silent frenzies

to bring you that one cloud in this cup of water

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impermanence

I later learned that the names are based on a similarity that the Pirahãs perceive between the foreigner and some Pirahã.  Among the men there that day was a young man named Xoogiái, and I had to admit that I could see some resemblance.  Xoogiái would be my name for the next ten years, until the very same Kaaboogí, now called Xahóápati, told me that my name was now too old and that my new name was Xaíbigaí.  (About six years after that my name was changed again to what it is today, Paóxaisi–the name of a very old man.)

–Daniel L. Everett, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes, 2008

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I am and you are, in the vast flux of things, only a stopping point favorable to a resurgence.  Do not delay in becoming precisely aware of this agonizing position: if it happens that you can attach yourself to goals enclosed within those limits in which no one is at stake but you, your life would be that of the great majority, it would be “deprived of the marvelous.”  A brief moment of pause: the complex, the gentle, the violent movement of worlds will make of your death a splashing foam.  The glories, the marvels of your life come from this resurgence of the wave that was tied in you in the immense noise of the cataract of the sky.

The fragile walls of your isolation, where multiple stops were composed, the obstacles of awareness, will have served only to reflect for a moment the flash of this universe at the heart of which you will never cease to be lost.

--Georges Bataille, “Communication”, Inner Experience, 1943

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If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.

–Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.4311

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We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.

–Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.52

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Glass: String Quartet No. 3, Mishima - i. Award Montage

Dublin Guitar Quartet

Art: Egon Schiele, Old Houses in Krumau, 1914

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The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual license for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work.  A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes.  His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind.  Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it.  

–Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman: An exercise in cultural history, 1979

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Hindemith: Sonata for Trombone and Piano - i. Allegretto moderato maestoso

Glenn Gould, piano

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Avoid contact with all people in whom there is no possible resonance with what touches you most deeply and toward whom you have obligations of "kindness," of politeness. Since these obligations engage me strongly as soon as I find myself in the presence of such people and engage me through an ill-fated habit of patience and good-will, which in fact becomes will for humiliation (sometimes abject). Imagine a musician in an orchestra playing off-key because his neighbor is doing so, to be nice.

[...]

Keep silent as before. It's better.

--Colette "Laure" Peignot, Fragments of a Notebook, 1937

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When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night's own solitude in a universe without end.

--O. V. de L. Milosz, L'amoureuse Initiation

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[E]verything about me is a lie; but that I am breaking--this, my breaking, is genuine.

--Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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Nietzsche’s thought represents in many senses the first deconstruction of the philosophical tradition.  By this I mean that his work contains both a sceptical de-struction of metaphysics and a post-metaphysical con-structive moment.  The sceptical moment is familiar to his readers, and it is his polemics against contemporary society, his relentless tirades against Christianity and Plato, and his ridicule of Kant, the ‘great Chinaman of Königsberg,’ which constitute his identity in the eyes of most.  I am arguing, however, that this scepticism is itself a strategic moment of negation that is posited in order to be superseded once more.  Nietzsche’s construction of a post-metaphysical thinking is not executed by a complete departure from the tradition, but is rather undertaken by a pushing through to their limits the implications in the thought of Kant, Descartes, Hegel and others.  […]  Because of its simultaneous negation and appropriation of metaphysics Nietzsche’s thinking is often characterized as an ironic discourse: not in the sense of a wilful playing with forms, though this may be what he aims to accomplish in many cases, but rather in the sense of maintaining a pathos of distance.  Distance toward one’s own values and those of one’s culture, knowing them to be purely interpretative stances towards the world, lacking resilience when put under scrutiny, while simultaneously adhering to them as if they had something more than a purely contingent worth.

–Matthew Rampley, Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Modernity

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So the sincerity of the moment passed; so it became symbolical; and that I could not stand. [...]

I observed with disillusioned clarity the despicable nonentity of the street; its porches; its window curtains; the drab clothes, the cupidity and complacency of shopping women; and old men taking the air in comforters; the caution of people crossing; the universal determination to go on living, when really, fools and gulls that you are, I said, any slate may fly from a roof, any car may swerve, for there is neither rhyme nor reason when a drunk man staggers about with a club in his hand--that is all.  I was like one admitted behind the scenes: like one shown how the effects are produced.  I returned, however, to my own snug home and was warned by the parlormaid to creep upstairs in my stockings.  The child was asleep.  I went to my room.

Was there no sword, nothing with which to batter down these walls, this protection, this begetting of children and living behind curtains, and becoming daily more involved and committed, with books and pictures?  Better burn one's life out like Louis, desiring perfection; or like Rhoda leave us, flying past us, to the desert; or choose one out of millions and one only like Neville; better be like Susan and love and hate the heat of the sun or the frost-bitten grass; or be like Jinny, honest, an animal.  All had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead.  Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying with fumbling fingers to prise open their locked caskets.  I went from one to the other holding my sorrow--no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life for their inspection.  Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken--I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely.  There I sat.

[...]  Let me touch the table--so--and thus recover my sense of the moment.

[...]  After Monday, Tuesday comes.

--Virginia Woolf, The Waves

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We have no choice but to interpret the objects of our love; no choice but to try to understand what makes them beautiful, what provokes our love; no choice but to try to see how they accomplish something--if they do--that nothing else in the world does and why, therefore, we will give them up for nothing else, however valuable; no choice but to desire to be in turn interpreted--affected--by them and so find something in ourselves that is ours and ours alone in the world.

--Alexander Nehamas, Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art

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Jusepe de Ribera, The Sense of Touch, c. 1615-16, oil on canvas

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Coming to awareness--of our mortality, absurdity, etc.--is an experience with intrinsic moral value.  So, you get two for one:  an aesthetic experience which in itself promotes an autonomous morality that is not in any way bound up with obligation, as well as a kick in the butt to stop droning rhetorically along.

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It became clear to me that there was no communication between what I was trying to say and [what] they were thinking. Bohr thought that I didn’t know the uncertainty principle, and was actually not doing quantum mechanics right either. He didn’t understand at all what I was saying. I got a terrible feeling of resignation. I said to myself, ‘I’ll just have to write it all down and publish it, so that they can read it and study it, because I know it’s right!’ That’s all there is to it.

Richard Feynman, reminiscing about the 1948 Pocono conference (via thesummerofmark)