lacan said a letter always arrives at its destination. i've been thinking about this for a long time — especially in the years when i was an artist. in australia in the late eighties i sent many letters to dead early modernists in europe at their last known addresses in paris (tzara, breton), hanover (schwitters), zurich (arp) etc. some of the letters came back to me with impressive stamps and markings and some of them didn't. unsurprisingly the germans and the swiss were most likely to return the letters but none ever came back from paris.
“In 1926, a seventeenth-century trunk of letters was bequeathed to the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague. The trunk belonged to one of the most active postmaster and post mistress of the day, Simon and Marie de Brienne, a couple at the heart of European communication networks. The chest contains an extraordinary archive: 2600 locked letters❊ sent from all over Europe, none of which were ever delivered. In the seventeenth century, the recipient also paid postal and delivery charges, but if the addressee was deceased, absent, or uninterested, no fees could be collected. Postmasters usually destroyed such “dead letters”, but the Briennes preserved them, hoping that someone would retrieve the letters – and pay the postage. The letters are uncensored, unedited, and 600 of them even remain unopened. The archive itself has remained virtually untouched by historians until it was recently rediscovered. The Signed, Sealed, and Undelivered group, an international and interdisciplinary team of researchers has now begun a process of preservation, digitization, transcription, editing, and identification of letterlocking formats and categories that will reveal its secrets for the first time – even, we hope, those of the unopened letters.” (SSU)
❊ Letterlocking "refers to the technology of folding and securing an epistolary writing substrate to function as its own envelope – a vital communications technology before the invention of the mass-produced envelope in the 19th century." Jana Dambrogio and Daniel Starza Smith are researchers at MIT working on this.
I have a couple of ... um ... issues with this review by Samuel Graydon in the Times Literary Supplement of what looks like a useful little book, Six Impossible Things by John Gribbin, but it's a great read and does a pretty good job in summarising the core problems of the physicalist/realist view of the world, time, space and everything in it and the im/possibilities afforded by quantum theory.
i hacked it a bit — apologies ...
Depending on how you interpret the results from a litany of physical and mathematical experiments, you are left, basically speaking, with only so many possibilities of how you might understand the world. In Six Impossible Things, John Gribbin chooses six of them and he sees them as solaces, interpretations which offer consolation in the face of the mighty mysteriousness of the ten to the power of five hundred universes and the eleven dimensions.
One : The world does not exist unless you look at it.
Two : Particles are pushed around by an invisible wave. But the particles have no influence on the wave.
Three : Everything that could possibly happen does, in an array of parallel realities.
Four : Everything that could possibly happen has already happened and we only noticed part of it.
Five : Everything influences everything else instantly, as if space does not exist.
Six : The future influences the past.
Op donderdag 16 juli om 10 uur in de ochtend, krijgt meneer Van D. het Ombra mai fu uit Handels Serse te horen, gevolgd door de Vocalise van Rachmaninov. Op Romance de Mignon van Henri Duparc lopen we achter zijn eenvoudige kist aan, de aula uit, naar het veld met algemene graven op de begraafplaats Sint Barbara.
about the old zen masters who went on and on until they were blue in the face about nothing
about the old zen masters who went on and on until they were blue in the face about nothing, literally : it was a kind of trick — a door through which you have to go to get to 'everything'. it is as if they were saying, to see everything you must first see nothing, you must become nothing — and you must be nothing without wanting to be something because, i think the old zen masters understood this, in nothing there is no other and if you experience there being no other then suddenly you realise that you are many things — not just one thing.
how i changed the life of the theologian of the fatherland (theoloog des vaderlands) with a small pink button i found in the street. (financieel dagblad 23-9-20)
if you're not interested in the i ching, the ancient chinese book of changes (and/or divination) do not click → here.
ik leef nog (i'm still alive), my grandmother would say without fail when you asked her how she was — and then she would laugh.
twenty five years after her death i still think of her often, and my mother and i, in our daily phone calls, remind each other of things she used to say and do. yesterday it was how she would always invite the neighbour around for morning coffee to avoid being asked for coffee at her house because the neighbour's coffee was bad. she would make it as people did in the war, using only a little coffee and adding roast chicory essence (buismans — you can still buy it today) to add flavour.
my grandmother was a half jew and a widow with three children
who survived five years of nazi occupation and the famine in the winter of 1944-5, so still being alive was a fact worthy of pausing over (om bij stil te staan) every day — and her laugh was one of incredulity as much as anything else.
therapy should be free
“Thank you to my therapist, Ian,” television writer Cord Jefferson said in his speech accepting an Emmy Award for “Watchmen”, initially eliciting laughter from the room. “I am a different man than I was two years ago. I love you. You have changed my life in many ways. Therapy should be free in this country.’’
hear hear. all forms of care should be free in all countries everywhere, and not just for humans.
All of reality is interaction
all of reality is interaction, carlo rovelli suggests, and “there is no such thing as 'here' or 'now.' our senses convey a picture of reality that narrows our understanding of its fullness and this is also true of the “huge wave of happenings” which is a human self”.
The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak.
— Adorno
i can't write a coherent sentence today. perhaps it's because last night i watched a mind boggling doco called #unfit – the psychology of donald trump. if you don't have the time or the inclination to watch it (free in the netherlands here) this is one thing you need to know : trump is a malignant narcissist who has his finger on a button which, when pressed, launches nuclear missiles which will completely destroy an entire country and kill millions of people. and there are other things, like : his behaviour and tactics mirror exactly those of other rightwing dictators in other parts of the world, now and in the 20th century and, not only is he hellbent on revenge when anyone crosses him or he doesn't like them, he cheats at golf — and not only when he is playing against tiger woods. you might say well there are worse things than cheating at golf, and there are. he does them too. all of them.
RIP Ron Cobb.
From birth to death we are, every last one of us, divided against ourselves. We both want to grow up and don’t want to grow up; we hunger for sexual pleasure, we dread sexual pleasure; we hate our own aggressions — anger, cruelty, the need to humiliate — yet they derive from the grievances we are least willing to part with.
Vivian Gornick — The Odd Woman and the City
From there the divisions multiply. We long for experience, we shrink from experience; we want to understand, we don’t want to understand. We confuse our neuroses for our innermost truths and in the end it all boils down to: nothing. Pointless disharmony. “Friendships are random, conflicts prevail, work is the sum of its disabilities,” she writes in another memoir, Fierce Attachments.
But then there are times when we feel ourselves whole. We stand at the center of our experience and something inside us “flares into bright life.” Under the influence of “a conviction of inner clarity,” we become eloquent, prolific — what Gornick calls our “expressive selves.” This, we feel, is the meaning of life. This is what it means to be alive.
this longread in the uk sunday times by p.j.o'rourke (who seems to have mellowed a little with age thank god) is replete with pithy well-crafted sentences and pointed funny/sad observations on the current state of amerika, the election, and its history :
America is what you get when you turn a random horde of people loose in a vast and various space. Some came here on the make, some on the run, some were dragged here involuntarily as slaves, some were chased here by poverty, oppression or bigotry and some were here already and were defeated by disease and demographics until they became foreigners in their own country.
french onion soup is really the nectar of the gods, a kind of european umami.
On Dec. 31, 1999, his 49th birthday, Tehching Hsieh finished a 13-year piece that consisted of not showing the art he made during that time. He created a collage with text that reads, “I kept myself alive,” which he issued the next day. He has not presented any new work since then, but when I asked if he missed art, he looked puzzled. I had not understood his position. “My work is not like an art-world definition of art,” he said. “It’s more like what you think about life. To me, art and life, it’s no difference,” he said at one point. “The work is in the living.”
australians are not allowed to leave the country without special permission from the government and some are so desperate to at least feel like they are going somewhere that a qantas flight to nowhere which departs from and lands in sydney sold out in 10 minutes.
Punt Uit
...een intieme en hartverscheurende getuigenis van een man die zijn levenspijn paart aan een doodswens, maar tegelijk vasthoudt aan het leven.
— from the review in Trouw by Belinda van de Graaf
Punt Uit is an almost unwatchable yet beautiful and compassionate portrait of the last part of the life of Michael Hellgardt by his partner Rosemarie Blank. Not to be missed.
i don't believe in astrology but i am interested in the fact that people believe in it, and as a cultural phenomenon and for the narratives astrologers construct! the australian mystic medusa is especially good.
using a picture of mark e.smith on the cover of a biography of iris murdoch as an ironic postmodernist gesture was widely misunderstood and proved fatal to their career as a book cover designer.
Ultimately the challenge is to undertake an ongoing, aesthetic project of total self-transformation (de prendre de soi meme), advocating a view of the self – or more accurately one's relationship with the self (rappot a soi) – as a free creation on the part of the subject...
— Foucault
come hither
we must remember, he said, that british people don't eat british fish...
sammy davis jr converted to judaism?! i think i did know that but it was in some deep cold storage part of my memory. it took days before i realised i 'knew' it, but it's a different kind of knowing.
unfortunately to watch the documentary on tv in the netherlands you need an account.
today is a big day for charlie kaufman fans. his new film, i'm thinking of ending things is released on netflix. mashable loves it. artforum likes it a lot. the uk daily telegraph says kaufman 'did one heck of a job'. i think that means they think it's good. the times of london doesn't like it:
“The problem, alas, is that Kaufman’s sensibility, originally so light, witty and thoughtful (think of the time-looping romance Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), has here curdled into leaden misanthropy and clichéd sermonising.”
as for me i will watch it again before i venture an opinion but i will say this : it's more anomalisa than synecdoche, new york — and i hope you don't mind voice over.
after her doctor retired, my mother, 85, was told by the new one : well you are VERY old...! which sounded to her like an accusation, as if it was her own fault.
i am not as old as my mother but much older than my father. one of the things about being or becoming old is that more and more things seem to happen which are difficult to believe, which you couldn't possibly have predicted. some of the things are good❊ and some of them are bad, really bad. one of them is that every day more people seem to give even less of a shit than they did the day before.
how can this be so?
❊ is my housing crisis over? it might just be, soon. a tiny but bright light has appeared on the horizon, not far from the border with belgium 🙂 but as the antipodeans move into spring this week my mantra is : be patient ... be humble ... want nothing ... expect nothing ... but be radically optimistic. something may be coming which is big ... big ... BIG. stay tuned!
A spokesman for Twitter said: “Our dedicated teams work to stay ahead of bad-faith actors.”
i have no idea what a bad faith actor is but i have several ideas about what it could be. i watched a lot of soap (principally the bold and the beautiful) on TV when i was an artist (and now there are the US presidential elections) but wouldn't “our dedicated teams work to stay ahead of bad-faith actors” be exactly what a bad-faith actor would say? the only thing missing is very hard as in 'working very hard' which is what spokespersons/bad-faith actors always say their dedicated teams are doing when they explain their company's latest gigantic cock up on tv.
man is god's ruin
peter falk vs columbo is a fascinating doco about peter falk and inevitably columbo (it even has a little scene from 'himmel über berlin' in which columbo is a fallen angel) but there is also plenty about his work with john cassavetes and gena rowlands — hey that rhymes with lowlands which has been cancelled this year.
speaking of his work with cassavetes i hear peter falk say something which has me scrambling for a pencil and a piece of paper. he is quoting someone who said : man is god's ruin. the dutch subtitle says : De mensheid is de ruïne van god.
as someone who didn't consume a single drop of alcohol for twelve years and then just recently ... well a year ago ... or is it two? ... in wagga wagga new south wales of all places, fell off the wagon, i was moved by this fragment from an interview with robin williams, the actor, who killed himself in 2014 when he was 63.
i don't much like the tone of this opinion piece from the uk daily telegraph about 'the world’s biggest self-help guru' brené brown but the point is that therapy takes a lot of time and work and you need to work with a therapist who is right for you, and that point is well made. but what people like brené brown are selling is not therapy but a product (and she has demonstrated that even vulnerability can be a product which is ... interesting) but this product is not aimed at the people who are locked up in psychiatric wards.
Naarmate het licht zich verder van de ochtendstond verwijdert en dieper in de dag doordringt, raakt het aan lager wal, en het vindt zijn waardigheid (ethiek van de avondschemering) pas terug op het moment dat het verdwijnt.
three good things :
1. the heatwave is finally over;
2. my piece in Trouw, together with some of the other contributions to the series Zin in het alledaagse by Henk Steenhuis, is going to be published as a book by Ten Have in 2021;
3. yesterday someone i am working with found a way to overcome the superego.
on witchmongers
I am interested less in what it is people believe than how they came to believe it. What does it take for someone to believe in something, for example a magic trick or witchcraft, or that the earth is flat or well ... gods.
Apparently magicians stress the importance of a 'plot' when you perform a magic trick. You see this in the spectacular plots devised by Derren Brown.
Might this be why conspiracy theories are so popular? The plot there is, in general terms, that there are people trying to pull the wool over your eyes but you are smarter than they think you are and you and your fellow conspiracy theorists are onto them.
The Christians came up with an especially irresistible plot which served them well for millennia, namely : someone who has superpowers loves you (what me? yes you!) unconditionally and also it is possible to die and to rise again and go to heaven. And all that is required of you to make this happen is to believe in them and to do what they say.
I discovered the importance of the plot in magic tricks by way of this semi-interesting story in The Times about a book called Discoverie of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot published in 1584.
The book sought to reveal the kinds of tricks used by magicians illusionists and sorcerers to make people believe certain things, especially their magic powers.
The book was groundbreaking and controversial at the time of its publication by Scot, a country gentleman from Kent. Though revered by magicians for its detailed descriptions of tricks including those involving cups and balls, playing cards and a knife “through the arm”, its primary purpose was to debunk claims about witchcraft at a time of growing hysteria across Europe.
As Scot saw it, so-called witchmongers abusing their authority sought to “pursue the poore, to accuse the simple, and to kill the innocent”. He warned readers with “chaste ears” to skip over his sections regarding the “filthie and bawdie” assertions of witchmongers regarding women’s sexual intercourse with demons.
The book was pivotal in changing attitudes and limiting the persecution in England of alleged witches, who faced the death penalty under an act of 1563.
What was that about pursuing the poor, accusing the simple, and killing the innocent? There are still plenty of witchmongers among us, it seems.
acedia
Medieval monks were prone to something called acedia—a “kind of unreasonable confusion of mind,” as the ascetic John Cassian wrote in the fifth century, in which they couldn’t do much of anything but go in and out of their cells, sighing that “none of the brethren” came to see them, and looking up at the sun “as if it was too slow in setting.” As scholars have pointed out, acedia sounds a lot like boredom (depression, too), although a particular judgment was attached to it: acedia was sinful because it rendered a monk “idle and useless for every spiritual work.”
Two articles on boredom in one day, one rather good, in the new yorker, and the other kind of ... boring, but then it was written by a psychologist.
the best job i ever had was working for the publications distribution cooperative in london in the late seventies. one of my publishers was cienfuegos and the anarchic telephone conversations with stuart in the orkneys were among the highlights of my working week.
if joggers were able to watch themselves jogging from behind they would just walk.
rescuing the formless from the form
as a young punk and would be writer i came under the spell of doris lessing, first through her science fiction (canopus in argus) and then through the golden notebook which was completely dazzling. a nice piece in the new york times today by karan mahajan reminded me about the importance of that book which should be read by every would be writer but, perpetually struggling for words to describe the kind of work i do with people, i was struck by this sentence :
Anna quits years of therapy, recognizing it is an evasive way of “rescuing the formless into form.”
what i practice is exactly the inverse : it is a non-evasive way of rescuing the formless from the form (and in this way it is not so very different from what i did as an artist) and perhaps this is why it is better not to call it therapy at all.
“Ours is the first period when man has become completely and totally problematical to himself, when he no longer knows what he is, but at the same time knows that he knows nothing.”
aevum
For Thomas Aquinas, “aevum” is “the mean between mortal time and divine eternity,” that is, “the measure of endurance enjoyed by angels, saints, and other celestial creatures.”
— from the end notes to Lay Studies by Steven Toussaint via this review.
have you heard the joke about the guy whose ex-wife said she was going to australia?
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
From “The Nobel Lecture in Literature.” 1993. In The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019).
yes. but i don't know. it's poetic and all, but isn't what we do, what we give, how we love — as well as what we say and hear and write and read, the measure of our lives?
and you would say : and also how we sing...
i dreamed i employed an australian woman to go fishing for me. after only an hour she came back with a bag full of plump and shiny fish and handed me a bill for two hours labour.
i said : but you were only gone for an hour, darling.
note : i rarely eat fish but i like to walk through fish markets and look at all the splendid fishes. they are like creatures from another planet.
any ideas for interpretations are welcome.
Mortals who are still alive are by definition on a vacation, some more than others, to paraphrase Améry.
even if you're highly suspicious of art and artists — and you should be — this doco on eva hesse called 'tracing the rope' is great, but you can only watch it via that link if you're in the netherlands.
or if you have VPN with a dutch server option :)
not tropical :
zoroastrians have an interesting answer to the age old question which believers in an omnipotent omniscient supernatural being wrestle with in private and which non-believers use in their pointless arguments with and against the believers : why, if god exists, does he allow there to be so much suffering on earth?
of course there are sound theological responses to that question but the problem with theology is that theological responses only hold water within the context of theology. you might say, well it's because of what happened in the garden of eden but for a non-believer this is not a satisfactory answer.
from a narrative perspective you might say, well what would be the point of heaven if everything was 100% hunky dory on earth? so suffering exists to make heaven, and thus believing in god, more attractive.
so the zoroastrian god, ahura mazda, has a problem : he is not omnipotent! he is omniscient though, which seems odd. wouldn't omniscience go hand in hand with omnipotency? but you can't argue with religious beliefs because they are not based on reason or logic — or, for that matter, on demonstrable facts. that's why it's called faith, as the local vicar who later became a bishop explained it to me when i was an agnostic teenager who desperately wanted a reason to believe.
ahura mazda is locked in a permanent battle with an evil spirit called ahriman and famine, disease, killings and other evils are not the work of a jealous and vengeful god, but are instead the temporary triumph of ahriman.
i agree with almost nothing freud said about the superego — also i don't agree with the person who decided to translate Ich as 'ego' and Über-ich as 'superego', and especially Es (you are also an it!) as Id, but that's neither here nor there.
the point is : Freud identified the Über-ich and for this we will be forever grateful. a thousand years from now he will be remembered for this, provided the human race is still around then and the planet would prefer it if it wasn't but who knows, humans might reinvent themselves. i am not a humanist but i am not an anti-humanist either. for all i know i may be an ahumanist, but i'd have to read patricia maccormack's book first.
i would say i am a radically optimistic posthumanist.
what's in a name? a rose is a rose is a rose, and a banded demoiselle damselfly is a banded demoiselle damselfly — although it is moot whether the latter is worthy of its name during the two years it spends in larval form skulking in river mud and waterweeds before finally rising from the reeds with a metallic blue body and iridescent wings glinting, to drift over the river. (via)
perhaps the human species does not realise its full potential until it embraces its own extinction. patricia maccormack who is interviewed here in trouw (in dutch) invites humans to do just that, which is why, i expect, she prefers to speak in terms of 'ahuman' rather than 'posthuman'.
i am looking in foxgloves for sleeping bumblebees.
eric idle : i don't like the word 'atheist'. it implies that there’s a god not to believe in.
last night watched most of a movie by mia hanson love called goodbye first love. i wish i could like her films more, they tick all the right boxes and she says all the right things about film making in interviews — but something is missing.
He wrote that he went through life 'amazed, perplexed and in a state of wonder' and he managed to put that way of living into words and transmit it via the page and with his breathless readings. He made me unafraid of magical thinking.
both seasons of errol morris's first person from 2000/2001 are now viewable free on youtube. the only truth (S02E02) is an interview with mob lawyer murray richman who says, many years ago my father told me moshi, life is a holem — a holem means a dream — that which was, can never be again and just as much of reality is a dream as what you dreamed the night before. it's of no consequence.
my mother sent me a picture of my-so-called-self with a stupid look on my face from ten years or more ago taken in the old V&D in utrecht. on the back she has written 'good old times'.
the picture was stuck, not very well, on to an old postcard and was easily separated — underneath was a gouache of an exquisite tulip that doesn't exist anymore painted by a woman called judith leyster in 1643, the height of tulipmania.
this is a different but very similar painting of the same tulip, the admirael van der eijck. it is a 'broken' tulip, “its colors splitting between a flat white and a lovely, soft red.”
and yes. now you may ask the obvious question, to which there is no answer.
for no particular reason, other than that it's there and well ... it is really nothing and something at the same time, here is the fall with new face in hell ... no wait ... only kiddin' ya ... yo la tengo with i heard you looking.
now rock out.
this rather nice, and useful, word was unknown to me : quiddity — the inherent nature or essence of someone or something or a distinctive feature; a peculiarity: his quirks and quiddities. it is from the Latin quid = ‘what’, so one might say quiddity = the whatness of a person or thing.
to be a bee
between 1853 and 2012 there were only 56 recorded cases of zoanthropy, which is when, if you're asked, what are you? you would answer, i am a chicken, or i am a dog or i am a bee.
if you had a megaphone, you ask,
and all the people who are lost
were gathered together,
what would you say to them?
well, i say, stroking my imaginary beard, i understand why you ask the question but i don't believe in the usefulness of hypotheticals. if you won the lottery what would you do with the money, that kind of thing. it's a good one for a conversation after christmas dinner with your mother (my mother loves this question and she always starts with, first i would pay off the mortgage — she's 85 and a half and she still hasn't paid off her mortgage! how cruel is capitalism? — and then i would give half of the rest of the money to you x) but it's not so useful when you're talking about the human condition and the meaning of life and the suffering of the world.
for me the point about talking with people is that it needs to be a dialogue, a conversation between people who trust and respect each other, and it requires a willingness to listen. you are only going to be prepared to listen to someone you trust and respect and you are only going to be prepared to talk about things that really matter to you with someone you trust and respect.
the utter stupidity and uselessness of a 'debate' is mind boggling. nothing that i could say to people whose trust and respect i don't have would be of any use to them because they would all hear something different and interpret what i say in their own way, because that's how language works.
to have a meaningful conversation with a small group of people who are gathered together for a reason is certainly possible and what is also possible there, if you gather with that group of people on a regular basis, is for respect and trust and friendship and love/care (agape) to develop between those people.
but to go into depth you need to talk with each person one to one, on a regular basis over a number of years — which is time consuming and impractical.
but the point of your question is something like, what would you ask everyone to consider, to think about and i'm glad you asked that because i've been thinking about this for half a century.
so ok i will play your game.
you'd have to be some kind of weird megalomaniac (or malignant narcissist) to entertain this but can i change it slightly and say, if all the humans in the world were gathered together and i had a megaphone and i could speak a language that they could all understand, what i would i say?
there would two things :
first i would ask : are you a believer in, or agnostic about — or even just interested in — the possibility of there being a mystery — the mystery at the heart and soul of the universe (or of the ten to the power of five hundred universes and the eleven dimensions) what the beat poet allan ginsberg called 'the starry dynamo'.
and i ask that because it is as if the people in the world can be divided into two groups : those that say yes to that question and those that say, no definitely not. (if you say, i don't know, you can join in with the yes group :)
and then of course there are the people who don't have enough to eat and/or who are sick and live in places where there are no adequate medical facilities and/or they are in pain and you might say, if you are a humanist or a person is committed to helping those people, quit all this talking and let's help these people and eradicate the injustices in the world first and you might say the same about the animals and the trees and the rivers and so forth and you'd have a good point.
but this is hypothetical is it not?
so all the people who say no to that, well they can all go back to what they were doing since we have nothing to say to each other which is of any use because the next question i would ask is if you think/feel/believe you are in some way connected to this mystery or whether you believe or hope that it is possible to experience a connection with this mystery.
and now it becomes interesting because the ones that have a specific religious affiliation, all of whom are still with us in this yes/maybe group, will answer yes to this question and they will have specific ideas or a narrative about this connection and they will have a name for this mystery, which may be allah or god or something else, and they are fine these people, they don't need me and they don't need to hear what i've got to say. i learned this working in a cancer hospital as a spiritual carer. they will talk to their imam or priest or rabbi and they will hear what they they want or need to hear from them, i.e. allah is great and/or god will (or will not) forgive your sins provided you do this that or the other thing.
so all those people can go over there and sit in the shade under those trees and talk together. that's great. i don't have an issue with what they do or do not believe — and if the reverse is also true, then we can all be friends, and please, if you are interested in joining in with the conversations in our group at any time, you are most welcome.
the group that remains are the people i am interested in talking with, but not through a megaphone.
these are the people who have an inkling of this mystery but who cannot name it (and perhaps do not want to name in case naming it destroys it somehow) but they are interested in the possibility of having some kind of connection with this mystery.
they are different to the people who have gone back to what they were doing before, call them the naysayers if you will,
somehow they know, and they know this is not rational or logical, it is not science, it cannot be proven, there is no evidence for it — although we might point to this grain of sand and say, well maybe the fact that there are fifty million million million atoms in this one grain of sand and that each of those atoms is like a little universe consisting of electrons and protons and subatomic particles and so on and on, maybe that's evidence — or the fact that there may well be as many galaxies and stars in the cosmos as there are atoms in this single grain of sand maybe that's evidence — but this is all highly speculative. we don't really know anything about this mystery other than we somehow know it's there, or that there is Something.
these are people i would like to think of as postatheists or post(a)theists.
post(a)theists agree that there is some kind of mystery, something deeply mysterious about being, about existence — and that it may be possible to feel or to somehow experience a connection with this mystery and we are interested in having a conversation about this with each other but post(a)theists are not interested in engaging in a debate about whether or not god exists and which way of believing in a god or gods is the best way. we are interested in talking together about our experiences of that mystery and/or our experience of being connected to it or the possibility of such a connection.
about the old zen masters who went on and on until they were blue in the face about nothing, literally : it was a kind of trick — a door through which you have to go to get to 'everything'. it is as if they were saying, to see everything you must first see nothing, you must become nothing — and you must be nothing without wanting to be something because, i think the old zen masters understood this, in nothing there is no other — and if you experience there being no other then suddenly you realise that you are many things — not just one thing.
and there is a great freedom in this. once you are free of what is almost an obligation to become more than you are, you are able to realise that you are everything. you have nothing to prove.
i don't believe in astrology but i am interested in the fact that people believe in it, and as a cultural phenomenon and for the narratives astrologers construct! the australian mystic medusa is especially good :
for taureans mars is officially retro (until mid-nov), you’ve embarked on your ‘spiritual warrior’ bender, turfing out decayed resentments, shadowy subliminal messaging, and habitual thought or emotion loops. you will never again experience such a strong phase for self-knowing and the confrontation of personal ghosts.
doesn't that sound awesome?
literally. and many people could do with more awe in their lives.
it makes you wish you were a taurean.
oh wait. i am one!
but of course there are as many ways of interpreting a retro mars as there are interpretations of the most mysterious parts of the talmud but this is the one you could choose to believe.
i used to have a party trick where i would drink an enormous amount of beer and wine and vodka or gin or whiskey and i would say to someone who was boring me at some party or in a bar : what starsign are you? i bet you are a scorpio! and then if they were a scorpio they would be amazed and if they said i am pisces, i would say : i knew you were either scorpio or pisces!
this was in a small outback town in australia, not quite pre-internet but a personal computer with a built in modem which you could connect to the telephone line if no one wanted to call anyone or be able to be called by anyone was still considered an innovation, so we had to think up our own entertainment.
for several years i read nothing but books about the holocaust and holocaust testimonies and listened first hand, in person and on video, to hundreds of stories of survivors.
and then at some point i realised that thing, maybe you've had it too, about the testimonies that are missing and that we will never hear, that couldn't be written and cannot be read : the testimonies of the terrifying and ... what word would you use? ... let's go with profound ... experience of suffering of the ones who did not survive.
and those are the testimonies that are missing from your book and every book that has been written — nor will they be in any of the books that are yet to be written.
you could send it in and pretend you wrote it!
but it wouldn't win because the question you have to answer in 150 words or less is : who did arnon forget?. i thought it was : which testimonies are missing?. that was probably unconscious wishful thinking on my part about what the question is — which is not unusual for me, in a wide range of contexts.
peter falk vs columbo is a fascinating doco about peter falk and inevitably columbo (it even has a little scene from 'himmel über berlin' in which columbo is a fallen angel) but there is also plenty about his work with john cassavetes and gena rowlands — hey that rhymes with lowlands which has been cancelled this year.
speaking of his work with cassavetes i hear peter falk say something which has me scrambling for a pencil and a piece of paper. he is quoting someone who said : man is god's ruin. the dutch subtitle says : De mensheid is de ruïne van god.
in other words, humanity has destroyed god and his vision. here we have an omniscient omnipresent and omnipotent supernatural being ruined by his own creation. ah the sad irony! now that would be something, right?
and peter falk says that cassavetes 'saw the ruins with a clarity that the rest of us would find unbearable'.
but rewinding, i find that what he actually said, quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson❊, was : “A man is a god in ruins.”
that's quite a difference. this is in part a problem arising from the fact that in english, 'man' can be used as a synechdoce, where a part stands in for a whole, so that 'man' can mean 'humanity' rather than 'a member of the human species of the male gender'. this doesn't work in dutch where you have to say 'de mensheid' if you mean the species, which is infinitely preferable due to a thing called patriarchy.
the person doing the subtitles for the doco didn't hear the 'a' at the beginning of the quote (or the 'a' before 'god') and assumed humankind was meant.
sometimes being bilingual produces an interesting idea thanks to a misreading, a mistranslation or something misheard. so the subtitle influenced what i heard and what i heard was much more interesting than what was said.
❊”A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.”
as someone who didn't consume a single drop of alcohol for twelve years and then just recently ... well a year ago ... or is it two? ... in wagga wagga new south wales of all places, fell off the wagon, i was moved by this fragment ❊ from an interview with robin williams, the actor, who killed himself in 2014 when he was 63.
“I was in a small town where it’s not the edge of the world, but you can see it from there, and then I thought: drinking. I just thought, hey, maybe drinking will help.”
It was 2004. Williams was in Yukon Province making The Big White with Holly Hunter and Woody Harrelson. He'd given up drugs and alcohol in 1983.
“I felt alone and afraid. It was that thing of working so much, and going, ‘Fuck, maybe that will help. And it was the worst thing in the world… You feel warm, and kind of wonderful. And the next thing you know, it’s a problem, and you’re isolated.”
whether i was ever a true alcoholic, and what it means to be a true alcoholic, i don't know but i drank every day and if i didn't consume a sufficient amount of alcohol for whatever reason i became very unhappy and i frequently drank far more than a sufficient amount and did and said stupid things which i regretted later or couldn't remember.
what alcohol and drugs do, at least for some people, is they temporarily silence the superego and allow the id to express itself. this is sometimes necessary but it's dangerous : there is a reason why the psyche evolved in the way that it did.
i miss robin williams and i miss philip seymour hoffman but i only knew them on the screen. i also miss a whole bunch of other people i knew personally that bumped themselves off.
i miss them because i know the inside of the black hole they were in and when you are inside that black hole you are so completely and utterly in despair about your inability to get out of it even though you got out of it before (remember?!) but now you are inside a different black hole. the one that opens up when you're 60 or 47 and your relationship ends and you'd put absolutely everything you had left into it and you're alone and you're fucked.
do you know what it means to put absolutely everything you have into something? but there is more where that came from, right?
there is always more. yeah until there isn't. do you know what it means to put absolutely everything you have left into something?
as the man said, it’s not the edge of the world, but you can see it from there.
i agree with almost nothing freud said about the superego and i also don't agree with the person who decided to translate Ich as 'ego' and Über-ich as 'superego', and especially Es (you are also an it!) as Id, but that's neither here nor there.
the point is : Freud identified the Über-ich and for this we will be forever grateful. a thousand years from now he will be remembered for this, provided the human race is still around then and the planet would prefer it if it wasn't but who knows, humans might reinvent themselves. i am not a humanist but i am not an anti-humanist either. for all i know i may be an ahumanist, but i'd have to read patricia maccormack's book first.
i would say i am a radically optimistic posthumanist.
for me, and from my experience of working with people and the work on my-so-called-self, you have to get to know your own Über-ich and find out what it is and how it works and doesn't work — and how it tricks you.
one of the ways in which it tricks you is if you believe that the Über-ich is the best version of 'you' and if you have a less than functional Über-ich (and there are many of us — probably because we had less than fully functional, or absent, fathers :p) you can be in a position where because you have difficulties planning, making decisions, knowing what to do or not to do, even being your so-called self, you think of yourself as failing or a failure as a human being.
of course the world in which we live, particularly right now, values the ego and the super-ego. the more 'super' your superego the better it is in a world run by neoliberal individualists, egotists and narcissists.
for dutch speakers : whenever anyone says 'super!' in response to something, you can quickly add 'ego' for fun — if they say 'top!' you can add 'dog'.
