As Above, Is Below » quote

A Review of the Reviewers

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 07:30:44 +0000

Critics constantly complain that writers are lacking in standards, yet they themselves seem to have no standards other than personal prejudice for literary criticism. (…) such standards do exist. Matthew Arnold set up three criteria for criticism: 1. What is the writer trying to do? 2. How well does he succeed in doing it? (…) 3. Does the work exhibit “high seriousness”? That is, does it touch on basic issues of good and evil, life and death and the human condition. I would also apply a fourth criterion (…) Write about what you know. More writers fail because they try to write about things they don’t know than for any other reason.
– William S. Burroughs, ‘A Review of the Reviewers’

Fire, Shark, Snare, Torrent

admin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 01:06:24 +0000

“There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed.”
- Buddha

Epiphany

admin — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 00:34:21 +0000

Critic:

You’ve made the right choice.
Believe me, today is a good day for you.
These are tough decisions, I know.
But we intellectuals, and I say “we” because I consider you as such,
must remain lucid to the bitter end.
This life is so full of confusion already,
that there’s no need to add chaos.
Losing money is part of a producer’s job.
I congratulate you.
You had no choice.
And he got what he deserved for having joined
such a frivolous venture so lightheartedly.
Believe me, no need for remorse.
Destroying is better than creating,
when we’re not creating those few, truly necessary things.
But then is there anything so clear and right
that it deserves to live in this world?
For him, the wrong movie is only a financial matter.
But for you, at this point, it could have been the end.
Better to quit and strew the ground with salt,
as the ancients did, to purify the battlefields.
In the end what we really need is-
some hygiene, some cleanliness, disinfection.
We’re smothered by images, words and sounds
that have no right to exist, coming from, and bound for, nothingness.
Of any artist truly worth the name we should ask nothing
except this act of faith: to learn silence.
Do you remember Mallarmé’s homage to the white page?
And Rimbaud, a poet, my friend, not a movie director.
What was his finest poetry?
His refusal to continue writing and his departure for Africa.
If we can’t have everything, true perfection is nothingness.
Forgive me for quoting all the time.
But we critics – do what we can.
Our true mission is -
sweeping away the thousands of miscarriages that everyday -
obscenely – try to come to the light.
And you would actually dare leave behind you a whole film,
like a cripple who leaves behind his crooked footprint.
Such a monstrous presumption to think
that others could benefit from the squalid catalogue of your mistakes!
And how do you benefit from stringing together
the tattered pieces of your life?
Your vague memories, the faces of people
that you were never able to love.

Guido:

What is this sudden happiness that makes me tremble,
gives me strength, life?
Forgive me, sweet creatures.
I hadn’t understood. I didn’t know.
It’s so natural accepting you, loving you.
And so simple.
Luisa, I feel I’ve been freed.
Everything seems so good, so meaningful.
Everything is so true.
I wish I could explain.
But I don’t know how to.
So. Everything is confused again, as it was before.
But this confusion is – me.
Not as I’d like to be, but as I am.
I’m not afraid anymore of telling the truth,
of the things I dont know, what I’m looking for and haven’t found.
This is the only way I can feel alive and
I can look into your faithful eyes without shame.
Life is a celebration.
Let’s live it together!
This is all I can say Luisa, to you or the others.
Accept me for what I am, if you want me.
It’s the only way we might be able to find each other.

- 8 1/2 IDEATO E DIRETTO DA FEDERICO FELLINI

Surface Penetration

admin — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:08:30 +0000

I found this written on a half sheet of notebook paper in a local alley:

…and as the cascading folds of extensive meme-connectors sheer and fall upon the crests of superficial ego-structures, the underlying none-ness is slowly revealed to the non-existent exterior body. It is then realized that there is no body, the notion of illusions is found to be in itself a meta-illusion, recursively parenthesised infinitely. Upon shedding waste, a decrease in overall substitution is gained throughout all related subjects – but only if the subject-object surface is penetrated by itself, thus ceasing any separation.

This has seen it to be so.

Communication

antilog — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:58:35 +0000

“The search for the mot juste is not a pedantic fad but a vital necessity. Words are our precision tools. Imprecision engenders ambiguity and hours are wasted in removing verbal misunderstandings before the argument of substance can begin.” — Anonymous Civil Servant

I spend my days looking for cameras

pfr — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 19:55:36 +0000

but all I can find

are the ones in my mind

now i’m running out of time

The Culture

antilog — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 05:12:26 +0000

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence. [...] Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time. [...] In our long striving to recover for the Western world a unity of sensibility and of thought and feeling we have no more been prepared to accept the tribal consequences of such unity than we were ready for the fragmentation of the human psyche by print culture.

- Marshall McLuhan

The Change

antilog — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 07:53:37 +0000

“I had nothing more to hope for; life had maneuvered me into a situation where there was no way out. I wanted to die; I was ready to do so. One afternoon I pulled the belt off my worn-out dressing-gown and made a noose from it. In my bathroom there was a hook for clothes high enough for me to hang myself from it. I shoved a chair beneath it, fastened the belt to the hook and put the noose round my neck. At the moment when I kicked the chair away, the belt ripped and I fell to the floor where I had fallen, inconsolable and too weak to get up. Then, still only half conscious, I dragged myself to the piano and confided my sighs and tears to it. Music, which I had loved so deeply, which was a constant companion to all my feelings, which inflames us to fight, which arouses us to love and passion, soothes our pains and instills peace in our hearts, Music brought me back to life that dreadful day. All of a sudden I was very hungry. ‘This time I’ll treat myself to two little sausages’ I decided. But outside I suddenly stopped. Something strange shot through me, call it a revelation or a vision. I observed my surroundings with new eyes, as if I were seeing them for the first time. The street, the houses, the dogs chasing each other, the men and women; now everything seemed different; even the noises of the city sounded different. I was fascinated by everything. Life seemed marvellous, it was worth living, even in prison or in a sickbed, so long as it was seen through these eyes. My ‘rebirth’ altered my whole psyche. In the chaos of my thoughts I discovered the mystery of happiness. I still hold firmly to it today; it is to love life unconditionally, the good and the bad.

“I don’t even consider myself to have any particular constitution or strength of mind, not even the ability to laugh in the face of misfortune. On the contrary, I am just as prone to nervous depressions, fits of rage and moods of impatience as everybody else, with the sole difference that I can recognize in them the unavoidable reverse side of the state of euphoria.”

- Artur Rubinstein