LOGORHYTHMIC

For Horia Cornean

I want to say to you: “all theorems are trivial, even when they seem colossal.” You will quote in turn that witty fellow of Guy Davenport: “every force evolves a form.” What else is there to do, then, other than drink to that? And stuff ourselves with goat meat in ginger and turmeric. Lick our fingers afterwards, get our noses sprayed by Pol Roger, and then turn to fresh raspberries. I then see color in the black hole, and you can also swear that you see a light. Right then and there. We’re ready for a cult. Our empire of the senses. A black hole has no information, so if we want to get something out of it, we had better start believing. We then go over to Taittinger and then and hence start philosophizing on identity and relationships. Then I want to say to you: “linking identity is the sum of divergence and entropy,” but then I know that you will quote me: “cut the crap.” So then I say instead: “Kafka was a vegetarian. And then he thought success is the biggest disappointment.” My reflection in the mirror is searching for the power function of this inverted logarithm. Who wants who to come? Oh, I so do. I do. Then you will. You will.

PARALLEL DIMENSIONS

Today I was accused of preferring parallels to finitudes. Well of course. Professionally, I’ve been interested in obscure things such as the fragment, for God’s sake, and personally, I like the idea that in my relationships with people in my circle of friends, I have with each and one of them a specific frequency wave that we share. Woa, some would say, this is gobbledygook, and indeed it is, if one insists on using as a set of norms things such as beliefs. As far as I’m concerned, I believe nothing on Sundays. On Sundays I think.

This whole discussion about parallel dimensions was sparked by my getting up with Cantor in my head. Cantor’s infinity – how many of them there are, what attributes they have and the like, not to mention digitalized mathematics, which claims to be on the brink of surpassing axiomatic thought through emergence, etc. – is enough to keep a girl busy over coffee. I felt coerced into thinking about things that I didn’t want to think about. I’m actually in the middle of writing a paper on, you guessed, fantasy, for a volume that goes in print at the end of this month. Gosh, I feel privileged that the editor trusts me to deliver the word in the last second – he allowed me to do so, because he knows that I always do, so I will – but it seems that I can’t get on with that until I say something here to the effect of how we tend to think of ourselves in categorial terms. (For the sake of simplicity, I’ll leave out the argument about the observer/observed paradox).

So, stereotypically there seems to be a difference between ‘parallel’ people and ‘finitude’ people. So far so good, the parallel ones go with the process, and never ask questions pertaining to content: an example would be: ‘what’s in it for us?’, but rather ask questions pertaining to form: ‘how is it for us?’ Obviously in opposition, the ‘finitude’ people go with the end result and thus pose pragmatic questions that rely on a linear progression of things that follow a clearly demarcated unfolding of a beginning, middle, and end. And now to the interesting question: what happens when finitude people fall for parallel people? If I have to provide an answer myself, and as is now established that I go with the parallels, I would have to say this: “it is rather unfortunate for the finitude person, as the parallel one will keep on going in a parallel also to all things that have a beginning, middle, and end.” The moral of this story? Don’t let yourself be coerced into listening to gobbledygook, if you’re not ready to go with gobbledygook which by virtue of its nature will at any time go parallel with any reason. (Just think of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Smullyan’s Scheherazade, Satan, and Cantor, or else just visualize that beautiful mathematical symbol for ‘congruence by definition’, the sign of equivalence plus one.)

A logical puzzle for you, lovers of games who may want to solve the puzzle of the “unfortunate situation” with the element of “us” in focus as the two questions above invite us to consider. Here is a scenario in true Smullyan’esque fashion:

1. premise: there is no us
2. premise: and yet
-----
3. what is the conclusion?

(For those logicians who will object to having two premises stem from two different categories (the ‘finitude’ vs. the ‘parallel’), I want to refer them back to the idea exposed above that the parallel dimension is superior to and encompassing of finitude. Hence the possibility to accept the two premises as if formulated by the same higher authority. Cantor is on my side here).

A bottle of champagne to the one that solves the mystery.
Enjoy your Sundays and your parallels.

BLESSING

For Ioana

I summon myself on the wizard’s threshold. I bring blessings: blessed be the virgin, blessed be the child, blessed be the man who loves so much that he can’t tell the difference anymore, blessed be the woman who loves so much that she can’t tell the difference anymore. And yet. Meanwhile, I sound like a Catholic. Blessed be the cat. Blessed be the mat. I sound like a structuralist. Saussure went bonkers from reading signs. It is not the sign that keeps us sane, but feeling. Painted with cosmic vibration. The color is yellow and white, white and yellow. The white makes room for red. “There is a Text in women,” Alexander Niccholes writes in 1615. Paradise Regained was also written in 1600s. “I see thou know’st what is of use to know.” Hold on to that. Hold on to the text. Hold on to the books. A whole library of touches. Real touches. Sublime touches. Painful touches. Readable touches. In The Book of Touches it is written: I shall not let you dangle in the air, but bless you. I shall not let you suffer alone, but bless you. I shall not let you love in silence, but bless you.

ENVISION

For Paul David Hojda

Something flows. Knowledge has movement. The movement of knowledge is to flow towards acknowledging that there is another kind of knowing than the Socratic one. The Greek’s proposition that "I know that I know nothing" is not very useful. Socrates is not thinking about knowledge in relation. But any androcentric maneuver should consider containers, counter-factuals, and contradictions. As such. And in as much. One desires to have one’s knowledge (of nothing) be contained by another’s knowledge (of something). As it were. Has Socrates ever read David’s song: “I am my beloved’s, his desire is for me?” Seeing as becoming. We contain knowledge and the other. There are only passages. Such as the one I quote from Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination: “whoever desires to be seen before his master should not enter except by means of this stone." The pronoun “this” takes the feminine form (zo’t). It is through the Shekhinah, the gateway to dwelling, that one gets to know about dwelling. "Communion can ensue only from envisioning, and envisioning only from communion." Envision the secret of the rainbow. The telephone rings. My nephew plays a Satie piece on the piano for me, and then whispers: “You know, I adore you.” I know.

MYSTICISM

I find that on Sundays I swear a lot. And that in spite of my being quite ‘religious’ on such days. Today I was trying to find some live organ concerts in the Copenhagen area, but all I could stumble upon on the internet were either ones that have been, or some future ones that feature French composers, whom I dislike. I’m a Bach kind of person. So I went swearing, all day and in all sorts of languages for variation sake. While also thinking of Mario Andretti's - the Formula One guy - words: "If everything is under control, you are going too slow." I've managed to keep a sense of mysticism up, however, judging by the various comments left by friends in connection with my latest updates on facebook. So, it was nice of the community out there to let itself be allured into the world of sentences, which for most people don’t make much sense. But my friends like to read signs. Especially on Sundays. And today they’ve raised me to the rank of high priestess or oracle. I liked that. Generally speaking, we like to believe that some of us possess powers that the majority doesn’t. For my part, such beliefs are good when we are in need of spicing up our lives. Having just attended a theater performance in Lyngby the other day, about some trivial little plot written by a famous Romanian playwright, Ion Luca Caragiale, and afterwards having spent some time around 11.30 pm at the central station in Copenhagen waiting for my train towards Roskilde, I swore that, yes, I was ready to go for all the mystery in the world, all cosmological synchronicities, and other mystical symmetries, rather than live the lives of the some 100 drunkards that passed by me. The only mysticism that preoccupies me these days is that stemming from my bewilderment at most people’s lack of interest in thought itself, not to mention imagination. Now, this type of generalization – I actually asked myself, what makes you think that you know anything about anybody’s life? – is bound to upset the politically correct, the rational, and the moralists, as indeed it’s a bad idea, but on Sundays and coming from the mouth of Pythia, I insist on my prerogative to pass judgment: yes, the lot I’ve seen at 11.30 pm on Friday, was a sad lot. So, if I were to give some advice – now I’ll enact another role than that of the oracle, as Sunday is about to be over, I’ll say this to people who feel that their lives aren’t exciting enough: read something, go with the process not the end result, and stop being afraid. Just say yes to what the mind loves in the unknown, and Pythia will follow. Alea jacta est. Now, that was rather well done, heuristically speaking, wasn’t it?

--- Walter Benjamin would agree. He already has, walking down the narrow path, the exclusive one-way street, figuring out what time the clock struck:

“To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in closure, feeling that their lives have thereby been given back to them. For the genius each caesura, and the heavy blows of fate, fall like gentle sleep itself into his workshop labor. Around it he draws a charmed circle of fragments. “Genius is application.”

("Standard Clock", from One Way-Street, Selected Writings: Vol. 1, 1913-1926, p. 446)

I'M HERE

For Watt

Beckett from across three pages, which I try to read at the same time – while three candles burn, while Bach pumps the organ, while my friend updates his status on facebook emphasizing that he likes to listen to Rabbi Elias talking incessantly, but that he also likes the Rabbi to get crushed by Bach, so that some silence would occur, while I listen to my friend and get astonished again and again because he gets it, all of it, and more so, while reading lumpy poems on the silly lumpy pudding website, while the organ suddenly takes over and the toooootally fat sounds hit you in the guttest of your gut, especially the uterus as the more anatomically specific oriented would have it, while the body sinks under heavy-weight thinking, and yet also floats in the air at the idea that all we have is words, performance, and costumes to enact the sublime, man, what bullshit, but we buy it, we buy all of it, because we sense it, man, how we sense it, that it almost makes us think that there must be more between heaven and earth, but there isn’t really, it’s all projections and mirrors, and man, how we want the best, the very very very best, the absolute best, the highest best, even Jesus said verily verily, the best exists, because we believe in it, man, can you believe that, that is just so astonishing, believing while remaining silent in the face of knowing that the other knows that one is ready already for the already, the already that has already happened, fuck man, where is Derrida when you need him to tell you that it's all very unique in that very deconstructive way, and sublime too, and verily and verily worth the while, but then he was a Romantic – Beckett says on the first page, because I can’t really read three pages at the same time, it’s all a bluff, Beckett says: “You’re on earth. There’s no cure for that.”

OATH

My best friend is visiting. This is always an event in itself. If we don’t talk about Wittgenstein – which we reserve for long telephonic conversations – then it’s always about things that fall between philosophy and theology. Heavy stuff, some might think, but not where we are concerned. We embody multitudes. We both wanted to study theology, but didn’t. We did what is worse, perhaps. Teach ourselves. In any event, if I’m the missionary converting kind, he’s the forgiving kind. When I embody the theologian I always think of myself as Der fliegende Holländer who is condemned to sail until Judgment Day. In Romanian we have an expression that characterizes someone who, when wanting to teach someone something, will not rest until the lesson is learned, so we say that the teacher forces the pupil to chase with her the “white sails” – all the staging of Wagner’s opera I’ve ever seen have had white sails in them, so there’s the connection. The beauty of the white sails is that they don’t exist. But as they conjure up an image in our heads as to what the result of the teaching lesson might be, they emphasize the process. If endured, the walking, sailing, or flying towards abstract lands, armed with a sense of trust, adoration, and anticipation, always proves to be a unique experience.

My friend forgives me for talking incessantly, and expecting total submission as we walk through the beautiful woods called Grib not far from Roskilde. Grib in Danish means catch. We catch things and the day up, convert the incredulous and call the stubborn ones stupid – that is, ourselves. I insist telling my friend: “the best season is autumn.” He thinks about it. I insist again, “don’t think: watch and smell. The best season is autumn.” He thinks about it some more. I insist a third time after having been met with the suggestion that there may be other seasons. Equally beautiful. “Wrong,” I say. “The best season is autumn.” As he realizes that this is not multiple choice, he turns to me and provides some arguments which rely on some interesting belief constructions. But I’m adamant. My husband, who is with us, turns to us from his walking ahead of us – he doesn’t have much patience for either philosophy, theology, or missionary positions – and thus says: “Shut the fuck up. You know this woman, and you know that she’s always right.” “Right,” my friend says.”

Back at home, we all sit at three small round tables, each with our laptops. Candles burn. Ethiopian incense burns. We listen to vocal music and I ask my friend to sing along. He wants to know why, but before I get to say anything, my husband says: “didn’t I just remind you to do what she says?” “Right,” my friend says again. How marvelous, I think to myself. As Yo Yo Ma plucks his cello to Bach’s music, I praise my taste in men. How did I ever manage to find these two? I convince myself that it has to do with the white sails. We all agree that we should start a new religion and call it the interrupted apron, after an Ashbery poem which my friend sends me via an email while sitting half a meter away from me. While computing, he’s reading Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath, I’m reading Marc Augé’s Oblivion, and my husband tumbles art quotes. But before I forget, or ask the question: “any followers wanting to wander,” here’s what my friend wrote in his post to me:

Dear Camelia,

to hell with all the others...

Here is a pertinent quote for you:

One might as well pick up the pieces.
What else are they for? And interrupt someone's organ recital -
we are interruptions, aren't we? I mean in the highest sense
of a target, welcoming all the dust and noise
as though we were the city's apron.

(From John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander)