Friday, January 05, 2007

On the Beach*

THE DRAWER OUT

An eye peace

REMAINS

An ear peace

DRAWN FROM WORDS

*

This small
Large mech-
anics
Called grace
Separates
The animal
From the animal
The head
From the head

Call it being
This ring
And this
Ring
Calling
The animal
To song
And flight

Fleeting
Fact
Of falling
Fleeting
Fact
Of a will's
Grasp
Ungrasped

*

WHAT WINGS x 2

One
Must
Fall
First

A modal fall

*

One must fall
To ageless
Incoherence
One's wings
Must turn
To dust
And dust
Must turn
To songless
Weeping
This will be
A charade
Of force
Our song
Will be
It will
Sweep
No one
Into its
Wake and
Wake
Kill from
Become

*

FLAT BLUE COLOR
SKY GOES HERE

(site)

CLOUDS CLOUDS
CLOUDS CLOUDS

Sun somewhere

Waves little crests
Their multitudes

(cite)

FOREGROUNDED REEDS

*

)
CANCEL
OCCULUAR
DURING
(

*

some things inside celophane

*

On the rim
Of all things
Seeing all
Things thin
Slices the actual
Reeds receeding
A world

On the rim
In waves
The waves
In waves
Thin Turner
The blue
His favorite

A timorous graph
A word like a wind
Sock a kinetic fact drawn
Like an Oceanic Dean

*

On the rim
Dreams are
Facts too
Of percept
Or ideas
Of waves
Composing
Motion

On the rim
And thinking
I just want
To see
The thing the way
The thing is
Actually
I want to say
What words mean

An ethic of gesture
Think your horizontal
Elements on the way and on and on

*

Earth

A SEVERANCE

Sky

*

The background of this dance has no background

Like a ring to an animal subtract hands from hands

Feet from feet we move without First Mover seemingly


*composed X-mas 2006 on Cape Cod

Thanks to the Scanning Bed

Thanks to Jane Lea & Brandon Stosuy I just got a scanning bed...

a New Year's card


from Cory Arcangel's Migros Museum monograph (2005)

a flyer for my fleeting improv group with Dave Nuss (No Neck Blues Band), Sheila Donovan (Tallboys, Amolvacy), and others

Eva Hesse's suicide in reverse?



three Polaroids of places I've lived

A Kabbalistic sticker by my friend Josh

a favorite (self-)portrait by Maya Deren, from Anthology Film Archives' The Legend of Maya Deren Vol. One Part II: Chambers (1942-1947)

me and my friend Marian, Fall 2005

a favorite "schablone" photo from Caroline Koebel & Kyle Schlesinger, Fall 2004. Check their Schablone book (2005) w/ Chax press...

some notes inside my copy of John Taggart's Loop

a Borscht recipe from a postcard I found at a Ukranian shop in the E. Village

Catherine Sullivan's Metro Pictures show, "The Chittendens," may have been the most interesting art showing in NYC (Thomas Hirschorn's "Superficial Engagement" and Guy Ben Ner's "Berkeley's Island" aside) I saw in 2006

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Badiou on Grace & Apostalic Discourse

There invariably comes a moment when what matters is to declare in one’s own name that what took place took place, and to do so because what one envisages with regard to the actual possibilities of a situation requires it. This is certainly Paul's conviction: the debate about the Resurrection is no more a debate between historians and witnesses in his eyes than that about the existence of the gas chambers is in mine. We will not ask for proofs and counterproofs. We will not enter into debate with erudite anti-Semites, Nazis under the skin, with their superabundance of "proofs" that no Jew was ever mistreated by Hitler.

To which it is necessary to add that the Resurrection--which is the point at which our comparison obviously collapses--is not, in Paul's own eyes, of the order of fact, falsifiable or demonstrable. It is a pure event, opening of an epoch, transformation of the relations between the possible and the impossible. For the interest of Christ's resurrection does not lie in itself, as it would in the case of a particular, or miraculous, fact. Its genuine meaning is that it testifies to the possible victory over death, a death that Paul envisages, as we shall see later in detail, not in terms of facticity, but in terms of subjective disposition. Whence the necessity of constantly linking resurrection to *our* resurrection, of proceeding from singularity to universality and vice versa: "If the dead do not resurrect, Christ is not resurrected either. And if Christ is not resurrected, your faith is in vain" (Cor. I.15.16). In contrast to the fact, the event is measurable only in accordance with the universal multiplicity whose possibility it prescribes. It is in this sense that it is grace, and not history.

The apostle is then he who names this possibility (the Gospels, the Good News, comes down to this: we *can* vanquish death). His discourse is one of pure fidelity to the possibility opened by the event. It cannot, therefore, in any way (and this is the upshot of Paul's philosophy) fall under the remit of knowledge. The philosopher knows eternal truths; the prophet knows the univocal sense of what will come (even if he only delivers it through figures, through signs). The apostle, who declares an unheard-of possibility, one dependent on an eventual grace, properly speaking knows nothing. To imagine that one knows, when it is a question of subjective possibilities, is fraudulent: "He who thinks he knows something [...], does not yet know as he ought to know" (Cor. I.8.2). How is one to know when one is an apostle? According to the truth of the declaration and its consequences, which, being without proof or visibility, emerges at that point where knowledge , be it empirical or conceptual, breaks down. In characterizing Christian discourse from the point of salvation, Paul does not hesitate to say: "Knowledge[...] will disappear"(Cor. I.13.8).
--Alain Badiou

Weeeping As Not Weeping

A Pricksong

--for Harry Partch & Aaron Moore

Some stray notes help
The open cope

A locomotion
Coats

The clouds
As they American
Pass

With strings detached

The least is the highest

The last shall
Be fast

Croons hobo neckbones
At long last.

The Man Without Hands cont'd

Without hands
But a mold
Still wet
From where
It fell

From a discontent
About description
About movement
A place ideas

Can continue
To move
Not for long blank
Nor for long similar
To themselves

This is the frame in an egg or a shell like a shack you forgot in the uncartooned desert

This is the bulk of dark the delving into it as it separates an optics from a prism of control

An ascendence a whereabouts an operation overlooking this operation

The model exits the picture and enters and exists this is a grasping of that model's animation

But eyes failed
To touch eyes
In the space remaining
Before eyes
Or after knowing was for

The reflection of flecks
The wings seeming
To touch
The symbolic haste

Of these wings
The uncasing of stars
An animation
Sings of pinpricks
Starts and stops