From the second essay, titled ‘The Tragic in Ancient Drama reflected in the Tragic in Modern Drama.’  I like what he has to say about disintegration (that is, dis-integration, becoming un-whole), and his inklings about the police state and the two-party system ought to receive notice.  His notion of numericality is relevant to my essay on Oppen: there, for sure, was a poet obsessed with aloneness and singular multiples.  His book, Of Being Numerous, might well be worth a comic reading…

That which, generally speaking, should be the content of this little exploration will not be so much the relation between the tragic in ancient and in modern drama as it will be an attempt to show how the characteristic feature of the tragic in ancient drama is incorporated in the tragic in modern drama in such a way that what is truly tragic will become apparent.  But however much I shall try to make it apparent, I shall abstain from any prophecy that this is what the times demand; therefore its becoming apparent will be devoid of consequence, and all the more so since the whole age is working toward the comic.

To a degree, existence is undermined by the subjects’ doubt; isolation continually gains the upper hand more and more, something that can best be ascertained by paying attention to the multifarious social endeavors.  That they seek to counteract the isolating effects of the age is just as much a demonstration of the isolation as is the unreasonable way they seek to counteract it.  Isolation always consists in asserting oneself as number; when one wants to assert oneself as one, this is isolation; all the friends of associations will surely agree with me on that, without therefore being able or willing to see that it is altogether the same isolation when a hundred assert themselves simply and solely as a hundred.  Number is always indifferent to itself, and it makes absolutely no difference whether it is 1 or 1,000, or all the inhabitants of the world defined merely numerically.  In principle, then, this association-mentality is just as revolutionary as the mentality it wants to counteract.  When David really wanted to feel his power and glory, he had his people counted; in our age, however, it may be said that the people, in order to feel their significance over against a superior power, count themselves.  But all these associations bear the stamp of arbitrariness and most often are formed for some accidental purpose, whose lord and master, of course, is the association.

These numerous associations, therefore, demonstrate the disintegration of the age and themselves contribute to speeding it up; they are the infusiora in the organism of the state that indicate that it has disintegrated.  When was it that the hetairias [Men’s clubs] became common in Greece except at the time when the state was in the process of disintegration?  And does not our age have a striking likeness to that age, which not even Aristophanes could make more ludicrous than it actually was?  Has not the bond that in the political sense held the states together, invisibly and spiritually, dissolved; has not the power in religion that insisted upon the invisible been weakened and destroyed; do not our statesmen and clergymen have this in common, that they, like the augurs of old, cannot look at one another without smiling [a sign that they know how laughable their business is]?

A feature in which our age certaily excels that age in Greece is that our age is more depressed and therefore deeper in despair.  Thus, our age is sufficiently depressed to know that there is something called responsibility and that this means something.  Therefore, although everyone wants to rule, no one wants to have responsibility.  It is still fresh in our memory that a French statesman, when offered a portfolio the second time, declared that he would accept it but on the condition that the secretary of state be made responsible.  It is well known that the king in France is not responsible, but the prime minister is; the prime minister does not wish to be responsible but wants to be prime minister provided that the secretary of state will be responsible; ultimately it ends, of course, with the watchmen or street commissioners becoming responsible.  Would not this inverted story of responsibility be an appropriate subject for Aristophanes!  On the other hand, why are the government and governors so afraid of assuming responsibility, unless it is because they fear an opposition party that in turn continually pushes away responsibility on a similar scale.  When one imagines these two powers face to face with each other but unable to catch hold of each other because the one is always disappearing and is replaced by the other, the one merely appearing in the role of the other– such a situation would certainly not be without comic power.

This indeed shows adequately that what really holds the state together has disintegrated, but the isolation resulting from this is naturally comic, and the comic consists in subjectivity’s wanting to assert itself as pure form.  Every isolated person always becomes comic by wanting to assert his accidentality over against the necessity of the process.  No doubt it would be profoundly comic to have an accidental individual hit upon the universal idea of wanting to be the world’s liberator…

Far too many questions left here.  For instance: What revolutionary mentality does the equally revolutionary ‘association-mentality’ seek to counteract?  What is the ’superior power’ against which the self-accounting people fight?  What bond ‘in the political sense’ once held states together?  How does one come to see isolation as comical, and is this vantage point an advantageous one?  I myself like the passage’s last sentence, since it rather well describes the character I’ve been busy figuring out how to create.

Listen, I’ve been deleriously raving about Pynchon to you guys for so long.  You have no reason to take me seriously at this point.  But I’ve been rereading Gravity’s Rainbow, and I am now even more convinced that it is the best and most relevant book of the latter 20th century.  And here are some passages from it, just to give you a flavor.   The thing is, I chose these almost at random.  I could’ve chosen any paragraph from the entire book.

“AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN.  These things appear on the walls of the Red districts in the course of the night.  Nobody can track down author or painter for any of them, leading you to suspect they’re one and the same.  Enough to make you believe in a folk-conciousness.  They are not slogans so much as texts, revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people… [elipsis in origional]

‘It’s true’, Vanya now, ‘look at the forms of capitalist expression.  Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, pornographies of deduction–aah, that sigh when we guess the muderer–all these novels, the films and songs they lull us with, they’re approaches, more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute comfort…A self induced orgasm” (155)

Proverbs for Paranoids 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immortality of the Master (241)

Rocket Limerick:

There was a young fellow named Hector,

Who was quite fond of a launcher-erector.

But the squishes and pops

Of acute pressure drops

Wrecked Hector’s Hydraulic connector (306).

Oh, no.  COlonies are much, much more.  Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit.  Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy.  Ehf?  Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as wolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals…Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression… (317)

(something for Sturgeon): …”from whom von Goll used to get cut rates on most of his film stock, especially on the peculiar and slow moving ‘Emulsion J’ invented by Lazlo Jamf, which somehow was able, even under ordinary daylight, to render the human skin transparent to a depth of half a millimeter, revealing the face just beneath the surface” (387) wouldn’t that be cool?

…”But, if I’m riding through it, the Real Text, right now, if this is it…or if I passed it today somewhere in the defastation of Hamburg, breakthing the ash-dust, missing it completely…if what the IG built on this site were not at all the final shape of it, but only an arrangement of fetishes, come-ons to call down special tools in the form of 8th AF bombers yesthe ‘Allied’ planes would all have been, ultimately, IG built, by way of Director Krupp, through is English interlocks–the bombing was the exact industrial process of conversion, each release of energy placed exaclty in space and time, each shockwave plotted in advance to bring precisely tonight’s wreck into being thus decoding the Text, thus coding, recoding, decoding the holy Text..If it is in working order, what is it meant to do? The engineers who built it as a refinery never knew there were any further steps to be taken.  Their design was ‘finalized’ and they could forget it.

It means this War was never political at all, the politics was all theatre, all just to keep the people distracted…secretly, it was being directed instead by the needs of technology…by a conspiracy bwteen human beings and techniques, bu something that needed the energy burst of war, crying, ‘Money be damned, the very life of [insert name of Nation] is at stake’ but meaning, most likely dawn is nearly here, I need my night’s blood, my funding, funding, ahh more more… The real crises were crises of allocation and priority, not among firms–it was only staged to look that way–but among different Technologies, Plastics, Electronics, Aircraft, and their needs which are understood only by the ruling elite…” (520-521, all elipses and italics in original)

Ok no one wants to read too much GR before they actually read it, when they will read WAY TOO MUCH of it.

happy solstice tomorrow.

So, here is my sound project– a mix of 66 voices reading different sections from Inger Christensen’s poem IT (1969). The poem/project breaks down as follows:

Section I: a 66 line stanza read by 66 voices
Section II: two 33 line stanzas read by 33 voices each
Section III: three 22 line stanzas read by 22 voices each
Section IV: six 11 line stanzas read by 11 voices each
Section V: eleven 6 lines stanzas read by 6 voices each
Section VI: twenty-two 3 line stanzas read by 3 voices each
Section VII: thirty-three couplets read by 2 voices each
Section VIII: sixty-six single lines read by a single voice each

I would love to use Pinko’s as a space for further discussion (about the text, about the interaction between voices, about the context for the idea, about the arranging process (which was designed to leave things largely up to chance)…etc.). Enjoy!

Section I

Section II

Section III

Section IV

Section V

Section VI

Section VII

Section VIII

I’m putting out a call for more information or pictures, if you have any resources. Deluze and Guattari briefly cite this artist, quoting another critic saying, “Since he was unable to free himself of these currents that were tormenting him, he gives every appearance of having finally joined with them, taking passionate pride in portraying them in their total victory, in their triumph” (qtd in anti-oedipus 17). He is an example of a ‘celibate machine’ who has passed through paranoia to embrace his submission to desiring-production.

aren’t the pictures cool? But they’re really low quality. I need better ones.

this link has a brief bio:

http://dilettantepress.com/artists/gie.html

Here is the latest version of the film I made last semester.

tr. John Blofield, ca. 1940. Originally written ca. 850 AD, by a disciple of Huang Po. Sturgeon: compare with Artaud’s letters. Q: Is it possible that Buddhism could save the schizophrenic?

27. Q: What is the Way and how must it be followed?
A: What sort of THING do you suppose the Way to be, that you should wish to FOLLOW IT?

Q: What instructions have the Masters everywhere given for dhyana-practice and the study of the Dharma?
A: Words used to attract the dull of wit are not to be relied on.

Q: If those teachings were meant for the dull-witted, I have yet to hear what Dharma has been taught to those of really high capacity.
A: If they are really men of high capacity, where could they find people to follow? If they seek from within themselves, they will find nothing tangible; how much less can they find a Dharma worthy of their attention elsewhere! Do not look to what is called Dharma by preachers, for what sort of Dharma could that be?

Q: If that is so, should we not seek for anything at all?
A: By conceding this, you would save yourself a lot of mental effort.

Q: But in this way everything would be eliminated. There cannot just be nothing.
[Consider the similarity between this last and Dostoevsky’s famous “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.” Nothing in the Western world (so far as I know) resembles Huang Po’s- that is, Zen’s resolution to this issue.]
A: Who called it nothing? Who was this fellow? But you wanted to SEEK for something.

Q: Since there is no need to seek, why do you also say that not everything is eliminated?
A: Not to seek is to rest tranquil. Who told you to eliminate anything? Look at the void in front of your eyes. How can you produce it or eliminate it?

Q: If I could reach this Dharma, would it be like the void?
A: Morning and night I have explained to you that the Void is both One and Manifold. I said this as a temporary expedient, but you are building up concepts from it.

Q: Do you mean that we should not form concepts as human beings normally do?
A: I have not prevented you; but concepts are related to the senses; and, when feeling takes place, wisdom is shut out.

Q: Then should we avoid any feeling in relation to the Dharma?
A: Where no feeling arises, who can say that you are right?

Q: Why do you speak as though I was mistaken in all the questions I have asked Your Reverence?
A: You are a man who doesn’t understand what is said to him. What is all this about being mistaken?

28. Q: Up to now, you have refuted everything which has been said. You have done nothing to point out the true Dharma to us.
A: In the true Dharma there is no confusion, but you produce confusion by such questions. What sort of ‘true Dharma’ can you go seeking for?

Q: Since the confusion arises from my questions, what will Your Reverence’s answer be?
A: Observe things as they are and don’t pay attention to other people. There are some people just like mad dogs barking at everything that moves, even barking when the wind stirs among the grass and leaves.

Blind dazily into deserted street walks over for a conversation. My head looks up. Hey blind. Is it goin any different today. He reckons it isn’t. Tractors got the same hell in’m they had yesterday. There ain’t gonna be any produce this harvest weekend.

How many chickens we got left, I ask him. He don’t know. Well is it gonna be enough to make due for the dinner, I say then. He shrugs.

Well then I magine you’ll be lookin for somethin to serve. He looks up, his unfortunate, sunk in cheeks reflecting sunlight. Boy’s got one slim neck. Could be broken in the split of a second.

It’s plenty: (didn’t quite see his lips move just then).

Glare. Sunlight hung in the humid air, swirling trace paths of commotion. It was time waiting, it wasn’t either of us was gonna say anything. We just looked, back and forth between us, seein if the other might have reason to turn lip. But neither of us did; we got set to go back to work, and we did. There wan’t ever a fight that day boss, there wan’t ever a fight. I say it simply as I can.