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.

John Cage - Great Waster of Time

Time Squandered

John Cage was a believer in the therapeutic value of boredom. One way to induce boredom is to raise expectations that something will happen in time either inside the one who waits, as in enlightenment, or outside in the external sensory world. The disciplined audience according to Cage will learn how to wait for this effect.  Nothing however is guaranteed.  The longer the expectation is unfulfilled, the greater the delay, the sheer quantity of time wasted in the mode of suspended activity, the greater the boredom suffered by the audience, the more acute its disappointment - the higher the spiritual benefits all around.  This rack of waiting resembles the structure of any false promise — “make them live in hope” says Gaveston, “upstart” and favorite of the King, at the beginning of Marlowe’s “Edward the Second”. False promises are also potentially fatal - “Aspettare e non venire è cosa da morire” is a popular Italian folk wisdom — futile waiting is a cause of death.  Cage’s performances were based on the principle of indefinite postponement.  Although for Cage the false promise is more like an implicit contract.  Boredom given by the performer must be equalled and paid for by boredom received from the audience.

Cage spoke freely of these matters in an interview conducted by David Sylvester and Richard Smalley in 1966 included in Sylvester’s collection “Interviews with American Artists” (2001).

Reading the interview now, freed from the dross of social and political trappings so important in ‘the Sixties’ for Cage and others, the bareness and harshness of Cage’s boredom therapy is fully exposed. Sylvester asks him why he likes to bore his audience to the verge of tears:

DS:    But you are asking them to give something?
JC:    Give in terms of the person who is disciplined to giving.
DS:    But the giving of time, you feel, is a part of that which has to be given?
JC:    Well, if something that is being given takes time, 

           then its receiving must take an equal time.

At some point John Cage ceased to be primarily a musician or composer and became instead a thinker or speaker.  He regarded his lectures though as a musical performance of speech, noise or silence.  Cage’s switch took place at a time when renouncing of art by artists in favor of silence or social activism was quite en vogue.  One can hardly imagine this urge today, perhaps because activism now is an obtrusive Doppelgänger of art. ‘Artists-activists’ are a sub-division of the so-called “activism industry” - involved in symbolic and ‘practical’ incursions in the pores of ordinary politics and geopolitics.  As such they are a sign of the further eroding of the distinction between art and ordinary life, which began in the ‘Sixties’. 

In an essay from the same period as Sylvester’s interview, Susan Sontag coined the expedient term “aesthetics of silence” for the bizarre renunciation of art of those days.  Sontag’s view of Cage is adulatory, whereas Sylvester is almost hostile. Curiously, Sylvester’s paring away of Cage’s declarations that ‘art is over’ seems far more contemporary now than Sontag’s affirmation of Cage’s “spirituality”.  One sees Cage’s true assault upon the audience (and indirectly the artist) in far more explicit terms.

“The proper goal of each activity is its obviation.”(John Cage) 
Sylvester almost turns him into a penseur maudit, which flatters Cage in a far more subtle fashion.

JC:    Why are people so stingy about their time?
DS:    Yes.
JC:    Why are they so ungenerous? What in heaven’s name

           is so valuable about 30 minutes or 45 minutes? Or an hour and a half?

Cage had a taste for mental torture like any evangelist.  People must pay him for the generosity with which he wastes their time.  The model for his own behavior is nature itself: “If you look at nature, for instance, it often seems to be wasteful, the number of spores produced by a mushroom in relation to the number that actually reproduce (...). I hope this shift from scarcity to abundance, from pinchpenny mental attitudes to courageous wastefulness, will continue to flourish.” (John Cage, 1968)
Cage wasted his audience using whatever means were handy. Prodigious waiting for nothing was the audience’s forced renunciation to match the chosen renunciation of the artist. Cage of course did not give up anything.  He didn’t consider himself redundant.  He was the waster not the wasted.  Cage muted his prepared pianos as a hitman might put on a silencer.

 

Narrow World of Chance

The Chinese, writes Baudelaire, tell time by looking into the eyes of a cat.

I looked into a book about John Cage smelling of mice.  Hemlock also smells of mice.  It grows in weedy places, in moist, loamy soils next to streams.  Growing forked from the root, it produces many unspectacular umbels.  John Cage was very interested in poisonous mushrooms.  He served them to his friends but ate more than anyone else.  John Cage liked poisonous mushrooms. He served them to his friends and almost died.  He also liked Satie, especially his piece “Socrate”. He would have devoured it too but was prevented from doing so by French copyright law.  Instead Cage made his “Cheap Imitation” which is slightly longer than the original. Socrates committed state suicide by drinking the cup of hemlock, thereby carrying out the death sentence passed by the Athenian polis. John Cage’s poisonous mushroom mess of ‘skunk cabbage’ was a cheap imitation of hemlock.

Adorno said about John Cage and the ‘New Music’ - and then John Cage came crashing into it.... 

Random Time

Random time measured by clocks as the duration of minutes and hours is wrongly called abstract. It is neither abstract nor aesthetic.
The basic mode of time as a quantity is error and inexactitude. Duration implies time as sheer quantity. It can be planned or random. This matters very little. But either way, it is never more than an approximation, hence merely empirical or accidental not necessary — ultimately tainted by those fixed ‘permanent emotions’ so necessary to John Cage.
Paradoxically, the only aesthetically useful emotions are the vague metamorphosing temporary ones. They may be false, but never inexact, inaccurate. That which measures time is not time.  Boredom is a good measure of time in Cage’s works.

Aesthetic time is in the mind and not in the clock. Time as a quality of reality implies the apriori perception that phenomena succeed or precede one another in sequence.

Through the mind’s innate ability to perceive sequence comes the certainty of substance (phenomena).  Substance is that attribute of phenomena which is extended (endures) in time.  One perceives substance as Being.  No substance or art is outside of time.  If it can be perceived it is temporal. Hence it is physically and metaphysically nonsensical to demand as John Cage did that people give him their time.  They could have more easily given him their soul.

What do the Chinese see in the eye of the cat?  They see the time of eternity says Baudelaire.  Time undivided by minutes and hours - “an immobile hour unmarked by clocks, yet light as a sigh, rapid as the blink of an eye(...)” (Baudelaire, “L’Horloge”). In Chinese time there is no ‘duration’, nothing ever passes.  The ghosts are here and the enemies of the ghosts are here.  The Chinese do not measure time with chronometers.  Neither did Beethoven, one of Cage’s declared enemies.  In Beethoven’s music there are vast passages of unmeasured space and time under the ghostly rule of the ever-metamorphosing fugue.  This rule is both light and inescapable - these are the principles and laws of universal simultaneity and sequence referred to as counterpoint.
Then I saw a cat come out of the bushes with a mouse in its mouth, not knowing how to get rid of it.

Mallarmé's 'Grand Jeu'

"The automaton moon above the forest of numbers - every star an official secret"

What does the game of dice mean for Mallarmé?  ('Today's game has blinded me' - Hafis)  His premise: no throw of the dice can abolish chance.  Isn't that obvious?  Why would a game of chance be designed to suspend or destroy its own conditions - chance?  If it were possible - would that be desirable?  Is it a tragedy that chance survives all or any throws of the dice?  Wouldn't life be even more boring without chance?  Isn't chance the only guard against  ennui and tyrannical habits?  One often speaks of pure chance.  Although chance has nothing pure about it.  Chance is indiscriminate and banal and reeks of the mechanical.  I would rather abolish a duty than leave it to chance.  Chance is something which interrupts a set course.  It is a non-intelligent intelligence which surpasses and limits the 'Absolute'

"faux manoir
              tout de suite
                        évaporé en brumes

                      qui imposa
                           une borne à l'infini"  ("Un Coup de Dés")

- yet chance and law are never far apart - if only the law of probability and stochastic processes.  Chance refers commonly to all phenomena which appear to take place without the interference of some sort of conscious Will - as if of their own accord.  But chance itself interferes in the phenomenon of Will.  The reasons for things called 'chance' are simply unknown.  Chance is just another name for the unknown or not yet known or semi-unknown.   Chance is not necessarily unforeseeable or even surprising. Otherwise how would one be able to predict some sorts of chance to a fairly accurate degree - like the movements of the stock market or the outcome of horse races.  Successful predictions do not abolish chance either.  The idea of risk is a limit to chance - it implies those circumstances when chance outweighs predictability - one risks the difference.  Risk is on one side - chance is on the other. 

Someone who has no chance is a person whose situation is probably completely known.  As Odilon Redon says in a journal entry dated 1908 "Le peintre qui a trouvé sa technique ne m'interesse pas."(An artist who has found his technique does not interest me. "à soi même, journal 1867-1915", 1989, p.110)  There is no lingering remnant of the unknown or "l'imprévu", the unforeseen.  All is lit up.  Curiously this situation is considered hopeless.  Humans associate hope with the unknown - when much is still in the dark and vague.

Vagueness is a great inducement for thinking.   Once Wittgenstein began to contemplate the properties of vagueness he became disenchanted with the clear-cut world of logical atomism.  "Grammar", the demiurge of his later philosophy, is the epitome of vagueness.  The real futility, the exhausting kind, is the attempt to efface certain iron rules of logic.  Unfortunately, one never knows exactly what these are.  But even the most unassailable logic can never compel belief.

What is the relation between vagueness and chance?  Is chance vague?  Are bodies vague or is vagueness only an attribute of language or other forms of representation?  Does vagueness occur first in thought?  Thoughts can be very vague - as can perceptions.  Every thought, says Mallarmé, is a throw of the dice.  Then are throws of dice also vague?  Vague thoughts, perceptions and language are on one side and on the other side are bodies which are not vague.  Vagueness has no empirical substance.  Although memories of empirical reality can also be very vague, especially memories of feelings. 

The exactitude of language camouflages the inexactitude of thoughts - one can substitute vagueness for inexactitude - feeling, memory or perception for thought .  Only rarely, does inexact language disguise exact thoughts.  Novalis says though - the vague or indeterminate moods augur happiness.