zen is just like this
His head. A Stone. Immortal.
The sky is blue, the tree is green;
salt is salty, sugar is sweet. A dog is barking, ‘Woof! Woof!’ Just like this, everything is truth. So you are also truth. “There is grandeur in this view of life… from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” — Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species His arm disappears. Skin like stone. materialism /məˈtɪərɪəlɪz(ə)m/ PHILOSOPHY the theory or belief that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications. “…the world-for-us, the world-in-itself, and the world-without-us are not three separate entities. I rather imagine them as three concentric circles: the smallest is the World, the next biggest is the Earth, and the biggest is the Planet—although these three circles might actually be the same size and even occupy the same place: their difference is not geometrical, but topological.” The first circle is like the home where we live. In this home, everything is familiar; we are surrounded by things that belong to us. We open the doors of this circle and go out: there is a second circle there, where animals and plants dwell without thinking and being thought. This is nature as such, or the world-in-itself, or — to borrow the name that Quentin Meillassoux gives relation—the Great Outdoors. We grab something there (some food, some wood to make a fire, some water, etc.) and go back inside. But we know that there are yet other doors, the doors of nature, that lead towards a Greater Outdoors where even the wildest of beasts do not dare to go, let alone humans.” —“Ultra-Black: Towards a Materialist Theory of Oil”, Oxana Timofeeva The rock. The primordial mountain. In the three worlds, There is nothing I must do, Nothing unattained to be attained, Yet I engage in action. —The Third Teaching, Discipline in Action, The Bhagavad Gita (translated by Barbara Stoler Miller) Nature. The Photograph. So you should simply make the instant Stand out, without in the process hiding What you are making it stand out from. Give your acting That progression of one-thing-after-another, That attitude of Working up what you have taken on. In this way You will show the flow of events and also the course Of your work, permitting the spectator To experience this Now on many levels, coming from Previously and A Merging in to Afterwards, also having much else Now Alongside it. He is sitting not only In your theatre but also In the world. — Bertolt Brecht, from "Portrayal of past and present in one", part of Four Theatre Poems The world constantly turns inside out, and we are the hole through which it does so (by “we” I do not mean exclusively humans, but a much bigger collective of beings that precedes concrete species). — Oxana Timofeeva, “Unconscious Desire for Communism,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender, and Culture 11 (2015): 32–48. Spectral Returnings “In 1980, Luis Alvarez, a physicist, and his son Walter, a geologist, made public their theory that dinosaurs were killed by a massive asteroid strike… [They] argued that evidence of the catastrophe was hiding in plain sight, the world over, as a thin layer of sediment enriched in Iridium, a metal commonly found in asteroids but rare on Earth. Under most circumstances, fossils form when animals die in places like river deltas where fine sediment slowly covers up their bones and ultimately encases them in rock. Not so at the apltly named Hell Creek formation of Tanis in North Dakota. Here, Robert DePalma, a PhD student at the University of Kansas, and a team of colleagues…are reporting the discovery of a 1.3-metre-thick sedimentary layer that was catastrophically dumped in a single day. Wedged between a 66m-year-old layer of Cretaceous sediment, and another dating from the subsequent Tertiary period, when mammals came to dominate Earth, the Hell Creek fossils are in the perfect position to record the moments that immediately followed this asteroid impact.” —Day of Reckoning, The Economist, April 6th, 2019. If you meet the Buddha, what do you do? Where do you throw your cigarette ashes?
this piece was first published in Topographies, an art book by Jason Lim. All images are courtesy the artist.
