Saturday, January 12, 2008
Artists
All artists are angels -lift us up out of this heavy dream, you wondrous beings! - It is your madness that makes you strong. Lift us all above the clouds, so we can see the Sun.
Last Words
A fragment of a short story about the last man alive (never completed)
Last Words
I decided to come back to Earth after I projected Ayla's coffin into Alpha Centauri. There was no flash at all, no consummating spark, only a brief reflection before I lost sight of my wife. I sat there for some time, watching the green yellow disk of the sun and the other points of light through the viewport window. Some were brighter than others, and some seemed to be of different hues, but they did not twinkle or gleam or flicker - there being no atmosphere to animate the light before it entered my eyes. They existed and hung in the blackness unlike jewels or eyes or tears, unlike any worldly thing at all in fact - as if in space, their masks had become mathematical rather than aesthetic, simplified - now they were simply points of coloured light in the unending darkness. I turned away.
So it was over and I was the one. I had always known it would be so - the thought of it being otherwise was never even a consideration. She had accepted her death as a gift from me - it was all I could give her - To not be the last. After she had drank from the cup she had looked into my eyes with a kind of wonderment - almost as if she was drinking me in as well. I had let her touch my face as she looked, and I clasped her hand tightly in mine, enclosing the warm fingers. I wanted her death to be bounded by me, by my love for her, an envelope of love saving her from nothingness. And in those final moments it really was as if our love existed tangibly, corporally, between our fingertips, filling up the space between us with a warmth that smiled into us both and drew us together. I only realised she had gone when her last glance never ended - it simply continued on in its own motionless fashion like one of the points of light outside the ship. I brushed her lids shut with a stroke of my hand before carrying her to the Escape Pod.
When my solitude began the love that had existed between my wife and I became something different - as if it had become fused with the past of all things, appropriated by them, as it were. I felt it was now the property of the universe itself, or of time or even the stars- no longer ours, no longer mine. In that sense, I lost her twice.
....
Of course I have not mentioned the others before her. Their goings had punctured the years like sharp needles at the time , but there had always been Ayla and the sweet enveloping mist of our love to fall back on. And those others (who were not really just others, but my dear friends) - they too had their own subterfuges and lies, and life sustaining pockets of love to reach into - but at least, so it now seems to me in my solitude, the truth was they died well - that is, in the manner of all previous men. They inherited a purely human death. We were a race of men, and the death of each of us was absorbed by the humanity of all the rest - and that humanity had proven infinitely absorbent, infinitely capable of taking death into itself and going further. Our own existence testified to the sinuous, winding victory of the human. It answered death with new life. Death was carried as a burden but our eyes continually found each other in the darkness and we walked on, together.
Why then, was it to end with with Ayla, with me, I cannot say. When I was a child I played with my companions like any child , teasing them and making stories, laughing too - and their faces were just as ignorant and joyful as my own. The hope in my parents eyes projected me forward into a universe of life, not death. I mistook love for the world, like all men before me. I was even an optimist.
Yet it has ended, afterall. Now I have to be the last man, and my merely personal life has ended. In allowing my love a human death I have ceased to be human myself. I have to take up the duties of my station, i feel, duties which are cosmic, rather than mundane. I feel that I will go to Earth, not because the she is my mother - but because she is my greatgrandmother. I was born on board ship - its white interior is like warm bed linen to me, it is my true home. But i will go to earth.
The phrase " to pay my last respects" comes to mind, even though this isn't quite right. I want to see some sand, I think - from the ocean shore, I'm not sure why. I will be with my greatgrandmother while I write what there is to be said.
And then I will die.
Last Words
I decided to come back to Earth after I projected Ayla's coffin into Alpha Centauri. There was no flash at all, no consummating spark, only a brief reflection before I lost sight of my wife. I sat there for some time, watching the green yellow disk of the sun and the other points of light through the viewport window. Some were brighter than others, and some seemed to be of different hues, but they did not twinkle or gleam or flicker - there being no atmosphere to animate the light before it entered my eyes. They existed and hung in the blackness unlike jewels or eyes or tears, unlike any worldly thing at all in fact - as if in space, their masks had become mathematical rather than aesthetic, simplified - now they were simply points of coloured light in the unending darkness. I turned away.
So it was over and I was the one. I had always known it would be so - the thought of it being otherwise was never even a consideration. She had accepted her death as a gift from me - it was all I could give her - To not be the last. After she had drank from the cup she had looked into my eyes with a kind of wonderment - almost as if she was drinking me in as well. I had let her touch my face as she looked, and I clasped her hand tightly in mine, enclosing the warm fingers. I wanted her death to be bounded by me, by my love for her, an envelope of love saving her from nothingness. And in those final moments it really was as if our love existed tangibly, corporally, between our fingertips, filling up the space between us with a warmth that smiled into us both and drew us together. I only realised she had gone when her last glance never ended - it simply continued on in its own motionless fashion like one of the points of light outside the ship. I brushed her lids shut with a stroke of my hand before carrying her to the Escape Pod.
When my solitude began the love that had existed between my wife and I became something different - as if it had become fused with the past of all things, appropriated by them, as it were. I felt it was now the property of the universe itself, or of time or even the stars- no longer ours, no longer mine. In that sense, I lost her twice.
....
Of course I have not mentioned the others before her. Their goings had punctured the years like sharp needles at the time , but there had always been Ayla and the sweet enveloping mist of our love to fall back on. And those others (who were not really just others, but my dear friends) - they too had their own subterfuges and lies, and life sustaining pockets of love to reach into - but at least, so it now seems to me in my solitude, the truth was they died well - that is, in the manner of all previous men. They inherited a purely human death. We were a race of men, and the death of each of us was absorbed by the humanity of all the rest - and that humanity had proven infinitely absorbent, infinitely capable of taking death into itself and going further. Our own existence testified to the sinuous, winding victory of the human. It answered death with new life. Death was carried as a burden but our eyes continually found each other in the darkness and we walked on, together.
Why then, was it to end with with Ayla, with me, I cannot say. When I was a child I played with my companions like any child , teasing them and making stories, laughing too - and their faces were just as ignorant and joyful as my own. The hope in my parents eyes projected me forward into a universe of life, not death. I mistook love for the world, like all men before me. I was even an optimist.
Yet it has ended, afterall. Now I have to be the last man, and my merely personal life has ended. In allowing my love a human death I have ceased to be human myself. I have to take up the duties of my station, i feel, duties which are cosmic, rather than mundane. I feel that I will go to Earth, not because the she is my mother - but because she is my greatgrandmother. I was born on board ship - its white interior is like warm bed linen to me, it is my true home. But i will go to earth.
The phrase " to pay my last respects" comes to mind, even though this isn't quite right. I want to see some sand, I think - from the ocean shore, I'm not sure why. I will be with my greatgrandmother while I write what there is to be said.
And then I will die.
Thoughts
Thoughts ( I wrote these down ages ago - felt lile sharing them here:))
The shoulders feel displeasure as a burden. Every muscle of the body has its own conception of evil, which is simply the cause of its pain. A composer witnesses the cacophony of suffering - the sensualist hides his fingers from the shock of the hammer's blow.
Deeper than the bond -fear at its dissolution.
To love someone is to see them foregrounded against those we do not love.
The souls of those we love flow into us and change our course.
Universal Love, "universalised love", is a nonsense. But universal possibility of love - universal openness to love - is the essence of humanity.
A word that means "to maliciously add extra dots to a Connect-the-Dots Picture" ...
Irony as affective 3D glasses - the pleasure being the perceived "depth" of humour, which appears when two contradictory flat interpretations are slid over one another.
Subjectivity becomes a matter of permutations : commodities are arranged on shelves, and periodically taken down and strewn across the floor randomly in an orgy of self-assertion. We all crave to swirl the eddies of production in our own special way, even if it is only cancerous smoke in our lungs.
The so called "descent" into particulars, really an acsent. The more we see the particular as a particular, the more spiritual it appears. The more we see the individual, the greater the weight of the world on its shoulders.
The distinctions in metaphysics are ugly. They pretend to precision but are really muddled. Which is far worse than the originally vague, but honest, distinctions in ordinary language.
Appeals to salvation recognise the real mismatch between the moral order and the world - they presuppose it ... ( therefore to reconcile the problem of evil, and still accept salvation is ridiculous.)
A word for opening the "open other end" end of a milk cartoon. Someone who does this all the time. ( A series of minor trespasses culminating in a total breakdown. He finally decides to kill himself but fumbles with the gun and goes completely mad.)
The unreality of dream not in the fantastic procession of forms, but in the shadowy half-aware formlessness of the Dream-"I" - and this the truth in the comparison between dream and world. ( Magical nature of dream - a world without a self.)
The feeling of despair is the cessation of emotional life, of inner response, whilst the state of perception continues. Thus one might be listening to the radio, the sounds will continue to fill the room, everything will quietly go on its own way, like a flock of birds drifting off towards the horizon, but what refuses to move, what is left behind, is the individual consciousness.
There doesn't seem to be any use for a literature of surrealism/absurdism anymore - these have seeped into society, into the very technology we use: hallucination, dream, are present everywhere. What literature can do is show the silhouette of personality against this background, like a shadow falling on something that is itself moving, indefinite.
I walked down the street. A little boy held his mother's hand and told her: "And then the skeleton stuck a needle in the man's eye!"
The idea of sitting down for a day with a great "classic" cuddled to your forehead, is probably more charming than the effect of the book itself ...
Personal Freedom: Everyone talks as if the only alternatives were a complete determinism of character, or a total plasticity. But we "become" ourselves in the manner of someone who wakes up half-way whilst rolling down a hillside - we were asleep for some of the roll and have gathered momentum ... the choice is there to change direction, but our maneuvering depends on the speed built up during the period of unconsciousness.
I felt a shudder of negative re-enforcement up my spine ....
The whole ocean is just a drop in the ocean!
Rain hitting the Earth for the billionth time - as if the clouds were trying to escape but never made it.
We never "consult" our memory - if we consult anything, it is the world laid out in front of us, which flings us without any choice back into our minds, into Memory.
The ability of man to hide himself - even from God. Despair is the agony of knowing one is beyond being known.
There's something funny in the thought that for billions of years the earth was silent - and then all of a sudden an ape started talking.
"Buried in the cold earth" - a stupid remark, which plays on our imagination to create a fear of death.
"Daze of our lives ..."
For a moment, as I was walking from the living room to my bedroom, I had a completely objective vision of the human race, of what our "Goodness" consists in, which is this: to aid our own, and see to our own species-survival. What do we (really) care for the other creatures on this planet, except in so far as they add or subtract to our own happiness? ( One shudders when one realises this.)
Might is not right - what genius first thought of that?
Walking in the rain, I felt like something the cat had dragged in, had dragged in.
To write of love, is an act of love.
Life is a jigsaw puzzle. The death of a friend removes one piece. It will never be complete.
That which is eternally true or: that which is eternally needed.
Ideals are not present in Art like shifting forms behind a curtain - they exist as punctures, ruptures, events.
Realism recquires a great deal of imagination.
Words, names, grown old and dissociated from their origins, like fossilised skeletons whose articulations have smoothed over with time.
The name and its origin: useless flower of sound, hidden root of meaning, history.
Each of us huge tangles, intricate knots of influences, tendencies. We see all the threads running in and out but not how they are intertwined. The concept of psychoanalysis - a "science" of disentanglement!
Ideals are blunt instruments.
Laws - exceptions to exceptions.
There is no grand view of life, but there is the necessity for a shifting of perpectives, a hopscotch jump between views which profess universality. Everyone wants you to believe their stories are absolute - and without some measure of illusion, even the little truth they contain could not be grasped.
Idealism in youth is not in contradiction to the chaotic behaviour actually exhibited - it is another conseqence of rallying around vague centres of being rather than the results of investigation. ( It is not even insincere - two heads full of Divine Love are naturally bound to hit into each other.)
The shoulders feel displeasure as a burden. Every muscle of the body has its own conception of evil, which is simply the cause of its pain. A composer witnesses the cacophony of suffering - the sensualist hides his fingers from the shock of the hammer's blow.
Deeper than the bond -fear at its dissolution.
To love someone is to see them foregrounded against those we do not love.
The souls of those we love flow into us and change our course.
Universal Love, "universalised love", is a nonsense. But universal possibility of love - universal openness to love - is the essence of humanity.
A word that means "to maliciously add extra dots to a Connect-the-Dots Picture" ...
Irony as affective 3D glasses - the pleasure being the perceived "depth" of humour, which appears when two contradictory flat interpretations are slid over one another.
Subjectivity becomes a matter of permutations : commodities are arranged on shelves, and periodically taken down and strewn across the floor randomly in an orgy of self-assertion. We all crave to swirl the eddies of production in our own special way, even if it is only cancerous smoke in our lungs.
The so called "descent" into particulars, really an acsent. The more we see the particular as a particular, the more spiritual it appears. The more we see the individual, the greater the weight of the world on its shoulders.
The distinctions in metaphysics are ugly. They pretend to precision but are really muddled. Which is far worse than the originally vague, but honest, distinctions in ordinary language.
Appeals to salvation recognise the real mismatch between the moral order and the world - they presuppose it ... ( therefore to reconcile the problem of evil, and still accept salvation is ridiculous.)
A word for opening the "open other end" end of a milk cartoon. Someone who does this all the time. ( A series of minor trespasses culminating in a total breakdown. He finally decides to kill himself but fumbles with the gun and goes completely mad.)
The unreality of dream not in the fantastic procession of forms, but in the shadowy half-aware formlessness of the Dream-"I" - and this the truth in the comparison between dream and world. ( Magical nature of dream - a world without a self.)
The feeling of despair is the cessation of emotional life, of inner response, whilst the state of perception continues. Thus one might be listening to the radio, the sounds will continue to fill the room, everything will quietly go on its own way, like a flock of birds drifting off towards the horizon, but what refuses to move, what is left behind, is the individual consciousness.
There doesn't seem to be any use for a literature of surrealism/absurdism anymore - these have seeped into society, into the very technology we use: hallucination, dream, are present everywhere. What literature can do is show the silhouette of personality against this background, like a shadow falling on something that is itself moving, indefinite.
I walked down the street. A little boy held his mother's hand and told her: "And then the skeleton stuck a needle in the man's eye!"
The idea of sitting down for a day with a great "classic" cuddled to your forehead, is probably more charming than the effect of the book itself ...
Personal Freedom: Everyone talks as if the only alternatives were a complete determinism of character, or a total plasticity. But we "become" ourselves in the manner of someone who wakes up half-way whilst rolling down a hillside - we were asleep for some of the roll and have gathered momentum ... the choice is there to change direction, but our maneuvering depends on the speed built up during the period of unconsciousness.
I felt a shudder of negative re-enforcement up my spine ....
The whole ocean is just a drop in the ocean!
Rain hitting the Earth for the billionth time - as if the clouds were trying to escape but never made it.
We never "consult" our memory - if we consult anything, it is the world laid out in front of us, which flings us without any choice back into our minds, into Memory.
The ability of man to hide himself - even from God. Despair is the agony of knowing one is beyond being known.
There's something funny in the thought that for billions of years the earth was silent - and then all of a sudden an ape started talking.
"Buried in the cold earth" - a stupid remark, which plays on our imagination to create a fear of death.
"Daze of our lives ..."
For a moment, as I was walking from the living room to my bedroom, I had a completely objective vision of the human race, of what our "Goodness" consists in, which is this: to aid our own, and see to our own species-survival. What do we (really) care for the other creatures on this planet, except in so far as they add or subtract to our own happiness? ( One shudders when one realises this.)
Might is not right - what genius first thought of that?
Walking in the rain, I felt like something the cat had dragged in, had dragged in.
To write of love, is an act of love.
Life is a jigsaw puzzle. The death of a friend removes one piece. It will never be complete.
That which is eternally true or: that which is eternally needed.
Ideals are not present in Art like shifting forms behind a curtain - they exist as punctures, ruptures, events.
Realism recquires a great deal of imagination.
Words, names, grown old and dissociated from their origins, like fossilised skeletons whose articulations have smoothed over with time.
The name and its origin: useless flower of sound, hidden root of meaning, history.
Each of us huge tangles, intricate knots of influences, tendencies. We see all the threads running in and out but not how they are intertwined. The concept of psychoanalysis - a "science" of disentanglement!
Ideals are blunt instruments.
Laws - exceptions to exceptions.
There is no grand view of life, but there is the necessity for a shifting of perpectives, a hopscotch jump between views which profess universality. Everyone wants you to believe their stories are absolute - and without some measure of illusion, even the little truth they contain could not be grasped.
Idealism in youth is not in contradiction to the chaotic behaviour actually exhibited - it is another conseqence of rallying around vague centres of being rather than the results of investigation. ( It is not even insincere - two heads full of Divine Love are naturally bound to hit into each other.)
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