2013
2013
Embedded Files
EN
EN
01.01 A new year’s eve party
01.01 A new year’s eve party
The music.
For quite some years now, the old balance of melody and rhythm has changed. The rhythm is now dominating – a basicly simple, repetitive rhythm, underlined by the monotonous bass.
The source of the rhythms was nature in the multiple manifestations of its phenomena. The source of the modern rhythm is one: the rhythm of the heart.
The music was bringing a nature’s echo and it was transferring the one who was playing the music, the one that was listening to it and the one dancing it, out there, in the world. The modern music, echo of the cardiac rhythm, the pulse, it immerses someone within his own body.
The opening out towards the world, that music was serving, was also an opening towards others: the dance was once dyadic, and even in much earlier years cyclic.
Today’s music, by immersing someone in his body, making him move in the rhythm of his internal organs, in his biological rhythms, it closes him down in to himself, it confines him in introversion.
That is the reason that nowadays one has to dance in an auto-erotic loneliness. His movement reminds us of autistic children.
02.02 William
02.02 William
Libby Busbee is pretty sure that her son William never sat through or read Shakespeare's Macbeth, even though he behaved as though he had. Soon after he got back from his final tour of Afghanistan, he began rubbing his hands over and over and constantly rinsing them under the tap.
"Mom, it won't wash off," he said.
"What are you talking about?" she replied.
"The blood. It won't come off."
On 20 March last year, the soldier's striving for self-cleanliness came to a sudden end. That night he locked himself in his car and, with his mother and two sisters screaming just a few feet away and with Swat officers encircling the vehicle, he shot himself in the head.
[guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 February 2013 16.42 GMT]
09.02 Mick Jagger
09.02 Mick Jagger
A documentary about the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger's scenic appearance.
His anorectic, doped emaciation. Its other side: the erosion of any interiority (depth, contemplation, mindfulness). The void in his eyes.
Like the also skinny fashion models, he incarnates an article to be just shown and consumed. A charismatic zombie.
The overstrained, spastic face. It reminds of the stud's face at the moment of ejaculation, which in this case takes place before the microphone and the audience's auditory canals. The female crowd in the arena plays the role of the orgasmic delirium.
10.02 Modern Greek literature
10.02 Modern Greek literature
From the module of Modern Greek Literature, in high-school:
“First-person narrative, homodiegetic and autodiegetic … Having as criterion the levels of narration and the narrator’s involvement in the events, it is ectodiegegetic-homodiegetic and the type of the narrator is ectodigegetic-homodiegetic … Narration with inner focusing”.
Like an Anatomy lesson. In the face of the lively, the pulsating, we were confused, taken aback, helpless, analphabet, rubes. But we didn’t step back. We killed it and now we can do something with it: we study it.
The revenge of the vulgar.
26.02 Knowledge
26.02 Knowledge
A description, of knowledge, like that required through psychoanalysis:
The peculiar movement of knowledge. For quite sometime it stays still, like a stone or like life in apparent death. Then, suddenly, and unexpectedly it acquires the character of a plant. You accidentally look towards its side: it hasn’t moved from its place, but it has blossomed. A great moment, but not the miracle yet. Because one day you turn your sight somewhere different, and that knowledge is now there, where it was not before for sure, it has changed its place, it has made a leap. That kind of leaping knowledge is what everyone awaits for. In the night, from which you have become full, you hearken to the growl of the new-coming predators, and in the dark their teeth illuminate dangerously and greedily. (Elias Canetti, Die Provinz des Menschen)
28.02 Underworld
28.02 Underworld
While in the tube station, at Syntagma Square, at noon. Most people wear black. If someone was to take their picture the old fashioned way, in the negative you would see white, blurred figures. They would come out from the grey station, into the town, transported through the escalators, like on industrial conveyor belts, hordes of ghosts.
The piano is playing. The musician is its instrument.
10.03 The pigeons know
10.03 The pigeons know
The sign writing Είσοδος [Entrance]. A group of pigeons look like they are watching closely the critical developments taking place at Euelpidon Square, documented in these days' snapshots.
Present in those photographs, taken by Tatiana Bolari, from Eurokinissi, are not the cups, or enraged friends of Golden Dawn, or even the captured ones, but the mute, different witnesses of all that is taking place there: the ever-present pigeons of Athens.
Source: the pigeons at Euelpidon that watch the jeep cars with the captured Golden Dawn members passing by/ iefimerida.gr
News and photograph reporters outside the court; the long hours of waiting, the boredom, the tiredness, the exhaustion. Sometimes, just then, unexpectedly the eyes open up for another view. The photo-reporter Katerina Bolari turns her sight towards the sky and the pigeons above the court’s entrance capture her attention. Their image seduces her. She takes the shot, which she then hands in at her agency, from where the picture reaches the different mass communication media.
What is it that seduces Katerina Bolari in the view of the pigeons that stand there, motionless and mute, on top of the sign? I believe that for a moment there she might be seeing the developments through their eyes. But what do those eyes see?
Those eyes see. It is for those eyes, and for those eyes only “seeing” is meant literally. It nestles in its word. We usually don’t settle for “seeing”, because we see in the exact way that is prescribed in grammar- as an active verb: we see and nevertheless we almost act: we recognize and relate everything we see with references to the time and place. The human look gets buried under the narratives that follow it. The human look is scattered between narratives. It is chatty.
It was midday and the silence of the animal great (Georg Trakl, Spring of the Soul).
The animal’s look remains silent. But this silence is not an act, since an act presupposes an Ego as its carrier. Behind this look, there is nothing – no Ego, no soul. The human look remains fixed to the representations of the seeing one. Thus, it is restricted, grounded to those representations, imprisoned by and in to them. The man sees, and at the same time he squints towards the several meanings of what he sees. He doesn't see as a whole.
The presocratic philosopher Xenophanes says of God:
ουλος ορα, ουλος δε νοει, ουλος δε τ' ακουει
His wholeness sees, and his wholeness thinks, and his wholeness hears.
Since he is not imprisoned within an Ego, his look is like that of the pigeons: the whole world. This is what excludes the chatter of their sight and makes their silence great. It is the silence of Confucius who in responding to his pupils’ encouragement to speak so they could keep notes, he answered:
Indeed, does the sky speak? The four seasons are underway, all things happen. Indeed, does the sky speak?
If we could observe our look in slow motion, we would realize that within milliseconds this is indeed the way we see, and it is only afterwards that the representations kick in. So it is in this way that we suspect, more or less distinctly, that the developments in Euelpidon Square, and of course this does not apply only to this event, are not covered, are not completely satisfied by our opinions, our interpretations, our actions, our turmoil, or our conflicts. Somewhere remains faint trace of silence; somewhere opens up a gaze that is still, tranquil, a sole gaze. This is what a Buddhist proverb describes:
The sky knows, and the earth knows as well, I know, and the others know.
The pigeons know. It is the fainted, disdained, shattered voice of our consciousness that makes us pay attention to them.
Everywhere with us, everywhere with us. (Seferis, The King of Asine)
In this archaic look things don’t have meaning. But now this is not privativ. To the contrary, the meaning that superimposes the look with representations is what deprives things from their native wealth, their world.
Seductive is exactly that which has no meaning (see Jean Baudrillard, Seduction, chapter "Death in Samarkand"). Seductive are the pigeons that look, over there, on the sign that shows the entrance to the court. They know. When we pay attention to them, we know as well. And it is there, it is from there, that we are welcoming to each other, a friendly society, and a friendly world.
I know, / I know and you know, we knew, / we didn't know / anyway we were here and not there, / and sometimes, when / it was only nothingness that stood between us, we were finding / one another all the way. (Paul Celan, So many Stars).
The pigeons in the court bring the great twist. Not the judicial and social turmoil. A twist that leads towards not anything new, but towards the latent archaic; a twist that is accomplished with “a step back” (Martin Heidegger).
A twist still and tremendous.
Thoughts that come on pigeons’ feet, they lead the world.
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra, ch. The stillest hour).
11.04 Faces
11.04 Faces
In the train. A group of young Spanish people, probably high-school students. Their faces. All so clean. They don’t denote any interiority, better, no multidimantionality. They are one-dimantional. I think of all those creatures in Facebook. The gaze that looks around and by looking at you it deadens you. Those words that tire-out in what they are saying, that fade out once they are said, like hammerings. It makes me almost embarrassed to face them.
26.04 Illumination
26.04 Illumination
The ex president of Unite States, George Bush, started painting. In an interview he reported: “has been eye-opening for me. […] I mean, I look at colors differently and I see shadow..“
Beautiful! Someone discovers that since he is not the master of the universe anymore he truly attends to the colors and comprehends shadows!
25.07 ''Live in her memory…''
25.07 ''Live in her memory…''
It is the long-standing wish given in funerals and memorial services. But the dead one doesn’t want that. Her reminiscence doesn’t allow her to rest. It torments her because it keeps her there among the living, but she doesn’t belong alongside them. It is only when she gets forgotten that she can die completely, she can get lost in her death, get relieved. So, you relatives and friends, for her sake "Live in her oblivion".
31.10 Curare
31.10 Curare
Curare is a substance that causes paralysis of the skeletal muscles. The bodily function, sensuality and consciousness remain intact.
Old songs. Foregone images, foregone passions. All is here. They touch the strings and these pulse, but no sound is coming out.
A body hears it all; it sees it and feels it; body lying under the grave, irreversibly apart from the place where the music plays.
Otherwise, a body that is under the influence of curare. In the last comparison curare represents time’s no-anymore. Just like the grave, just like the mute strings.
DE
DE
09.02 Mick Jagger
09.02 Mick Jagger
Dokumentarfilm über die Rolling Stones. Die szenische Erscheinungvon Mick Jagger.
Seine anorektische, gedopte Abmagerung. Ihre andere Seite: die Rodung jeglicher Innerlichkeit (Tiefe, Kontemplation, Achtsamkeit). Die Leere seiner Augen.
Wie die ebenso knochigen Modelle, ist er eine Ware reiner Präsentation und Konsumtion. Ein begabter Zombie.
Das überspannten Gesicht. Es erinnert an einen Koitierenden im Moment der Ejakulation, welche hier vor dem Mikrophon und den Gehörgängen des Publikums stattfindet. Die weibliche Menge in der Arena übernimmt die Rolle des orgasmischen Deliriums.
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