Vertov (on Obediance)

Because we are what we make we make what we are
Awl is to shoemaker as camera to man
Facts fall coincident a playing-soul in reality
Dreams of being a body while the body dreams of having a soul (Artaud)
Leader chases leader light records glass

The spaces in between Rovner's intensities
Multitudes moving in deformed organization her sublime
Time of leaves leaves we are such powers
Eyes dilate diaphrams across distance hear me my distances
This is just a stage sounding every name in history

Soul dreams and cradles flashing body mummified in actuality
Actual memories sensing still surfaces still sequences sensed
Momento mori leeward these waves sound sound
The thing itself sounding the thing to which it is homed
Going down lapped by tongue landless tongues notwithstanding

Because the impossible is of the possible because
The possible thinks impossibles plausible splices compose
Hands over glass hands lend editorial eyes to propositions
Like an angel he keeps falling to his psudonym all wound-up
Spinning Top we are this permission of waves history free me song as I am

That higher mathematics of facts in this obediance
Free me fell number going down wrapt by felt things
Actionable idea potentia prodigal bodies fold
Nature has an eye called percept and there is nowhere it doesn't see
We see with all the little ones every fact coincident at this shore

A content crushes the skull marks are audible
Displays scratched far away and we are the distance
Below and above is the work to be done
Sure of interval ponderables go in a charmed sense diving
Sense to sense divining sense to sense beheaded.

CNN Effect

CURSE YOU EYES

Beheading

"They're horrible here with their obsession for beheading. I'm surprised anyone's survived."
--Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique

"A young German-Catholic woman said in 1993: 'The dream of the individual is to be two, the dream of the State is to be one'. They cut off her head."
--Jean-Luc Godard's Notre Musique

"The other argument often used to suppress pictures cites the rights of relatives. When a weekly newspaper in Boston briefly posted online a propaganda video made in Pakistan that showed the 'confession' (that he was Jewish) and subsequent ritual slaughter of the kidnapped American journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi in early 2002, a vehement debate took place in which the right of Pearl's widow to be spared more pain was pitted against the newspaper's right to print and post what it saw fit and the public's right to see. The video was quickly taken offline. Notably, both sides treated the three and a half minutes of horror as a snuff film. Nobody could have learned from the debate that the video had other footage, a montage of stock accusations (for instance, images of Ariel Sharon sitting with George W. Bush at the White House, Palestinian children in Israeli attacks), that it was a political diatribe and ended with dire threats and a list of specific demands--all of which might suggest that it was worth suffering through (if you could bear it) to confront better the particular viciousness and intransigence of the forces that murdered Pearl. It is easier to think of the enemy as just a savage who kills, then holds up the head of his prey for all to see."
--Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others

The imaged Word...

The imaged Word, it is, that holds
Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know.
--Hart Crane, from Voyages XI

WJ on Mysticism (Quote)

a la Betsy Bonner...

"But with the memories, concepts, and conational [sic] states, the case is different. Nobody knows exactly how far we are 'marginally' conscious of these at ordinary times, or how far beyond the 'margin' of our present thought trans-marginal consciousness of them may exist. There is at any rate no definite bound set between what is central and what is marginal in consciousness, and the margin itself has no definite bound *a parte foris*. It is like the field of vision, which the slightest movement of the eye will extend, revealing objects that always stood there to be known. My hypothesis is that a movement of the threshhold downwards will similarly bring a mass of subconscious memories, conceptions, emotional feelings, and perception of relation, etc. into view all at once; and that if this enlargement of the nimbus that surrounds the sensational present is vast enough, while no one of the items it contains attracts our attention singly, we shall have the conditions fulfilled for a kind of consciousness in all essential respects like that termed mystical....

In each of the three cases, the experience broke in abruptly upon a perfectly commonplace situation and lasted perhaps less than two minutes. In one instance I was engaged in conversation, but I doubt whether the interlocuter noticed my abstraction. What happened each time was that I seemed all at once to be reminded of a past experience; and this reminiscence, ere I could conceive or name it distinctly, developed into something further that belonged with it, this in turn into something further still, and so on, until the process faded out, leaving me amazed at the sudden vision of increasing ranges of distant fact of which I could give no articulate account. The mode of consciousness was perceptual, not conceptual--the field expanding so fast that there seemed no time for conception or identification to get in its work. There was a strongly exciting sense that my knowledge of past (or present?) reality was enlarging pulse by pulse, but so rapidly that my intellectual process could not keep up the pace. The *content* was thus entirely lost to retrospection--it sank into the limbo into which dreams vanish as we gradually awake. The feeling--I won't call it belief--that I had had a sudden *opening*, had seen through a window, as it were, distant realities that incomprehensibly belonged with my own life, was so acute that I can not shake it off to-day."

from William James' "A Suggestion About Mysticism"