FRAG/MENTS

ON TIME

2012-01-26T12:49:00.005+01:00

I’m anticipating with great pleasure my sabbatical this term. Although I enjoy teaching, I find it that if I have more time I can teach more systematically people other than students. Or people interested in what we call ’weird stuff’. As I like to think of myself as a reader – I read books, Tarot, pictures, children, animals, the universe, stones and water – I find that it helps people to know that there are others in the world who appreciate their time on a level that's not culturally time-bound. We all have an intuitive knowledge about the fact that time is significant, but we rarely have this knowledge consolidated – such knowledge often gets to be perceived as some cosmic gobbledygook. So, we either doubt too much, or we believe in nonsense too much. Here, what I have to offer is this: we are here to pay attention – or so the Zen Buddhists say, or so the Shamans say, or so Bach says, or so the mathematicians say, or so we all say.

To arrive at any conclusion takes time. Neither intelligence nor thought contribute to enhancing the nuance of understanding that time and space alone create. The impatient ones, the ones who even want a reward for their blunders, get a reward. We call it the world of clichés.

I’ll be globetrotting again in search of the present, away from myself, away from repeating myself to death, repeating others to death, away from the past, away from projecting fictions into the future, away from myth and symbolism. On my schedule I have new and old places to visit: London, Tromsø, Harstad, Delhi, Turku, New York, Helsinki, Olso, Copenhagen, and then back to the source, Roskilde. I will conclude a few things, but not before I get out there all the senses available to me. Get them in there as well. I’ll take the time it takes to eat and appreciate those oysters at Grand Central in New York and the roast goat in Tromsø, hear the sound of the drums pulsating at unison with ancient history in Harstad, say abracadabra with the magical Giordano Bruno in Turku, get all Aquarian with John Starr Cooke in Helsinki, greet and greet and greet the holy men in Delhi and Kurukshetra, get hit in my gut by the dust of my 1181 supernova spread all over in Oslo, step into the cathedral in Roskilde and say, I’m back, and so are my senses, or at least my sense of time.

We can’t run away from time, therefore all time is always the right time. The only thing that may be wrong in our ballooning through space is failing to make a few good distinctions. To right that wrong, it takes time. So take it. It's all you've got.

SHAPE-SHIFTER

2012-01-08T11:49:00.001+01:00

Breakfast on board the Hurtigruten ship that goes from Bergen and all the way up to Kirkenes. There are things to see on the way, adventure activities on land, kissing huskies and dog sledding, flying over the snow and communing with the spirit of Odin in the Lofoten islands. All very good. But I’m reminded of a pledge I made some 2 years ago on the same Hurtigruten, when I decided that if I should ever get rich, I would buy the entire fleet and enforce a few rules. Starting with banishing all the yakking at breakfast. I listen to people talking over their coffee, all in a very assertive way, all being very formal and reverential. All about the kids’ schools, work and health, and the occasional love grief or frustration. No one is interested in the meaning of life, or the grand nothingness. We pass it ever so gracefully, though. The white Lyngen Alps stare us in the face silently and are inviting us to imitate them. Sit in silence and wonderment. But we don’t do it, of course not, and why should we? How could we? In this civilized world, it’s crucial that we yak at breakfast in a loud voice, as we need to remind ourselves of our mighty powers which we need to exercise as soon as we get out of the house to go to work, to school, or to seduce somebody. The meaning of life is called selling. We need to sell all that we’ve got: Our looks, our brains, our bodies, our souls, our dead ancestors, and our relatives. Everything is for sale, and the ones who can do it best are the ones considered successful. They are showered with rewards in the form of prizes, which then enable the winners to sell themselves some more – now by proxy, meaning that it won’t matter any more how brainy or empty-headed you might be, or how good looking. People will buy your stuff simply because you won a prize. It’s a good life.

Lunch is coming. Free buffet. The other rule that I would enforce if I had the fleet would be the ‘no ‘free’ lunches’ rule. No more eating. Only bread and water. If you want salt on the bread, you can lean over the railing on board and let your bread be splashed with sea-water. There would be retreat rooms instead of TV rooms. No soap operas. The only drama allowed would be the drama created in these silent rooms, where people can get to do yoga, meditate in zazen, and feel the pain of disciplining the body. All for nothing. My chief of staff in charge with the well-being of the tourists onboard will have one announcement only over the speakers: ‘good morning ladies and gentlemen, today we begin the day with selling nothing.’ ‘Guten morgen, meine Damen und Herren, heute Morgen fangen wir an Nichts zu verkaufen.’ ‘God morgen, mine damer og herrer, i dag starter vi dagen med at sælge ingenting.’

Dinner time. Everyone out on the deck. The full moon creates magic, Trollfjorden is not bewitching for nothing, even though the trolls are not interested in exchange rates and more selling. Here you get the magic all for free. By the time you hit the deep arctic, the only desire you will have left would be the desire to think of yourself as one without a self. As No One. You will come home empowered. Nothing will impress you anymore. You will be able to see through a lot of shit. You will wear masks all according to context and circumstance. You will have become a shape-shifter.

BELIEVING

2012-01-03T12:22:00.002+01:00

I’m cruising through the Arctic in the North of Norway. I do a Tarot reading here, and another there. I quickly settle the score with the incredulous ones upon being presented with the question: ‘so, you’re an academic AND a fortuneteller?’ I just say ‘yes.’ But ‘yes’ is never enough. ‘Surely you don’t believe in that sort of thing,’ people go, without defining what ‘that sort of thing’ is. I always say the following to this: ‘well, obviously I don’t believe in it. What I believe in is the words of men and women walking down the aisle, swearing eternal love to each other, only to demonstrate the opposite in the end.’ As they say, 50 million people can’t be wrong. They all believe in THAT sort of thing, and so do I, so help me God.

Here’s a recent reading that addressed the above issue. As one can ask meta-questions of Tarot, we asked the following: ‘how does the belief in tarot compare to the belief in marriage?’

I pulled two sets of 3 cards for each, one for Tarot and the other one for marriage:

TAROT: As de Baston (Ace of Wands), Roy Despee (King of Swords) Le Fov (The Fool)

On what you get out of your belief in Tarot, here’s what I said:

Tarot allows you to put your will and belief forcefully to work in the service of your dissecting mind. Whatever you find sets you free. You don’t explain the Tarot, you just let it walk its talk. It will always have an answer that will tell you what you need to know. Whether you believe in the Tarot or not, the Tarot always wins.

MARRIAGE: 3 de deniers (3 coins), Valet de deniers (page of coins), 5 de coupes (5 cups)

Here, the story is this one:

Two get together to tend to a third. But they only use half of their potential. With assets buried in the ground, what you invest in returns as disappointment in love, broken engagements, loss and sorrow.

THE VERDICT: Before I said anything, the woman in front of me disclosed that she is tired of her marriage, that she is tired of who she is in it, and many more things. I myself got a lesson in the benefits of why not to do it.

So, no fortune was told on this occasion. More like misfortune, which is yet not enough reason to give up fortunetelling just because the uninitiated may have a problem with it.

Enjoy your freedoms, and the suspension of (dis)belief.

§

Note on the deck: Jean Noblet’s Tarot de Marseille, 1650, as restored by Jean-Claude Flornoy

WINTER SUN

2011-12-16T16:59:00.012+01:00

Part of my academic research is dedicated to looking at Tarot as a cultural text. What does this mean? This means that I look at how the visual language of Tarot intersects with cultural precepts about a given phenomenon, a type, an archetype, a relation (of class, gender, race, sex), reality, magic, and the physical and metaphysical world. This is already more than what most people associate with Tarot: a fortunetelling device that the gypsies, neo-pagan witches, and other such devils employ in their charlatan endeavor to cheat venerable people out of their money. To me, I don’t really see what the difference is between such tricksters and the ones working on Wall Street, but then again, such is the working of language. Some names are more respectful than others, and people are entitled to their opinion. I’m happy to report, however, that most of the serious Tarot readers wouldn’t be caught dead trying to defend the workings of Tarot, explain endlessly on what we can use it for, nor why we should upgrade the condition for its existence from crap to crown. For the interested folks, there are enough clever books out there they can consult.

TO FOLLOW OR NOT TO FOLLOW TRADITION

The thing about tarot worth knowing is that there are 2 main traditions: before occultism and after. The occult tarot was started by the French in around 1781. Some of them were into illuminism and masonism (Antoine Court de Gebelin and later Comte de Mellet) when they started claiming that there is a relation between tarot and the ancient Egyptians. This is a good story, but there isn't any real historical evidence to support it. In around 1900, and in spite of the lack of sources, The Golden Dawn order in Britain revived the research into Tarot’s links with Thoth, and particularly Aleister Crowley proved to be influential. His own Thoth Tarot, designed with Lady Frieda Harris as the illustrator, is still very popular. Edward Waite’s contribution to Tarot made an even more brilliant impact, as the deck that he designed in tandem with illustrator Pamela Colman Smith has gone on to become the most copied Tarot, and the standard Tarot now used throughout most of the Western, Anglo-American world. Many artists still use Colman Smith’s insights for the illustration of the minor Arcana cards.

The other tradition is the ‘French’ tradition based on the Visconti-Sforza pack (the first Tarot we know of from 1450) and the Tarot de Marseille pack. The Marseille cards, although originating in the north of Italy and then Paris, are a stylized derivation of the Visconti-Sforza cards. Unlike the occultists, the ones working with the historical decks – and which do not have picture representations on the minor Arcana cards but stick to the geometrical patterns – are simply not interested in finding correspondences all over the place between this and that spread position, Kabbalah, numbers, and some other complex system of symbolization. I myself work with Tarot de Marseille and the Visconti-Sforza cards. I never do ‘spreads’ – cards locked in a certain position whose meaning is assigned beforehand. I do 3 cards at the time, and no more than 9. No reversals – some prefer to shuffle the deck with reversed cards. Also, I never see the individual cards as having any inherent meaning. In conjunction, a synthetic message emerges all by itself, out of the direct, simple, and beautiful images that these cards represent. In a card-reading context for divination purposes, as people come to you with a question, my philosophy is that it should be possible to give them one straightforward answer in 10 seconds flat without losing yourself in irrelevant details and redundant information. If, however, there's another agenda, and people come to you for something else rather than an answer – to be reassured, to be comforted, to find peace, to confess – then there is the option of going the therapy way, and perhaps even conduct masterclasses in esoteric studies. Thus, depending on how you frame the question, you can follow either the 'keep it simple' types or the psychology consultant types. Both groups can work magic in terms of helping people with their issues.

TAROT AS CULTURAL TEXT

From a cultural point of view, the most fascinating thing to consider is that there is no other art form that has been reproduced to such an extent as the Tarot cards. Especially the 22 Major Arcana cards, the cards dealing with archetypal forces, have undergone fantastic transformations. No other art form can boast such a history of engaging generation after generation in rethinking ways of understanding such popular cards as the Death card, the Devil, The Emperor, the Tower, or The Lovers. It is, for instance, fascinating to see how a feminist deck puts a spin on these types, by telling the same story of an archetype as does a fantasy deck, a queer deck, a cats’ deck, or a housewives’ deck. As I have emphasized elsewhere in my reflections on Tarot, we can appreciate Tarot for its art, for its cultural significance, for its philosophy, for its secrets, for its poetry, for its psychology, for its shamanic qualities, for its prophetic powers, for its letting us know where we are in the present, for its derailing of our reality, for its presenting us with an alternative view of the choices at hand, the love that kills us, or the kindness of strangers.

Thus, in my writings on Tarot I emphasize both the divinatory aspect of the cards and modes of reading the cards that enhance our interpretative skills. While divination relies on the kind of reading that takes us beyond rationally understanding a situation, and which does not necessarily lead to action, hermeneutics, knowing what to make of 3 pictures on the table, enables us to perceive how we can ‘understand’ things with our emotional faculties. This is actually a crucial distinction, as, say, if someone understands at the cognitive level that he or she is not happy, if such understanding leads to action, the action more often than not turns out to be ‘wrong’, in the sense of its being off-beat with ‘what is really going on’. Conversely, if one ‘feels’ that one is not happy, the action following the desire to change that often leads to the right course of action. We have countless scientific reports, from neuro-psychology to its cognitive counterpart, that claim veracity for this state of affairs. Our best actions are not the ones that ‘make sense’ but the ones that ‘feel right’.

‘DISTURBING’ TAROT

As an example of what we can see in cards that cut across history, art, hermetic philosophy, and cultural text, I want to give an example of what reading with unusual decks can do for us. These decks are Elisabetta Cassari’s Solleone cards (1983), and the Swiss philosopher, Charles Frey’s Der Akron Tarot (2004) (now both out of print and difficult to find collector’s items). So, let me plunge right into it.

SOLLEONE TAROT

A woman comes to me with a question about her relationship with a man, whom she presents as being inflexible, and ‘not very quick at relating to matters of the soul,’ as she puts it. Three cards fall on the table, and I deliver the first 10-second ‘sentence.’

A powerful man (Il Re di Denari, The King of Pentacles) is intent on banishing you in the desert (L’Eremita, The Hermit) for having sacrificed his material goal for an ideal that he is clueless about (L’Apesso, The Hanged Man). The woman poses an additional question: ‘how can I go against such a man?’ And the cards answer: ‘poison the bastard with your wit.’ (Tre di Spade, 3 swords; Due di Coppe, 2 cups). In Cassari the 2 of cups has an unambiguous message: give him more poison.

What I like about Cassari’s deck is the fact that it dares to go against the tyranny of dogmatism. In her critique of the Catholic Church, she denounces the stupidity related to men formulating rigid rules and then innocently asking: Is there anything else other than the Inquisition? The innocence stops at the stake, where the powerful cardinals, moralists, and other clergy assume the role of spectators, yet passing the final Judgment: ‘burn the defying witch.’ The subtle message in Cassari’s whole deck is to pose mirror questions à la: is there anything else to do to these men than bewitch them, poison them, or stab them? If one looks at her High Priestess, one can clearly see that the woman there is leading other women into the temptation.

Seeing Tarot as a cultural text is not even a small task, nor a frivolous one. In the feminist context, or the ‘against status-quo’ context, one must honor the intercourse between women and wit, for it formulates a poetics of the visual text as it is written in the image of the iconoclast. Where more humble pursuits are concerned, such as helping people, decks such as Cassari’s leave us, the self-proclaimed diviners, with the choice of getting it out of our special drawer where we hide it just at the moment when the woman in front of you is spilling her guts over her disappointment: her man manifested again his passion for her by informing her that he will now do the dishes as he can see that she is kind of tired, thereby not only assuming that such a task ‘obviously’ belongs to her, but also that he rules not only over the favors that he graciously decides to bestow on her, but also over maintaining the house-order. I often ask these women: ‘are you happy with what this man gives you?’ They often say no, and then they point out that it is pointless to tell such men what they want as they would never get it. It’s a sad, sad situation, I always conclude, intoning to Ray Charles.

DER AKRON TAROT

This brings me to another example, this time from a reading with Der Akron Tarot.

3 cards fall on the table: Der Mond (The Moon), König der Scheiben (The King of Pentacles) and Das dunkle Kind (The Dark Child).

The same powerful man as the above Cardinal with money is depicted in Der Akron Tarot almost as a Dickensian fat frog who has had too much to drink, eat, and who is now even tired of ordering servants around to serve him. His dull mind is incapable of paying attention to the quiet, intuitive signals from the moon. One can only speculate that in this conjunction, as the moon remains a distant and incomprehensible thing, succumbing to its fascinating shadow will only bring out the inner psychopath in the king. The Dark Child is a terrible card, and one of Akron’s original contributions to Tarot, along with devising 2 cards for the Devil (in Der Akron Tarot we have a total of 80 cards, rather than the traditional 78).

Women are no better than men here. The mature Königin der Kelche (The Queen of Cups) is vain and superficial in spite of her cunning ability to function as a mirror for the soul, while the Prinzessin der Stäbe (The Princess of Wands) is daddy’s insufferable girl. Die Hohepriesterin (The High Priestess) pops out of a magic box with electrifying hair, and Die scharlachrote Anima (The Scarlet Woman), who is also something else beneath, a black goddess, is Akron’s second Devil. Der Herrscher (The Emperor) may attempt to organize and ‘educate’ these beings, but he is useless in his function. All big uniform – here comes the general – and very little brains. The cattle underneath him pull in different directions, but he is too busy with his own size to notice anything. Laugh, laugh, laugh – at him. Again, this Tarot is a wonderful work of deconstructing the grand myth behind power figures.

FEEL THE SWORD AND BE HAPPY

There are a thousand modern decks around, and most of them do not have such bleak visions of the reality of man (and you are welcome to take ‘man’ literally). Most decks are happy to follow the old suit and accept the legacy men left throughout the ages: wars, battles, possessiveness, and falseness. In these decks, kings are benevolent, even the King of Swords, cups are always about love, wands about virile and erect passion, coins about magic, and swords about intellectual acuity. The Emperor is a responsible father who makes his Empress happy, and together they manage their wonderfully functioning kinds. While I try not to take any positions beyond the fact, or beyond the claim that I merely look at how language constitutes us differently, I must admit that I don’t like these decks very much. In people’s ordinary reality, Cassari’s rendition of the 10 of cups, with the woman doing the dishes, tired and consummated by child-rearing, is much closer to what they experience than the rosy, rainbowy image that we find in most of the other contemporary decks, where all people are just beautiful, happy, and unaware.

So, I must confess that I’m a purist. I read with Visconti-Sforza and Jean Noblet, my 1450 and 1650 decks which are free of imposed on symbolism, and for special occasions, I read with what others have now called ‘disturbing’ decks. But for their cultural significance I look at as many tarot decks as I can possibly get my hands on. There’s enough Tarot genius around to keep us entertained until the day we die, provided that we give it a chance, and see it for what it is: the work of people trying to understand themselves in the simplest of ways, which is the way that’s free of prejudice, free of cultural preconditioning, and free of judgmental eyes.

With the holidays around the corner, I hope you’re all lucky to get a pack of cards. Have a joyful Tarot Christmas.

(For more Tarot related posts, go to my Taroflexions website).

ZAZEN

2011-12-07T16:15:00.004+01:00

Every now and then people say things to us that make us disclose the reasons for our counter-reactions. This month I’ve been constantly reminded of the fact that although I don’t follow any religion whatsoever, I am what others call a Zen Buddhist. Given my life philosophy, I must admit that both in and out of the Zen Buddhist context, I’ve now been a Zen person for 27 years. In fact I can even remember the exact date, when, on December 7 1984 I went Zen, after having confronted a whole Sanhedrin of another religion. I made some ‘unfortunate’ statements against the venerable institution of marriage, which the patriarchs, members of the venerable council in charge with maintaining the venerable tradition, didn’t like. As patriarchs are not in the business of listening to the voice of reason, I decided that it was high time for me as well to stop reasoning and to stop explaining what is wrong with hypocrisy, cultural preconditioning, and uniforming the self according to five-year plans.

I’m happy to say that 27 years down the road, I’m still against competing in school for the highest grades at 16 – so that you can impress your teachers and make your parents proud; showing your sexual prowess at 21 – it’s all about sex anyway, as some smart folks claim; getting both the dream job and the dream man at 26; feeding the third baby at 31; getting a divorce at 36; sleeping with your boss for a promotion at 41 – or getting another man to turn you into a respectable woman, and with whom you can live in a bigger house; getting involved in the community for the sake of preserving the future for the future generation at 46; ‘finding yourself’ at 51 after some brief internal crisis – you can’t be too unhappy for too long; getting ready for the marriage of your own children at 56; swooning over the grandkids at 61; retiring at 66 – you did well, after all; going on a pilgrimage at 71 – it’s time to think about death, but not too hard, you don’t want to get too depressed; pestering your family doctor about the whole world’s personal and political ailments at 76; and ending your days with the big remote control in your hands at 81 – as you can’t understand what all this minute technology is all about.

‘Yes, yes,’ most people would say, ‘but there are nuances, it doesn’t have to be like that, we can find that every age is meaningful in itself, and there are all these stories we can invent about ourselves,’ and so on and so forth. ‘Good for you,’ I’d say, ‘and good luck with it.’ And this is the point when I’m forced to disclose that I don’t believe in meaning, and that all of the above means nothing. Time means nothing and 'personal realizations' mean even less. ‘What do you mean you don’t believe in meaning,’ people would then further insist, and you begin to see the consequences of their rationality and how it shines through, for you yourself don’t make any sense. ‘You must be depressed or something, someone must have hurt you, or done you some wrong to be so cynical,’ people would rationally conjecture. To this you would be adamant in your response: ‘No, nothing is wrong with me.’ ‘But then how can you still not believe in meaningful narratives,’ people would go rationally, for there’s a lot of logic in the logic of concrete manifestations. And yet, even though you’d insist that modes of perception are often irrational, and that this is the reason why you believe in poetry - for poets are the only ones who don’t have a problem with death and are not so goddamned self-delusional - somehow the others would still win. ‘Yes,’ they’d argue, ‘but poets are a thing of the past, and besides, who can ever understand poets? They are all mad. They have no morals, no family values, they are all dangerous, and not to mention, suicidal.’ Indeed, most rational folks have a point. So what would you then say, if you had to maintain your position, however precarious? You’d have to sound conclusive and say, ‘now listen, do you know why I don’t place my faith in language, even if language is all we’ve got? Why I don’t like to consecrate words and rituals because they don’t mean anything at all? Because I’m a Zen Buddhist, that’s why.’ ‘Ah, well, finally, why didn’t you say so,’ people would go, sighing with relief. ‘That explains everything.’

Happy holidays to you all. Everything is clear now, and it still means nothing. Take it from a Zen Roshi who has just stumbled over some more funny koans, and even funnier stories of perception. Here’s one from Josh Steiger:

The Zen Roshi and the Ice Cream

A Zen roshi and his buddy from India (who was himself, of course, a yogi) are taking a walk along the beach. In the distance, they see an island, and on that island is an ice cream stand. Now, it's a hot day, and the venerable masters agree to go to the island and cool off with a nice lime sherbet.

The yogi says, "For thirty years, I secluded myself in a monastery, high in the hills of Nepal. Every day I would walk on hot coals, hang myself from the ceiling with fish-hooks, and eat feathers. After my thirty-year seclusion was over, I had the ability to walk on water."

The roshi says, "Why the fuck would you do all that? The ferry only costs ten bucks. I could've gone to that island and back a million times on the ferry, in the time it took you to learn how to cross the water at all. You must be some kind of retard.”

And if this is not enough, take a last minute peek at the latest EyeCorner Press books. Get some for Christmas, and enjoy all the rational and venerable stories about everything between heaven and earth.

FAMILY BLING

2011-10-26T11:52:00.011+02:00

England is a good place to visit if you want to get a sense of the prevalent state of conformity in the land. As I walk the miles and miles of long paths full of ethnic shops in Birmingham, one thing is clear. ‘Family’ is big here. I have nothing against families, but seeing what sells the most makes me rather suspicious. There isn’t a single shop that, in addition to selling food, fabrics, or incense, is not also selling picture frames. Especially the golden and the silver ones are popular. The minute I enter a shop like this, the owner strikes up a conversation that is almost always identical in its exchange with what I get to hear and say in all the other places:

‘Can I interest you in a picture frame?’
'I don’t think so.’
‘Why not, don’t you have a family of your own?’
‘Sure I do.’
‘So, what’s the problem, then?’
‘There is no problem, I just don’t like to think of my family as objects in a frame.’
‘How many children do you have?’
‘I have none.’
‘I’ll pray for you.’

Obviously the implicit assumption on the owner’s part is that if I had more than one child, then there would be no way in HELL I wouldn’t want to present them nicely, as they pose happily on display for everyone else to see. So the number of children is very important. The more of them one has, the more one can fill the empty space on the dresser with their representation. Now, due to my platonic philosophical inclinations that favor being kind over being merely smart, I refrain from commenting on the fact that I find such displays disgusting. What mythologies people fead their hearts and heads with is really their problem, but I often speculate what the reaction might be, if I said that I preferred to see empty spaces on furniture and fireplaces filled with books rather than idiotic pictures that disclose the poverty of thought and emotion in the house. (Actually, I think that I said that once, and it didn’t go so well with the well-intended party).

Roaming through the art galleries in Birmingham, I notice that while people have always wanted to represent families, it was never the poor who got to do it. So I wonder what happened between 1350 and 2011. How has the transmigration of the discourse on family as dictated by the affluent groups been translated into solid ethnic British conviction of the ‘this is the way’ as dictated now by the ones who have to compensate for lack of recognition and money? (We leave the middle space populated by the snobbish bourgeois who make the norms for clichés out of this).

“It’s all about memory,” my sister tells me – as she is trying to keep me away from ending up in the hospital due to high blood pressure. “People use their family members as objects in mirrors, in order they that appear closer.” “Closer to what?” I ask, while being reminded of the attention signs written on all American cars regarding the perception in the mirror of vehicles behind you on the road. “Closer to what they imagine they have, but don’t have,” she says, “a fulfilled soul.”

As I try to understand what such a statement means, and what its implications might be for all those who declare themselves soulless on purpose, so that they can be exempted from having to engage with deconstructive commonsense, my sister turns to the wall behind her and says: “Why don’t you stop worrying about people buying crap, and take a family picture of me right here now, in this pub, featuring another family." Above her seat, Led Zeppelin is grinning from another time in a picture frame, and I can’t help thinking that Robert Plant has just made today’s showbiz headlines in Mail Online, with a remark on his joining the establishment after receiving CBE from Prince Charles. (I bet that the family picture will make it into a frame on the mantelpiece).

Some stupidities never change. I think I’m going to book myself a flight to the Arctic today. I’m getting claustrophobic here.

CALVINO'S CLAIM

2011-10-16T00:04:00.008+02:00

One of my absolute favorite writers, Italo Calvino, would have been 88 today, had he not kicked the bucket in ’85. I secretly entertain the idea that he would have lived longer had he gone Zen. The ‘don’t think’ doctrine would have saved him from the brain explosion that he suffered. Calvino thought too much. Couple that with a heightened sense of play, and you’re in trouble. For, you end up tormenting yourself about whether to think or to play. The thinker, by definition, has a hard time with play that allows for all sorts of contradictions. For the thinker, the aim is often to say something instructive and clear. The player, even when following a strategy for play, has his eyes on something else. Self-expression may be part of it, but the smart player will ditch that in favor of creating a space where other things can happen rather than merely deploying the actualization of one’s own ego in popular recognition. After all, the player, also by definition will do anything to escape becoming entombed and impotent within the very world of self-imposed constrictions. The art is, and has always been to rise above limits.

What I like about Calvino is that he was obsessed with Tarot. Especially Tarot de Marseille. In his great book, The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969), a bunch of people – wanderers – end up in a castle on a dark and stormy night. They want to have dinner together and chat like normal people, when they realize that they’ve lost their speech. The owner of the castle provides them with a deck of cards, Tarot cards, and they all start speaking in visual tongues. The stories they tell are most truthful and accurate, heartfelt and hilarious, and there’s no ambiguity about anything at all. Everybody gets the picture. Speaking the visual language thus seems to leave no room for misunderstanding. This is a very nice move. That the image can communicate its message in a more direct way than its verbal counterpart is rather liberating. One is free from having to make stupid assumptions, or having to ask all the time what the meaning of it all is. What an image invites us to consider is the possibility that we might just experience a revelation. And the beauty of a revelation is still this one: that it needs no ‘rational’ discourse to explain it. It’s magical.

Since Calvino wrote his book there seems to be consensus among the serious Tarot de Marseille readers that he raised the bar on sophisticated interpretation. What is more, this sophistication is all about keeping it simple. You have the cards in front of you. There are pictures on them. You look at them and you have two options: to go the cultural way, or the free way. Cultural preconditioning creates a preponderance for readings that rely on repeating set phrases. The gypsies and the occultists prefer this practice. The free-way types of reading prefer the space between your eyes and your nose, and the leading questions are always of observation. What is happening? And how does it make you feel? In my opinion the best Tarot de Marseille reader right now is Enrique Enriquez, who, following Calvino and other no nonsense men, argues for the efficiency of engaging the picture at the querent’s own level. According to Enriquez, the ideal situation in a one-to-one Tarot session is this one: the cards fall on the table. The reader sees them, the querent sees them, and they both know it. Words are redundant. By following the simple rules of observing what elements rhyme with one another when going from one card to the other, and by looking at the shape, color, sound, and rhythm of these elements, we should be able to remember what we already know. Enriquez has even truncated the whole reading method to the idea that:

between

“Once Upon a Time” and “Happily Ever After”

is about going

from warm to cold
from cold to warm

about contracting if you have expanded
about expanding if you are contracted

because you are a lump of clay

(and I mean it nicely).

Calvino was a poststructuralist and a postmodern man. This means that while he appreciated all the binary opposites and beautiful symmetries he was not buying any mythologies. He was no occultist, concerned with learning heavy stuff between heaven and earth by heart, and he didn’t give a damn about the symbol. Calvino was a man of letters. And he took the visual image’s own word for it. For instance, and unlike some Golden Dawn folks who decided that the now 400 years old card of the Lover in the Marseille lore is about the marriage between heaven and earth, Calvino took a good look at what the image communicates beyond the symbol and decided that not only are we dealing here with a man unable to decide between two women, but that if we also looked carefully we could see that that choice has already been made. The Lover, with his hand firmly planted onto the blonde woman’s crotch, while flirting with the smart one over his shoulder, is nothing other than a deceitful bastard merely enforcing what some other clever writers have emphasized ever so eloquently. In the words of Nabokov: men always want to fuck Eve – as she looks like their mother – while being forever fascinated with Lilith – who doesn’t give a damn about reproduction. In the face of having to choose, or pretending that we do, for whatever reason, we have Calvino’s word for it that things are really much simpler than we imagine. Thus he says in the Castle: “Every choice has its obverse, that is to say a renunciation, and so there is no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing.”

In honor of Calvino’s birthday, I pulled 3 cards for him, wishing to see what he might communicate from beyond the grave, and what might be Calvinesque par excellence. Here’s what I got:

CINQUE DE DENIERS (FIVE OF COINS), LE FOV, CINQUE DE COUPES (FIVE OF CUPS)

Keeping with the tradition, here’s the 30-second interpretation – as it really doesn’t take any longer to figure things out:

Don’t be impressed by the exciting core of things, material or emotional, that are seemingly external to you. You are yourself this very center, forever caught in the paradox of ‘no difference between the act of choosing and the act of renouncing.’ Squeezed between the fives, now you let go of the money – and renouncing the establishment’s cat scratching your balls – now you’re ready to get drunk, giving in to the temptation of believing that love can make you feel special. The Fool is what has always been: the truest to his unstable nature, and therefore the most stable. The one who believes nothing and assumes no responsibility for any claims, except perhaps this one: freedom doesn’t have to cost anything at all.

While writing these words, I’m thinking of yesterday’s event, when, over fancy beer at the local pub, The Bishop’s Arms in Jönköping in Sweden, I pulled these cards for myself in connection with musing over the freedom to do what Calvino did, whatever the fuck he wanted. Read more Tarot. But how? There’s no tradition for it here in Scandinavia, not any that is worth much. I got these cards:

LA PAPESSE (THE HIGH PRIESTESS), LE CHARIOR (THE CHARIOT), JVSTICE (JUSTICE)

‘Jolly good,’ I said to myself: forge ahead with the knowledge you have, and go goddamn professional.

We bow to Calvino tonight, to Enrique Enriquez, and to our partners, who, although not Marseille’ists, pay close attention.

Note on the deck: Jean Noblet’s Tarot de Marseille, 1650, as restored by Jean-Claude Flornoy.

For more Tarot related posts, go to my Tarot Reflections website.

TEMPLARS

2011-10-09T00:33:00.025+02:00

Köln. The day after. The post-conference trip ends with a tour of the Dom, the magnificent cathedral from 1242, which is a close imitation of the one in Amiens. As with cathedrals of this caliber, the legend has it that the first architect made a pact with the devil. I'm thinking of pacts, and what we use them for. If this is true indeed, then what the architect made a deal for was to encode the language of the birds into the stones.

The night before, over beers and weird light at the local pub, I read the Tarot cards for my closest friends. Frank Klaus, one of the three musketeers in the trio which includes Rainer Kaus and Cathrin Grabner, has some doubts: should he continue with the Jesuits or do philosophy instead? We use the cards to get an insight into an alternative reality. The cards fall precisely into place reflecting exactly the nature of his question. This morning, he tells me how on the way to his hotel around midnight he heard the organ very loudly playing in the church. There were no lights on, and there was no traffic around. It was all very quiet, except for the music thundering all of a sudden. “My god,” I said to him, feeling jealous: “you heard the language of the birds. How fortunate.”

While looking at the beautiful stained glass windows from the renaissance, depicting what we often find in the Tarot cards, I initiate the now reduced number of people from the conference into the legend about the nomadic cathedral, the Tarot cards. With the destruction of the Order of the Temple on the night of October 13, 1307, the masons and the architects of the sacred buildings went underground. Their teachings re-emerged, however, around 1400 in Northern Italy, and legend has it that in order to prevent the assassination of masters opposing dogmatic systems, whatever knowledge about how the sacred can be experienced literally and in a direct way, was to be encoded unto a pack of cards. As playing cards, this knowledge survived, and with it, so did the brilliance of the structure of 22 types and 56 relations.

Everyone likes this idea. So we decide to stick to churches. The three musketeers suggest that we all go and see another master, Peter W. Rech, an art therapy professor, painter, and a hardcore Lacanian. Peter lives in a church. A modern church, but a church nonetheless. At some point, when the catholic congregation went over to graze on other pastures, Peter bought the place and turned it into a gallery. He himself now lives in the bishop's rooms right across the main building. The altar is in his living room and filled with postcards of Peter's paintings with variations over Courbet's L'Origine du Monde. Peter never paints anything else. For him, that is the Real. We sit in the middle of the Real and drink a grand cru French wine, while stuffing ourselves with goat cheese and Danish cookies. Peter wants Frank to read some fragments. Very lyrical, which in German, with its amazing falling tone, acquire a certain gravitas. We all feel pulled towards the stone. Frank, the cardinal, has a very soothing voice, and we make him give us a blessing. Courbet is winking. We all know what we know.

We leave Peter's place in Rainer's vintage 1980 blue Mercedes. While cruising through the woods, Die Köningin, Cathrin, is trying to communicate to us what the plan is. This woman gets things done. But Rainer turns on the music, and says: "here's the short version of what the meaning of life is: spend your time wonderfully." Barbra Streisand gets channelled and we all marvel at her voice while she enforces Rainer's point. The song I'm a Woman in Love makes us all nod. And I'm thinking: This IS the language of the birds. Sung in Rainer's blue cathedral, and seen in Peter's Courbet cathedral.

Back home, two hand stenciled Tarot decks await me, sent from another cathedral. Roxanne Flornoy, the wife of the late master cartier Jean-Claude Flornoy sends me her warm greetings, handwritten on an additional special card: The Hanged Man. I read this as a message. The meaning of life is to let it all hang, and let whatever streams through you turn into a church bell, resounding the joy of knowing the children of Maitre Jacques.

LOGICAL

2011-09-19T02:00:00.004+02:00

Often the best commentaries to our work come from unexpected sources. They are also often delivered with humble aplomb, which is the best way of expressing genuine enthusiasm. I respond to such feedback with a bow, in gratitude for people's way of expressing also that which cannot be conjured in words. While lost in reading weird texts on the internet on 10 different websites, I get a mail of profuse thanking. Fernando Silberstein, a professor of psychology and psychoanalyst – in his spare time, a neoplatonist plus an infinite number of other things – has been reading my book, The Logician. He insists that it's fantastic, offering a string of supporting adjectives to that effect, creating correspondences to his own work, Lacan and heavy to read Renaissance Spanish scholars and Jesuits, and emphasizing the emergence of parallel dimensions of all sorts. Out of this writing that he has been reading. My writing.

I used to say that I write for myself and strangers, following a truly clever woman, Gertrude Stein, but time and time again, I feel that I need to revise that philosophy. How can we call strangers the ones who make an effort to let you understand that although their enthusiasm cannot be expressed in words, they still want to say it? They find ways to say it. They are like those fairytales cavaliers who ride to the end of the world to bring you the word. The word that is impossible to utter other than by capturing it in a wave from the ocean, or in the swishing sound of the wind as it cuts through your boots on one of the 7 mountain tops that you have crossed. As Silberstein wants me to understand that he means what he says, he sends me a link to a piece of music, Bach on crystal glasses, in reference to one of my references to such things. This makes me think that I write for special people, for the ones who I imagine have open souls, and who allow me to salute the divine in them. It makes me think that I write for the people who can see with their hearts what is essential and which remains impenetrable to the eye. I write for the people who I know can sing. I write for the people who can make us come through the gates of the fantastic, to a place where we join that fool of Don Quixote, the best logician of them all, and intone with him at unison on Bach's music, the only logical consequence of silence: to sit and stare at vibration, as it articulates eloquently what is never said:

“I came to the gate, where some dozens or so of devils were playing tennis... in their hands they held rackets of fire; but what amazed me still more was that books, apparently full of wind and rubbish, served them for tennis balls, a strange and marvellous thing.” (Cervantes)

Here is the book again, The Logician, almost one year after its publication, full of wind and rubbish, and other marvelous things.

CATHEDRALS

2011-09-15T10:34:00.012+02:00

Last night I was at my sister's playing the godmother fairy. She had called me to consult with me on a full moon problem. The night before, on the 13th, on her way to work at the hospital for the night shift, she found herself alone on the train platform. In the very bright light of the moon she noticed a figure hiding behind a light pole on the other side, waiting for the opposing train. She was singing softly some church hymns, and was wondering whether to do it louder so that the other could hear her. The opposing train approached, and then in a split second she saw what she could now identify as a man in his 30s jumping on the tracks. He laid down crossing them. His face turned towards her. With her mouth already open, the words, 'Oh God,' were uttered at the exact moment when the train made full impact. For the next longest five minutes in her life, she was kneeling – her physical power gone from her legs – looking at the remains. Scattered body parts, blood, an ear and a palm next to her, and bits of clothing still fluttering in the wind on the tracks. Her own train arrived, she stepped inside it, numb, got to work, where another man was dying – and she almost broke down. But she didn't. She called the police, reported the event, and then was told that she must have her state of shock checked at the psychiatric ward.

And this is where I came into the picture. When she called me in the morning, she wanted to ask me why the professionals insisted that she shouldn't think that it was her fault, and that there was nothing she could do to prevent the man from taking his life. 'Obviously I don't think that,' she said to me - though she did entertain the idea that if only she had sung louder, then, perhaps the man would have stopped. I said to her that the reason why the professionals insist on the guilt part is because it doesn't occur to them to say that she had to go through this because some divine power must have loved that soul enough to grant him his last moment in the vicinity of human breath, a singing breath. Insofar as all she cold say was, 'Oh, God, Oh God,' God was invoked, and it was enough for the young man to have a proper burial. I asked my sister: 'why do you think he turned towards you, while preparing to die, instead of placing himself with his face down, or facing the moon?' 'I don't know' she said, 'I've been wondering about that.' 'Stop wondering,' I said to her. 'You were chosen to perform a very special task. To allow a dying man to take your hand – however coercively and violently – and say a prayer for him – however unconsciously.' 'This is a privilege of the highest,' I then further said, 'and you be grateful that you were found worthy of it.'

My nephew intervened at this point, to remind his mother of the parents' day event at his school, the Roskilde Cathedral High School. 'You must also come' he said to me, and I blurted at him, reminding him that it was not given onto me to perform the task of mothering anyone. My sister insisted that what I was saying was complete nonsense. 'Some mothers are of the spiritual kind,' she said, and they are itinerant, and therefore the best. Outside the school, I was standing before its tower. This school used to be right next to the Roskilde Cathedral proper, but as it grew in size they had to move it. The original tower could not follow, but thanks to technology, a beam of light was installed to reflect the shape of the cathedral. How beautiful and ingenious, I thought, and then bemused that there is something special about itinerant cathedrals. After listening to the Rector instructing the young ones on refraining from drinking binges, Paul's class performed Stevie Wonder's song, 'Don't You Worry About a Thing.' I took my sister's hand, and said to her, 'you know, my dear, you're a cathedral and a tower of strength. I bow to you.' Our hands touched and the world stood still, yet resonating.

THE SECRET OF OIL

2011-08-29T21:34:00.007+02:00

I sit at my dinner table anointed. I'm having white corn on the cob and spring potatoes. This ritual involves pouring a considerable amount of Israeli oil on your plate, and sprinkling it with rock salt from the Kalahari desert. The salt is very important. You then take your precious little fingers though the mix, and with them thus baptized you grab a potato. First, you smell its peal for the divine earth in it, and then you toss it vigorously though the salty oil, before you bring it to your lips – no, no, no, not yet. You, don't bite it yet. You hold back. You allow your lips to kiss it to the point where you swear that you are one with the potato, that you come from the deepest underground in Africa, and that you are resurrected after having been crucified on Mount Scopus, Har HaTsofim, in Israel at harvest time. Bachelard, the magician, brings you back to your senses, when you begin to contemplate the whiteness of the corn. As the cob also gets enveloped in the Kalahari mine, you start speaking in tongues. Well, in Bachelard's French, to be more precise, which you, however, translate into English: “When a poet tells us of the secret of milk, he is not lying, not to himself, nor to others. On the contrary, he is finding an extraordinary totality” (On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, 8). My partner follows my fingers getting deeper and deeper into my throat, and asks me: “is that oil good?” I faint.

THE WAY OF THE SIGN

2011-08-27T20:48:00.007+02:00

NEW BOOK: In my years of teaching literary theory, it has never ceased to amaze me that students find it difficult to understand that – even though a futile act – we still have the obligation to go against myths of self-deception, false principles in the name of whose war is waged, and crass stupidity that is always murderous in its intent. I've published The Way of the Sign as a way of keeping it simple. As a way of suggesting that we must situate ourselves as far away as possible from anything that presents itself as the keeper of traditional values, or as suspicious of new developments. Traditionalists have no imagination, that's why they are called traditionalists. We must go against their idea that everything can be sold and bought; that everything is designed and packaged to cater to our basic needs for sex, security, and soul-searching. These needs do not manifest themselves as empty bubbles into which we can throw our clichés and idiotic 'concrete' solutions. Literary, visual, and cultural theories make us see what is wrong with ventriloquizing what we think others want to hear. They make us see what is wrong with speaking from a place that is devoid of inner strength and conviction.

While I haven't proposed any new idea – in this context, I find the old ones better than any – I ask simple questions. In this sense, The Way of the Sign is a book about extraction, about reducing methods of inquiry to the bare bones. It guides students through 10 schools of theory and criticism. The focus is on ‘asking’ each theory to give its best in the simplest way, by making us see what is at stake and how we might respond to it. In simple Socratic dialogue, I invent scenarios: ‘What is happening?’ Deconstruction asks. And we answer with it: ‘We are buying a mythology.’ ‘How does it make us feel?’ ‘Dumb.’ ‘What is happening?’ Marxism asks. And we answer with it: ‘The rich cheat us.’ ‘How does it make us feel?’ ‘Angry’. ‘What is happening?’ Feminism asks. And we answer with it: ‘Nobody sees us.’ ‘How does it make us feel?’ ‘Invisible.’

By posing such simple questions, I try to bring out the complexity of the ideas formulated in different approaches to texts, and the joy at discovering that some theories are mighty simple, and therefore also beautiful. The book’s aim is thus to contribute to every student’s ‘aha’ experience. Make it richer, so that they might fall in love with theory, and consider that if decisions need to be made at all – about what to think or what is best – then they should be about never ceasing to ask questions. Or consider that it is not our actions that are important, but how we receive the gift of joy. As with Mary Oliver:

“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. And much can never be redeemed. Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.”

Enjoy!

THE WAY OF THE SIGN: CULTURAL TEXT THEORY IN TWO STEPS

EYECORNER PRESS
ISBN: ISBN: 978-8792633101

PRESS MATERIAL

CONTENTS

Introduction | KEEPING IT SIMPLE | 9
Chapter 1 | STRUCTURALISM AND DECONSTRUCTION | 19

Chapter 2 | MARXISM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS | 41

CHANGING SANCTUARY

2011-08-09T11:58:00.004+02:00

Back from Norway and feeling the same old regret for not taking the plunge and moving over there for good, my heart leaps with awe and astonishment at what awaits me. Among things piled up in my mailbox over a month, I find two books by Matthew Remski. I don't know Matthew, but for some reason he seems to know me. A card accompanies Syrinx and Systole, and yoga 2.0: shamanic echoes, which says: “To a mentor, plus inspiration from afar.” Over the years, I've grown accustomed to people seeing me as some kind of a teacher, or some kind of an “esoteric genius,” or other such things related to some form of transmission. True, I have funny interests. And yet, for my part, I'm suspicious of instructing. More often than not the act of instructing is misunderstood. And I leave teaching “positive change” to the host of self-helpers who blissfully remain ignorant of both change and positiveness. For, what form does change assume in relation to what we know, how we are, and what we are willing to acknowledge about our nature? What conditions change, and what does it mean to be positive? That you have to take it all in good stride? Like hell you do. That would require a whole lot of seeing, and seeing is not what we're doing, in spite of the visual culture we live in. Seeing requires time and the recognition of light. Ours and others'. So, what do we really see?

Cognitive psychology of the 'you can fix it' kind never invites us to see anything, only to asses the so-called situation, and then change it. So you change the situation and lose sight of yourself. Nice going. Next step: self-deception. I believe in light, and the nature of light is to enlighten. And the beauty of light is that it comes without forcing. When you see the light, you also see the balance between your intelligence and your acts of kindness. You let it all stream through you, and that is all. Of course, since this theory is so simple, there's no money in it. Hence we don't get to hear about light on TV or other channels promoting happiness. Emanating light is not about petting each other on our backs and instructing each other on how well we're doing and how fantastic we are.

Writes Matthew in the yoga book: “When you open your mouth to speak, nature throws her voice outwards, through you. The land moves your hands. The weather moves your feet. Your point of view is singular yet comprehensive, because the world itself is looking out through your eyes. When something arises to be done, there is no question about whether it should be done. How it should be done arises naturally as you begin to do it” (29). So, no forcing. If a wall is impenetrable, leave it unchallenged. It the world is dense and dull, leave it to its devise. I also read these lines from Syrinx and Systole: “Inquiry begins with the harshest consonants (ts and cts, and dental ds) but opens into a palatal ds and lingering ns: What exactly don't I understand?” There are these 3: liberty, self-sufficiency, and frankness. Anything else is nonsense. These 3 require the kind of self-knowledge that exceeds the cynic's lot. If there's a task we want to preoccupy ourselves with, then it is this one: let us read more poetry. The words of the poets carry heavy light with them, and this light beams far and bounces into our sanctuaries. Matthew Remski, thank you.

GREEN LANGUAGE

2011-07-18T20:38:00.011+02:00

I’m on top of the mountain and fly with the eagles of Norway. I look down on the green waters and see fish. Lots of fish. They say that birds are a higher form of evolution of the fish kingdom. I like fish, even though most of them have small bones. Hardly ever a strong stamina. They are good at adapting, and being malleable, and all that. But they would never understand an uncompromising bird that would insist on breaking a wing before changing its mind. Birds are air animals, and some like to shit on the heads of tall statues. In Romania, where I come from, most statues of Lenin and Stalin have a crown on top made of sharp blades. Some birds fly straight into them – they don’t get the point about the communists trying to prevent the occurrence of immoral acts, such as being free and independent.

So, while flying I get this idea, inspired also by the zoological narrative which has it that while the chimpanzee has 13 ribs and homo sapiens only 12, it goes without saying that when God decided to take a rib out of Adam to create the woman, he was thinking about her as a higher form of evolution than the other species. With Adam being demoted and all that, it also goes without saying that he was unable to see that logic, of the higher self. Consequently he argued for millennia that Eve was his inferior. Therefore she had to submit to him, and cook for him, and give him children, and all that nonsense. So I get this idea that perhaps while flying, one could speak the language of the birds, go back to more commonsensical times. Back in time, to the time before Adam screwed up logic with his complex of inferiority, the language of the birds was the only one uncontaminated by shit. It was the perfect divine language, green language, angelic or Enochian language, and magical language for communicating grand esoteric secrets. We don’t evolve for nothing.

I heard a bird today instructing me in the following initiatory idea: Thou shall move on top of a mountain in Norway. If Norway was a religion, it would be your only religion. Thou shall open The House of Spirits and Spinach. There thou shall serve the following: for breakfast, the toast called The Flying Magic Spinach Carpet; for lunch, the sandwiches called Ali Baba and the 40 Spinach Thieves; for dinner, the lentil-stew called 1001 Spinach Nights. Go to bed and have green dreams.

HOUSE

2011-07-07T15:20:00.011+02:00

Yesterday was a day of checking out houses. Going from old farm houses to the virtual types, the latter installed as part of the House exhibition, also called Living, at the museum of contemporary art, Louisiana, I came home with a sense of relief. Where I was concerned, I declared it once again to myself that I am definitely not the 'let's play house' type. The reason for this has little to do with my general aversion against all things status quo and the tyranny of possessiveness. As I entertained myself with watching people's reactions to houses, I rather got a clear idea in my head that the reason for my remaining immune towards such exclamations, oh no, or oh yes, has to do with my zen inclinations.

As the idea of 'house' is related to material gain, pride, and compensation for lack of imagination, a zen approach to dwelling finds itself at odds with this form of stability and uniformity that houses invite us to appreciate. And which we do, for the sake of convenience. There is a slight irony here, however, as zen can also seem a philosophy of stability: it insists on change as unchangeable. At the museum, enjoying the samples of wooden houses in the forests of Norway the most, I was reminded of this zen koan: “Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.” I could feel surrendering to the calmness of detachment. I felt rising above the successful manipulation of feelings that the exhibition operates with. It was enough to take a quick look at most people's strong reactions to the way in which houses were depicted and represented to make me feel good about myself. As people were either repelled by some dwellings or envious of others, I was reminded of the wisdom attached to the trio of learning: understand, accept, and let go. Most people see the latter stage of renunciation as a sign of resignation, but here I would have to insist that insofar as we don't move towards living but towards dying, accumulating things in life will reach a dead end a lot faster even before the other end is experienced, which is the real tragedy. And this is the paradox: the more one lets go, the more one experiences what it means to live in the world. This is the teaching of zen.

I live in a beautiful apartment, but I think of my next move: it will not be down the road, but into the wild.

NUMEROLOGY

2011-06-13T15:18:00.006+02:00

In her works on the natural numbers, Number and Time and Psyche and Matter, Jung's assistant, Marie-Louise Von Franz recounts the story of the value of numbers for the Chinese. Even in the military, where men of logic and order rule, it looks like action and choice are under the law of qualitative numbers rather than quantitative ones. So, once upon a time there were eleven generals who had to decide whether to go to war or not. They took a vote. Three were in favor, eight against. They went to war. Now the question: what must these men have been possessed by to engage, following the minority, when the majority decided against it unambiguously? According to the Chinese tradition of assigning more symbolic value to some numbers over others, a relation of worth taking precedence over success becomes crystal clear: insofar as the number three expresses unanimity, and number eight indicates dubious attachments, it follows logically to endorse the three and discard the eight. This story makes one think of Einstein's often quoted line: “try not to be men of success but men of value,” which allows us to ditch our foolish urge to only engage with things that 'make sense.' Von Franz has also written a fascinating commentary to a medieval text attributed to Thomas Aquinas, Aurora Consurgens. In Aquinas's “Fourth Parable On the Philosophic Faith which Consisteth in the Number Three,” there is an interesting relation of sublimated value between eternity, equality, and the bond between eternity and equality. Diverting the energy associated with 'unacceptable' impulses into a socially acceptable activity has only the function of getting it wrong. While Von Franz makes the obvious remark that “the entire work of the alchemists is an endeavor to reintegrate that unsublimable residue, the sinners on earth and the fallen angels, into a whole,” (255) we are left to ponder on why we love the logic of action as dictated by symbolic choice.

AURORA RESURGENS

2011-05-20T12:07:00.005+02:00

I'm tempted to advertise for Anthony Johnson's new book, AURORA RESURGENS, with these words: when in doubt, think hermetic – and thus remain in doubt. I've done this to an extent in my introduction to this book, and yet, I came out of it with a sense that when you deal with texts that fly, the certainty principle is the last thing you want to preoccupy yourself with. You go with the light. Especially the light that enlightens in obscure ways.

Read this book, which is a wonderful collection of three sets of texts, about Enochian Angels in the legend of The Shining Ones, an opera about Giordano Bruno's The Clavis Magna – and some domestic drama in which characters say to each other things like this: “love is leaving it be” – and poems, poems, poems, formed in diamond shapes, and resounding musical notes of the highest.

Read my intro here, for a preview.

Enjoy!

EYECORNER PRESS

ISBN: 978-8792633057

ZEN

2011-05-13T23:28:00.005+02:00

Halfway through the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem my sister is having a moment of purification. As a chess player, I like to anticipate all sorts of scenarios when visiting such places, so I’m prepared when she asks me for a plastic bag. I give her one, I push her into a corner next to a video of dispossessed Jews, and then watch over her as she is puking her guts out. People react in different ways to such things. The spilling of the guts continues through various bathrooms, and then in fact all the way back to Tel Aviv. As plastic bags pass through our hands, all quietly and discretely with hardly anyone noticing anything, I start philosophizing. I tell my sister that although it’s impossible to understand what goes through people’s heads when they decide to dispossess others even of that which they don’t have, on another level, such cruel acts contribute to enhancing what Freud said, namely that “the goal of all life is death.” Generally, as we work contrary to this very fact, judging by the fervent ardor with which we attach ourselves to things, fellowmen, children, and animals, it makes one wonder what indeed we must all be possessed by when we fail to understand that what makes us content is not attachment but detachment. As my sister was preoccupied with the consequences of taking the whole world’s mistakes on her shoulders, I went for a swim in the Mediterranean sea for a splash of self-baptism: in went an Orthodox, and out popped a Zen Buddhist. Only in Israel. Shabbat shalom to ya’ll.

GRAVITY WAVE

2011-05-01T00:02:00.005+02:00

At a concert with Emmylou Harris in Oslo tonight, I got struck again. Just before she walked on stage, I was thinking about a song of hers that I referred to in another post almost two years ago, after having listened to it cruising through the Norwegian mountains. I was trying to relive that moment when Emmylou walked on stage, strapped her guitar around her astonishing body, and started singing it. The song “Here I am” had suddenly acquired a double meaning. And by the time she got to the line, “I'm the promise never broken,” a river of tears came down my eyes and I experienced a lift off. I was riding what my friend and master, the sufi mystic and drum maker Norbert Eckermann, calls "a gravity wave." I felt rising above the cruelest month of April, which thus ended on a note of hope. Eight days ago, Norbert told me in a confident moment: “be a secret without religion.” I'm still thinking about it. In eight days I'll hit Jerusalem for a splash of sanctification, but I couldn't help musing that, for me, Norway is and will be the holiest of the holy. It opens my heart, and I forgive. Perhaps that's what being a secret means. Fred være med os.

HESTRA

2011-04-25T23:52:00.015+02:00

Hestra, the holy sheep, is having babies. This is why I couldn't find it out and about on the premise near the place I was vacationing over Easter. As I approached the enclosed stable rooms, however, I heard a familiar sound growing increasingly louder. Beh, beh, beh! “Hestra,” I shouted myself, and almost fell on my nose in the dirt as I stumbled towards the gate. Hestra saw me coming and almost jumped out of the shed – big belly or no belly. Such joyful sight. Hestra was over the moon and was already enticing all the other mothers and their babies to welcome me in the sun.

“Oh my,” I said to her, “so you've missed me?”
“Beeeeh!”
“I missed you too.”
“Beh, Beh.”
“I'm so glad they haven't turned you into salami.”
“Beh, beh, beh.”
“And how is it going in the kids department?”
“Beh.”
“So they keep you at it?”
“Beh. Beh.”
“Well, better that than dead meet.”
“Beh, beh, beh.”
“This way we get to still see each other.”
“Beh, beh, beh, beh.”

It goes like this with me and Hestra, and it's always a grand pleasure to communicate with her. But this time, as I was also moving towards the opposite barn to see what the moo cows were doing aligning themselves with a lot of interest in my direction, I heard the whole bleating choir behind me. “Beh, beh, beeeeh, beeeeh, beh, beh, beeeeh, beeeeh.” “All right, all right, I'll come back right now," I had to say, just to calm down Hestra and the sisters. But Hestra wanted to make sure I was going nowhere. She was half ways out on my side, and I wondered what I should do, catch it, or let it catch me. You never quite know with sheep. My sister was astonished at such excitement, and all she could say was this: “by Jove, I understand that you want to come and see this sheep every year, and if I didn't know you any better, I'd swear you'd make the Swedish boy an offer he can't refuse and sell you the whole goddamn farm, the runic stone included.” I said to her: “maybe you don't know me any better.” “Beh,” said Hestra, and I could tell that this one sheep was worth more than a whole world. At least it made me sure of one thing: that if I won't hack it as an academic, I'll excel sublimely in the sheep business.

PASSION

2011-04-14T02:11:00.004+02:00

I’m reading Rachel Pollack’s novel Temporary Agency and while listening to the sublime Nima ben David’s playing on one of my favorite instruments, the bass viola da gamba, I stop at Rachel’s epigraph for Part Two from Euripides: “I pray that love may never come to me with murderous intent, in rhythms measureless and wild.” Nima stretches her fingers on the neck of the instrument in an impossible way, weaving her touch with the vibrations from her bowing in such a way that I feel penetrated in both my vision and my gut. This instantly reminds me of Rachel’s other book: The Body of the Goddess in which she uses this epigraph from Judith Guest’s Miss Manners for one of her chapters: “Ways of doing things may be new, things to be done are generally not.” The bass goes very low on four strings at this point and I hide quickly in Euripides’s prayer. I search for the word of my passion. In Euripides’s time, the Greeks never wrote obituaries. They posed only one question: did the dead have a passion? The text escapes through the soundscape, and a gate opens.

RESURRECTION

2011-04-05T18:15:00.009+02:00

What people do behind our backs can be quite astonishing. But lucky for us if we like surprises – or signs. Signs are everywhere all the time – as some good masters have pointed out – and if we bother to think about ‘what it might all mean,’ we may be able to construe some narratives that are anything but boring. The veracity of these narratives is not the most interesting – sometimes knowing what we know is already more than enough, and if we should need proof, all we need to do is wait a little. Proof of the known unknown usually has a way of coming to us all by itself. Now, Derrida’s ghost is over me – blessed be his specter. It’s only been a few days ago that I was talking about him in a public forum, and yet now it looks like he wants to be even more forcefully resurrected. But, as befitting a grand master, he does it meta-style, circular-style, and roundabout-style, by imploding himself, as it were, in another text about me, so to speak. Which is to say that he has just managed to haunt the writer Gordon Lish, who once wrote about one ”Gordon Lish” and the death of his wife in his book Epigraph – on which I wrote myself in an old article, and in which I called on Derrida. Now, Lish, being haunted because Derrida calls back on me, has dug up this article of mine and re-published it himself HERE, thus fully resurrecting it along with pics which he stole from my website. Great move. And great pics. The whole affair reminded me of this great line of Jacques’: “When I have nothing to do in a public place, I photograph myself and with few exceptions burn myself” (Postcard, 37). Now I wonder how this applies to virtual public places. I go ask the cards. My old article compels me to do so, as it’s all about divination and hermetic traditions – though not so overtly stated. I was more cautious in those days. – I’m sure I’ll get an honest and straight answer – I always do. If not on what Derrida wants from me, then surely on how to own up to my own ghost.

P.S I FORGOT TO SAY THAT I LOOOOVE GORDON LISH - HE MAKES ME LAUGH VERY HARD - thanks, Jewboy!

BIBLIOKLEPTIC

2011-03-29T23:09:00.004+02:00

Time again to disclose what writing lights our fire - and these days, other people's fires. I've been asked to answer questions about EyeCorner Press by the editor of Biblioklept, and here is what came out of it. Fun, fun, fun, swear words and improper words in between, but all veeeery commonsensical.

For all those interested in the state of the general heart-break over what's going on in the academia these days, the interview might strike a sympathizing chord: you're not alone. And yet, here, if we appeal to any community, then it's the loving kind. Aaaabsolutely.

Read and Enjoy. And then buy or steal some EyeCorner Press books.

CRACKS IN TIME

2011-03-21T15:51:00.004+01:00

Bach's Birthday must not go unnoticed. His music, in all its manifestations, is like lumen, or light, adding to our normal intelligence. It makes our spirit go up and our soul go down. It makes us ascend in our spiritual consciousness and descend in our soulful complexity. It makes us penetrate the crown of material reality and reach pure beauty. We're grateful for the crack in time that Bach shares with us. Thus we forget why we're here, while remembering what we do for others. Sending them listen...

EXPANSIONS

2011-03-09T00:33:00.002+01:00

To those who have been anticipating a word of wisdom from me on women's international day – in good old-fashioned bashing style - I can keep it real simple and refer to another sage, Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford: "It's all in your head, you just have no idea how big your head is." Happy expansions of the mind!

ZOHARIC BEAM

2011-02-28T23:51:00.021+01:00

I've always been against the idea that life is something that one seizes, one grabs, and one adds to the list of things and achievements that one wishes to take into one's grave. Let's face it, life is something we experience, perhaps the way one experiences light, and it has nothing to do with what we make of it. This latter idea, of making something of life, is mainly an idiotic Western thought developed to counter both the fear of death and the feeling of guilt for not investing enough time and energy into thinking about what life really means. This month I was fortunate enough to spend time among people who, for the most part, are trying to understand what life is on its own terms. When asked they all said: “everything is connected, so why bother with petty things and cultural constraints?” Most of these people don't have families, they don't do the right thing in terms of getting a solid and stolid job, and they don't give a shit about moral principles based on lots of hypocrisy, lying, and regular dishonesty. And they don't compromise either: if they can't get the stallion, they don't settle for the mule. They are all drummers attending a drumming workshop with the best master, the Lord of the Frame Drums himself, Zohar Fresco – also the Lord of Light, if you ask me, blessed be his name. He keeps it simple too: “remember that you're here to serve, and to read souls.”

Zohar Fresco is not only a man who can bang on the drum in the most sublime way imaginable, but he is also one who has mastered the art of simplicity, elegance, and correspondence. He communicates through dynamic soundscapes made up of equal measures between four elements: the pulse, color, energy, and spirit. “The drum is only a tool, tav in Hebrew, and has embedded in its name both the idea of oneness and life. Then there is also the idea of connection – the Hebrew letter vav is the sound of being joined, one and another, AND.” I let myself be pulled into the kabbalistic philosophy of Zohar's drumming, and think about how amazing the idea of joining is, yet joining not horizontally, as one may think is logical, but vertically. Of course, the one and the other cannot and should not be dissolved into one another. They must remain independent. “Before a child is born,” Zohar tells us, “the first thing that he hears is his mother's pulse and her voice.” “Remember,” he then says by turning to the majority of men in the room, “what we all want is this, to hear the woman's voice and her pulse. The woman always wins, remember that.” Something in Zohar's voice leaves no room for disagreeing. He speaks softly, and his words fly as do his fingers on the drum. I insist on touching his hands for the whole time I'm present. And he lets me. And we both feel the power of the shekkinah. He knows why I'm there. I'm not there to imitate his inimitable style, nor am I there to learn how to drum. I'm there for the light, the formless form, which yet in his hands exudes the rigor of discipline. Zohar masters to perfection not only what can be turned into articulate and clear sound, but also the voiceless, what he calls the ghost notes. I like these notes the best. They allow me to follow the movement of his hand into 'almost' sound. The sound of the silent O. “I'm zero,” Zohar says, "I start from zero on this round thing which is the drum, a zero itself, and I give nothing. But I want this nothing to move people.” His playing moves me. I cry. And then I cry some more as I realize that he plays for me, just for me. Zohar wrote a piece called Echad, One, and I understand what he means by pulsating at unison with another's heart: D-, -T, --, T-. So we also drum for each other. Each in our own way. And the collective beat of 22 joins in. Zohar's gaze following our fingers reminds us to remember the connection: as above, so below. And yet, while his drum electrifies vertically, his gaze establishes a horizontal line as well. We're all under him, but only because he insists on no hierarchy. “I'm here to serve” is his mantra, and one hears it as the doum on the drum, the very vehicle which creates dynamics. Zohar leaves us all flat on our bellies, supplicating, or flat on our backs, ecstatically contemplating the stars.

People ask me whether I drum for shamanic purposes. While I reply in the negative, I tell them about various archaic techniques of trance-inducing rituals. By drumming, most shamans of the world believe that they can fly to the Cosmic Tree. The skin of the drum is revived through a pulsing touch and voice. The sounds taken together recall various spirits. As such, the drum is used as a means for ascension. The shaman is a medium who creates a correspondence between theriomorphic ancestors, the mythical subterranean beings nurturing the roots of the tree, and the cosmic branches holding the dead souls. The way Zohar slides his finger on the drum, pressing on it as if to demonstrate my point, creates a swishing sound that always makes me bite my lips. His moist hand tapping gently on the dead skin reanimates some other worlds which I'm trying to mix in with my own. “So, you are an alchemist,” a biochemist interested in drumming asked over dinner. “I don't know about me,” I said, “but I know that Zohar is one. He has the right ingredients, and he knows how to mix them. He puts into his playing neither too much, nor too little, but exactly as much as it's necessary. He takes balance and control to sublime levels. The level where we can all hope.”

A few German percussionists insist that I'm a kräuterhexe, a healing herbalist witch with a penchant for synthesizing philosophies and religions. “Drumming is a form of divination,” I say. The drummer summons the sun and the moon, the underworld, the Lord of the Dead, AND... the Echad.” “You will hear spoken in symbols, what you already know,” I tell another, who calls me a healing Tarotist. “The shamans of the tundra Yurak call their drum a singing bow,” I further say, and they offer horse-meat to the master of the drum. What can we offer Zohar? Perhaps an acknowledgment of what we are, including the ghost notes. “I'm all these things because of the magic of noise and the magic of music. We're all summoned by light.” “You have to pull the light to yourself,” another Kabbalist drummer says, and concludes that I'm a “funny woman.” At the end of the day, I don't know about the funny part, but fun I had. In Zohar's company, one always thinks of him as a pulsating light. Splendor is embedded in his hame. If Zohar is a zoharic pulse, then drumming must return to him. Let us then intone with the shaman, the alchemist, the kräuterhexe, the Tarotist, and the ghost note: Zohar Fresco, we bow to you in refraction. Let there be fragments of light.

HUMP

2011-02-11T23:54:00.014+01:00

Playing music with my family and friends last night, I was thinking about how to prepare for my crossing a desert next week. As I'll make a stop in the middle of an oasis, I was thinking of camels and high priestesses. In esoteric traditions the high priestess is considered as the link between the archetypal and the formative, the one who represents “the journey homeward or the return to oneself” (Angeles Arrien). Rachel Pollack makes a beautiful point in her book, The Forest of Souls, about the connection between intuitively sensing the splendor of things that exceeds our grasping and our need for a conscious processing of 'divine' information. Referring to both, the sephiroth – (and the longest journey by camel riding between the two unconscious points, keter (the visible crown) and daat (the invisible knowledge of infinite sharing) and the beauty of tiferet (the heart) – and quantum physics (we hop from one change to another), she talks about our need to make ourselves sacred, not only through magic, but through gimalut chasidim, through riding the camel of loving-kindness. What saves us from drowning in the sand (where we often intentionally stick our heads into when we don't want to hear the truth) is tapping into the secret knowledge of the mistress of waters, waters of which she gives off freely thus drawing spirit into the physical world. The alchemical marriage between Rebecca and Isaac was consolidated by her falling off the camel's back when she got a glimpse of his splendor before she entered his world. He took her into his mother's tent, and they both understood something. The 11th sephiroth is not invisible for nothing. It teaches us to play with the veil of homecoming.

ZORN'S LEMMA

2011-02-01T17:26:00.006+01:00

When the mathematicians hit you, be ready. It may not be only numbers that they have in store for you. Here I was, thinking of the growing intensity in the ping-ponging that I play with my genius friend, and laughing at the idea that the more I think that I can handle the biggest infinity around, imagining also that I sit on the edge of the universe where there's a lot of space between the galaxies – that's it, no more clutter, just as I like it up there – not even dust – so, yes, thinking at the edge of the universe of how beautiful it is to add one more zero to the one, and thus get further and further away from screwed up perspectives and verbal animations, I think, yes, with the biggest infinity around, the only ordinary thing that will happen is seeing the emergence of patterns that replace the world of words with images and symbols, and yes, the obvious itself will also occur like magic, and the obvious is that soon I'll change my profession, and so will he, the genius, that is, I mean, here at the edge of the universe, with space in between the ordinary occurrence of the obvious, yes, what will happen is that I'll take up his job at Aalborg University, a mighty universe indeed, and he will take up mine, an even bigger universe, as I'm always into bigger things than anyone else, and we'll improve the world from within, we'll go from the 10 raised at the power of minus 16 to some other 10 raised at some very nice infinity, to destroy numbers, crush them, to make some light, so ok, we'll need some help, I think Caravaggio is a good bet, and so is Zorn's 11th axiom of set theory, yes, we need to fix first some existences, even Gertrude Stein was into redemptive acts, so why not us, get past the obvious but not losing it out of sight, and also past the Bible, but not losing it out of sight either, and then we'll pause 5 minutes into the film that H, the genius, has been circulating around for our instruction into Zorn's lemma, which says that, well, Zorn says a lot of things, that there must be a yes somewhere in it, there's for instance a very nice yes in the very fifth minute, after the alphabet and the creation, and after the facts: "In Adam's fall we sinned all"; "Thy life to mend, God's Book attend"; "The Cat doth play, and after slay", when the camera takes a break from all that infinite obviousness of ordinary things, and when it pauses on the yes, lo and behold, not on anything else, in fact it does so quite stubbornly, pause, that is, or hesitate, to be more precise, and yes, of course, before you know it, H and I will have a lot of fans, we do already, and they will all shout, oy, or perhaps, oh my, how clever of you two, by Jove, but then by then Jove will be out of sight, I mean, with all this infinity in the provisional, who's to say what we'll get out of changing professions, but then again, at the edge of the universe, whether H will be a mediocre poet, and I a lousy mathematician, the question is, will it make any difference, no difference at all, we'll be so spaced out, and totally Muybridgian, beyond analogies, beyond the laws of attraction, beyond the laws of correspondences, beyond the laws of causality, beyond the laws of end results, and, I'm sure that I'm missing some laws right now, I'm sure of it, but, in any event, and even beyond 'whatever', there is light, there's lots of light even there where there's lots of space between the lightning stars, and yes, even though I hate it, I think that I'll pick up the phone and ask the genius what the hell he's thinking about, although between the two of us, I know it already, so perhaps to the fans then, yes, we promise, we'll do it, we'll hit this one. Let there be 11 of them.

EXAMINATION

2011-01-26T19:46:00.006+01:00

Examining students for orals can be a challenging task, especially if you have to do it from 9 to 6. But the day can have its moments. One of my students working on Lars Von Trier's genius in his sublime masterpiece The Antichrist walked into the examination room today armed with the Bible. “Can I quote from the Bible?” she asked. “The Bible is always a good starting point,” I said, and then she went: “It is written on the ten commandments: 'You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.'” I tried not to blink, and was waiting for the point. “Yes, the points is,” she said, “that this is when it goes wrong for women. They are treated as men's property. They are equal not to the man himself but to what else he owns, a house, a mule, and even his children. And that is a problem.” “Yes,” I said, “that is a goddamn problem. And what are we doing about it, to restore the balance?” I then continued, hinting at what von Trier is suggesting we should all do. The student hesitated, and hesitation for me in such crucial moments may have fatal consequences, for I engaged in a merciless tirade. “Are you in love?” I asked her, and I could tell that not only did she not see that one coming but that she was also on the verge of retorting, 'how dare you ask me about my personal life.' She didn't though, and offered an honest answer in return. “I'm in love,” she admitted, and I went: “And? What's next?” “Well,” she hesitated again, “I don't know.” “Are you sure that you don't know, are you sure that you're not waiting for your man to pop the question, take you to the altar and graciously let you know in front of witnesses that now he will do you the favor of loving you forever and ever by TAKING YOU as HIS? You'll thus consecrate the fucking ritual of 'I take thee' and hence perpetuate the idiotic idea, now as old as a few millennia, that's it's all right with you to be officially 'taken.' Most men never think of women as being independent creatures but rather as being either 'free' or 'taken' objects, which is something that I myself find utterly disgusting.” I know that I shouldn't have said 'fuck' in an exam situation, but when you're provoked, you're provoked, and I take that sort of provocation very seriously. “Sure,” I continued, “the woman also says, “I take thee,” but somehow, and unfortunately for our lot, while the man always ends up owning the woman more than she ever does him, she is just lucky to have been 'found'.” “I will never get married,” the student said. “Are you sure about that?” I said, and she went, “yes, I won't.” I wanted to say, and perhaps I did say it actually: “hey, don't pledge anything to me here, and especially not something that you won't be able to commit yourself to. We live after all in a society of compromises.” But then something beautiful happened. She changed her tone and her body language, as if hit by an epiphany. Perhaps she understood something about the implication of serious speech acts. We looked at each other, she nodded, and I gave her the top grade.

(NOTE: the student graciously allowed me to 'report' on this, but suggested that I emphasized that this was not the only topic we discussed at the exam. Of course not. What I re-construe here got settled in 1 minute and 33 seconds in the classroom just before the half hour examination ended. But in its proper context here, the 'marriage thing' is the most interesting. Thanks)

SUPERNOVA

2011-01-23T14:09:00.005+01:00

My energy is on the rise. The countdown has started to when I'll hit the most holy of the holiest: Norway. First, a week in Oslo in May, and then a month in the mountains in July and August. The place is booked. Hallelujah. While I feel indestructibly powerful, the feeling of freedom that Norway gives me reminds me as well of the fact that I'm also free to feel humble. Such joy, to be on top of the mountains of abstraction. And such warmth, to know that the vistas from there are not conflicting. Mentally I'm already in the new cabin looking outside the window and thinking: here I'm most logical and also most esoteric. And it's fine. It's not even uncommon. While I'm typing this right now, being physically in my own living room, I'm facing equally grand vistas: the shelf of books containing esoteric wisdom. My eyes glance sideways along the spine of Michael Dummett's book: The Visconti- Sforza Tarot Cards. Hmm. Of course, I say to myself, and why not? If it didn't bother Michael Dummett to be a Professor of Logic at Oxford and to write books about tarot, why should it bother me? Mother was another example of combining cutting sharpness with acknowledging that repudiating what we don't know that we do know is a bad idea. If it hadn't been too impractical to become a philosopher in Romania in the 80s, she would have liked me to become a logician... and more. All the same. Alexander Neckam, or Albricus, was also a professor at Oxford around 1186 and taught The Song of Songs and other images to all who had a mature mind and sublime intelligence ["maturi pectoris & sublimis intelligentie"]. His teachings reflected his experiences with the Sardae Sagae, the wise women of Sardinia, who, immediately after the explosion of the supernova of 1181, took him to their subterranean temple Ta Rat' and initiated him into the fuller meaning of the Imagines Arcanae [Secret Images]. I said previously in another fragment that Norway is my lucky star. A fragment of my own supernova. Blessings unto it.

MUSIC THEORY

2011-01-19T17:42:00.002+01:00

I'm listening to Handel's Rinaldo. The strings make one understand what high-mindedness is. The percussive thunders, what grace is, and the duets suggest what would happen if men allowed women to take the upper hand, begin with the caressing of the brains rather than balls. What would happen is that they would learn something close to the philosophy of tantric sex – not quite that, and yet more. (My nephew declares in secret that he wants to become a professor of Italian - it's a good beginning.)

MORNING IN THE FOUNTAIN

2011-01-15T18:27:00.005+01:00

Some days are definitely better than others. Absolutely. It's been a while now since my friend, the genius mathematician who doesn't want to be called a genius – but he can't dictate around here – has been bugging me to write an article together. But today we both decided that that won't do. It's not good enough. I mean, why an article when we can do a whole book? As we have exchanged ideas on the first chapter “The Uncountability of Nothingness” of now well under its way book: Morning in the Fountain: Infinity in the Provisional, we got energized by the idea that it would be interesting to apply the Banach-Tarski theorem to the isometrical transformation of one nothingness into two identical nothingnesses. And why not? We are after all disciples of Cantor's cult of infinity, so I'm sure that we'll hack it in no time whatsoever. Indeed, there are enough wonderful things around that will keep us mentally tall, in a heightened state of excitement... and formless. As Cioran put it: “Infinity leads to nothing for it is totally provisional. ‘Everything’ is too little when compared to infinity [...] The penchant for form comes from love of finitude, the seduction of boundaries which will never engender metaphysical revelations [...] Let us live in the ecstasy of infinity, let us love that which is boundless, let us destroy forms and institute the only cult without forms: the cult of infinity.” (On the Hights of Despair, 99-100)

HIPPODRONE

2011-01-12T22:15:00.030+01:00

I have my teeth into some Mozart chocolate circles, sent to me by Norbert Eckermann for Christmas. The circles were awaiting my return from New York. While relishing them, I think about how fortunate I must be to possess what I call the Stradivarius of frame drums. While in New York, and roaming the percussive worlds, I saw no one playing the sublime Eckermanns. “As no one can afford them,” says Billy, the owner of Drummers World, who sent his regards to Norbert through me, while showing his distress that, obviously since he had no such fine instruments in his store, there was nothing he could do for me. And yet, as he went on and on about Norbert's goat farm, and gushing at the man's devotion, he made me feel blissful. Some say that plenty equals bliss, and these days I must say that I owe my feeling of plenitude to Norbert. So, Norbert, thanks for the chocolates and your genius.

I play a few numbers on the smashing tar, shift to the riqq for a sweaty saltarello, and then throw myself at the church bells in The Play of Daniel by the Dufay Collective. They sing about the writing on the wall just as Anthony Johnson is writing on my wall on Facebook. This is in response to a comment I made on his collection of “Hippodrones” which he posts occasionally for public display in the same forum. These hippodrones are bits of highly informative, witty, clever, and above all generous, very generous lines that make our days much much better even than they are already. As Anthony is also a fan of Norbert – I made sure of that – he anticipates with delight the math in my introduction to his upcoming book with EyeCorner Press, Aurora Resurgens. It occurs to me that all the significant men in my life know something about math. And the best ones are the esoteric. I list here below the fun exchanges on oracular history, while being grateful for all the synchronicity provided by Anthony and Norbert, in absentia in New York where I was fragmenting my way through the image world of Visconti & Sforza, fellow templars of Anthony's, and the sound world of Thomas Adès, a fellow creationist of Norbert's. The latter, in his concert with the New York Philharmonic, 7 Days, enforced once again what everyone knows but won't admit it: that it ain't about sex, but geometry and numbers. As Shakespeare put it: “Go to your bosom: Knock there, and ask your heart what it does know.”

Anthony Johnson Hippodrone (22). ‘Aha Moment’. What has been lost through the arc of history? Recharging the muses (in the BM’s exhibition on ‘The Egyptian Book of the Dead’) was the insight that ‘Aha’ is a benevolent pygmy hippo goddess. And that the image of Ipet (her child-centred sister) counters the scary red shadow of Seth’s water-horsical devotees. So let us raise our wands to Aha, Ipet, and the way of the White Hippopotamus!

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- Jyrki Huhta Aha, and her less-known cousin Nods.
  14 hours ago ·
- Alan Prosser Good morrow hippodronicus rex! I'm too happy in receipt of your wisdom to reciprocate at present, but I will try to become philosophical as the day wears thin and I become resplendent with spaghetti bolognese.... (oh and just a teensy diet coke)
  10 hours ago ·
- Camelia Elias And let us not forget the number 22.
  8 hours ago ·
- Bent Sorensen It's a little known fact that the Egyptian mathematicians were preoccupied with what is known as aha-problems - equations in which the phrase "a-ha" is used to indicate the unknown quantity, x... (See the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus at BM)
  8 hours ago ·
- Anthony Johnson Hmm, all this mathematical talk of 22s and Rhind papyri makes one think about the number 11. After all, the Rhind papyrus has '11' written on its obverse side, is 33 cms wide (in later Christic terms, the number of Error resolved by the Trinity), and was produced in year 33 of the reign of Apophis. As the palindrome 'aha' is replicable by 121 (i.e. 11 x 11), might we therefore not speculate on whether we are talking here about the square of the hippopotomuse?
  6 hours ago ·
- Camelia Elias Exactly! And how beautiful!
  6 hours ago ·
- Bent Sorensen ‎"If in doubt, square it"
  6 hours ago ·
- Anthony Johnson Happy 2011!
  6 hours ago ·
- Camelia Elias A decantic cup for you as well, plus one.
  6 hours ago ·
- Bent Sorensen Should have been done on 11/1/11 at 11.11...
  6 hours ago ·
- Alan Prosser read and weep, Melvyn Bragg!
  6 hours ago ·

IF IN NEW YORK

2011-01-02T11:14:00.003+01:00

HYPERION ART JOURNAL ANNOUNCES:

CELEBRATE ECP’s recent publications with drinks, live music, and recitations.

Join us in celebrating the publication of Rainer J. Hanshe's The Acolytes and several other new books published by EyeCorner Press, including novels, poetry, plays, and more.

The Eyeball Kid - LIVE IN PERSON!

Authors Hanshe, Sorensen, Gibbons, and DiDonna will perform from their texts. Dashing editor-in-chief Camelia Elias will be flying in from Europe, and she'll be performing too. Hell, she might even play the drums, but they won't be bongos...

Featuring live jazz performed by improvisationist extraordinaire Sir Randall Moore, and the Alper Yilmaz Electroacoustic Trio.

Manhattan Inn

632 Manhattan Ave (near Nassau), Brooklyn, NY

(G train to Nassau or L train to Bedford).

http://manhattaninn.blogspot.com/2009/12/manhattan-inn-photos.html

FRIDAY JANUARY 7th

TIME: 5 – 7:30PM

FREE ADMISSION

Happy Hour: half off all beers and well drinks

EyeCorner Press is a daring and eclectic independent publisher based in Roskilde, Denmark that publishes work in English, Danish, Romanian, and bilingual editions. A host of other compelling works will soon be published by ECP including Yunus Tuncel's Towards a Genealogy of Spectacle, George Hunka's Word Made Flesh: Philosophy, Eros, and Contemporary Drama, David Kilpatrick's Writing with Blood: The Sacrificial Dramatist as Tragic Man, and more.

http://eyecornerpress.com/

IT'S WONDERFUL

2010-12-29T22:59:00.012+01:00

I'm in Bad Kissingen. This is a wonderfully isolated spa place in the south of Germany that used to gather all the literary and musical geniuses of the previous century. It still happens today. From Tolstoy to Rossini, a host of others in between come here to taste the smacking nostalgia for the keiser und kirche culture, and the glorious days when maintaining all things status quo was not only the noblest aim in life, but also the very meaning of life. I'm at a spa hotel that has eeeeeverything in it, including little rich guests, and it amuses me at breakfast to read the look on 80-year old ladies when they size me up and wonder what I must be possessed by to pair my very expensive cashmeres with strings of mountain crystals in all colors instead of proper diamonds – which they flash in my direction with a mysterious largesse. I start laughing, when I feel the presence of the spirit of my dead mother in the room. Going to spa places used to be her thing, yet the only conservative act she ever engaged in. I almost see her taking a seat next to my table and urging me to play cards. Not poker - for God forbid to rob people of their precious possessions - but tarot. Mother is whispering, as she spreads the cards for the old widows and domestic housewives: “they all want to know things, no matter how over the hill they may be.” I follow suit, though I prefer my own card deck to hers. While she uses the Rider-Waite pack, I prefer the Visconti-Sforza. She is good with the symbols, I with the precision. We wink at each other.

The people of Bad Kissingen have so much money that they don't know what to do with it. So they splurge on organizing musical festivals, which I've attended for some years now. They can afford to bring in both, some of the best performers around and some of the weirdest. The only difference is that the weirdoes don't get press coverage, and nor do you get to see their faces plastered all over the city's posters. But this is all the same. As money doesn't interest me in the slightest – and I have a bizarre tendency to share it around, if I have it, or spend it under the oddest of circumstances, when I have it – I use my other senses to follow what money can't buy. As far as I'm concerned, I feel grandly privileged to have the year of 2010 end with being in the company of masters and geniuses who do things for the sake of enlightenment as an experience rather than an idea that can translate into financial benefits.

The formidable ensemble Oni Wytars delights with its program that unites Jerusalem with the beat of Mediterranean music, also anticipating my special rendezvous with them for a whole week in February at an institute of higher learning on Crete. Ensemble Unicorn, with its "Erotiche Lieder" program, follows my resurfacing out of the hamam, some hundred meters under the ground, where I've been communing with salts in the city's famed Salzgrotten. While inhaling what one can otherwise get by the sea - plus more and minus the tourists - the song “Via Con Me, It's Wonderful,” by Paolo Conte comes to my mind. “Via via, vieni via con me. Niente più ti lega a questi luoghi. Vieni via con me,” sings Conte, and it soothes my soul to know that there are still a number of wonderful things around that we can enjoy, if, as he puts, we dare to enter the dark love, rather than lose ourselves to the world of conventions. “Entra in questo amore buio. Non perderti per niente al mondo.” The only condition is that we know ourselves. Being above ambivalence and duality is a tall order and requires a rough and tough honesty. But it can be done, if we listen properly to the silence of the salts, or sands. Or else play and drink with the following: Carlo Rizzo, genius and god on the riq; Ross Daly, genius and ghost on the lyra; Luigi Lai, genius and grandmaster on launeddas. Happy New Year to you all.

GOING OUT

2010-12-05T01:22:00.002+01:00

Another life ruined. This is what I told myself, when I took my nephew out last week, and as I was listening to him declare that he wants to move to Norway.

I’ve been going out lately, and Paul likes going out with me. For a very simple reason: because my idea of going out is taking the Olso boat, stuffing myself either à la carte or at the buffet while cruising, then working it all out, exorcising the fat devils, by climbing the mountain to Frogneseteren and then coming down on skis or my bum. We did this together in full sunny glory and minus 10 degrees, and then we sailed back to Copenhagen the day after.

On the boat, one of the best entertaining times is when I get to sit on the 9th deck in the panorama bar, and watch the drunkards go by. I have a strategy. I place myself almost in the middle of a long red couch, which indicates an opening towards others to sit by me. Oh, the stories some of these people have to tell are fascinating. This time around, an unconventional and gay corporate Norwegian took a sit and told me that he had too much to drink. I asked him what he had: “cognac, snaps, beer, and cocktails,” he said. “Oh, that’s bad,” I said. “I’m from Lillehammer, and I like going into the wilderness to visit friends, very special friends” he then said, and I went: “I’ve been there, nice place, nice people.” “Oh, but wait until you see Tromsø,” he said. “I’ve been there too,” I said. “Oh,” he said. “But not for motor-biking, I bet.” He won. I’ve never been motor-biking in Tromsø.

I’m back in Tromsø right now. And while I’m pretty good at car racing – I should try the bike one of these days – I never thought I was any good at winter sports. And yet, I find myself powder skiing from sea to summit. My brain, as always here, feels free and razor-sharp, and my mathematical mind has never felt better. I imagine being able to calculate like a god. I’m thinking of my life a month ahead, when I’ll be done (for now) with saying hello to the Alaskan huskies, chasing the aurora borealis on a sleigh, and drumming with the arctic shamans (Anthony Johnson, Paul Muldoon, and Mari Boine are here too). So, I speculate: what are the odds of having my spirit slumber, as one does in hot places, when I’ll be making odd sounds by playing the tombak and the tar in Teheran and Tel Aviv with the masters? I’m thinking of Zohar Fresco’s name. What’s in a name? And how will it resonate, when I’ll be standing in such close proximity to the grand percussionist, letting his fingers touch mine, and pulling his magical energy to myself? The odds are null, and I’m pleased with this result in spite of the weather forecast: 30 degrees plus. And I’ve already started practicing even by unanticipated coincidence.

As it happened last week on the boat, I found myself counting rhythmical beats. My sister made me dance to YMCA, which I can never resist – as I’ve always been a fan of the gay community and its way of reclaiming the body and other such shit. Not to mention the queer way of wiggling the bum, and courting a lady. Quite sublime. In the middle of the Village People singing, I heard my sister shouting and laughing: “that’s your Norwegian,” and pointing to a guy who managed to fall over the dance floor, landing on his own ass on top of some more drinks on the nearby table. His legs were in the air, showing off expensing pointy shoes. I’m thinking of my own soul suspended between beats when I’ll hit the Middle East, sanction the patriarchy once more, and get lost in the droning sound of the oud. The walls of Jericho will come down on the first beat, and the soul will stand naked to the corner of the eye. Going out as a concept will have outed itself, and with it, so my desire to ever leave the Arctic.

I gave a talk on Wittgenstein and stones here in Tromsø, at the Nordic Irish Studies conference. It went down well. In fact so well that at the closing reception the Irish ambassador quoted from my paper, which he called “wonderful and fascinating.” This catapulted me to experiencing some wonderful 15 minutes of fame. He also ended his speech with these words: “yes, let’s have more Wittgenstein. Let’s get Wittgenstein back to Ireland”. I ended drinking too much while explaining to everyone why an Americanist who doesn’t do Irish studies for a living likes Wittgenstein. I told everyone that it’s because of his last words: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life,” he said, thus showing that he never had a blind spot for language. Indeed, ‘the wonderful’ is never up for negotiation. This is an achievement that deserves attention.

On the threshold of the New Year, and since I won’t have time for the regular missive of holiday wishing, what with my going out these days – zipping also to New York in between my Polar and Persian dashing – here it comes now, to you all: I wish you not to be happy but to live wonderfully. The wonderful experience has a history of lasting longer, and of being far more memorable than anything else. Read some Wittgenstein, pay attention to the language you speak, seek the company of geniuses, don’t eat cold cheese, and don’t forget to stand tall mentally. Doum, ta, ka, doum.

THE LOGICIAN

2010-10-22T00:02:00.001+02:00

On my 42nd anniversary, I celebrate my mother. I always thought it appropriate, to celebrate your mother on your birthday. I thus give myself a book of fragments which celebrates my mother’s formal genius. I took some advice and collected here some of my texts that have been circulating in virtual space. The Logician begins with what my mother liked and it ends with what I like, materially speaking. What lies beyond that, who’s to say?

My mother is dead, and has been dead for a while, but one of her repeated questions, posed in her mysterious metaphysical moments, still haunts me: “formally speaking, how can we determine what everything is? How can we determine what nothing is?” Kafka writes in his notebooks: “Nothing came of it… just residues of light traversing the words.” But light in itself, surely, it is everything already, isn’t it?” My mother didn’t want to write. She thought that knowledge should be shared not sold. She was a good Marxist and a good logician. I hear her saying, as I did some 20 times a day while she was still around, "logically speaking, when writing is no good," or as in my case right now, it has run its course, "then surely music is a good interval?" Indeed it is. So, on my 42nd birthday I return to what I wanted to do for some time now, making music. Check my new project here, the Quintus Perfectum ensemble.

Some people think I’m good at some things. Perhaps. Who’s to decide? Meanwhile, today, I’ll create some sounds in special places at request. Perhaps making music can beat the light, or nothingness. Though not in the sense of winning over it. For what would be the point of that? What would be the point of that?

Enjoy!

THE JUDGE

2010-10-02T13:30:00.008+02:00

I’m preparing some thoughts for a future course on the representation of the judge in literature and film. There are many, and they all come in various disguises. More evidently we go from the figure of the wise and intelligent judge, who is unmovable in his ways, to more emphatic judges who show their vulnerability and its relation to doubting. As a middle or anomalous category, we also find judges as fools, or women, who are always perplexing insofar as what they do before passing a verdict is reason their emotions. Their verdicts are always correct, yet their ways of getting there are always counterintuitive. As such, these ways are often deemed wrong, viewed with suspicion, or dismissed by the limited lawyers and prosecutors.

This judge who is also a fool never receives any recognition because even when he arrives at the right conclusion, his act is deemed the work of chance. Of course, what we are talking about here is the fine nuance between material and immaterial evidence, rational and irrational proof and discourse. This nuance permeates the otherwise rigid structure of a legal court-case, which dictates that if you can prove it, you win. As the success rate of the winning party over the losing party is based entirely on evidence, it is less clear how the immaterial kind of evidence, which is often part of the whole package of evidence is taken into account. In other words, there is always evidence of some fact that is based on invisible proof. But the fact that the proof cannot be seen does not make the proof in itself any less absent. Quite the contrary. But then again, how to represent it, and what kind of judge will be able to identify that which may resist final representation?

Derrida wrote beautifully about the dynamics of knowing what you know evidenced by the seeming absence of proof. There is always a trace and a supplement, he writes, which haunts what is insisted upon as being present, and as such, as being the opposite of what is absent. Presence feeds on absence, and it stands in a parasitical relation to absence. A good judge will always take this into account to the perplexing faces of the realists, rationalists, and positivists who populate the courts. And bearing this in mind, it is thus shown how difficult it is to overturn a verdict which is already the result of thinking about variables also in terms of their interplay with what is seemingly missing from the set of evidential proof. As legal history has shown, once an assumption has been proved, by using the above strategy of inclusiveness, it stands. Thus all evidence produced to counter an initial solid judgment has often been shown to be not strong but stupid. And why? Simply because what characterizes a supremely solid judgment is its commitment to assessing in equal measure both the implications of the visible and the invisible proof. A solid judgment is thus always rendered against the background of inclusiveness, of valuing the function of the traces, supplements, and absences that characterize the immaterial proof in the evidential set and which make the final evidence complete.

The beauty of being a judge consists of the fact that one can sanction the very idea of justice according to one’s own strength, intelligence, and knowledge of precedence (knowledge of Derrida is also included) thus bypassing the same attributes that the masses may also exhibit, but who, for the sake of courteous conduct, need to follow the biblical injunction: ‘judge not, lest ye be judged.’

Judging as a profession is thus the only thing that can sanction justice in relation to the immutable law. This is something that I return to nostalgically, as becoming a judge was something I embarked on before I changed tense and geography. But I still think of what the criteria for being a supremely decisive and non-hesitant judge is. It’s a compelling thought, especially when, in our culture, we often see that the representation of the judge in various media is lacking in nuance. For, when the hammer falls, the seeming finality of the verdict is destabilized already by the reverberation of what haunts the serious, performative speech act: ‘the judge has spoken.’ For, the sound of the hammer may also reverberate in such a way that it will only be heard by the perplexed who can thus clearly see that the judge does not only speak but also dictates: ‘stop wasting my time trying to convince me that the immaterial evidence is not evidence enough. Go home, be merry, and read something.’ Loss is all around us.

PICTURESQUE

2010-09-30T17:18:00.004+02:00

I’m selling my paintings. Some want the Jews, some the ‘women who know things,’ some the math, and some the readers. I keep the infinities for myself as they are dangerous in the wrong hands, and I don’t want to end up being cursed for ruining people’s lives.

As I popularize the news of my new-found luck on Facebook – people actually pay me heavy money for the stuff, and swear that I have it as a painter – I think of some of the comments. Not long ago, an art critic and a painter of caliber himself made the comment that while my work manifests too much brain power, it’s lucky that I’m at the same time “sensual, exciting, and creative,” which shines through the intelligence. The reference was also meant to cover the cross between my visual and my writerly endeavor, as some of the paintings are accompanied by textual fragments. I said nothing of what the premise for assuming that I’m “too smart” might be, as the same critic did me the favor of being quite on top of what’s going on in my work, thus showing acute perceptiveness. And I like that. As he put it, the paintings exhibit a rigor of rigid precision, of ‘cutting to the bone’, and of tight consistency, though not in a way that puts the act of reducing thought to a bare essential on a cliché track, but quite the contrary. It makes the statement that going for the authentic crisis rather than the inauthentic cliché is worth the while and always preferable. I can live with such comments that can identify what elements precisely in my aesthetic projects have the potential to rise above the tension in the opposition between the drama of learning about the limits of your experience through the complexity of assessing pain and the frivolous learning through merry-go-round cognitive models à la ‘change your attitude and you’ll see an effect… – why? – because I said so… – errr, what’s the argument? – beh, there’s none, but it worked for the Harvard business boys, so, – ah, ok, thanks, here’s a sack of money for nothing.’

Today I explained to a friend of mine, a political theorist and an activist, who made the comment: “Charmant. Adorable! "Women who know things," that there’s more to it than that. I quote myself below:

"In that category 'Women who know things' I'm trying to counter the stupid assumption that when 'men know things', they are geniuses, and we accept that. When women 'know things' they are 'too smart for their own good,' and we don't accept that. We pity them, wrongly assuming that they are missing out on things, or else we either fear them, or we assume that the manifestation of brain power is a manifestation of women's desire to merely get laid. I mean, really! Logically speaking, isn't it so that if you are 'too smart', you're probably also smart enough to know quite precisely and already what you're missing and what you aren't? Lord have mercy....”

Her reply:

‎:))))))

:)))))))))))))))))))))))))

))))))))))))))))))))))))))

))))))))))

I like that. It makes its own quiet statement. Wittgenstein as a woman who is not sorry if it’s stupidity she’s missing out on.

BOYS TO MEN

2010-09-26T15:31:00.008+02:00

Yesterday I attended my nephew’s 16th birthday, though, in actuality, it is yet to come, as he was born on the 28th. A few other boys were also attending. Being in the company of teenagers can be thoroughly entertaining, and as I’m prone to listening to what they have to say, I often find myself in the situation where I hear myself delivering life lessons, or making points that often have a ring of finality to them. Paul is good at initiating a feel-good atmosphere on all levels. For instance, as soon as I entered the room, he hurried towards me, kissed me, and then proceeded to check out my silk jersey dress. “Why have you come as if dressed for the funeral?” he asked, and then swiftly moved on to admiring my necklaces: one made of real pearls and the other made of lava stones and amethyst. He particularly liked the latter. “Oh, that’s very beautiful and interesting,” he said. “I made it myself,” I said, and then he went on even more swiftly to telling me that he liked my presents.

Between eating, singing, and playing the piano, there was room for some other kind of playing that involved argumentation and belief. “Last chance,” Paul said to me, after showing me all the insides of his computer, and all the technical stuff in it, “to admit to the benefits of a PC over a Mac. If you’re not going to believe this now…” “Then what?” I cut him short. He tried to argue, but he wasn’t convincing. So I said to him, extrapolating from the event, and adopting a reverential air suited to the making of a universal and therefore important point. “Don’t ever give people ultimatums, or tell them that this is their last chance to do something, or believe something, unless you actually really know what you’re talking about, and unless you can really calculate the risks pertaining to the implications of such statements." “Why is that so important?” he wanted to know. “Because” I said, “if you don’t know what you’re saying, and yet insist on issuing final ‘warnings’ without thinking, then you will merely disclose that you’re full of shit, that you have no good judgment, and no experience.” “Oh,” he said baffled, and then continued: “that’s bad.” I read this as an implicit statement that, when it comes down to it, and in spite of their age, boys do want to be taken seriously rather than be dismissed on account of being silly, insensitive, or foolish. “You’re goddamn right it’s bad”, I then said, “and the sooner you learn this the better, namely that knowing what you’re talking about is what distinguishes between mature and immature people. So take your pick.”

Benjamin came to my rescue, as I was about to venture into a potentially unpleasant ‘grow-up, for Christ’s sake’ moment, and started performing massage on my back. “Oh, my,” I said, and just as I was getting into it, he ran to his computer while asking: “how do you write this in Italian?” – he was fascinated with the google translator and the robot behind it uttering all sorts of sounds. Benjamin is a bit of a language genius. I said to him: “now, you finish the job you started, and then I’ll tell you.” “All right he said, and then proceeded to even ask me how hard I liked it, and what other sado-masochistic-like punches on my back I preferred. The other grown-ups in the house were giving me the look of: “Benjamin never takes any orders from anyone, how did you manage…?”

After the massage, Peter tried to convince me, also by way of helping Paul out, that an Acer computer is better than a Mac because you can play all these things on it. “Like what?” I said. He showed me a game in which he was running around with a shot gun in the desert trying to kill infidel soldiers. “Why is running around like that interesting at all when there’s no strategy?” I asked him, implying that if that’s all you can do on an Acer that otherwise looks like shit on a Mac, then I wasn’t convinced why I should even bother installing such things on my computer to begin with, not to mention why I should change computers at all. “Oh,” he said, quickly, “there’s strategy, there’s lots of strategy.” “Yeah,” I said, "like what?" “You have to be fast,” he said. “Oh, and that’s what you call strategy?” I asked, destabilizing his beliefs in a snap, which, also in a snap left him dead on the ground. He got shot by the other guy on the screen. It goes to show that thinking can also have this consequence.

At this potentially metaphysical turn, I got hit in my head by Janus who wanted to play with the huge Pilates ball. It was lucky that I decided to wear a jersey dress, for I wouldn’t have been able to handle that one, had I opted for some other garment. I made this remark in reference to Paul’s initial ‘funeral’ comment. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about it” – Paul is always thinking – “and I’ll grant you: you wanted to match my white shirt, but you didn’t know that I was going to wear the Norwegian one, did you?” Oh, I liked this game the best, for it gave me the opportunity to ask him: “are you absolutely certain about that?” "No," he had to admit, and then went: “if the opposite is true, then I want to know how you arrived at that calculation and conclusion.” I told him. When we parted he whispered: “I’m glad you’re part of my life.” Back at home, I sank into my chair and I felt like saying that I was also glad that I was part of my life. And his, of course, of course. Just for laughs. Paul, happy birthday.

CELEBRATION

2010-09-22T15:50:00.004+02:00

Today I thought I caught a glimpse of Bach and Walt Whitman together. As I was trying to ask myself why Bach is so sublime, and in answering to myself that it's because he knew how to celebrate himself, a weird wire from Bach to Whitman electrified my own self. Statistically speaking, as weird occurrences happen at a much higher frequency than we like to believe, and hence, the weird is never as weird as we like to believe, I settled for the idea that, indeed, if we want to experience being wired to something that resists full comprehension, then we have to listen. Just listen. We can even listen to the smell of autumn as it vibrates through strings.

AESTHETICS

2010-09-12T22:53:00.004+02:00

As autumn sets in, I read some seasonal poems. Paul Celan's Corona does it for me, though I can't help thinking about the one element in Celan's poetry that—where message is concerned—always comes across unambiguously: where art is concerned we all participate in the same ideal. According to some literary critics, it is precisely this position of sharing the absolute that is most problematic for Celan.

Formally speaking there is no problem. Morally speaking there is a problem. For Celan—who lost most of his family in the concentration camps—as a writer there was no difference in what he was doing and what the Nazis were doing, namely participating in the creation of art. No one can argue that what drove the Nazis to their atrocities was essentially an aesthetic project. They had an idea of getting blond people to populate the earth—supposedly because the earth would look more beautiful if it just stuck with one kind of color, so they pursued this almost by the book, the aesthetic book, that is. And one can trace the formation of art according to the definition of art in the Nazi project almost to the point of no deviance.

A serious fellow artist cannot disregard the similarity. So, Celan's question here, and one which can also be traced in all of his poems is this one: insofar as poetry is the result of an aesthetic project which relies on the reduction of many ideas to one, how can one then allow oneself to accuse others, who think the same, for the 'wrong' kind of thinking? It is quite clear here that what bothered Celan was the fear that ultimately it is not imagination that has the potential to drive people mad, but logic. Poets don't go mad, they merely kill themselves. Rationalists, au contraire... God have mercy on their souls...

What Celan has achieved in his grappling with the problem of symmetry that guides certain aesthetic projects is his honest suggestion that where art is concerned, it needs to be true to itself and not to its presupposed responsibility. This is a tough message to put across. Celan's honesty, in this sense, can be said to be a high form of generosity, as it consists in equal measure of both, what is possible and what is impossible to represent. As often with art, however, there are the fewest who are ready for ultimate acts of giving, especially if they consist of disturbing and painful elements. A crisis arises when the even fewer who may actually get it, for whatever reason, may at the same time also fail to recognize the act fully. What remains, then, if you want to stay intact in your integrity as an artist, are only two contradictory strategies that you can embody: either going the rational way or the emotional way. Celan died like a Romantic poet. The Nazis turned mad. We obviously need more logics for the excluded middle.

Meanwhile, here's Corona for an early autumn day, and for the middle way,

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.

From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:

then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it's Sunday,

in dream there is room for sleeping,

our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:

we look at each other,

we exchange dark words,

we love each other like poppy and recollection,

we sleep like wine in the conches,

like the sea in the moon's blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people

look up from the street:

it is time they knew!

It is time the stone made an effort to flower,

time unrest had a beating heart.

It is time it were time.

It is time.

STRAW

2010-09-11T11:11:00.003+02:00

Für Anselm Kiefer

A sea of love. There must be a sea of love behind it. “It's chess” the blood relation says. “Don't touch it,” the gatekeeper says. “Why not? This hair is made of straw, Margarethe's hair is made of straw.” “Because Anselm won't like it.” “We don't speak Danish,” the chess lover says. “No, but you understand it. Now move away.” “Yes, sir, Hitler sir,” we say in perfect Danish and vanish in Shulamit's painting. In the alcove where the Ice and Blood awaits, I hear the sister of mercy asking: “What do you see?” The alcove's resonance goes like a bullet through the surface, it ricochés on the hero's palm, and glides into the sea of love, vibrating. I'm cutting a wave with Anselm's scissors and plant it on Shulamit's head. She starts talking: “Du bist Maler, Wort Gewitter Eis und Blut.” Maybe. Maybe. “What do you see?” “I see a theory of the moon,” the pianist says. “You are the crystal woman.” “Who taught you to talk like that?” “You did.” I sip ashes through the straw, and imagine another feedback. I'm the crystal woman. I cast my reflection on your strength and your power gets divided by four. Das ist Melancholia für Paul Celan, Sol Invictus für Jean Genet, Konstellation für Margarethe, und Sternenfall für Shulamit. You can't drown in the last straw. I make a wish for the utterance: You are powerful, my love, and I believe you.

GET THE BOOK

SOIRÉE

2010-09-06T00:01:00.013+02:00

My sister invited her language class to celebrate one year of learning Danish. It was fun to be reminded of old times, when I myself had to go through it. Sounds incongruent with each other mixed in with music, as Paul was giving some encores along his piano teacher, Pippi, who is here to celebrate his upcoming 16 years birthday. Small kids in the background joined their little voices in, and I started counting. Danish, Romanian, Hungarian, Farsi, French, German, and Dutch. That’s seven languages together. I threw in some dead ones too. “Russian,” I said to my sister. “Remember when mother had guests from Bulgaria, and two weeks she spoke nothing but Russian? How she loved it, and was high because she had a chance to practice it?” We thought then that it was embarrassing to have our mother speak Russian. No one else we knew wanted to do that, or could. “And silence,” Paul said. “Silence is also a language.” “Indeed it is,” I said, and I went home translating.

Paul & Beethoven: Still with Noise from Camelia Elias on Vimeo.

Paul's teacher, Pippi from Camelia Elias on Vimeo.

Paul & Bach in the dark from Camelia Elias on Vimeo.

COARCTATE

2010-08-30T20:52:00.007+02:00

For the intelligent and sensual lovers, now available from amazon US and UK, Mark Daniel Cohen's Coarctate: Antigone's Return and Selected Poems.

For a preview, read the Introduction here.

ENJOY!

EyeCorner Press - ISBN: 978-8792633002

IT IS WHAT IT IS

2010-08-29T00:12:00.003+02:00

Last night in Torino. I'm having spaghetti alle vongole at a place recommended by Giuglia, a waiter who served me lunch at another place. “Oh, you came,” she said, and was ecstatic. Spaghetti alle vongole was not on the menu, but Giuglia made sure that I got them. In my eating-out experience, if you care to pay attention to the one waiting on you, you may be surprised. They may let you in on things that they don't necessarily share with others. As it turned out Giuglia is not only a very professional waiter but she also used to pick strawberries on Samsø in Denmark. She needed the money to get herself a certification to teach hatha yoga for children, which she acquired in India at the famous Mysore place for yoga instructors. So Giuglia is many things. I gave her my email and told her that if she ever came back to Denmark she could come and see me, and we would do some yoga together. “Oh, you're so elegant and quiet,” she said. “All Libras are.” I don't know about elegance, but it's true about quietude. I can be quiet.

Thus, while having great food at Chiosco dello Zoo, in quietude, I was thinking about connections. Harold Pinter came to my mind. He was 44 when he met Antonia Fraser, a 42 year-old aristocratic woman, married to an important politician, and with 6 children. He was also married. But what the heck, when lightning strikes, it strikes. He assaulted the poor woman with love poetry, writing that is even embarrassing, and flowers, so many flowers that it's impossible to imagine. She ditched everything, moved in with him, and when both their spouses finally gave them their divorces, they married in 1980. When they first met, however, he told her that he wanted to marry her when he would be 80. “I'll be 78,” she replied. But he didn't care. They married long before that, though, and they lived happily ever after, until Pinter's death. They thus had 33 years of love. As can be read in Fraser's memoir, Must you Go? in all Pinter's love letters to her there's one idea that prevails: the power of connection between them. As he put it: “everything we do, connects the space between death and me, and you.” Antonia's favorite poem is, however, the one titled: It is Here. The last lines read:

What did we hear?
It was the breath we took when we first met.
Listen. It is here.

On the way back to the hotel I was trying to listen to the sounds in the street. On Saturday evenings, the Italians like to drink, order the wrong things—she, the ice cream, he, the tiramisu, then she eats his tiramisu and he eats her ice cream, an ad hoc solution which they both agree on by sealing the pact with a kiss—and inspire. I entered a bookstore that was still open at 10 pm. I picked up the book entitled Le Più Belle Poesie d'Amore, and found myself agreeing with the Austrian poet Erich Fried, that love is what is it, nothing more, nothing less. In love, if “yes” is said, it is not said as a favor, but rather as a manifestation of the acknowledgement that love is what it is. Here, in Italian rendition:

QUEL CHE È

È assurdo
dice la ragione
È quel che è
dice l'amore.

È infelicità
dice il calcolo
Non è altro che dolore
dice la paura
È vano
dice il giudizio
È quel che è
dice l'amore.

È ridicolo
dice l'orgoglio
È avventato
dice la prudenza
È impossibile
dice l'esperienza
È quel che è
dice l'amore.

CONTINUITÀ

2010-08-27T18:29:00.008+02:00

- Spaghetti alle vongole, anche oggi, e ancora una volta?
- Si, sempre.
- Ah, sempre! La donna della continuità.
- Si, sono io. Grazie.
- Grazie a lei.

RADIO

2010-08-22T22:54:00.003+02:00

I’m sitting so close to Lars Vogt, the world renowned German pianist, that I really get pulled into his timing. He begins with a formidable Janacek, In the Mist, and I’m convinced that I’m in the mist. Or at least well on my way. There is after all only about two feet distance between us, Janacek and I, mediated by a performer in trance. The president of the Schubert Society in Roskilde, who arranged the concert, announced already, by introducing Vogt, what he thought we all ought to feel, namely gratitude of the highest, for after playing for 60 people in the beautiful Biedermeier Hall at Hotel Prindsen, Vogt is going to play Albert Hall for 6000 people. God Save the Queen (from such hassle) —Like we were in need of having people tell us what to be grateful for! But grateful we were. I was, and I wasn’t afraid to show it. I went wild in the end, and I was the only one. 59 people in their 70s behind me—yes, we’re still in the provinces, and yes, there were still empty seats in the front row—were either in pain or were showing their enthusiasm as if they didn’t have any. Of course, it hit me that these people must have thought that they all had to behave nicely what with the concert due to being broadcast on the Danish radio channel P2 on Tuesday. Now, you can’t have all that ecstasy show, or hear, can you? Schmucks. I think I’m going to listen to the concert again—oh, the Janacek was so sublime, and so was Schubert, well Schubert always is—and I can anticipate that I’m going to have a good laugh listening to myself yell Bravo. Bravo, indeed. Such playing tonight, for a quiet crowd in the background, made me think that I was left completely alone on this planet. Alone only with the sounds, the mist, and the silent sweat pouring over the keyboard. For some reason I’m convinced that the radio will transmit whatever wavelength I got to ride into thankfulness.

REASONS

2010-08-20T21:33:00.001+02:00

My best friend sends me an email telling me that he was invited to lecture in Norway. “Norway will never let go, will it?” he asked, knowing the answer in advance, at least where I'm concerned. But then I have a way of influencing the people close to me, so Norway has also become special to him. I took him to Norway 9 years ago, and he still keeps talking about it, even though this is the first time he returns. Five hours later, my car flew swiftly on the road, green lights or red lights all the same, to find myself in the company of The Oslo String Quartet. I took a sit in the front row, and praised my luck that although arriving in the last minute, I still found all the seats right under the players' noses unoccupied. Well, this is Jyllinge, after all, and thank God for it. The people in the country have a way of keeping themselves in the background, which, especially at concerts, suits me excellently. The string quartet! Ahhh! Sitting right there, up front, and close up, how sublime! It's not only the breathing into the instruments that you can hear, and which gets to resonate even more than otherwise, but you also get to see the sweat coming down the necks of the performers. The drops of bodily water were so intensely dispersed that I got some on my Max Azria pants. "I breath Norwegian air," I told myself, and it's enough to make me utterly ecstatic. It enhances the autumn smell in Olden which I'll be breathing in October. Thank God. While looking at the crooked cross, and listening mainly to Schumann, I pledged with myself to make a real move for the presidency of the Schubert Society which has arranged the concert, rather to my dissatisfaction—WTF, get some Schubert on the program, for Christ's sake—and then show my satisfaction at the enforced realization that I was right to move to Roskilde in the first place. Three years ago, I said to myself, why the fuck Roskilde, when it hit me. For three reasons: Bach was here, Schubert was here, and someone else I liked was here, but now I can't remember. And yet, reasons are reasons enough. It maybe that everything passes, my memory included, but everything is not always everything. At least that I remember.

SUPREMES

2010-08-17T19:29:00.005+02:00

Georg Cantor is on my mind. As forever, actually. And I feel like saying that where his continuum hypothesis is concerned, if you buy it, then it saves you the trouble with doubting either the extent to which numbers are there, where you believe them to be, or their cardinality. Cantor's numbers are large. Infinitely uncountably large. For the weak-hearted, like myself, there is more than enough right there to make you faint. By analogy, if the idea with things unending is to have an application beyond the world of hypotheses, then it can be thought of in terms that mediate between action and expectation. If your action is based on epistemic belief in transfinite numbers (also metaphorically speaking), then the expectance to see the consequences of such action impact on others falls down to zero. Hence, you expect nothing. Therefore, then, the only sensible thing to do where expectance is concerned is not to say that you're waiting for things to happen—as one would if one were part of a religious cult in which belief is tied to the promise of things actualizing at some point; one is still waiting for the Messiah—but to say that if things happen, they happen, and if they don't, they don't. This means seeing everything as secondary to the way in which the continuum itself unfolds. If one can't imagine abstracts, one can listen to Bach and consider his recitative technique in the context of liturgical mass. The recitative ceremonial in liturgy follows very rigid formulas based on repetitions, and yet, for all its objectivism, the recitative is also emotional as it works as a constant recognition of the structure of the infinite. I'm listening to Bach's O Ewiges Feuer, O Ursprung der Liebe, and I feel like thanking Cantor. For the continuum. For making us sing, alone or in unison: it's there, es ist da, all of it, in all its supreme beauty and unending sensual memory of numbers. Numbers played on us. If the music stops for a while when we get blasted, it only does so, because the singer needs to take a breath.

INEVITABILITY

2010-08-15T18:06:00.002+02:00

I'm in Gilleleje this weekend, a summer resort in the north of Denmark. This morning it rains. A soft rain that makes all the pine trees in the garden look bigger. I sit on the swing and let the drops envelop my face. My nephew, Paul, knows that this is the moment. When to ask me metaphysical questions. He begins, however, with a concrete approach: “what relaxes you?” he wants to know “—and don't say Norway.” I say Norway. He doesn't ask me why, because he knows already, so we don't waste time on that. But I tell him that doing nothing in Norway entices me to think of how, for the most part our choices are both arbitrary and inevitable. This also means that we don't always rationalize what feels right. It's like family relations: they are also both arbitrary and inevitable. Which also means that I'm saying enough already. “So,” Paul goes, “this means then, that we should never resist what feels right, even though we often have to match people's saying that we also have to do right by them.” More rain is falling, yet neither of us is going inside.

RADICALS

2010-08-12T18:33:00.005+02:00

I'm having this exchange about fonts with Mark Daniel Cohen, who, like me right now, is pouring himself over InDesign designs. Those witnessing our fragments here, must remember that not long ago, in a post about theorems, we cut a deal for a book (in the comment box). Now the book is done, and it will be available on amazon.com next week. Stay tuned.

So, while uploading files here and there, Mark asked me what I thought of the letter E in Bembo italics. Well, I've been swooning already over his good taste in the layout, so I let him know that, yes, not only have I noticed the Es, but also that I got carried away in fantasy by the letter R and its connotations of regal feet—the Regina allowing graciously for the next letter to appear, but not so fast, not so fast. Her garment must unfold, so obviously, and necessarily, there's a lagging distance between R and whatever other letter that follows it. The cover, of course, suggests such royal preoccupations, which Mark did just for me.

Then he told me that he found it rather disturbing that the play “Coarctate: Antigone's Return,” following my introduction, starts exactly on page 33, which is the number he used for the draft file of the table of contents, a fictive number he gave the draft to get a sense of space. So, to begin with, there were 17 entries for 33, which makes a total of 561. Now, 5 + 6 + 1 is 11 + 1, another set of 3s. Ohhhh, yes, how lovely, we can all agree, for lack of better words or arithmetics.

Now, some would wonder why I choose to share all this private info. Because we are radicals, and because radicals like good stories. And because radicals can both laugh at themselves, the stories they tell, and the stories that numbers tell. This is what I call never ending entertainment. This is what I call laughing seriously. If you want to know what I mean, here's a preview of Mark's book, via my introduction: “A Touch of Tongues.”

Hopefully many of you out there will hurry to buy good writing next week, packaged in sublime design, and having all those other cosmic numerical geometries on top of everything else.

"In this volume, Mark Daniel Cohen offers, in the first part, a fresh and intelligent look at Sophocles, re-writing Antigone almost as a Beckettian version of Tristan and Isolde. The modern-day domestic drama is continued in the second part of the volume, in which selected poems aptly combine the trivial and the sublime, the mark and measure of every great classic. Camelia Elias writes the introduction under a contaminated spell."

DATE OF RELEASE: AUGUST 25, 2010 from EYECORNER PRESS

RECOMMENDATION

2010-08-08T19:22:00.000+02:00

If you have to go to Norway on a short trip by boat, make sure that on your way back you book yourself first class. You'll need all the champagne in the fridge, and everything else in the sweets department to drown your frustration with having to come back. As I perambulate back and forth on the deck, I'm being pursued by Italians who share my feeling of being frustrated. Their reasons are, however, different. Nonetheless, my bubbly brain picks on their swearing and cursing: porca miseria, they keep saying. I lose them, but back in the Commodore Class Captain's Cabin, I can't seem to be able to lose their expression. All the same. A bit of practicing is never damaging. Quite the contrary. As I'll be in Torino at the end of the month, I can anticipate my going up and down the corso, saying to myself: porca miseria, I could be in Norway instead of here right now. By Jove, how we can master wasting time! Jævlig trist.

CLOSER

2010-08-08T01:05:00.003+02:00

In the 10 years I've been 'doing' Norway, not once did I not have sunny days in Oslo, and that in spite of occasional bad weather forecasts. And not once did I not dig the churches heavy style. Since the beginning, I've always fancied the idea that the whole of Norway is one big church, and that there really isn't anything you can do here other than worship, and get closer to the light. This was corroborated by Leonard Cohen last night, who, in a new song, decided to disclose the secret: that the Name must be blessed. Well, Leonard has been into worshipping for a long time, but as he sang this new one here, it was clear that the 'Norway thing' also got him. How he kneeled, suddenly, and with a different force and humility than in some of the previous songs! One could not be mistaken about why he did it. Today in another church, the New Yorkers rode the worshipping wave. The a cappella quartet, The New York Polyphony left us all breathless, and thinking that we really do need to live more lives. One is not enough for all that worshiping that we want to do, and worshipping through singing must be the only thing worth doing on this planet. As one of the singers put it, “it's next to impossible to escape the gravity of the flat keys.” Indeed.

GENERATION

2010-08-01T17:37:00.006+02:00

Vincent closed Controversy today with a talk about people in their 40s. What he wanted to know was one thing rather than ten, namely: do people in their 40s live authentic lives, or are they a bunch or hypocrites? Although this is a singular and straightforward question, the invited guests were all over the place in answering it, and had a hard time staying on topic. Quite unusually also, in the middle of the show, one of the guests got replaced with another of Vincent's and my former colleagues, Pelle Guldborg Hansen. That was a good move, as the person who left the show was only interested in talking about himself and his 15 years of cocaine abuse, which he now kind of regreted as it didn't get him any closer to what he imagined he would get out of it.

In fact, one of the problems with people not staying on topic was also due to the fact that they all talked about what 40-year olds imagine, or what we learn to imagine, and then consequently desire. There was no consensus on what we supposedly want. The discussion took a turn towards gardening, with the conservative retards insisting on the value of minding their own pots and plants, rather than those of the entire world, and the more idealistically oriented ones insisting on the idea that what one calls one's own garden is an illusion. Here Pelle was right to talk about what he calls the fiasco generation, and insist that where we go wrong is in not being able to keep up the pace with the way in which morality codes change. As some ideals simply become irrelevant, they need to be replaced with new ones. Yet, in our search for new ideals, it is not sure that we realize that we have to exhibit basic empathy towards each other all the time. Implicitly he was also going against the nonsense formulated by the others on the show that hypocrisy comes in different forms; some types are better than others, and some types are downright good or at least pragmatic. The argument for the latter was that, in principle, we don't want to alienate our mothers in law by telling them that their food is crap, when we can be nice about it, take their bad cooking in stride, and say instead that it is heaven. As far as I'm concerned, last I've checked hypocrisy was still hypocrisy. It is never good, and it is certainly not a sign of either good manners, good behavior, or authentic living.

Vincent's last question on what we pass on to our children was relevant in light of the missing consensus on where we have them now or on where we want them to get to. Here everyone went back to the garden, and it was clear again that context means different things to different people. The conservatives were adamant in their belief that as they have access to full agency and free will, they can thus also do whatever the heck they want to their kids, among other things, instill in them good values, however indeterminate these may be. The ones on the show with pluralistic inclinations insisted on the fact that our kids are not really ours, as many others contribute to their upbringing each in their different ways, some better than others.

For all the divided opinions, and towards the end of the show, no one wanted to see themselves as fucked up, which is perhaps a good thing all together. Feelings about one's own worth may be what they are, but it is still ideas that have more potential. This being said, I'm happy to say that as long as we value ideas more than we value time, or even the time it takes to get us where we want to be ideally, then we're all safe. After the age of 40, there is basically only one question to pose. I'll leave it to Patrick Kavanagh to enlighten us all, while also expressing the usual gratitude to all those who want to bother making TV summer programs that rescue us from disappearing entirely in our thoughts or dreams of winter. Vincent, thank you.

AFTER FORTY YEARS OF AGE

There was a time when a mood recaptured was enough

Just to be able to hold momentarily November in the woods

Or a street we once made our own through being in love.

But that is not enough now. The job is to answer questions

Experience. Tell us what life has taught you. Not just about

persons—

Which is futile anyway in the long run—but a concrete, as it were, essence.

The role is that of prophet and savior. To smelt in passion

The commonplaces of life. To take over the functions of a god

in a new fashion.

Ah! there is the question to speculate upon in lieu of an answer.

—Patrick Kavanagh

SMOKE

2010-08-01T14:35:00.002+02:00

“Some things go up in smoke,” I say, after dinner with family in a relaxed environment, and while thinking of Glenn Gould. My nephew, Paul, never minds playing something for me, which is great, yet, I have a hard time with the background noises. The man in the house is pottering about in the kitchen, the water is running through the faucet, and the moonlight is distorted. According to Glenn it wasn't Beethoven who needed sound enhancement, but Mozart. “Play Mozart with the hoover in the background,” he said, “and you're set.” “This sound goes up in smoke,” I say, while Paul is plonking away undisturbed. “No matter,” he says, echoing me and Beckett, and emulating a hybrid of the body language of Valentina Lisitsa and Glenn Gould taken together. “You know,” he says, “I've just realized that I never saw you smoke.” He knows I'm against it. “And you look so silly in that wrap. I like you better in your elegant mode,” he goes, and then reassures me, however, that he knows that I'm merely playing silly. I want to look like a Hollywood babe on the red carpet going to a concert. “Let's go out and smoke a cigarette,” he says, and I oblige him. We both agree that what with moons out of whack we can afford to be not only silly but also stupid, for I tell him that I really think that all smokers are rather stupid. Phillip Morris also thinks so. I've seen him on TV saying it. He was serious about it, and he wasn't afraid of people refraining from buying his nicotine just because he thinks that all his customers are stupid. “I wish stupidity would go up in smoke, now that I'm not in Norway anymore, breathing fresh air” I say. “I don't even like Norway,” Paul says, to get back at me for having missed me a whole month. I want to kick him, but instead I give him a kiss. He's the only one I know who sports Norway like a pro. He, on the outside. Me, on the inside. The stupid thing about Norway that he tells me is not something I take seriously, for I know exactly where it comes from. “You kiss all the time,” my sister says, but she knows that Paul and I are in the middle of putting things right. In their order. Beethoven can't even see what has just hit him: a ray of light and smoke, a touch of softness on the silk and sorrow, creating a sound that only lunar things can hear.

Paul plays Beethoven from Camelia Elias on Vimeo.

MASTERING THE MASTER

2010-07-24T20:47:00.006+02:00

I'm good with stones. After my last day in the wilderness, before going cosmopolitan in Bergen and Kristiansand, I imagine being Atlas, carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. I don't want to leave. It's a good thing that stones, sometimes, don't wait for you to ask them questions. They can also do it. So, the stone I saw today, asked me: “are your lessons done?” anticipating a priori my next visit to Norway, which will be on the 6th of August. In principle, I have no reason to cry over Norway letting me go. I'll be back in Oslo in no time already, for a Leonard Cohen concert, which is why the stone anticipates his repertoire, by way of countering my sadness. “My lessons are done,” I answer it. And think simultaneously about how odd it is that however much we may resist it, we always voice the codes of ideology that rule in the country where we live. My statement to the stone thus presupposes a role I must have assumed at some point, I tell myself. Which is to teach something. Most of all I like to think that I'm good at teaching love. At least that's what my mother used to tell me. And she was a real master.

In the Western tradition of the relation between a master and a pupil, the belief in equity rules. The prevalent idea is that the master can also learn from the pupil, and not just teach. In traditions other than the Western, the master is not interested in the pupil from whom he can learn. The master is not a master for nothing. The master is only interested in the pupil who will exceed him in time—and after the lessons are done—and not the one who will teach him something in return along the way. I like the saying “when the pupil is ready, the master will appear,” for it means that a master never entices a student on the path to enlightenment. The student must come to the master on his own. Yet a master never acts against his instinct and knowledge, taken together, when, if approached by a pupil, he feels that the pupil is not ready. Even when the pupil insists. When the master says, “you're not ready,” and the pupil goes, “try me,” the true master never acts on this challenge, because the true master knows in advance that that is not true. In traditions with well established hierarchies where this ideology of refraining from action even when it is tempting to do the opposite is still prevalent—be that in Herman Hesse's book The Glass Bead Game or Oriental contexts that have retained a rigorous and uncontaminated approach to mastery and how to achieve it—it is easy to determine who the master is and who the apprentice is. In the Western context, which is flexible in its opening to incorporating the banal at the level where transcendence of the very banal is nonetheless desired—it is more difficult to think of who is doing what, for what purpose, and why. On a more mundane level, we also have manifestations of people wanting to teach other people something, yet it always goes wrong when there is no consensus on who the master is and who the apprentice is. The domestic scenario, “this woman is trying to change me, but I resist,” never really goes anywhere.

The desire to transcend transitory things such as sex or career plunges you into a state of solitude, as you place yourself above having to answer to ethical calls or having to fulfill duties towards others who expect you to do just that. When you are above, you're above, and your act of hovering above is bound to remain in a state of the ineffable where the rest are concerned. As a general rule, people will not get it. Placing yourself in a state above signification has this function: to free you from having to make any sense. This, people will not get either, especially if they want to have a relation with you. The few who do get it, however, join the club, or the cult, and the relation is thus one of pure energy. I like this state, as it bypasses even the concern with when to begin teaching, if you are a master, when to stop, if you started too early, or when to declare it an exercise in futility, when there is no feedback. I consider myself lucky to know a few people who have the ability to step into energy. Where all this energy goes, what we use it for, and why, only time can tell. Meanwhile, let us anticipate the ko(h)en's words: when the wise man said, "follow me," he walked behind.

FUTURE

2010-07-23T23:55:00.014+02:00

After the mountain plateau, the famous Atlantic road, and dinner in Bud, I have a look at the guest-book at the restaurant. I want to contribute my name, when I notice that 9 people in a row, all have the wrong date: the 23rd of September. I follow suit, while laughing at the site. But I'm the 10th person with insight. While I write the same, following the suggestion started by an obviously absent-minded fellow traveller which was then continued by 8 others who were even more absent-minded, I also let the ones following me 'know'. Being the 10th, however, makes me think of the Sefirot, the tree of knowledge, or revelations, which has beauty at the center. I'm having an insight into the future, and I think that it's beautiful what I see: myself in Norway, again, in September, chasing the Ohr-Ein-Sof, the infinite light of what is both possible and impossible. The crown, Keter, says: “I am that I am.” In Norway, there's no doubt about it.

FACEBOOK

2010-07-22T20:36:00.011+02:00

Being on Facebook is like being on any of the other public channels: you're both there and not there. You're both yourself and another. You are both a secret and a mirror. I have to say that I'm amazed at how many with a Facebook profile, also among my own list of friends, regularly send out warnings against this and the potential maltreatment of personal data by this and that presumed or not so presumed big corporations. I laugh all the time. As far as I'm concerned, I ignore such warnings, and I insist on having all security on FB disabled. I don't worry about corporations using my photos for adds, and nor am I afraid that I might get fired or sued because I say something that might disagree with disagreeing parties. And why? Simply because (1) I don't presume that anyone reads anything I have to say, (2) nor do I presume that my life is so goddamned interesting that it would even remotely interest those with interests. And (3) I trust that fairly intelligent people will know better than that. Which means that they will know that there is always a filter placed on what the presumed-public-to-know must know. What idiots might think doesn't interest me. If, however, I nonetheless choose to believe that some might read my blog or the feeds on my updates, I do not do it because I presume anything, but because such a belief, or rather hope, may create an entertaining narrative, such as in this simple scenario: if I said this, which may or may not be true, what might others then think? Such invitations to speculations enhance our reflective thinking and appeal to our ludic sense, but should not be confused with what we know as a matter of fact. We don't often swear by our assumptions unless we have a very good reason for it.

On the question of privacy—as against the state of when you yourself feel the need to expose yourself as a big secret on line to compensate for the fact that you have no secrets of your own—it's really very simple. If you want to stay private, there are a few places you can still go to—try Tromsø, or a top of a mountain where you can play the hermit ascetic—or make sure that you don't appear on any websites or links that you yourself upload in cyber space. As a general rule, I actually believe that only those whose lives are even more boring than mine actually worry about someone out there always watching. I say, if that is the case, let them watch. It's not like I'm an innocent lamb, and I entice to no such watching with my presence on the internet. This being said, I'm amazed that we still need to debate what to do about our cyber selves, while using the vocabulary and conceptual apparatus that is only adequate enough for barely covering the notion of the self as we know it thus far in terms of the self's universal actions: you get born, you fuck and procreate, and then you die.

On Controversy today, people interested in communication—a writer, a rhetorician, a media researcher, and a student—talked about the benefits or the disadvantages of having a profile on Facebook. Some invoked pragmatic reasons—you want to know what others are doing, even if the info you get may not be so accurate—and others claimed that the whole thing is rather superficial. Your own info and the info provided by others is just not enough to rank among meaningful communication. The writer—a man past his prime and the oldest on the show—and the youngest, the student—didn't think that they need to either show off their bare bums in pictures or have their physical profile they already have more enhanced in virtual space.

So, the question of one's cyber identity was seen either as a whimsical position, by those against Facebook, or as a necessary and interesting engaging with new media by those pro Facebook. The only woman on the show, the rhetorician, implied that she has no time for anything else other than being on Facebook all the time. She was also an advocate for the positive way in which Facebook enhances our senses. The sixth sense was invoked, but what was said about it was mainly nonsense. The sixth sense is not the same as the sense that we might get about people through what they let us know about themselves through their writings. The writer, here, added that the problem with getting 'senses' about other people's state of mind is that the information often comes in an unmediated or unedited form. He doesn't appreciate, for instance, when people who write X-mas cards, write about every detail in their lives over a whole year. As a social forum he was against this type of communication, yet as a forum for promoting your public life as a writer and lecturer, he was more welcoming of Facebook.

The other question raised was the question of whether Facebook can be a forum for democratic debate or whether it is merely a forum for self-promotion. Why this should be any different from the other web sources where we plaster our faces all over the place, not to mention write everything about our academic life, publications, and other grand things that we have achieved, beats me. The point is that ever since old times, when people began to have access to public media, they have always been interested in exposure. It's a basic form of desire. What we need is to learn about the codes of conduct that are devised in connection with all new media, and that these codes are up for constant revision, and hence nothing to fear. Perhaps what we also need is a good spanking. We need to have someone tell us that we don't need to do anything for the sake of appearances, nor do we need to live our lives in constant dependency on this or that myth, or engage in acts that materialize as a set of ideological beliefs.

The whole point of Facebook, and one which seems to escape many, is that Facebook opens towards destabilizing the idea that knowledge of the other can be achieved if only we get to read the other like a book. Facebook plays with the ironic ineffable of the fact that insofar as more and more become more and more illiterate in our dominant visual culture, such readings of faces, according to the book, and as a book, are virtually impossible. Perhaps we can all start thinking of the implications of not being able to read people anymore, rather than yak unreflectively about being constantly under some presumed surveillance.

Here in the wilderness, I'm glad, though, that I can be sure of no hidden cameras around that would catch me with my ass over the fence to the daisy house. But then, as established previously, this is a magical place where the mirrors are not deceiving, and the reflections are really true.

AVALON

2010-07-21T17:05:00.019+02:00

After surveying the mists of Avalon last night, while thinking of Roald Amundsen, and donning a T-shirt featuring his expedition, I found Nikolai on the porch. “How about a cruise tomorrow morning?” he asked. “We won't have sun, and there'll be other people on the boat. Disabled people,” he further said. “So what,” I said? “And if you must know, I absolutely adore cruising through Avalon,” I continued in a convincing voice. “Through what?” he asked. “Avalon,” I said. “What's Avalon?”, he wanted to know. “Have you heard of King Arthur?”, I asked. “Yes,” he said, “but that's about it.” “All right,” I said. “I'll tell you all about it tomorrow.” So, today, I was telling stories over grilled fish and cutlets at the round table with a bunch of disabled knights. Now, that was some experience. I made good friends with the ones who were functioning well enough to sustain a conversation both mentally and physically. Especially Trond took a liking to me. He is a David Helfgott type. After asking everyone whether they didn't think I was just about the sweetest thing on the planet, and getting it confirmed, he wanted to hug me every third minute. His language other than that of the body was very well adapted to my Danish too. So, in a wonderfully clear and resonating Norwegian he told me that he didn't think I looked one day older than 25. He knew exactly where Arad was. “About 20 km from the border with Hungary, isn't it?” “Precisely,” I said. “What else do you know? I asked him. “Oh,” he said, "about Romania, I know about your classical music tradition," he said, and then shifted, while getting some help: “I can't tie my shoe laces by myself, you know.” “I can see that, I said.” [...] “So, Camelia Elias from Arad via Roskilde,” he said, "are you coming back here next year? You know, Nikolai gives us a trip every summer, and you're welcome.” “Well, Trond, if you insist, how can I say no?” Knight Nikolai approached us and said that he was going to build a top luxury cabin in the place of the old Elverhøj hut so that I can stop thinking about the daisy house, and just enjoy all that he has to offer. This sounded very good to me, so I said to him that such royal treatment, now and in the future, will not be forgotten. Only in Avalon. There, we can all be knights, sweet queens, and redeemed souls. Being among so many helpless and hopeless people, I thought of what King Arthur said: “there is no worse death than the end of hope.” Trond's take on life and Nikolai's generosity made me want to hope, hope hard, and keep the faith.

SPIRITS

2010-07-20T15:15:00.002+02:00

While driving through Åndalsnes yesterday, I said to myself: what a strange place. This place is full of strange voices. While I'm not the kind of person who hears strange voices, I like to take risks with listening to the unsaid, the unarticulated, and absent voice. Of course, the name of the place suggested it already, and perhaps it was my unconscious desire to explore the brink of breaking—sound into articulation—that made me think of strange relations. Åndalsnes, The Valley of the Spirit. One of Hunter S. Thomsen's often quoted phrases came to my mind: "when the going gets weird, the weird goes pro.” I thought of what Socrates and Plato would have made of that, what with their distrust of everything spiritual and artful. Art is no good, they both declared, because it allows for too much unconscious desire to emerge. Voice needs an origin, they further believed, and were even more distrustful of Greek drama and the oracles. Blanchot pointed to an essential aspect in his comparison of works of literature to the articulation of the sacred voices of oracles, insofar as they both have the potential to 'deceive', as it were, truth. And Socrates, for one, wanted only true discourse. No nonsense, such as listening to a tree, waters, or images. Says Blanchot in his The Infinite Conversation:

"Like sacred language, what is written comes from no recognizable source, is without author or origin, and thereby always refers back to something more original than itself. Behind the words of the written work, nobody is present; but language gives voice to this absence, just as in the oracle, when divinity speaks, the god himself is never present in his words, and it is the absence of god which then speaks."

In the Valley of the Spirit what I was hearing was an indictment that I myself pay closer attention precisely to that which evades truth, to the discourse of absence, of silence, and of mute image. These things operate not with truth, but with topos. They are there. Which is also the reason why exploring their territory involves taking risks. The risk of miscommunication, the risk of betrayal, and deceit. But this risk is also a necessary price we pay if we want to follow the oracle: know thyself. You get to know thyself by placing yourself in a state above signification. Thus you are free from having to talk or from having to make gestures. This is something that the pre-Socratics have understood. Heraclitus, for instance, believed that the oracle "neither speaks out nor conceals, but points." The oracle thus never predicts.

I like to think that what I was also listening to while in the valley of the spirit was the idea that as a consequence of knowing thyself, you can begin to trust more the people in your life; their acts, their beliefs, and their love. As you can also hope that they trust you. Within this trust, the question: 'who speaks beyond the text,' or 'whose voice is there behind the words?', becomes more nuanced as we stretch the elastic of our finitude and of what we can know about ourselves and others into realms that are vaster than the vastest.

VICTORY MARCH

2010-07-18T17:05:00.005+02:00

If love is a gift, you can neither win it, nor lose it. By the same token, you can neither give nor withhold the satisfaction of admitting to loving that the other may want to enjoy especially when love is indirectly declared. Looking back some 100 years, such satisfactions would usually get settled in court, in church, or in duel. All 19th century novels are masters at exploiting precisely this difference between love and marriage. Where marriage contracts are concerned, yes, we are free to declare: I won him. I won her. But not in love. Where love itself is concerned, we can say that we are either fortunate enough to experience it or that we are not. This fortune is, however, not linked to the other fortune that we may experience when playing games. Thus, in love, you neither win, nor lose. And Hallelujah for that. We can all intone to Leonard Cohen's eloquent words: “Love is not a victory march.”

In Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, I like it very much when Marianne cries passionately in her exchange with her sister Elinor about Willoughby's intentions towards her, now vanished into the air. When Elinor asks: But did he say it, that he loved you?, Marianne is prompt with an unambiguously affirmative answer. Yes, she says, he did. And then immediately reflects further upon the matter. Well, he didn't say it directly, he never did anything other than imply it, but I KNOW that he loves me as much as I love him. Nonetheless, Willoughby goes on to marry another. But the point is made however, and quite unambiguously, that it is clear that Willoughby does love Marianne, and that it is just too bad that he never actually says it. Or is it? If love is never declared directly, it has at least these pragmatic functions: (1) it leaves the one who wants to hear the words in a state of suspicion, and hence free to love elsewhere and (2) it leaves the one who wants to say the words but cannot free to activate a new narrative in which the unsaid love never happened. Hence, also here, there is thus the freedom to look elsewhere for some other love.

The only problem is that if life imitates fiction indeed, as many good literary folks have already established, then there is the problem with memory. Memory busts the ceiling of reason, makes a hole in it, and activates the part of knowledge that will never go away. I KNOW, Marianne, says about Willoughby's love, and yet, off she goes to also marry another. Willoughby, on the other hand, consolidates Marianne's knowledge by witnessing her marriage from afar, impotent, on the back of his horse. He then rides into the sunset forever miserable.

Indeed, where marriage is concerned, the ceremony is crucial. You have to go through with it, and say the words: 'I do.' It is also crucial precisely because it can never guarantee love. 'I do' is never the enunciation of love but the enunciation of commitment. Where love is concerned, you have to say nothing. Therefore love comes in unmeasurable degrees, some are vaster than others, and some more true than others. As they also say, true love is the most difficult because it always operates with the horizon of the crossing of aims. This horizon is also most crucial as it allows one to turn back if love gets too tough, perhaps to the initial crossing of aims, the one that gathers points articulated on completely different premises. How often do we not hear these positions assumed by lovers on a daily bases, from Austen to all romance in tabloids. He: I want sex. She: I want the soul. If “it” happens, then the aims are crossed, and both get what they want, on a simple basis. The love that grows sophisticated, however, even out of such disparate aims, has at least the advantage of always being able to revert back to the simple state. The only thing that is lost is the nuance. Some can live with that.

Now, given that this is quite so, why is it that so many of us still can't make that distinction, and thus keep confusing the gift of love with the act of marriage? Where words are concerned, we all want to hear it, sure enough. And yet, as good literary folks have also established, gestures are more powerful than words. So the question is not one of saying but one of doing. What kind of gestures can we thus make when we want to NOT declare what we nonetheless want the other to hear ever so clearly—and without the fear of getting sued for insisting? How do we bypass the ensuing suspicion that love's non-referentiality produces? How do we make sure that the doubt about the love of the other does not turn into mere cynicism, resentfulness, revenge, and restitution? —Here's is your gift of love. Take it back. I want nothing from you. I'm fine.

One of my favorite critics is Gabriel Josipovici. In his brilliant book, On Trust, he makes a very apt comment on what happens when, in our desire to experience the fullness of love, or its continuos expression, we forget to think of it in terms of its finitude once death occurs. He calls this “the double vision” of the sense of life's abundance that entails the event of death, also as an abundance.

“[the] denial of the dual vision ... in the end entails a denial of the world we live in and, ultimately, of ourselves as embodied beings existing within that world. Yet such is the nature of suspicion that, once unleashed, it appears to produce a totally convincing and self-consistent world, not simply an alternative way of looking at things but the only way there can possibly be.”

If we cannot resist suspicion, and let love touch us beyond bonds, perhaps we can all do what the wise Cinderellas do, run and regret. Here in the words of another bard, Patrick Kavanagh:

Beauty at the Beauty Ball
Lose your silver slipper where
Some man passing may recall
A virtuous woman's prudent care.
Silver slipper, symbol of
Modesty who understands
That to run is part of love
The wiser part. Men in all lands
Are searching for a princess who
Spilled the last cocktail in her shoe.

... and from another poem:

And have you felt that way too

That someone was in love with you

And was afraid to speak? The air

Vibrated with your mutual prayer ...

Without an introduction you

Are doomed to love and never woo.