The Fountain

 

 Finally got round to watching 'The Fountain' last night.

 A dramatic and fabulous meditation  on catholic and mayan images of time, love, infinity, death and rebirth  - I couldn't really ask for more.  The mayan ideas reminded me of ken russels altered states - but the open ended images of this move appealed to me more. Definately plenty of room for a hyper-realist approach - the film made perfect sense to me , as I am sure it did to you - but for entirely different reasons.

 Its always amused me that the west has a teliological obsession with life after death - I for one was always as equally interested in life before birth - or as Jim Morrison described it "doing time in the universal mind". Why in myth is  time recurrently presented as the "weak dimension" - why is it we can imagine the world without it. Our perceptual process is built on time - but what would we see if we took away time ?

 There was a fictional work called flatworld when I was younger that talked about a world in only 2 dimensions. It never really caught on as much as the idea of the timeless and eternal. But it was interesting none the less. I read recently of a fellow William Lane Craig who had been a professor of time. Sounds pretty neat profession.

 Interesting thing in the movie about the tree of good and evil - barth suggested in his work on christian ethics - that his first goal was to remove this distinction.  When I've  read those christian myths I've always thought god hid the tree of life because obtaining it would be to cruel a fate for a race whose mind had already collapsed into the dualisms of this and that. Death might be cruel but at least it returns us to the infinite - as opposed to the finite. There was a early church father who talked about souls moving out of the mind of god into the world of forms only to eventually return rebound into the wholeness of infinity - just to get bored and pop out again in an endless cycle. Origen, he was the one who was posthumously declared a heretic, and yes he cut his willy off.

 My only hyper-realist puzzle is in genesis god says that men would become like the gods if they knew the difference between good and evil. Why would this not be a good thing ? I have an inkling but sometimes I think that it is not that we make forms of this and that - we make symbols - language - pointers to the great unknown - The habitual danger of humankind is that we bind to these symbols. Dense fleshly creatures we destroy ourselves because rather than remembering all our talk is just an echo - we think our distinctions are real and kill ourselves and others in the process. The gods it seems can see good and evil and not be fooled by its folly.

 The only question is are they a reflection of us - or are we a reflection of them - or both ? But be careful we cant ask the second or third question in public anymore.  When was the last time you urinated on a grave ?

foolishness

 Charming little essay on the value of foolishness as a state of mind and a means of teaching

 - all in less time than it takes to read "The Idiot"

 The wisdom of holy fools in Postmodernity

 

means of communication

 

 Have been playing on a few blogs recently - seems to be a big game out there where you get together with a little pack of dogs of a certain size and calibre and try and bark out words just like them.  Animal jestures and Jesters with language.  Everyone gets a coffin but it seems if you work hard you can earn your own nails...

 Check out this video : korsakofs pyschosis

 Apparantly music dispells the cobwebs of the logically paralysed mind - by unifying duality through harmonic structure it returns us to the authentic coherence of our somatic landscape. Its not tuina if its not three vectors of force - its not a music  without....

 

 

Sources - Making Space - Letter to Saario 2007

Making space didnt come out of a bubble - the ideas Antti and I articulated in response to the blackened gloom of the nuffield theatre had been swirling around in our discussion throughout the year. I include a letter I wrote to Antti a few months before the piece was composed - it was written as the first letter in a series examining the christian tradition in a postmodern setting :

Letter to Saario Easter 2007

Text - From " Making Space "

Heres the text from the making space project Antti and I undertook at The Nuffield in Lancaster Last year -

When The Curtain Falls.


Keep your chin up – keep your cover up – don't let it fall. Its dark – there's nothing here
except what you want to see – blink and you could miss yourself. Where's a black cat in a dark
room that isn't there.


Space, time, corporeality and passing over.


Make a body in space and time. Borrow your parts. Make it on your own. Hurry; gather up the
pieces – little Frankenstein. Build muscles, fuse joints, pull skin hard over flesh and bolt your
teeth down onto your jaws. Stand up tall. Don't listen. Don't feel the pulse – the drag – the
slipstream of the nothing from which you came – nagging at you – pulling you down like a
black dog. You can't hold out forever. Your body wont last: you have to give it back.
A space like me doesn't talk. It doesn't need to – it's you who remember. I just echo the
sounds – the vibrations you leave behind. Listen to yourself. Close your eyes – what are you
doing with my sounds – what are you making – what do you feel? In Your body: No words. In
these echoes – can you feel the very flesh of your future? Where were you past? Am I what
remains when everything else is gone?


Fill your space. Fill you body. Fill your lungs. Breathe at me. I enter the creases – the spaces
you leave behind. Ghosts breed in the folds in the fissures and cracks of flesh – in the warped
coils of a grasping fist. Like a thief through an open door. Like a slave crouched to a
brandished whip. Leave a gap and I will enter – after all I am simply you. I was never here.
Am I the best friend you'll never have? You can't possess me. Try to hold nothing in your
hand. Leave me and respect me – offer me your ghosts, you memories your senses. Let me
remake you – cut the chords – let the curtain fall. Drop the whip and close the door. Grow out
of me. I am the night of your birth.


Each moment. Each sound. Each new second is my child. Like Space. Like a universe born
from nothing, flower and wrap round your spaces – your sounds – bodies and senses with my
infinitude. In the heart of the earth buried deeper than your fears I am the eternal spring.
Beneath the pain – I am the hidden place. Fall into me. Let your flesh hang like a dead man.
Pieta.


What is the space of (our) existence?


"Truly I say to you, if a seed of grain does not go into the earth and come to an end, it is still a
seed and no more; but through its death it gives much fruit. He who is in love with life will have
it taken from him; and he who has no care for his life in this world will keep it for ever and ever"


Time, space, and linearity.


The body is a whole , an organic living unity of form and function. Each body mirrors our
social body, which in-turn reflects our world as a whole. The narcotic brokenness of our
culture flows in and out of our disconnected physicality. Compacted and ill aligned, our
body's become the carriers for our madness and despair. The space and effortlessness of a
child's posture and movement is broken, etherised and eviscerated by our shared experience
of "adulthood". By uncovering the residual calm of theatrical space and relearning how to
respectfully occupy our own physical space, we can begin to recover a social health and
wholeness. The very nonduality of our theatre space - its ability to confront and comfort -
exemplifies the wholeness of mind that a balanced society must exemplify. Our shared
history has merely been the exclusion of possibilities – the restriction of space, intellectually,
culturally and ethnically. In the past we have attained our view of ourselves by exclusion
and definition. In the third millennium, we can explore how we can view ourselves through
the catholicity of inclusion and mutability.


The only constant thing is change. "All things are in motion and nothing remains still " –
Heraclitus. The movement of one thing into another: of becoming "not-a-thing", and in turn,
something else: This is the substratum of our bodies, world and universe. Cultures, which
build their values on halting this inevitable process ; Cultures, whose goal is to possess,
freeze and contain experience, into pleasure, wealth or sexual gratification; these Cultures,
inevitably become the victims of the natural processes they are trying to halt or manipulate.
Pleasure can weaken the body - wealth distract the mind. It is the glutton who howls with
hunger. The rich become the poor ,and the downtrodden become the oppressors. The cycle
is whole, even in its brokenness.The body is a whole , an organic living unity of form and function.

Each body mirrors our
social body, which in-turn reflects our world as a whole. The narcotic brokenness of our
culture flows in and out of our disconnected physicality. Compacted and ill aligned, our
body's become the carriers for our madness and despair. The space and effortlessness of a
child's posture and movement is broken, etherised and eviscerated by our shared experience
of "adulthood". By uncovering the residual calm of theatrical space and relearning how to
respectfully occupy our own physical space, we can begin to recover a social health and
wholeness. The very nonduality of our theatre space - its ability to confront and comfort -
exemplifies the wholeness of mind that a balanced society must exemplify. Our shared
history has merely been the exclusion of possibilities – the restriction of space, intellectually,
culturally and ethnically. In the past we have attained our view of ourselves by exclusion
and definition. In the third millennium, we can explore how we can view ourselves through
the catholicity of inclusion and mutability.


Antti Sakari Saario
& Robert Penman.
14/09/07.

reset - september

I've reset the controls.

Opened up the airways - new blog for a new year - Its like a new academic dairy - glossy lumenescent and completely empty.

What's the agreed text - society of spectacle ? Any other ideas - I only smelt the edges of the book - so we could start there - we need a gossamer of thoughts to weave ourselves round - what do you think ?

Ill go grab my copy and get started - can we do mein kamf next ?

b.b.b.

The Blunt Smokes You

'Tricky is not so much a narcissist as a narcossist. Narcissists never smoke, never do drugs because drugs take time away from yourself, precious time that the narcissist could be spending on themselves. The narcissist gets high on the endless supplies of themselves. The narcissist works fulltime on the endless job that is themselves. For the narcossist, on the other had, the self goes up in smoke. Being is an unbearable heaviness.'

Kodwo Eshun (1999) More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction. London, Quartet Books. p.59.