Thursday, 27 August 2009
Love is the heady euphoria which springs from the banal monotony of existence with one's self. It is greater in its magnitude than any so-called 'crime against humanity', it hoists upon the creaking shoulders of an individual forced already to bear the great weight of all humanity the dreams and expectations of another.
Monday, 17 August 2009
If a man desires a Revolution, then write him a song and let him have it.
The sublime weight of the brave humility streaking through Carlos Puebla's music fell, with a splash, into the dripping, ebbing melancholia of my life one evening. I have always envied the musician: a man may scribble away all his days and even reach the pinnacle of literary genius. They can hoist accolades upon his tortured shoulders (if they are free of torture, he has either failed completely, for having not suffered, or he has succeeded all the more, for torturing himself to the point of feeling that torture which he has invented for himself - we have so much to learn from Pessoa), they can cite him as the noblest and most veritable of visionaries. Yet, what has he achieved? A multiply-instantiable collection of inherited symbols. No book has ever existed. Words, like all things, float about the world meaninglessly, seamlessly spilling into and out of each other, lolling around the world as though on the tip of our tongues. What we think they mean is precisely that: what we think. All thought stemming, as it does, from consciousness, I conclude that no words exist (or that they exist, but only as illusions), no words transcend, no words dream. And if no words dream, then neither do books. We dream when we write them, and we dream when we read them. This is especially true of all 'unconscious' writing: what could be more directly the result of a man's consciousness than the aimless unfurling of words from the depths of a soul, a self, which he doesn't have - unfurling, as the banner of self-negation, the ultimate synthesis of his conscious attempts to discover his non-existent self with the matter he substitutes for that impossible unified whole, his memory, which bears the very stamps of the reality he wishes to transcend? Yet, the tortured shoulders of the literary genius receive their massage from the soothing hands of chance, the chance that his dreams have lapped against and seduced our own.
The musician, for his part, conquers us more illusorily (and, thus, more artistically). For the shimmering textures (this is how I can best describe them) of those Cuban guitars danced so merrily, so mournfully against Puebla's implacable voice that I felt myself, consciously, surrender to all that it did not mean and, consequently, all that it could mean for me. This wonderful sound, I realised, sounded like Cuba precisely because it belonged to Cuba. If it belonged to Cuba, and Cuba belonged to its people, then it must be a product of that people's will.
Enthused, I felt a brief but sensational rush - the illusion of having a will of my own - a desire to strike down and tear open the very faces of my enemies. Unable to picture a face, I realised: I have no enemies. Yet still, I felt myself in the grip of that force which meant that nothing but the music was of any matter, nothing but the music existed; I righteously, venomously decided that all those who spurned it should be my enemies. That I should rally the world in that beautiful image of all that those sounds apparenty symbolised in Carlos Puebla and his Cuban cohorts. Hasta siempre, la revolucion!
It was then that I began to wonder: if I have been mobilised by the sheer thrill of the sound, how is that that I can influence others in the same way? For it became sadly evident that the music had mobilised me because I had willingly allowed it to. Nobody forced me to hear it, nobody had tainted it. In even suggesting it to another, I would be corrupting it, stamping upon its pure elegance all of the drab and inconsequential exteriority which I present to the world, the other, whom I wished to conquer with it.
I smiled: how could any Revolution occur without music, or without art? I thought (and still think) it absurd to attempt to construct society in my own image when my image is itself so hopelessly diffuse. Revolutionaries seldom realise (though they still expect, which is rather different) that only force will conquer tyranny, and only force will keep it at bay. So it follows that the forceful overthrow of any tyranny will be essentially forceful, and forceful - tyrannical - in its self-preservation. Any conscious individual knows that a Revolution is not a Utopia - it is merely a hint of what it could be. Utopias are effervescent assertions the reality, of dreams and, as such, they are products of the transcendent imagination. Ideology alone has no hope of suggesting them.
Therefore, what does Puebla's music have to do with tyranny? One might say it combats the tyranny of non-music, of oppression by blandness and uniformity. But how? It is this question, and its lack of any possible deterministic or rational answer, which leads me to believe that revolution is an instance of art. The Revolutionary seeks to overcome the stifling material conditions of his existence and, in so doing, he must create an alternative. No Revolution can ever reasonably live up to its name, for the tyranny it seeks to annihilate (or better, overturn) is unique; if it is unique, it must be different from all other tyrannies. If there are different tyrannies, there can be no Form of tyranny - and there can be no Form of opposite. The opposite of oppression is whatever the conquering Revolutionary makes of it, whatever Utopia drives it. Whatever it sounds like.
I was content. My imagination throbbed with the face of Che, of sunny Cuba, of righteous expressions of freedom, happiness and tolerance. I was transported from the world in wave after wave of indolent joy. A Revolution had occurred in my heart and, just for a moment, I had overcome tyranny. I had my revolution and, in writing, I dreamed it all the more.
Yo soy esto que soy, un simple trovador que canta.
The sublime weight of the brave humility streaking through Carlos Puebla's music fell, with a splash, into the dripping, ebbing melancholia of my life one evening. I have always envied the musician: a man may scribble away all his days and even reach the pinnacle of literary genius. They can hoist accolades upon his tortured shoulders (if they are free of torture, he has either failed completely, for having not suffered, or he has succeeded all the more, for torturing himself to the point of feeling that torture which he has invented for himself - we have so much to learn from Pessoa), they can cite him as the noblest and most veritable of visionaries. Yet, what has he achieved? A multiply-instantiable collection of inherited symbols. No book has ever existed. Words, like all things, float about the world meaninglessly, seamlessly spilling into and out of each other, lolling around the world as though on the tip of our tongues. What we think they mean is precisely that: what we think. All thought stemming, as it does, from consciousness, I conclude that no words exist (or that they exist, but only as illusions), no words transcend, no words dream. And if no words dream, then neither do books. We dream when we write them, and we dream when we read them. This is especially true of all 'unconscious' writing: what could be more directly the result of a man's consciousness than the aimless unfurling of words from the depths of a soul, a self, which he doesn't have - unfurling, as the banner of self-negation, the ultimate synthesis of his conscious attempts to discover his non-existent self with the matter he substitutes for that impossible unified whole, his memory, which bears the very stamps of the reality he wishes to transcend? Yet, the tortured shoulders of the literary genius receive their massage from the soothing hands of chance, the chance that his dreams have lapped against and seduced our own.
The musician, for his part, conquers us more illusorily (and, thus, more artistically). For the shimmering textures (this is how I can best describe them) of those Cuban guitars danced so merrily, so mournfully against Puebla's implacable voice that I felt myself, consciously, surrender to all that it did not mean and, consequently, all that it could mean for me. This wonderful sound, I realised, sounded like Cuba precisely because it belonged to Cuba. If it belonged to Cuba, and Cuba belonged to its people, then it must be a product of that people's will.
Enthused, I felt a brief but sensational rush - the illusion of having a will of my own - a desire to strike down and tear open the very faces of my enemies. Unable to picture a face, I realised: I have no enemies. Yet still, I felt myself in the grip of that force which meant that nothing but the music was of any matter, nothing but the music existed; I righteously, venomously decided that all those who spurned it should be my enemies. That I should rally the world in that beautiful image of all that those sounds apparenty symbolised in Carlos Puebla and his Cuban cohorts. Hasta siempre, la revolucion!
It was then that I began to wonder: if I have been mobilised by the sheer thrill of the sound, how is that that I can influence others in the same way? For it became sadly evident that the music had mobilised me because I had willingly allowed it to. Nobody forced me to hear it, nobody had tainted it. In even suggesting it to another, I would be corrupting it, stamping upon its pure elegance all of the drab and inconsequential exteriority which I present to the world, the other, whom I wished to conquer with it.
I smiled: how could any Revolution occur without music, or without art? I thought (and still think) it absurd to attempt to construct society in my own image when my image is itself so hopelessly diffuse. Revolutionaries seldom realise (though they still expect, which is rather different) that only force will conquer tyranny, and only force will keep it at bay. So it follows that the forceful overthrow of any tyranny will be essentially forceful, and forceful - tyrannical - in its self-preservation. Any conscious individual knows that a Revolution is not a Utopia - it is merely a hint of what it could be. Utopias are effervescent assertions the reality, of dreams and, as such, they are products of the transcendent imagination. Ideology alone has no hope of suggesting them.
Therefore, what does Puebla's music have to do with tyranny? One might say it combats the tyranny of non-music, of oppression by blandness and uniformity. But how? It is this question, and its lack of any possible deterministic or rational answer, which leads me to believe that revolution is an instance of art. The Revolutionary seeks to overcome the stifling material conditions of his existence and, in so doing, he must create an alternative. No Revolution can ever reasonably live up to its name, for the tyranny it seeks to annihilate (or better, overturn) is unique; if it is unique, it must be different from all other tyrannies. If there are different tyrannies, there can be no Form of tyranny - and there can be no Form of opposite. The opposite of oppression is whatever the conquering Revolutionary makes of it, whatever Utopia drives it. Whatever it sounds like.
I was content. My imagination throbbed with the face of Che, of sunny Cuba, of righteous expressions of freedom, happiness and tolerance. I was transported from the world in wave after wave of indolent joy. A Revolution had occurred in my heart and, just for a moment, I had overcome tyranny. I had my revolution and, in writing, I dreamed it all the more.
Yo soy esto que soy, un simple trovador que canta.
Saturday, 15 August 2009
Prelude to the Manifesto of Sadness
I stare, despairingly and disparagingly, into the sodden essence of things.
The world has abandoned me because, rather than return its glassy-eyed gaze with the thousand-mile stare of conscience, I shyly looked away and surrounded myself with the highest form of all reality - dreams. In turn, I abandoned the world because it stubbornly refused to let me go.
I am incapable of detachment. Like an irritating (and, potentially, highly embarassing) moth which has settled on my shoulder and refuses the sternest of coaxes, life nibbles away. Perhaps it would be better to say that I abandoned the world because with every rational step I took towards it, I sunk further into the quicksand of metaphor and allegory. All matter repulses me, all life is a film-set. Unable to accept the world on a rational basis, I took shelter in words. Words, those imperious bastions of potential, erected, who knows how, against wave after wave of consciousness, the self-perpetuating sadness of the world. Yet even then, I found that in their employment, the words led me all the way back. Those waves of consciousness had eroded them, torn them up into a brand new landscape of their own making. The most wondrous allegory, the most joyous of all stories, the tallest of tales fizzled out before my eyes and shrank into a pathetic whimper which the Universe never answered back. Indeed, I had told myself the very tallest of tales.
Thus, unable to accept the world rationally, by which I mean through perception, interpretation, or involvement - through consciousness - and, finding that the medium of words was itself but one more metaphor for nothingness, I retreated yet further into myself. A retreat which resulted in my discovery that to venture beyond consciousness was to forego all knowledge. To forego all knowledge was simply to be, to build a golden palace of inertia amid the drubbery of Life.
Yet, even here, I found no release. For, in my loneliness, I found that it was precisely in my failure to apprehend the Universe, rationally or irrationally, that I was wired to it. My golden palace was resplendent with the finest treasures of the imagination, the calm acceptance of the incomprehensible, the absence of the chasm between reality and fiction through the knowledge that, instead of existing to substantiate one another, neither even existed. Yet I had cut myself off from the very ground upon which I had built my palace; my yearning for transcendence had been, all the while, rooted in the realisation that the conceptual is but a bastardised step from the actual - that my thoughts were subject to my subjectivity. In hiding, I had reified myself. Subject only to myself, I was the object of noone and nothing but myself. I had negated myself. I had become like everybody else.
Someday, somebody will read these half-baked expositions of the weightiest of feelings and pass judgement. They will deconstruct my own deconstruction of myself and find nothing. They will catalogue my scribbled, scattershot bits and pieces - properties of my Being to myself, bouts of social dis-integration to others - and stamp upon it the authority of their own interpretation, their Symbolic Order of all that I never was. I shall cease even to 'Be' and to exist as the bastard child of all those wasted hours which bred to form all of which constitutes this, my Manifesto of burning and overwhelming sadness.
I am incapable of deatchment. Life nibbles away.
The world has abandoned me because, rather than return its glassy-eyed gaze with the thousand-mile stare of conscience, I shyly looked away and surrounded myself with the highest form of all reality - dreams. In turn, I abandoned the world because it stubbornly refused to let me go.
I am incapable of detachment. Like an irritating (and, potentially, highly embarassing) moth which has settled on my shoulder and refuses the sternest of coaxes, life nibbles away. Perhaps it would be better to say that I abandoned the world because with every rational step I took towards it, I sunk further into the quicksand of metaphor and allegory. All matter repulses me, all life is a film-set. Unable to accept the world on a rational basis, I took shelter in words. Words, those imperious bastions of potential, erected, who knows how, against wave after wave of consciousness, the self-perpetuating sadness of the world. Yet even then, I found that in their employment, the words led me all the way back. Those waves of consciousness had eroded them, torn them up into a brand new landscape of their own making. The most wondrous allegory, the most joyous of all stories, the tallest of tales fizzled out before my eyes and shrank into a pathetic whimper which the Universe never answered back. Indeed, I had told myself the very tallest of tales.
Thus, unable to accept the world rationally, by which I mean through perception, interpretation, or involvement - through consciousness - and, finding that the medium of words was itself but one more metaphor for nothingness, I retreated yet further into myself. A retreat which resulted in my discovery that to venture beyond consciousness was to forego all knowledge. To forego all knowledge was simply to be, to build a golden palace of inertia amid the drubbery of Life.
Yet, even here, I found no release. For, in my loneliness, I found that it was precisely in my failure to apprehend the Universe, rationally or irrationally, that I was wired to it. My golden palace was resplendent with the finest treasures of the imagination, the calm acceptance of the incomprehensible, the absence of the chasm between reality and fiction through the knowledge that, instead of existing to substantiate one another, neither even existed. Yet I had cut myself off from the very ground upon which I had built my palace; my yearning for transcendence had been, all the while, rooted in the realisation that the conceptual is but a bastardised step from the actual - that my thoughts were subject to my subjectivity. In hiding, I had reified myself. Subject only to myself, I was the object of noone and nothing but myself. I had negated myself. I had become like everybody else.
Someday, somebody will read these half-baked expositions of the weightiest of feelings and pass judgement. They will deconstruct my own deconstruction of myself and find nothing. They will catalogue my scribbled, scattershot bits and pieces - properties of my Being to myself, bouts of social dis-integration to others - and stamp upon it the authority of their own interpretation, their Symbolic Order of all that I never was. I shall cease even to 'Be' and to exist as the bastard child of all those wasted hours which bred to form all of which constitutes this, my Manifesto of burning and overwhelming sadness.
I am incapable of deatchment. Life nibbles away.
A Brief Refutation
Hypocrite - derived from the Greek word for 'feigning or 'play-acting', 'hypokrisis' - associated with 'hypokronai' ('I play a part').
Augusto Neto ( http://i-dontthink.blogspot.com/ ) accuses me of hypocrisy. He accuses me, therefore, of holding or expressing conflicting opinions, opinions which I may or may not have. In either case, he accuses me of lying.
To this, my refutation is simple (or infinitely complex): Everything that is 'thought' is an illusion. To think of something is to negate it, to deny its very right to 'be', for 'being' is anterior to conscience and it is from conscience that all thought must stem. Each thought, as a product of conscience, must ultimately be a product of Being. If 'I' possess any right to exist whatsoever, it is not as a supreme construction of all my thoughts (what a vile mess 'I' would be in then!). Such an argument cannot be justified, as to justify anything, according to the standard I have just set, would be to acknowledge its existence. It is a basic metaphysical paradox. Playing various parts is simply my way out.
Augusto Neto accuses me of being irrational; so be it. The more 'rationally' he behaves, the more his Being allows itself to be drowned by consciousness - the more he believes he 'emerges into existence' - the more he negates himself. The more he 'thinks', the more he imagines himself. And such a rational mind can never hope to imagine too much; never can it even hope to burst the seams of its own artificial scenery.
It could be said that I could imagine him better than he can himself; it could even be said, that I have made him up.
Augusto Neto ( http://i-dontthink.blogspot.com/ ) accuses me of hypocrisy. He accuses me, therefore, of holding or expressing conflicting opinions, opinions which I may or may not have. In either case, he accuses me of lying.
To this, my refutation is simple (or infinitely complex): Everything that is 'thought' is an illusion. To think of something is to negate it, to deny its very right to 'be', for 'being' is anterior to conscience and it is from conscience that all thought must stem. Each thought, as a product of conscience, must ultimately be a product of Being. If 'I' possess any right to exist whatsoever, it is not as a supreme construction of all my thoughts (what a vile mess 'I' would be in then!). Such an argument cannot be justified, as to justify anything, according to the standard I have just set, would be to acknowledge its existence. It is a basic metaphysical paradox. Playing various parts is simply my way out.
Augusto Neto accuses me of being irrational; so be it. The more 'rationally' he behaves, the more his Being allows itself to be drowned by consciousness - the more he believes he 'emerges into existence' - the more he negates himself. The more he 'thinks', the more he imagines himself. And such a rational mind can never hope to imagine too much; never can it even hope to burst the seams of its own artificial scenery.
It could be said that I could imagine him better than he can himself; it could even be said, that I have made him up.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)