Auto-Critique

Interpretation of Mask on Cross

A: Why is it so hard to fix a soul?

B: The soul is in constant fluttering movement between the heavenly forces which pull it upwards and those animal ones that pull it downwards. The four winds are alone capable of holding it still when they all converge in exact equal velocity upon the soul as their centre.

A: Does the mask fit in its frame of four red waxed bars like the soul held fast by four equal winds?

B: Yes. The artist has created a replica of this suspension. The heavenly forces are completely balanced by the animal forces. So the masks could be the souls of heroes or demons. For only in them are the animal and heavenly powers in exact equivalence.

Forbidden Scenes

A: When one has looked at something one should rather have not looked at, or which it was dangerous to look at, or both and for too long, but one has to record it somehow, even if this was all in a face which has been seen by many others as well but to whom this sight was not revealed, how could anyone judge if what is in the face is in the image and the other way around as well.

B: When reporting forbidden scenes or sights one must strictly confine oneself to talking about what one sees and not about what one feels.

Only by observing this rule will you avoid being yourself harmed by what you see. But if you keep to this rule you can report freely all that you see – without the need to omit anything.

“Don’t look at yourself and inherit freedom” (Hafis)

A: What about not thinking about what you see?

Should one confine oneself to thinking about all things besides what you are seeing?

B: The mind moves from the seen to the unseen says Emerson. Meaning the mind moves in on itself. It is unseen. The workings of the mind are unseen.

A: But surely they are capable of being manifested?

B: But that which is manifested is not in the mind. Whatever it is which is seen only gives vague testimony that a mind had once worked there.

               “The things which I have seen I now can see no more.”

A: That’s Wordsworth isn’t it?

“Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”

B: It certainly is. Unseen does not mean secret. A secret could be revealed. The perpetual unseen abolishes the drama of betrayal.

A: I suppose that something by nature unseen could not become a forbidden scene . One needn’t worry about looking at it either.

B: Forbidden scenes aren’t necessarily hidden. They are mostly there long before one has a chance to prepare for them. One should never expect a forbidden scene to obligingly keep itself out of sight. One should on the contrary expect it always to appear, at any moment. Just like any apparition should always be expected. This is not a unique quality of forbidden scenes. It’s the law of the universe – nothing which is susceptible to being seen can ever hide, nothing can ever be hidden. In particular errors.

A: When one corrects an error can’t it be said then to be hidden?

B: Then especially not. The error has become enshrined in the correction. Even if the error were by nature unseen, its correction would always be seen. By the same token, there is no such thing as a virgin soul.

A: Why not?

B: Because if a soul were here for the first time, it could logically also be here for the last time. But that’s impossible. Nothing is last under the sun.

Concentration

B: Reduction is the anti-nature, the principle of art. Art reduces the absolute quantity of existence. Art is a great reducer. That which is natural adds and multiplies, the unnatural subtracts and divides. This is the origin of concentration.

A: But what about natural selection? Isn’t that a natural principle of reduction?

B: Natural selection refers to the variety of means by which nature meaning species multiplies itself. The generative principle is nowhere contradicted by the principle of natural and sexual selection. It’s as creationist as anything in nature.

A: To create is natural, human.

B: To destroy is unnatural, divine. To concentrate is more than human, not divine but artistic.

A: But doesn’t the artist create anything at all?

B: Yes. But not on purpose. Mostly danger, shame, and dishonour for himself. He doesn’t need much.

A: Give me an example of this concentration.

B: Look at the lamp hanging in front .

A: I’m looking.

B: What does it look like?

A: Like a house.

B: You know what it’s called?

A: Yes. Socrates’ friends.

B: Is it very big?

A: No. It’s quite small.

B: Why is it so small?

A: Because Socrates built it for his friends.

B: Was it big enough for his friends?

A: It was. It got bigger and bigger. It was too big in the end. 

B: You see. You’ve given me an example of concentration yourself. Need I say more?

A: What does this concentration look like?

B: In the morning everything looks hopeful and restless, in the evening despairing and concentrated. That is the true face of concentration. Despair looks concentrated. Or concentration unveils itself in despair. One cannot despair without being concentrated about it or concentrating on it.

One cannot be hopeful without feeling restless. When one is restless however one is unable to concentrate. And soon loses the very grounds for hopefulness. And so runs the cycle between hope – restlessness or movement – inability to concentrate –despair – ability to concentrate on one’s despair – generation of new hopefulness.

A: What exactly does art reduce?

B: Primarily emotions, sensations and secondarily actions. Superior art displaces great quantities of motions, sensations and emotions, all entities whose being is lodged in the temporal and spatial occlusions.

Inferior art injects vast amounts of sensations, emotions and motions into an already surfeited field, magnifying the animal outreach.

A: Is superior art more powerful?

B: Only to the degree to which it has become pure spiritual law and has no being nor idea lingering in the temporal and spatial occlusions.

A: When does that happen?

B: Actually, never, but the greater the art, the more longing it engenders for what will never be.

A: So art does create something. It creates longing.

B: You are right. But longing is a formless negative attribute of the mind. It is the power in any individual that causes him to set off on a heated restless erratic pursuit of oblivion. The power does not move itself. That is what one commonly calls love. The auto-violent engine.  Once started up, it fires itself until the body of fuel has been completely turned into heat and light and all motion ceases.

“My longing is so hot

That I readily catch fire

In contemplation of

The noble object, for whose sake

Fiercely burning

I shower sparks from my embers

Upon the stars.

No moment in all the years

Which would have seen my

mute signs show any change.”

(Giordano Bruno, Of the Heroic Passions)

A: Aren’t there any other people besides artists whose livelihood depends on reduction in a similar fashion?

 B: A few. Very few.

A: Give me an example. Something familiar, closer to home.

B: It’s not really the same. But if you insist. Anyone involved in horse racing. Especially in the steeplechase.

A: What do you mean?

B: I knew you would ask that.

A: People betting on horses want to win so that they can multiply their fortunes. Even if they lose, betting itself goes on.

B: True. I don’t mean gamblers. They are creationist. I’m referring to the jockeys and their horses, to a significantly lesser degree to their breeders, trainers, owners, stable lads, etc.

Stable lads have half formed sinful faces. But they don’t depend on them staying like that. When full grown they can still move around with the horses in their trailers at night. But the jockeys have to stay small. If a jockey can’t stay small he will soon be a dead jockey. Growth in the jockey is a slow cause of death. That’s what happened to the greatest jockey of all times – Fred Archer. He grew bigger and put on weight. He went on a strict diet; sometimes his intake was restricted to castor oil and orange juice.

But nothing he did reduced his size back to where it was originally.

The diet itself wore his nerves out. He couldn’t stay light. Eventually he had to shoot himself. A martyr to his metabolic rate. He was twenty nine years old and undefeated.

A: It seems to me he didn’t really succeed in his reduction. He was dependent on being born reduced. As soon as he had to reduce himself, his life turned into a disaster.

B: You have just proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the force needed to withstand a natural drive, in other words, a force of reduction, cannot be identical with that same natural drive, quite simply because it is the force and the only force opposing it, hence the anti-drive or reductive force must be unnatural.

A: Do you mean if the drive is natural, the anti-drive is unnatural?

B: I do.

A: Which is greater?

B: The natural drive is by far greater but infinitely common. The unnatural anti-drive is weak but exceedingly rare. Seneca would have one believe that something which is a common property, in this case, the natural drive, is not less valuable just because it is common.

Similarly, the older virtues are not more virtuous because they’re older, hence Jupiter cannot be considered more virtuous than a mortal.

A: You haven’t said anything about the horses. How do they exemplify the unnatural force of reduction?

B: The race horse, in particular the one which is ridden in a steeplechase, can be said to be racing on his own death.

A: Do you mean his legs are his death?

B: Very good. You have an intuitive grasp of the tragedy of the race horse.

A: Yes I think I do. The horse’s legs carry him to victory, they are his means of locomotion, they are what make him great. But they make him fall as well. When he breaks his leg in a fall, he will be put down. No matter how great a champion he was until that moment.

The legs of a race horse are a bridge. On the one side is his life and on the other side is his death.

B: “Let him who is a chief be a bridge. “  (Branwen Daughter of Llŷr,   The Mabinogion)

A: But it is a bridge for one. When he has crossed it, one time, the bridge will have served its purpose.

When his legs stand, all stands, when his legs fall, all falls. That is quite reduced, I agree. 

Enough said.

B: Not quite. All does not fall. The tragedy is completed. There would be no tragedy without a sacrifice.

A: Is a sacrifice a reduction?

B: Yes. There are always sacrifices made before any tragedy. The Greeks sacrificed to Poseidon before the horses and chariot races. The sacrifices before the event signify that a sacrifice during the event is expected, even desired.

A: Is that why all the noses of all the masks are broken?

B: Yes. The noses of the masks have been sacrificed in advance of the race. The twelve masks are Odin’s jockeys riding Odin’s horses in Odin’s race.

“Dedicated to Odin, I to myself”  (words of Odin, in Edda)

A: Is the red wax their blood?

B: No. It is Kvasir’s blood.

Supply and Demand

1. Great Works

Krishna speaks of three worlds like the Zohar (Kabbalah).  The wise ones are also those who hold the world together.  They keep the circle of sacrifice-action-nourishment rolling.  Sacrifice is negative supply.  In the economy of sacrifice, what one does not have is an asset.  Dostoyevsky accumulated many such sacrifice assets during his prison days, but only with the help of an aloof brother who did not write him during his four years of hard labor in the Siberian 'katorga' camp and ignored his repeated demands for money and petitions.  His brother was an agent of the gods of sacrifice - those cosmic auditors who pay particular attention to the levels of necessary obstruction, harm and misery upon which great works depend.  Great works notoriously thrive upon fragile relationships.  For one reason or another, usually meta-economical, such works can only be sustained by a faulty and inadequate source.  Most of Dostoyevsky's letters from Siberia are pleas for some kind of sustenance.  Books for example.  Hegel, Kant, French economists, literary journals, anything and all the details.  He had an insatiable craving for histories of the Church and Church Fathers although he considered himself a sceptic.   Dostoyevsky's favorite lamentations are those designed to move his brother to request his transfer to a post in the Caucasus, "at least it's in Russia".  The land beyond the Ural is mere administered territory, to be banished to that part of the Russian Empire is to be cut off from life itself.  His brother remains admirably unmoved.  Dostoyevsky's eloquence is wasted on him, a valuable additional sacrifice.

Still as always with Dostoyevsky, in the depths of forced renunciation he is inviting provincial judges, socializing with landowners and petty government officials, people are carrying his letters to Moscow and Petersburg,  and couriers are turning up miraculously.

2. Meta-Economics

"All Being should be transformed into Having.  Being is one-sided — Having synthetic, liberal."

("Alles Seyn soll in ein Haben verwandelt werden.  Seyn ist einseitig — Haben synthetisch, liberal.")

Novalis, Das Allgemeine Brouillon, Nr. 79, Hamburg, 1993, p.15)

Although sacrifice like Being is groundless, the economy of sacrifice is strictly non-ontological.  Being does not have Being.  Can a commodity have a commodity?  Can a risk have a risk?  Being is - whether you like it or not.  It does not have a relationship of having to itself.  Thus, Being cannot sacrifice Being.  No matter how much Being subtracts from Being, it will always end up being Being.  From the point of view of the economy of sacrifice Being is not a great work.

As Being is always Being, its powers of metamorphosis are nil.  Similarly as Being does not have Being, Being cannot 'forget' nor 'remember' Being.  Being is never anywhere else except by or with Being.  Badiou's demand, echoing Heidegger, 'let us forget the forgetting of the forgetting (of Being)' compounds Heidegger's error.  The 'forgetting of the forgetting of the forgetting' is a new chapter in the infinite and immortal history of error.

Errors are exceedingly fertile.  They breed other errors easily.  Errors are hybrids of fiction and fiction, like interest on interest.  And yet, the lifespan of any given error is not infinite - like all matter, organic and inorganic, they too become eventually obsolete. 

    
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Night Sky Quotes

1.

My Night in the Bad Class

2.

“alles was ist ist zuwenig (…)”

(Everything which is is too little.)

Oswald Wiener

3.

Die Welt ist alles, was der Unfall ist.

A Wittgenstein Victim

4. 

“achtung.

was besteht, ist veraltet.”

(Attention.  What exists, is obsolete.)

Oswald Wiener

5.

How to measure that fraction of measurable to immeasurable?

6.

Why is there action and not just nothing?

7.

“Wenn ich der Regel folge, wähle ich nicht.

Ich folge der Regel blind.”

(When I follow the rule, I do not choose.  I follow the rule blindly.)

Wittgenstein

8.

Open minds are like shared anuses.

9.

Grammar is Theatre

10.

“What is a sadist?”

“Someone who likes to dish out pain.”

(Older youth instructing younger youths on evening rush hour train from Oxford to Didcot Parkway)

11.

If there is no perfect logic, does it mean there is no logic?

If a thing is not perfect, does it mean it is not that thing?

12.

Aesthetic Pain

13.

Everything is allowed as long as it’s insincere.

Confession of Insincerity

14.

The poet is not bad (maudit), language has a certain badness just waiting for the one, who is expected to arrive.

15.

To be true to an event, which ended in defeat, is to be true to a lost cause in its aspect of lostness – it is to be true to lostness, not to Revolution.

16.

For years we resented the false emotions of others, until we realized they were our own and our best possessions.

17.

The gentleman is the real valet.  Only another gentleman can use him with no remainder.

18.

My sensations may be like everybody else’s, but my ataraxy is my own.

19.

Errors are immortal.

20.

“Logik der Empfindung und Fantasie.  / Logik ist schlechtweg Grammatik.”

(Logic of Feeling and Fantasy.  /  Logic is simply grammar.)

Novalis

21.

“Dans le monde réellement renversé, le vrai est un moment du faux.”

(In a really upside down world, truth is a moment of falsehood.)

Guy-Ernest Debord

22.

The stronger the urge, the closer it comes to passion, the more treacherous it was, the higher its content of falsehood, so that we have processed ourselves into that desirable phantom in the centre of all blind instinct, a will full of lies. 

Our Will is the Grand Lie of Being.

23.

Not even madness can cure cowardice.

24.

Your Empire needs you.

25.

“Ich kann ihn suchen, wenn er nicht da ist, aber ihn nicht hängen, wenn er nicht da ist.”

(I can look for him when he is not there, but I cannot hang him, when he is not there.)

Wittgenstein

26.

What does it mean to say that someone is lost, although not physically lost?  Does he know he is lost?  Or to say of someone that he is broken?  What is it, which is lost or broken?  Does he know when he is broken?

27.

There is something of the despot in both the artist and the philosopher.  The work of art or work of philosophy expects absolute obedience.  Each implies the will to absolute power – to completely possess and compel the ‘hypocritical’ Other.