Tomorrow night, I’ll be waking up in that city that never sleeps. Let’s hope I make it there and back again.
Reclusland will once again be quiet until I do, as my trip is pretty fully scheduled.
You never realize how many friends you have until you try to see them all in the same week.
See you all in a week or so!
Excerpted from Page 505
In the snow outside my window I see a small green frog, one eye blinking, and the other wide open, unmoving, looking at me. I know this is God.
He appears just like this before me and watches to see if I will understand.
He is talking to me with his eyes by opening and closing them. When God talks to humans he doesn’t want humans to hear his voice.
<…>
His other eye opens and closes as it speaks a language incomprehensible to humans. Whether I understand or not is not God’s concern.
<…>
There are no miracles. God is saying this to this insatiable human being, me.
Then what else is there to seek? I ask of him.
All around is silence, snow is falling soundlessly. I am surprised by this tranquility. In Heaven it is peaceful like this.
And there is no joy. Joy is related to anxiety.
Snow is falling.
Pg 225-226
The love songs start at dusk, at first drifting across from the other side of the river. The bamboo groves on the mountain opposite are bathed in the pure gold of the lingering rays of the sun while this side of the river is already cloaked in night. Young women in groups of five or six come to the river-bank, some standing in a circle and others holding hands, and begin calling their lovers. Melodious singing rapidly fills the vast night. Young women are everywhere, still with their parasols up and also holding a handkerchief or a fan. There are some thirteen- or fourteen-year old girls who are just becoming aware of boys.
In each group, one girl leads the singing and the other girls harmonize. I observe that the lead singer in invariably the prettiest of the group, I suppose choice by beauty is a fairly natural principle.
The voice of the lead singer rises in the air and I can’t help noticing her utter sincerity. The correct word is perhaps not “sing”, for the clear shrill sound comes from deep within so that body and heart respond. The sounds seem to travel from the soles of the feet then shoot up between the eyes and the forehead before they are produced – no wonder they’re called “flying songs”. It is totally instinctive, and certainly devoid of what might be called embarrassment. Each woman exerts herself, body and heart, to draw her young man to her.
The young men are even less inhibited and come right up to the women to choose the one they like best, as if they are choosing a piece of fruit. At this point the women move their handkerchiefs and fans, and the more they are examined the more feeling they put into their singing. When a conversation starts, the young man takes the woman’s hand and they walk off together. The marketplace with its stalls thronging with ten thousand heads during the day time is now a vast singing stadium. I am suddenly surrounded by an expanse of passions and think that the human search for love must have originally been like this. So-called civilization in later ages separated sexual impulse from love and created the concepts of status, wealth, religion, ethics and cultural responsibility. Such is the stupidity of human beings.
Pg 140:
It is a carved wooden mask of an animal head with a human face, two horns protrude from the top of the head ad alongside these are a pair of smaller, sharp horns so it cannot represent a domestic cow or goat. It would have to be some wild animal, the demonic aura of the face definitely doesn’t have a deer-like docility and the place for docile deer’s eyes have no eyeballs and instead are two round gaping holes, eye sockets jutting out. Beneath the brow bone is a deep furrow, the forehead is pointed, and incisions radiating upwards upwards from the center of the forehead and the brow bone make the eye sockets even more prominent. It is thus that the eyes terrify the enemy, which is precisely how it is when beast and man confront each other.
When the mask is warn, the eyes in the darkness would shine with an animal glow through the gaping holes in the protruding eye sockets. Especially with the lower eye sockets hollowed out into two black crescent-shaped furrows pointing upwards, it looks even more evil. The nose, lips, cheekbones and chin, all executed with delicate precision, are those of an old man with a sunken mouth. The cleft on the chin has not been forgotten and the dry, shrunken skin clearly shows the bone structure. The lines of the prominent bone structure have been carved out with simplicity and forcefulness, so it is not just an old man, but one exuding a spirit of determination. At both sides of the tightly pursed lips are two carved sharp fangs running right up to the sides of the nostrils. The nostrils are flared and produce a definite look of scorn and derision. The teeth haven’t fallen out from old age but the front teeth have been knocked out and fitted with fangs. The two small holes at the corners of the tightly pursed mouth probably once had tufts of tiger whiskers sticking out of them. This very intelligent human face is at the same time full of animal savagery.
The sides of the nostrils, the corners of the mouth, the upper and lower lips, the cheekbones, the forehead and middle of the forehead indicate the the carver had a sound knowledge of the human head. Looking at it closely again, it is only the eye sockets and pointed forehead that are exaggerated, the thrust of the carving of the flesh gives it a sort of tenseness. Without the tiger whiskers, it is a replica of the face of primitive man with markings on it. Their understanding of nature and the self is fully encompassed in the round black holes the eye sockets. The two holes at the corners of the mouth reveal nature’s scorn for man and show man’s fear of nature. The face also accurately expresses the animal nature of human being and the fear of this animal nature within themselves.
Man cannot cast off this mask, it is a projection of his own flesh and spirit. He can no longer remove from his own face this mask which has already grown like skin and flesh so he is always startled as if disbelieving this is himself, but this is in fact himself. He cannot remove this mask, and this is agony. But having manifested itself as his mask, it cannot be obliterated, because the mask is a replica of himself. It has no will of its own, or one could say it has a will but no means of expression and so prefers not to have a will. Therefore, it has left man with an eternal face with which he can examine himself in amazement.
Pg 15:
To talk about a mixture of history and legend is how folk stories are born. Reality exists only through experience, and it must be personal experience. However, once related, even personal experience becomes a narrative. Reality can’t be verified and doesn’t need to be, that can be left for the “reality-of-life” experts to debate. What is important is life…Reality is myself, reality is only the perceptions of this instant and it can’t be related to another person. All that needs to be said is that outside, a mist is enclosing the green-blue mountain in a haze and your heart is reverberating with the rushing water of a swift-flowing stream.
Pg 12:
In those contaminated surroundings I was taught that life was the source of literature, that literature had to be faithful to life, faithful to real life. My mistake was that I had alienated myself from life and ended up turning my back on real life. Life is not the same as the manifestations of life. Real life, or in other words the basic substance of life, should be the former and not the latter. I had gone against real life because I was simply stringing together life’s manifestations, so of course I wasn’t able to accurately portray life and in the end only succeeded in distorting reality.
“At this time of life, one has already been wounded many times by love; it no longer evolves solely in accordance with its own unknown and inevitable laws, before our astonished and passive heart. We come to its aid, we distort it with memory, with suggestion. Recognizing one of its symptoms, we recall and revive the others. Since we know its song, engraved in us in its entirety, we do not need a woman to repeat the beginning of it—filled with the admiration that beauty inspires—in order to find out what comes after. And if she begins in the middle—where the two hearts come together, where it sings of living only for each other—we are accustomed enough to this music to join our partner right away in the passage where she is waiting for us.”
(via a friend)
I wonder, can it work this way? With either love of another person, or love of God, can we fill in the blanks with memories of past experiences? Or must each new moment be lived as it is born and dies within and around us? Although each moment is new, can memory serve any useful purpose, or is it only a stone which trips us up? How to keep the levels separate, so that truth and memory can dance together, allowing truth to always and in everything trump memory, but without cutting away the nuance and skill which memory allows?
What is the most profound difference between us, between you and me? You already known it. It’s these ancestral memories. Mine come at me in the full glare of awareness. Yours work from your blind side. Some call it instinct or fate. The memories apply their leverages to each of us – on what we think and what we do. You think you are immune to such influences? I am Galileo. I stand here and tell you: “Yet it moves.” That which moves can exert its force in ways no mortal power ever before dated stem. I am here to dare this.
The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines.
Very “The Medium is the Message”, eh?
An update on my experiences with those tape patterns I work with. A couple from the old place in Brooklyn and a new one in honor of the new Portland life.
Reclusland will be going silent for the next couple of days. We will to be back at it on Sunday, or Monday at the latest (I’m excited by all the comments, and will be replying soon!)
Hope you all enjoy the weekend!
“There is no such thing as rule governed creativity.”
—–> 
CHANGING LINE:
Hexagram Twenty/Line Five
Nine in the fifth place means:
Contemplation of my life.
The superior man is without blame.
A man in an authoritative position to whom others look up must always be ready for self-examination. The right sort of self-examination, however, consists not in idle brooding over oneself but in examining the effects one produces. Only when these effects are good, and when one’s influence on others is good, will the contemplation of one’s own life bring the satisfaction of knowing oneself to be free of mistakes.
The question asked was:
The ways in which the world seems to be dissolving, with quality bleeding into mindlessness. What is this?
The answer:
—>
CHANGING LINE:
Hexagram Twenty/Line Three
Six in the third place means:
Contemplation of my life
Decides the choice
Between advance and retreat.
This is the place of transition. We no longer look outward to receive pictures that are more or less limited and confused, but direct our contemplation upon ourselves in order to find a guideline for our decisions. This self-contemplation means the overcoming of naïve egotism in the person who sees everything solely form his own standpoint. He begins to reflect and in this way acquires objectivity. However, self-knowledge does not mean preoccupation with one’s own thoughts; rather, it means concern about the effects one creates. It is only the effects our lives produce that give us the right to judge whether what we have done means progress or regression.
“There is no outward spiritual freedom in such a landscape. Do you not see it? You have no open universe here with which to share. Everything is closures – doors, locks, latches! . . . Such a landscape as this turns you inward in search of whatever freedom your spirits can find within. Most humans are not strong enough to find freedom withing.”
To the world-explorers, the myth-true lay over the horizon, or amongst the mountain peaks. Those of action sought the unknown there, and confronted truth and beauty.
Now, all horizons are inhabited by us, all mountainous values are known. What little empty spaces are left are dried up veins of pyrite, seeds spat out after the fruit has been devoured, for we know the ripe and golden flesh is long gone.
Where can we turn, to find our myth-true? Where is our unknown self? Where it has truly been all along. Within. The vast and ever-undiscovered country.
Pg 111:
Perhaps that is why the world today is beginning to crack apart around us. Everyone seems inspired by some religion that promises fulfillment. Within the clashing words we are all expressing the same impulses. We are divided over methods which are the fruit of our reasonings, but not over our goals, which are identical.
Let nothing astonish us from now on. The man who had no notion of the stranger sleeping within him, but who sensed his awakening at a single moment in an anarchists cellar in Barcelona, will know only one truth, through sacrifice, through mutual support, through an inflexible vision of justice: the truth of the anarchists. And as for the man who, just once, stands guard to protect a whole congregation of little nuns as they kneel in terror in a Spanish convent, that man will die for the Church.
If you had put it to Mermoz, as he plunged toward the Chilean face of the Andes with victory in his heart, that he was wrong, that no business letter was worth the risk of his life, Mermoz would have laughed in your face. Truth is the man who was born in Mermoz as he flew through the Andes.
If you want to convince a willing fighter of the horror of war, don’t call him a barbarian: try to understand him before judging him.
Consider that officer if Southern Morocco, who at the time of the Rif war was commandeering an outpost, hemmed in between two mountains held by rebels. One evening, he was visited by a delegation from the western mountain. They were drinking tea, as was the custom, when shots rang out. The tribes from the eastern mountain were attacking the post. The captain tried to move the enemy delegations out, but they replied: ‘Today we are your guests. God will not allow us to desert you…’ And so they joined his men and saved the post, before climbing back to their eyrie.
But the day before their own assault was due, they sent ambassadors to the captain:
‘We came to your aid the other day…’
‘That’s true.’
‘For you we used up three hundred cartridges…’
‘That’s true.’
‘It would be an act of justice to return them to us.’
The captain was a gentleman. He could not exploit an advantage gained from generosity of spirit. He gave them the cartridges that would be used against him.
Truth for a man is what makes him a man. When a man has experienced this dignity in relationships, this loyalty when the stakes are high, this unusual gift of esteem within matters of life and death, when he compares this ennoblement granted to him with the mediocre bonhomie of the demagogue who would have expressed his fraternity with those Arabs by clapping them heartily on the shoulders, flattering them yet at the same time humiliating them, then that man will feel towards you merely a slightly contemptuous pity if you argue against him. And he will be right.
But you will be equally right to hate war.
Pg 109:
I kept gazelles at Juby. Everyone did. We enclosed them within a trellis fence, in the open air because they need the running water of the wind, and because nothing is as fragile as a gazelle. Captured young, they survive nonethless, and they take food from your hand. You can stroke them, and they push their damp muzzle into your palm, and you think they are tame. You think you have sheltered them from that unknown sorrow that silently snuffs out their flame, bringing the softest of deaths to gazelles… But the day comes when you find them pushing the fence with their horns, looking towards the desert, drawn by a magnet. Escape from you is not their conscious thought. They come to drink the milk you bring them, and press their muzzle even more affectionately into your palm… But as soon as you let them go, you find that after the brief semblance of a contented gallop, they are at the fence once more. And unless you intervene again they would stay there until they died. Is it mating season, or just the need to gallop until they have no breath left? They do not know. Their eyes were not even open when you took them captive. They know nothing of freedom amid the sands, nor the scent of the male. But you have greater intelligence, and you know what they are seeking: the vast open space that will fulfill them. They want to become gazelles and dance their dance. They want to experience the straight sprint at eighty miles an hour, punctuated by abrupt leaps as if flames were springing at them from the sand. Jackals have little importance if truth for gazelles is to taste fear, if it is fear alone that makes them surpass themselves, driving them to the most spectacular acrobatics! What does the lion matter if truth for gazelles is to be ripped open by a claw in the sunlight? You watch them, and you think they feel a yearning. Yearning, a desire for something unnameable… The object of desire exists, but there are no words to express it.
And what about us? What do we yearn for?
Pg 104:
Truth is not that which can be demonstrated. If orange trees put down firm roots and bear fruit in one place of ground and not in another, that piece of ground is truth for orange trees. If a particular religion, culture, scale of values and pattern of activities encourage that sense of fulfillment in man, liberating within him a lord who was oblivious to his own sovereignty, then that culture, that scale of values, and those activities are the truth of man. And logic? Let it cobble together what explanation it can for life.
Pg 41:
I do not know what is taking place within me. This weight unites me with the ground while so many stars are magnetized. Another weight restores me to myself. I feel my weight drawing me in so many directions! My dreams are more real than these dunes, this moon, these presences. Ah! the miracle of a house is not that it shelters or warms you, nor that its walls belong to you. But that it has slowly deposited in us all those stored resources of gentle joy. And that deep within the heart it forms the shadowy range of hills in which our dreams, like spring waters, are born.
Pg 31:
We are all young barbarians still enthralled by our new toys. What other meaning can our air races have? A man flies higher, runs faster. We forget the reason why. For the moment the race itself outweighs the purpose. And this is always so. For the colonial soldier who is founding an empire, the meaning of life is in conquest. The soldier despises the settler. But was the goal of his conquest not the establishment of that settler? In the exhilaration of our progress we have made similar use of men in the building of railways, the construction of factories, the sinking of oil wells. We have forgotten sometimes that these structures are meant to be of service to men. While we were conquering soldiers, we had the morality of soldiers. But now we must be settlers. We must bring life into this new house which as yet has no human face. If one man’s truth was in building, for the other it lies in living.
No doubt our house will become more human. The more perfect machines become, the more they are invisible behind their function. It seems that all man’s industrial effort, all his calculations and his nights spent poring over drawings, all these visible signs have as their sole end the achievement of simplicity. It is only as if the experimentation of several generations can define the curve of a column or a ship’s hull or an aeroplane fuselage, and give it the ultimate, elementary purity of the curve of a breast or a shoulder. On the surface it seems that the work of engineers, designers and research mathematicians consists only in polishing and refining, easing this joint and balancing that wing until there is no longer a wing joined visibly to a fuselage, but a perfectly developed form freed at last from its matrix, a spontaneous and mysterious whole with the unified quality of a poem. It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away. At the climax of evolution, the machine conceals itself entirely.
Pg 29:
To be a man is, precisely, to be responsible. It is to know shame at the sight of poverty which is not our making. It is to be proud of a victory won by our comrades. It is to feel, as we place our stone, that we are contributing to the building of the world.
Some seek to class such men with toreadors or gamblers, and extol their contempt for death. But I don’t care a damn for anyone’s contempt for death. If it doesn’t have it’s roots in an acceptance of responsibility, it is just a sign of poverty of spirit or of youthful extravagance.
Wind, Sand, Stars (Terre des Hommes in the original French title) is the telling of the real-life aviary exploits of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Price, when he was flying mail across North Africa and South America during the early years of air exploration. Which may sound boring but is soon revealed to be a riveting tale of humanity venturing blindly, but willingly, again and again into the unknown.
The resolution and strength with which these journeys were undertaken, given how little they had to go on once above the clouds, never ceased to amaze me. And still, they went, smiling, into that unmarked expanse of blue, over the cloud-hidden mountains, and, when they were lucky, landed safely at their destinations only to fly out again soon after.
Saint-Exupery’s narrative wanders in and out multiple stories, creating an abstract collage of beerhall-tales, bonhomie, and bona-fide wisdom. Yet he maintains his golden thread of wonder throughout, building to a pensive but hopeful climax with a call for the rebirth of the Spirit of Greatness in man, for “Only the Spirit, breathing on the clay, can create Man”.
Ah, just go read it it already; I’m done trying to sell you on it. And come back over the next several posts for several tasty excerpts.
The past is dead wood, and perhaps the present grows best with our mere attendance.
