But I am more than dust and ashes: I am my best part, I am my soul.

- John Donne

The Friend

“This is not two friends who engage in thought”, Deleuze and Guattari write; “rather, it is thought itself which requires this division of thought between friends” (WIP: 69).

This operation takes place as if the personae were so many divers, descending from the plane of immanence into the sea below, where singularities lie scattered like so many stray pearls. Braving the depths, the personae collect these shimmering ordinates (chiffres) and then return to the surface, where these singularities will be thrown on a table of immanence like “a handful of dice from chance-chaos” (WIP: 75). With each throw, we induce the features that will be arrayed, collected and diagrammed in the concept. 

-  Gregg Flaxman

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

 “Have you ever thought, not only about the airplane but whatever man builds, that all of man’s industrial efforts, all his computations and calculations, all the nights spent working over draughts and blueprints, invariably culminate in the production of a thing whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity?

It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of the human breast or shoulder, there must b experimentation of several generations of craftsmen. In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#creativeevolution

Sata Sa Gnata

Sata Sa Gnata: Difference is better than resemblance.

The speech of silence is achieved when words, and their potential ability to hurt meaning, are done away with. Words entrap meaning, torture it, slice it into pieces the way a butcher cuts the meat of a slaughtered animal and serves it to us...In silence, meaning is no longer heard, but felt; and feeling is the best hearing, the best instrument for recording meaning. 

- Of Water and the Spirit, Malidoma Patrice Some

On Love

Genuine love neither presupposes a judgement nor is it a sentimentality. Its unique feature is that it is always love for a person; it is directed towards the person as reality. But what is reality? Certainly it is the other's physical charms, but also the other's mental-spiritual qualities, and over and above these there always remains that which is unfathomable. This is the true object of love. In proceeding towards its object love makes everything of value achieve the highest possible value ideally destined for it; and in this way it brings out the highlights of another's worth. Love elevates, it never degrades; at its highest pitch it is not love for something alien, but participation in it as something inalienable.

- Life of Naropa, Herbert Guenther

minor philosopher

King of Kong

About a month ago, I watched King of Kong with my then 11-yo son. I think we both really enjoyed it. Billy Mitchell, the villain, is the teeth in the ass of the bear, Steve Wiebe, who is even too shy to correct the referee Walter Day on the pronunciation of his own name. Somehow, in some weird way, Steve needed Billy to motivate him on to break the records. They were connected like an assemblage, the crystalline and the organic.

Follow the curve

Twenty-one years ago today, W.G. Sebald was driving to Norwich, the city explored in his internationally acclaimed novel The Rings of Saturn. He had just pulled on to the A-146 when his car “failed to follow the curve and drove straight into the opposite lane.” 

https://www.towntopics.com/wordpress/2022/12/14/thoughts-on-the-fine-art-of-vertigo-with-w-g-sebald-and-franz-kafka/

Unfold, enfold

 (encapsulate)

maths, theorems, precepts

break/flow

What does it mean to be able to breathe?

-AO, p.99

Does the bee understand it will die before it stings?

Literature

"For literature is like schizophrenia; a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression."

- Anti-Oedipus, p.133

Ross Gay on Joy

Being of and without at once and the same time.

Anti-Oedipus

"In the literary machine that Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently forced out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over.”

 

AlphaGo

"AlphaGo look like the real mirror. When you play with AlphaGo, you feel very strange. You look like you're all the time naked. The first time you see this, you don't want to see, because, "This is me? Real me?" And more and more you need to accept. "Oh, this is the real me. So now, how can I do it?""

 - Fan Hui, 1:05

From Letters and Other Texts (2015)

 From Letters and Other Texts (2015):

p.201: In any case, fluxes flow.

p.216: Delirium is the peasant missing the furrow with the plow. And all sexuality is that.

p.223: It's simple, when you are fucking, when you are having an orgasm...the is no image.

p.225: Intensities drain images.

p.226: The image is the extension than an intensity takes when it dies.

p.239:  Schizo-analysis can be done anywhere, anytime, with anyone, without a contract, without transference.

p.254: I do not invent anything, I do not project anything, I do not bring anything into the world, I am nothing, not even a nothing, especially not: nothing more than an expression.

p. 257: Softness of the belly, as Giono wrote: consciousness is softness.

 

The narrow place

 https://twitter.com/NYT_first_said/status/1626539561080717312?lang=en

Our world is a cracked bell that no longer sounds

- Goethe

Circled with a bright edge

 'And yet it is true it is true. In the destructive element immerse.'... He spoke in a subdued tone, without looking at me, one hand on each side of his face. 'That was the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream- and so- ewig- usque ad finem....' The whisper of his conviction seemed to open before me a vast and uncertain expanse, as of a crepuscular horizon on a plain at dawn- or was it, perchance, at the coming of the night? One had not the courage to decide; but it was a charming and deceptive light, throwing the impalpable poesy of its dimness over pitfalls- over graves. His life had begun in sacrifice, in enthusiasm for generous ideas; he had travelled very far, on various ways, on strange paths, and whatever he followed it had been without faltering, and therefore without shame and without regret. In so far he was right. That was the way, no doubt. Yet for all that the great plain on which men wander amongst graves and pitfalls remained very desolate under the impalpable poesy of its crepuscular light, overshadowed in the centre, circled with a bright edge as if surrounded by an abyss full of flames. When at last I broke the silence it was to express the opinion that no one could be more romantic than himself.

Conrad, Lord Jim

Zeroes, infinities

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKmGVE85GUU