eternalities lose their charm.

LEV SHESTOV from: Apotheosis of Groundlessness

The raptures of creative activity!—empty words, invented by men who never had an opportunity of judging from their own experience, but who derive their conclusion syllogistically: "if a creation gives us such delight, what must the creator himself experience!" Usually the creator feels only vexations. Every creation is created out of the Void. At the best, the maker finds himself confronted with a formless, meaningless, usually obstinate and stiff matter, which yields reluctantly to form. And he does not know how to begin. Every time a new thought is engendered, so often must that new thought, which for the moment seems so brilliant and fascinating, be thrown aside as worthless. Creative activity is a continual progression from failure to failure, and the condition of the creator is usually one of uncertainty, mistrust, and shattered nerves. The more serious and original the task which a man sets himself, the more tormenting is the self-misgiving. For this reason even men of genius cannot keep up the creative activity to the last. As soon as they have acquired their technique, they begin to repeat themselves, well aware that the public willingly endures the monotony of a favourite, even finds virtue in it. Every connoisseur of art is satisfied if he recognises in a new work the accepted "manner" of the artist. Few realise that the acquiring of a manner is the beginning of the end. Artists realise well enough, and would be glad to be rid of their manner, which seems to them a hackneyed affair. But this requires too great a strain on their powers, new torments, doubts, new groping. He who has once been through the creative raptures is not easily tempted to try again. He prefers to turn out work according to the pattern he has evolved, calmly and securely, assured of his results. Fortunately no one except himself knows that he is not any longer a creator. What a lot of secrets there are in the world, and how easy it is to keep one's secret safe from indiscreet glances!

...on "style"

"To 'communicate' a state, an inner tension of pathos through signs, including the tempo of these signs - that is the meaning of every style ...Every style is 'good' which actually communicates an inner state, which makes no mistake as to signs, the tempo of signs, the 'gestures' etc....instinct is here infallible." Friedrich Nietzsche

"One's sensibility, that is one's genius." Charles Baudelaire

"Art is the reverse of general ideas in that it describes only the particular, wants only the unique. It does not classify, it declassifies." Marcel Schwob

"Personal Art - and that is the only art - is always incomprehensible. If it is understood it ceases to be Art to become a subject for new artistic expressions." Remy de Gourmont

Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 19-28)

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.

excerpts from: History And Utopia - E. M. Cioran

. . . tyranny is just what one can develop a taste for, since it so happens that man prefers to wallow in fear rather than to face the anguish of being himself. Generalize the phenomenon and the Caesars appear: how to blame them, when they answer the requirement of our misery and the pleas of our cowardice? They even deserve to be admired: they fling themselves upon assassination, constantly brood upon it, accept its horrors and its ignominy, and devote all their thoughts to it, to the point of forgetting suicide and exile, less spectacular formulas though gentler and more agreeable. Having opted for the most difficult, they can flourish only in uncertain times, sustaining chaos or else throttling it. The epoch favorable to their advance coincides with the end of a cycle of civilization. This is obvious with regard to the ancient world, and it will be no less so with regard to ours, which is heading straight for a much more considerable tyranny than the one rampant in the first centuries of our era. The most elementary meditation on the historical process of which we are the result reveals that Caesarism will be the mode by which the sacrifice of our liberties will be consummated. If the continents are to be welded together, unified, it is force that will do the job, not persuasion; like the Roman empire, the one to come will be forged by the sword and will be established with our unanimous collaboration, since our very terrors demand it.

Benjamin & Eliot

Mankind which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympic Gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. Walter Benjamin

The more highly industrialised the country, the more easily a materialistic philosophy will flourish in it, and the more deadly that philosophy will be . . . And the tendency of unlimited industrialism is to create bodies of men and women - of all classes - detached from tradition, alienated from relegion and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.
 T. S. Eliot

from: Wyndham Lewis

Absence of responsibility, an automatic and stereotyped rhythm, is what men most desire for themselves. All struggle has for its end relief or repose. A rhythmic movement is restful: but consciousness and possession of the self is not compatible with a set rhythm. All the libertarian cries of a century ago were based on unreal premises, and impulses that are not natural to, and cannot be sustained by, the majority of men. Luxury and repose are what most men undeniably desire. They would like to be as much at rest as if they were dead, and as active and 'alive' as passivity will allow. When action is required of them they prefer that it should be 'exciting' and sensational, or else that it should have a strongly defined, easily grasped, mechanical rhythm. The essential fatigue and poorness of most organisms, and the minds that serve them, is displayed in nothing so much as in this"sensationalism". Every low-grade animal is to some extent born sadic, for that is the only way he can "feel". Sensationalism and sadism are twins. The only effort that is acceptable to many people is violent, excessive, and spasmodic action.

from: E.M. Cioran

"And the people?" It will be asked. The thinker or the historian who employs the word without irony disqualifies himself. It is all too clear what "the people" are destined for: to suffer events and rulers' whims, lending themselves to the schemes that weaken and overwhelm them. Every political experiment, however "advanced", is performed at the people's expense, is carried out against the people: the people bear the stigmata of slavery by divine or diabolic decree. No use wasting your pity: the people's cause admits of no recourse. Nations and empires are formed by the people's indulgence of iniquities of which they are the object. No head of state, no conqueror fails to scorn the people; but the people accept this scorn and live on it. Were they to cease being weak or victimized, were they to disappoint destiny, society would collapse and with it history itself. Let us not be over optimistic: nothing in the people permits us to envision such a splendid eventuality. As they are, the people represent an invitation to despotism. The people endure their ordeals, sometimes solicit them, and rebel against them only to rush into new ones, more horrible than the old. Revolution being their one luxury, they fling them-selves into it, not so much to derive certain benefits from it or to improve their lot, as to acquire for themselves, too, the right to insolence, an advantage which consoles them for their habitual setbacks, but which they immediately lose once the privileges of chaos are abolished. Since no regime assures their salvation, the people adapt them-selves to all and to none. And from the Flood to the Last Judgment, all they can claim is to fulfill their mission honestly: to be vanquished.

from: Remy de Gourmont

"The true interest of life comes from its obscurity; it is incomprehensible, illogical and uncertain, and that is why the most fastidious love it with a gloomy passion. If the solution of the enigma was whispered in our ear at the age of reason, should we be able to go on living? Having no more uncertainty, we should have no more hope. The philosophers' phrase, "I live out of curiosity", is applicable to all lives. Certainty is a stae of annihilation. The notion of paradise is so near to that of Nirvana that Christian hapiness and Hindoo hapiness can be defined philosophically by the same word; both contain the idea of repose. All activity has uncertainty for its principle. Happiness itself, if it is presented under inevitable conditions, ceases to be desired with sufficient force to be happiness. We no longer desire the inevitable; we await it. Can happiness be seperated from the ferment, desire? Yet all men ardently desire certainty; they desire it to a mad extent; they forget all the enjoyment, all the shades, all the charms of the present to hold out their arms and their foreheads towards a cold idol with an empty belly. Perhaps, if the time is favourable, they can thrust their hands into the hole bored out by the multiple contact of blind wills; and then what? Is it certitude to touch a stone, wood, or a wound? Without submitting to views of finality, we may suppose that if certainty is a state of inaction, the mania for certitude on the contrary is a principle of action. Truth is only a statue of shadow, but to reach it man takes a thousand troubles one of which perhaps is fertile. This is only a risky hypothesis, for few human creatures are fitted to utilise an abstract principle as a lever, and that is very fortunate. Every time abstraction has become the guide of humanity, civilization has deviated, has sunk, has despised life to exalt a celestial glow, to adore a star, an idea, a nothing."

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Selections from: Ortega y Gasset, José (1883-1955)

Life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his ‘ideas’ are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defence of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality. The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic ‘ideas’ and looks life in the face, realises that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. As this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost—he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Man always aspires after more than his circumstances permit, hence he’s always, to a degree, unhappy. I believe only in ambiguity, because reality itself is that way. The modern paradox: an enormous progress in terms of culture should have produced...a man indisputably more barbarous than was the man of a hundred years ago.

We harbor no resentment or bitterness towards life but rather refuse to embrace the mental and emotional comforts of rational man. The tragic nature of human experience, a toilsome journey without a goal, and the inherent pain of thought underscores our world view. Beyond this apparent disillusionment with all things human lies an affirmation of the physical and temporal conditions of being: an attempt however futile to live life beyond appeal. Our world is without hope. In such a world lucidity is a burden which men seek to avoid . . .We are in many ways mystics of the absurd who have renounced the mental and spiritual comforts of the world of ideologies, and a belief in the myth of human progress, to experience an inner exile: an exile which finds its voice in the chosen role of anchorite in relation to the vulgarity and sordidness of a decadent civilization.

pan, pan is dead.

Lovely world, where art thou? Turn, oh, turn thee,
Fairest blossom-tide of Nature's spring!
Only in the poet's realm of wonder
Liv'st thou, still, - a fable vanishing.
Reft of life the meadows lie deserted;
Ne'er a godhead can my fancy see:
Ah, if only of those living colors
Lingered yet the ghost with me!

Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805)

We are little better than clairvoyant
puppets at times petulant...
a cryptic convergence of
anatomy and anxiety;
shadows of a departing
divinity in a theater
of incidental gesture.

april is the cruelest month

shadows

At the cost of our innocence we acquire the consciousness of our estrangement from the objective world. The tragic nature of human existence, the fate a reflective soul experiences when it realizes that there is no meaning to its pain, is the profane birthright of our haunted self-awareness.


Beyond the vanity of hope lies the comfort of disillusionment.

Our most profound defiance is not directed outward to the political world of systems and hierarchies. It is, rather, directed at the terror of our own being. By giving our vision lucid form, we assert the power of the creative will over the self's ever degenerative, ever present, impulses towards oblivion and chaos.

Hoping for nothing except the very remote we seek repose in the equivocal mystery of infinity.

from: Giacomo Leopardi

Man (like the other animals) is not born to enjoy life, but only to perpetuate life, to communicate it to others who come after, to conserve it. Neither he himself, nor life, nor any object of this world is actually made for him, but on the contrary, he exists completely for life. terrifying, but a true proposition and the final word of all metaphysics. Existence is not for the existing - even if it offers some good, that is pure chance. That which exists does so for the sake of existence; this is its real, manifest end. Existing things exist because they do; an existing individual is born and exists because one continues to exist, and existence conserves itself in him and after him. This all becomes clear when we recognize that the pure, true end of nature is the conservation of the species and not the conservation or felicity of individuals, a felicity which does not really exist in the world, either for individuals or the species. From this one must necessarily arrive at last to the general, summary, supreme, and terrible conclusion above mentioned. (Bologna, March 11, 1826)

from: The Journal Intime

To descend without murmuring the stream of destiny, to pass without revolt through loss after loss, and diminution after diminution, with no other limit than zero before us - this is what is demanded of us. Involution is as natural as evolution. We sink gradually back into the darkness, just as we issued gradually from it. The play of faculties and organs, the grandiose apparatus of life, is put back bit by bit into the box. We begin by instinct; at the end comes a clearness of vision which we must learn to bear with and to employ without murmuring upon our own failure and decay. A musical theme once exhausted, finds its due refuge and repose in silence.
...And life consists in repeating the human type, and the burden of the human song, as myriads of my kindred have done, are doing, and will do, century after century. To rise to consciousness of this burden and type is something, and we can scarcely achieve anything further.
To rebel against fate - to try to escape the inevitable issue - is almost puerile. When the duration of a centenarian and that of an insect are quantities sensibly equivalent - and geology and astronomy enable us to regard such duration from this point of view - what is the meaning of all our tiny efforts and cries, the value of our anger, our ambition, our hope? For the dream of a dream it is absurd to raise these make-believe tempests.
To be a conscious monad - a nothing which knows itself to be the microscopic phantom of the universe: this is all we can ever attain to.

Henri-Frederic Amiel

from: Henri Bergson (1859 - 1941)

Philosophers have paid little attention to the idea of nought. And yet it is often the hidden spring, the invisible mover of philosophical thinking. From the first wakening of reflection, it is this that pushes to the fore, right under the eyes of consciousness, the torturing problems, the questions that we cannot not gaze at without feeling giddy and bewildered. I have no sooner commenced to philosophize than I ask myself why I exist; and when I take account of the intimate connection in which I stand to the rest of the universe, the difficulty is only pushed back, for I want to know why the universe exists; and if I refer the universe to a Principle immanent or transcendent that supports it or creates it, my thought rests on this principle only a few moments, for the same problem recurs, this time in its full breadth and generality: Whence comes it, and how can it be understood, that anything exists? Even...when matter has been defined as a kind of descent, this descent as the interruption of a rise, this rise itself as a growth, when finally a Principle of creation has been put at the base of things, the same question springs up: How - why does this principle exist rather than nothing?
Our life is thus spent in filling voids, which our intellect conceives under the influence, by no means intellectual, of desire and of regret, under the pressure of vital necessities...

Selections: Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936)

There is something which, for want of a better name, we shall call the tragic sense of life, and it carries along with it an entire conception of the Universe and of life itself, an entire philosophy more or less formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense may animate, and does animate, not only individual men, but entire peoples. And this sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though later these ideas react upon it and corroborate it. But there is more to it than that: man, because he is man, because he possesses consciousness, is already, in comparison to the jackass or the crab, a sick animal. Consciousness is a disease. Man is possessed either of an excess of matter or an excess of spirit, or to put it better, either he feels a spiritual hunger, that is, a hunger for eternity or he feels a material hunger, that is, a hunger to submit to annihilation. When spirit is in excess and man feels a hunger for yet more of it, he pours his own spirit out and spreads it abroad, and as it pours out it grows by contact with the spirits of others; when, on the other hand, avarice takes hold, man withdraws into himself, thinking thus to better preserve himself, and ends by losing everything . . . It is not charity to rock and lull our fellow men to sleep in the inertia and heaviness of matter, but rather to arouse them to the anguish and torment of spirit. Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future. Suffering - which comes from the collision between con-sciousness and unconsciousness - is cured, not by submerging oneself in the unconscious, but by raising onself to the highest consciousness and thus suffering more. The evil of suffering is cured by more suffering, by higher suffering. There is no point in taking opium; it is beter to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound, for if you fall asleep and no longer feel pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist. Do not, then, close your eyes before the overawing Sphinx, but gaze on her face to face, and let her take you in her mouth and chew you with her hundred thousand poisonous teeth and swallow you up. And when she has swallowed you, you will know the sweet taste of suffering. Suffering is the way of consciousness, and it is through suffering that living beings achieve self-consciousness. To possess consciousness of oneself, to have personality, is to know and feel oneself distinct from other beings. And this feeling of distinctiveness is reached only through a collision, through more or less severe suffering, through a sense of one's own linits. Consciousness of oneself is simply consciousness of one's own limitation. I feel that I am myself when I feel that I am not others; to know and feel the extent of my being is to know where I cease being, the point beyond which I no longer am. The passion to be remembered if possible when oblivion overtakes all others is tremendous. From it flows every envy, the cause, according to the biblical narrative, of the crime which began human history: the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. It was not a struggle for bread: it was a struggle to survive in God, in the divine memory. Envy is a thousand times more terrible than physical hunger, for envy, is a spiritual hunger. If the so-called problem of life, the basic problem of food, were ever solved, the earth would be turned into a hell, as the struggle for survival would become even more intense . . . We aim at being everything because we feel it is the only way to escape being nothing. Enemies of the state say that Cain, the fratricide, was the founder of the State. And we must accept that such is the fact. Civilization began upon the day that one man, subjecting another to his will and compelling him to do the work for both of them, was enabled to devote himself to contemplation of the world, and thereafter put his captive to the creation of lavish works. Slavery allowed Plato to speculate upon the ideal republic, and it was war which brought about slavery. It is for no idle reason that Athena is the goddess of warfare and of science. But is there any real need to reiterate these obvious truths, so often forgotten only to be so many times recalled?

the art of perspective

Man's sense of the infinite underwent a fundamental and radical revaluation; the religious and eschatological nature of which was replaced by the mathematical and scientific - estrangement being the result of the distance measured, alienation became a function of Geometry . . . the vanishing point of the sublime.

Selections from E.M. Cioran (1911-1995)

As art sinks into paralysis, artists multiply. This anomaly ceases to be one if we realize that art, on its way to exhaustion, has become both impossible and easy. What will be the physiognomy of painting, of poetry, of music ,in a hundred years? No one can tell. As after the fall of Athens, of Rome, a long pause will intervene, caused by the exhaustion of consciousness itself. Humanity, to rejoin the past, must invent a second naiveté, without which the arts can never begin again. When modes of expression are worn out, art tends toward non-sense, toward a private and incommunicable universe. An intelligble shudder, whether in painting, in music, or in poetry, strikes us, and rightly, as vulgar or out-of-date. The public will soon disappear; art will follow shortly. A civilization which began with the cathedrals has to end with the hermeticism of schizophrenia. A work is finished when we can no longer improve it, though we know it to be inadequate and incomplete. We are so over taxed by it that we no longer have the power to add a single comma, however indispensable. What determines the degree to which a work is done is not a requirement of art or of truth, it is exhaustion and, even more, disgust. Only unfinished - because unfinishable - works prompt us to speculate about the essence of art. One does not write because one has something to say but because one "wants" to say something. What we call the creative instinct is merely a deviation, merely a perversion of our nature: we have not been brought into the world in order to innovate, to revolutionize, but to enjoy our semblance of being, in order to liquidate it quietly and to vanish afterward without a fuss. What can be said, lacks reality. Only what fails to make its way into words exists and counts. There is value only in that which bursts forth from inspiration, which springs up from the irrational depths of our being, from the secret center of subjectivity. The fruit of labor, effort, and endeavor has no value, and the offspring of intelligence is sterile and uninteresting. I delight in the barbaric and spontaneous elan of inspiration, effervescent spiritual states, essential lyricism, and inner tension - these things make inspiration the only reality of creation. I have no ideas, only obsessions. Anybody can have ideas.Ideas have never caused anybody's downfall.

Francis Picabia: Aphorisms

Nature is unfair? So much the better, inequality is the only bearable thing,the monotony of equality can only lead us to boredom. * Let us never forget that the greatest man is never more than an animal disguised as a god. * Those who draw their ideal from the ideal tend to have regrets later: ideals all belong to an era other than honesty. * Our thoughts are the shadows of our actions. * Reason is a light which makes me see things as they are not. * The problem of conscience only presents itself to us when we begin tounderstand the extent to which we can do without it. * All men are in effect a single man because multiplicity is only an illusion. * The most convincing eloquence is silence. * Beauty is relative to the amount of interest it arouses. * Paralysis is the first stage of wisdom. * Men have more imagination for killing than for saving. * The unknown is the exception, the know a deception. * Sleep, death; frontiers. Great beauty always hesitates between life and death.

Giovanni Gentile - Selections

But we cannot think, we cannot open our eyes without sinking into a flood of sorrow from which we must struggle to the shore. And it cannot be otherwise, for thought is not intuition or immediate self-revelation. It is a process; this implies that we are always journeying and always arriving, yet never arriving. We "are" only insofar as we "are not"; and we suffer. The world fills itself with hostile and frightening phantoms; at every step we come to impassable barriers. Such is life even for the least tragic-minded. If we turn to comedy, what do we get? A superficial laugh. This is the inherent pain of thought, from which there would be no rest without the soothing effect of art. When a circle of thought is concluded and closed with the seal of feeling, the thinking subject erects itself aloft in its infinity and liberty. Then man feels the joy of life and the pride of power. In this return of the subject to itself lies the catharsis of all poetry and of all art. Life is a tragedy, in which man is subject to Fate. But this universal tragedy has its own catharsis, which is art, the eternal source of youth from which constantly springs and sparkles the magic water that makes life flow again in the dry reeds burned by the fires of thought.

from: The Philosophy of Art (Cornell University Press 1972 )

Die Form - Reflections

Music: a spirit which appears extraneous to the world of appearances, which reaches out for another truer reality the essence of which searches beyond the transitory facade of this "world" to a realm free from the mannerisms and boastings of the mundane and prosaic world of deception and self-aggrandizement. Music invokes the tragic winds of fate and the pure beauty born from the primordial encounter of self and senselessness; whispering the temptation of the ineffable to our wounded souls across infinity. Music: a spirit of dissatisfaction, an apparition lost amidst posthumous reflections . . .

photo: Philippe Fichot

http://www.dieform.net/

Eduardo Recife

"Vintage images are just beautiful, there's something about them that impresses me. I love old stuff, vintage magazine, old photos, old books... Everything looks more uninteresting these days... Its hard to describe a style... The style is what you see, the category or name is not really important..."

http://www.misprintedtype.com/v4/

 Virtual reality no longer works only at the scale of individuals, as in madness, but at the scale of the world. One should therefore turn around one of the commonplaces of conservative cultural criticism: In contrast to the notion that new media turn us into passive consumers who just stare numbly at the screen, the real threat of new media is that they deprive us of our passivity, of our authentic passive experience, and thus prepare us for mindless frenetic activity - FOR ENDLESS WORK.
http://www.autopsia.net/

Alas, what are all of man's works,

past and present: a mere handful of mud

to be desiccated by a ray of sunlight,

and scattered by a gust of wind.

Giorgio de Chirico

Melancholy is at the bottom of everything, just as at the end of all rivers is the sea. Can it be otherwise in a world where nothing lasts, where all that we have loved or shall love must die? Is death then, the secret of life? The gloom of an eternal mourning enwraps, more or less closely, every serious and thoughtful soul, as night enwraps the universe. Henri-Frederic Amiel (1864)