Vers l'Orient (Late Early Obsessions)

“The festivals of the Bairam….in the midst of which, like a pale sun, can be discerned the endless ennui of the late sultan.” (Baudelaire, L’Art Romantique) 

Five letters of the heart to 

the eye

Five equal and opposite letters of the

eye to the heart

“La querelle des yeux et du coeur” (Giordano Bruno)

equals

The flaming heart

The flooded eye

“Eros, Eros, whose yearning poison drops in the

eye and wakes sweet sighs in the beleaguered heart. 

Never lead me along the tangled roads of limitless craving.” (Hippolytos, Euripides)

Ratzo  and Shov

Impossible Love-Kabbalah

The dialectics of love and craving

Love breeds tranquility

Craving breeds intranquility

Tranquility craves the full intranquility

Intranquility craves the empty tranquility

And so they turn and circle invert and reverse

almost forever.

Mathematical lovers would probably agree - the

best chaos comes from a slightly tarnished precision. 

Our work should give the viewer a gnawing sensation

of incompleteness. The bad infinity of the incomplete 

series.

Scene: The crowded quadrangle in the morning.

The clock tower on the bridge always points 

to ten o’clock.

In the distance, the forest of geometry.

Nothing is ever short enough or far enough not to be possessed by the reversed eye of the crowd. When reversion breaks loose into the universe, against the planets, anywhere could become the scene of fatal lucklessness. Any object - its prop. So much of it is sleight-of-hand, now you see it, now you don’t, eventually an exquisite corpse or a disappearance. The more unsentimental, technical or sudden, the better. Just like any accident.

The reversed eye is satisfied only by mass collisions. The imagination is a second select mass. There the collisions are so disconnected from desire or appetite.

Forward counting numbers are expanding.

Backward counting numbers are contracting.

Time going by is the expanding age.

Time ago is contracting, shrinking back to a point

out of which forward time can expand again.

Forward numbers are an expanding universe.

Backward numbers are a contracting universe.

Hope is the shape of forward counting numbers.

No hope is the shape of backwards counting numbers.

No hope has more promise

than hope.

One shouldn’t have to wait for nature’s spectacles for that acute sense of a missed opportunity. In a work of art one can miniaturize the intervals between those exceptional moments of sensation and multiply them as well.

It could possibly give the willing pliable spectator the feeling of having more and other lives and more and other worlds to squander them in.

Our fortune testing machines resemble accidents more than anything else because they promise so many ways of escaping all destinations. Hence effectively a rescue. When all chance has been suspended - risk lies in the law of the favorite. Symmetry is only uncertainty. The law of the favorite is both ancient and modern. Unlike horse racing, the favorite in the reversed world is most unlucky. The higher the odds in your favor the unluckier you are. We would far rather have an uneven than an even set of odds. How else could one always have ‘one more chance’?

We have been perfecting our grand theory of accidents and philosophy of risk based on the laws of shipwrecks. There is no mystery in chance. Chance abolishes it. We would rather be an enigmatic toy of fate than some fingered throw of the dice. The same trigonometry which one uses to calculate navigation of shipping routes can be used just as well to calculate the accidents upon these routes. With one small addition - one calculates how the desired port of destination should under eternal circumstances never be reached. How hard and how mysterious never to arrive.

Coincidences are a species of groundless phenomena which happen only once.

Risks are little nothings which could happen any time. It is quite plausible that there is a grain of madness at the heart of nature, a primary vertigo of the universe, a folie des grandeurs or a consuming dread which makes us believe all things are possible. Fortunately or unfortunately most of the time they are not.

The accident is nothing special but it might be sometimes less, sometimes more than the normal case. It is a normal case with an unknown plus or minus. The unknown too much or too little also follows laws. The same law simultaneously establishes the force of habit and through the accident cancels it. That is the first provisional axiom of the shipwreck. An accident is always rare and equally very common, because it follows a law, or in other words, there are only common accidents which are rare. That is the second provisional axiom. Therefore anything can happen most any time. Not only theoretically.

Even in ‘life’ how often does one only hear someone or something but never sees them? Or something silent like a place seems to look back at you? How much more is one driven to understand?

A cold heartless person is likened to a cicada in the poem of Miwa No Sugikado - which can be heard, but is nowhere to be seen. The heartless voices of a broken-hearted piece.

Spiritual Topography

Our ground floor is the tongue.

Between the tongue and floor of the mouth is

the lower inner sky, the most vast,

also the top of the next world,

hence - highest and lowest pitch of this one.

The body’s impurities are twinned with heaven’s purities.

People clutter the memory. The memory of the empty place

is strongest. The soul likes to remember the empty places - empty of people. The echo - pitch of the soul is the reverberation of the empty place it remembers.