By the Mark

 

Restaurants used to be one of the few places where you could have an experience that was completely human

 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/dining/pete-wells-how-restaurants-have-changed.html

Mushrooms

 

Mina Loy

The is Neither Life nor Death (1914-1915)

Only intensity,

And tame things

Have no immensity

- Mina Loy

Om - This sylable is the whole world.

Hook/egg

Swerve

"Why is it invariably I who swerves first? Why precisely me and not him?"

- Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

Brumaire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brumaire#:~:text=Brumaire%20(French%20pronunciation%3A%20%5Bb%CA%81ym%C9%9B%CA%81,(mois%20d'automne). 

Taiji

In Taiji (T'ai Chi) movement, follow the curve to be aware of the straight line. 

- Master Wu Yu-Hsaing

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

On Love

From "The Shortest Shadow", by Alenka Zupancic, p.174-175.

minima/anima

our existential state

 

 What is enlightenment, and if there are deep structures, is this evidence of a universal mind?

Eternal Return

I think the eternal return is comparable to when you have a wisp or grasp of an idea or a sentence and it flies away from you and you know if it has any importance or resilience, it will come back, perhaps in a more distilled or complete form. It takes a certain amount of faith, and to fear losing the grasp of concepts sometimes invokes anxiety. But the mere fact that robust concepts are structured to be remembered tells me that we live in a world that operates as gyre, a magical sorting hat. Our agency is delusional, yet when coincidences, synchronicities, and signs surface unexpectedly, my faith in the path (Way) redoubles.

Genius is combinations in communication

Notes on the Third Section of Alenka Zupancic's "The Shortest Shadow"

P.126: 

"God is this radical negativity."

P.127:

"To will nothingness" and "to will something" becomes a hinge such that the structure collapses in upon itself and one is left in depression. The depressive desires nothingness, yet to achieve that desire is to feel the pain that there is nothing to will, like the spirit of gd leaving the body.

 P.133: 

This third eye is in fact the envelope, a double helix with another circle or helix traced inside the center, pure potentiation or non-negative difference.

P.135:

The donkey brays "Ya-Ya" as the beat generation said "yes yes yes" to everything, to piss and shit and fucking indifferently. These blind affirmations are as useless as negations.

P.136:

To affirm is to "set free what lives." This happens by virtue of the eternal return. The gyre spins and at the point of inscription, for the duration of an infinitely short moment, the Real is set free to make its mark.

P.145:

Break on the break. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFKMtv8tU0U

P.148

Discussion of the metonymic object of desire. This connection between words and desire (as opposed to metaphor) is integral, and relates itself to the fable of What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. This pulsation of perpetual desire is in fact Eros, akin the pulsation of orgasm or the hair flip of a squirrel's tail that is in heat.

P.153

Beyond good and evil is the eternal return.

P.160

"Dead things are looking at us," and the vitality of detritus, squalor. (cf. Jane Bennett)

P.173

"We see the difference between the object and the Thing without ever seeing the Thing." This is the function of parallax.

p.174-175

Zupancic' theory of love.

The tables might wobble but they don't fall down

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oo5-74dWGS0

That Wonderful Inconsistency

 “Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?” Biddy quietly asked me, after a pause.

“I don’t know,” I moodily answered.

“Because, if it is to spite her,” Biddy pursued, “I should think—but you know best—that might be better and more independently done by caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should think—but you know best—she was not worth gaining over.”

Exactly what I myself had thought, many times. Exactly what was perfectly manifest to me at the moment. But how could I, a poor dazed village lad, avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and wisest of men fall every day?

“It may be all quite true,” said I to Biddy, “but I admire her dreadfully.”

- Dickens, Great Expectations

Khora, the womb and formless interval, the matrix of possibility

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh%C3%B4ra 

All the light that does not blind us resides within the soul

Prime density

 https://youtu.be/3RfYfMjZ5w0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_spiral

Woolf, Diaries, 1925

 I sometimes think humanity is a vast wave, undulating.

Belle Noiseuse

"Nature’s way is a complicated succession of curve within curve."

 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23060/23060-h/23060-h.htm

Topology is ethics

If/then

The capacity for rationality is best expressed by the ability to perform networked and causally dependent if/then logic. If/then logic demonstrates an understanding of timing, sequence, chained prognostication. I once had an ex named Anna G who appeared to not be able to plan beyond the moment.

reversal as negation

A record, a proscription, a prophecy, an alibi, a diversion, an aspiration, a respiration

Nabokov

 "Infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised."

Watchmen

 

 

Emerson on Abandonment

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment. The great moments of history are the facilities of performance through the strength of ideas, as the works of genius and religion. "A man" said Oliver Cromwell "never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going." Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium and alcohol are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, and hence their dangerous attraction for men. For the like reason they ask the aid of wild passions, as in gaming and war, to ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the heart.

Polarity and Wave Direction

 

 I saw the future in a thunderstorm.

A Maximal Difference

 https://harpers.org/archive/2002/02/lesprit-du-terrorisme/

Ever Given

 https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cargo-ship-ever-given-penis/

Immanence

"We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing more. It is not immanent to life, but the immanence that is in nothing else is itself a life. A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete beatitude." - Gilles Deleuze

Dialogues

 In each of us there is, as it were, an ascesis, in part turned against ourselves. We are deserts, but populated by tribes, flora and fauna. We pass our time in ordering these tribes, arranging them in other ways, getting rid of some and encouraging others to prosper. And all these clans, all these crowds, do not undermine the desert, which is our very ascesis; on the contrary they inhabit it, they pass through it, over it.

Reminiscence

 https://yoyochey.blogspot.com/2009/12/i-recently-went-to-hip-hop-show-paying.html

Immanence

Immanence, Jack London, Buck

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.

The "summit of life", the apex, this "complete forgetfulness" is immanence of course, but also maps to the apex of the normal distribution, the tip of gabriel's horn even, the point of inscription that is the minutest cylinder/cone of infinite length but finite volume, the point at which "In the Penal Colony" the inscription of the sentence/judgement is contemporaneous with death.

Ahab

 Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (turns to go). Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Prætorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world’s); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I’ll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So.

Fitzgerald on Crack

"Instead of being so sorry for yourself, listen—"she said. (She always says "Listen," because she thinks while she talks—really thinks.) So she said: "Listen. Suppose this wasn't a crack in you—suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon."

"The crack's in me," I said heroically.

"Listen! The world only exists in your eyes—your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you're trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I'd try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it's much better to say that it's not you that's cracked—it's the Grand Canyon." 

Dance of the Seven Veils

 

El Aleph

 On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland’s — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.

Rebel Without a Cause

 

Moby Dick / Lucretius

Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.

- Herman Melville

NAND Logic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAND_logic

Ode on a Grecian Urn

 "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

gd bless the child

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_1LfT1MvzI

Emerson, via BKR

 "There is a process in the mind very analogous to crystallization in the mineral kingdom. I think of a particular fact of singular beauty and interest. In thinking of it I am led to many more thoughts which show themselves, first partially, and afterwards more fully. But in the multitude of them I see no order. When I would present them to others they have no beginning. There is no method. Leave them now, and return to them again. Domesticate them in your mind, do not force them into arrangement too hastily, and presently you shall find they will take their own order. And the order they assume is divine. It is God's architecture." - Journals, Jan 7, 1832

"Joy emerges as the sole motivation for philosophizing." (PI:84)

"I am no longer myself but thought's aptitude for finding itself and spreading across a plane that passes through me at several places" (WIP:64)

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" (Flaxman 2019, WIP:75)

Giant Steps

In Giant Steps, Coltrane incarnates ideas within modal scales, like boxes inside boxes, a nested solo.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30FTr6G53VU

the primary order ... grumbles beneath the secondary organization of sense

 LOS, 125

On Friendship

Even as truth seems to bring friends together, to secure their fidelity, and to underwrite their contracts, Deleuze insists that friendship constitutes the means with which thinking becomes a problem and becomes conscious of itself as a problem. Inversely, then, perhaps the problem of philosophy can only be posed “‘between friends,’ as a secret [confidence] or a confidence [confiance], or as a challenge when confronting an enemy, and at the same time to reach that twilight when one distrusts even the friend” (WIP: 2). Perhaps the problem of philosophy is posed between friends because only in such a relationship, which is precisely a matter of mutual trust (confiance), can we introduce distrust. Perhaps only among friends can we risk the risk.

Gregg Flaxman, 2005

Gregg Flaxman on Deleuze's "Philosophy".

Free Solo

"That’s the most magnificent crack on planet earth."

https://fsharetv.co/movie/free-solo-episode-1-tt7775622

The Unknown Masterpiece, Balzac

Nature’s way is a complicated succession of curve within curve.

wolves on love

But the wolves, Deleuze and Guattari insist, are a multiplicity.

They live in packs and as such their existence is only partly individual.
A pack of forever variable intensities, wolves express the way bodies
are continually composed and recomposed through desire. They are
linked together as a multiplicity in which ‘each element ceaselessly
varies and alters its distance in relation to the others’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004: 34). To become-wolf is to surrender the unity of
the supreme self to the multiplicities that make the subject but one
intensity in a larger pack. Held together and fueled by desire, such
packs are fluent and irreducible to the One. This is also how we must
understand making love. To love somebody is ‘to find that person’s
own packs’. These packs are the multiplicities enclosed within that
person. Love is joining these multiplicities together, ‘to make them
penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person’s’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004: 39). Such ‘heavenly nuptials’, created by moving
through so many bodies in each other, is making love through a
body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 40).

Joshua Ramey, Gilles Deleuze and the Powers of Art (2006)

Desert Islands and Other Texts (2004)

on repetition

If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the
general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to
the ordinary, an instantaneity opposed to variation, and an eternity
opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition is a transgression. It
puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in
favor of a more profound and more artistic reality. (DR 2-3)

deleuze on art

Art

. . . does not imitate, above all because it repeats; it repeats all the repetitions, by virtue of an internal power (an imitation is a copy, but art is simulation, it reverses copies into simulacra). Even the most mechanical,the most banal, the most habitual and the most stereotyped repetition finds a place in the work of art, it is always displaced in relation to other repetitions, and it is subject to the condition that a difference may be extracted from it for these other repetitions. For there is no other aesthetic problem than that of the insertion of art into everyday life. The more our  daily life appears standardized, stereotyped, and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order to make the two extremes resonate—namely the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death . . . [art] aesthetically reproduces the illusions and mystifications which make up the real essence of this civilization. (DR 293)

Trancendental Empiricism

Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible:  difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity.  It is in difference that movement is produced as an “effect,” that phenomena flash their meaning like signs.  The intense world of differences, in which we find the reason behind qualities and the being of the sensible, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism.  (DR 57)

becoming

But they had been young once. The odor of their armpits 
and haunches had mingled into a lovely musk; their eyes had 
been furtive, their lips relaxed, and the delicate turn of their 
heads on those slim black necks had been like nothing other 
than a doe’s. Their laughter had been more touch than 
sound. 

Then they had grown. Edging into life from the back 
door. Becoming.

- The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

It's a Power Constellation: Macolm Gladwell on Country Music

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/16-the-king-of-tears

“THE THING THAT PUSHES US OVER THE TOP INTO TEARS IS DETAILS. WE CRY WHEN MELANCHOLY COLLIDES WITH SPECIFICITY. AND SPECIFICITY IS NOT SOMETHING EVERY GENRE DOES WELL.”

“THAT’S HOW YOU GET TEARS. YOU MAKE THE STORY SO REAL AND THE DETAILS SO SHARP AND YOU ADD IN SO MANY EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS THAT THE LISTENER CANNOT ESCAPE…[IT’S] FAR EASIER JUST TO FALL BACK ON THE BLAND CLICHE THAT ‘WILD HORSES COULDN’T DRAG YOU AWAY.’ COUNTRY MUSIC MAKES PEOPLE CRY BECAUSE IT’S NOT AFRAID TO BE SPECIFIC.”

https://twitter.com/ninthstbakery/status/1155483383864201216

Bridges

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9-yfeA2JZs

James Salter, a Sport and a Pastime

"I see myself as an agent provocateur or as a double agent, first on one side — that of truth — and then on the other, but between these, in reversals, the sudden defections, one can easily forget allegiance entirely and feel only the deep, profound joy of being beyond all codes, of being completely independent, criminal is the word."

"The sum of small acts begins to unite them, the pure calculus of love."

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

A Ring in Which Combray was Locked

We would follow the tow-path which ran along the top of a steep bank, several feet above the stream. The ground on the other side was lower, and stretched in a series of broad meadows as far as the village and even to the distant railway-station. Over these were strewn the remains, half-buried in the long grass, of the castle of the old Counts of Combray, who, during the Middle Ages, had had on this side the course of the Vivonne as a barrier and defence against attack from the Lords of Guermantes and Abbots of Martinville. Nothing was left now but a few stumps of towers, hummocks upon the broad surface of the fields, hardly visible, broken battlements over which, in their day, the bowmen had hurled down stones, the watchmen had gazed out over Novepont, Clairefontaine, Martinville-le-Sec, Bailleau-l'Exempt, fiefs all of them of Guermantes, a ring in which Combray was locked; but fallen among the grass now, levelled with the ground, climbed and commanded by boys from the Christian Brothers' school, who came there in their playtime, or with lesson-books to be conned; emblems of a past that had sunk down and well-nigh vanished under the earth, that lay by the water's edge now, like an idler taking the air, yet giving me strong food for thought, making the name of Combray connote to me not the little town of to-day only, but an historic city vastly different, seizing and holding my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of buttercups.

-- Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Deleuze #1

Deleuze #1

What is the shape of a flower without petals?

A frame without a door? 

Or a donut with no hole? 

Life is overwritten by consciousness, filled with excuses,

Excavated 

Leaving 

Railroad ties without rails

And a body without organs.  

you know who you are

Human

"I made you in my image"

possession, delusion, vision, hypnotism, trance, hallucination, and narcosis

Indeed, Artaud likens the cinema to possession, delusion, vision, hypnotism, trance, hallucination, and narcosis because, in all of these experiences, we are inhabited by an "other" logic, our brain and bodies given over to a force that lies outside of us.  With respect to the moving image, Artaud's question is not, What is the nature of thinking? but, What is this thing that thinks inside of me?

G-d inscribes a "law" in us that makes us equal to the incredible variety of nature.

-- from Gregory Flaxman, "This is Your Brain on Cinema"