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)