Scar Tissue

The most emotive line of all: a scar.

Platelets and other tiny bits of the repair machine
spin a web so fine as to leave a silver line,
cleaved and shimmery to catch my eye.

In the Heat

Desert in Egypt, 20th December 2008

Thinking on the need to generate mystery as a device within works, while sweating in the humid summer evening. It's a sweet time.

Eleni's Dog

I passed Eleni's dog today - the stray she loves - as I was walking to the street with the minaret. It was foraging in a half moon of turf land that accidentally carries sounds like an amphitheatre and always needs its grass cut. The dog looked busy enough, with its small head perched on a big barrel body and a kind of permanent grin on its face; familiar looking wiry biscuit-coloured fur; short legs to trot around the harbour with, unkempt nails tapping on the paving. A mutt's life, that black gummy grin still hanging in the air after the dog has gone. Tourists stood nearby taking photographs of the decrepit houses crumbling above us under the sun.

I looked at the dog and remembered how Eleni had been telling me one evening about it. We were sitting on the harbour with our backs to the people and watching night creep up at us from the sea, watching as the world beneath the water's surface disappeared and the waves transformed themselves into brooding slow-moving beasts, blackening. Eleni told me about how the dog would come and sit beside her to share the view and she made the sound of the dog's sigh. And with a jolt, just like that, the two were one!

Silver

Lilies and Natality

This is an image I picked up of the harbour burning in Chania, and the mosque. In real life the mosque is pink stone, a very beautiful building.



After reflecting a little on the fleshy nature of some lilies I have been enjoying, it seemed as if the petals were too rich, too perfectly designed to be real. Then Y and I decided that a painting of these petals would seem unreal. And there you have it, a flower so beautifully carries the whole burden of reality upon its resplendence.



Got very excited yesterday over Hannah Arendt's concept of Natality. Shall be adding more.

More Treats

http://www.philipglass.com/audioplayer/audioplayer.html
It's the Violin Concerto that's got me.

A Treat

Some Van Gogh for us as I tired myself out reading Introduction to Phenomenology well into the night. Really enjoyed Gadamer's optimism and Arendt might be a new hero of mine... (what a photo on that link!).

Iannis' Fishes

Iannis told me a story one evening about the fishes in the harbour. He warned me first that he had gotten this information from someone else, another friend and so could not verify it, but he felt it to be true.

He said that someone had found some fishes in the far corner of the harbour drinking rum and getting a bit rowdy one night. They were only medium size and had thought that they were safe from human eyes but the drinking had addled their brains and they had not reacted to being spotted quick enough. That's youth for you.

Bliss

I'm in the most glorious mood, not the most conjusive state for intellectualising.
Bliss!

Crete

Mystical Tsikoudia

Am enjoying thinking about mysticism and drinking tsikoudia, Greek raki.

Some pleasant concepts that deserve more attention from me:

the occult
revelation,
revelation as truth in religion, in Heidegger
anxiety as a groundless state of fundamental truth of Being (more Heidegger)

empathy, sympathy, love, relating
relating as primary means of being-in-the-world
magic
magic from David Abram
recent advances in technology and brain science
recent advances in psychology, behavioural science
epiphany
religious ecstacy

I'm buzzing off connections in a little-bit-drunk-kind-of-way. Finished the beautiful Kazantzakis' God's Pauper today and Dermot Moran's chapter on Heidegger. Revelation as truth, revelation as beauty. Lovely.

Muted Colours

A feature on the BBC photo blog has resonated with me this morning. It is about muted colours in photography. Here in Greece we have been experiencing Summer proper and the period between 3pm and 6pm - siesta - has struck me for its muted colours too, though of a different sort to the photo I show here. Under the strength of the sun at this time it is difficult to raise our eyes as the brightness is overpowering, and in the squint the world becomes either flattened black shadow or bleached bright glare.

The two sides of the line again; the view rendered black or white, hot or cold, though both light and shadow as difficult to see into, as the other, against the other.

Siesta time here is also gloriously silent.

Shut Eye

Aesthetics Making

Aesthetics making belief,
love in at number 14, below beasts,
order
and,
sense.

A Kind of Play of Surfaces

A kind of play of surfaces, for what are surfaces other than interfaces? The meeting of two different impressions where one substance throws to light the differences of the other. The waves move rhythmically in a corner of my view and shine like flashes of light caught on hammered pewter. The sea, framed by sugar paper mountains and the little box houses that look out with hooded windows are all cast in hues of shadow and are all still but for the waves. The sun shines on me and my squinting expression will be tan-lines when I go home.

The sweet solitary chirp of a singular bird slips into the space between car engines and dogs barking. It pierces the distance as if to emphasise height, for what is distance other than a view? The clouds have become a heavy blue and the sun’s rays are beaming with the certainty of geometry, a heavenly pathway if I ever saw one. Earlier today the harbour was awash with swollen ocean, smacking pungent black weed at my feet. Frothy and sensual, the green made by a sea churned in wild storms to a brooding murky mint, all vital movement and white spray. The sun is sinking now and the light is soft golden as a tired finale to the day and the hubbub of the street rises but can’t touch this gentle vision, opened and unfolding even as the light fades. The sun moves so quietly to the little bird's song.

More Liminal

It is a beautiful bright sunny morning here in Greece, still quiet before the traffic. I just read the Wikipedia excerpt on liminality again and am turning the concept round in my mind.

Imaginitively, the line marks the edge of one thing and the beginning of another - a road to cross. Liminality becomes no man's land between two worlds, the threshold before dissolution of identity, disorientation and a relaxation of normal thought, self-understanding and behaviour. Out of this period of liminality we emerge again with new perspective, as a new person.

Now I'm near the end, I feel somehow that my time in Greece has been entirely for this reason.

I'm going to do something a bit cheeky now. I just did a Google image search with 'liminal' and found that the word is a popular one with artists. So, I don my curator hat and present a select few. I haven't asked permission, but copyright and credit lies with the artists and any objections will be graciously adhered to.


Liminal Condition Detail copyright Susan Palmisano


Land-Care Yuccas copyright Kurt Brereton


Liminality copyright Kevin Sargent


Copyright Er| Naem & X.iso for album Liminal Sampler 2008 by Various (Liminal Recs)


Liminal copyright Andrew Rose

Indolence and Liminality

Pulled this card from the deck recently. Made me laugh.

Found myself (while) looking into a comment I read about going from A to B and thinking about liminality. It's an incredible concept, traversing such exciting explorations as drawing, anthropology, structuralism, religion, and so on. I am gathering words to stew over during my evening: empathy, criticality, indolence and liminality. I think it might be time for some new labels.

Am remembering Keats' diligent indolence.

Empathy and Criticality

Coming back to an earlier post, I am wondering about empathy and criticality. The statement creates a relationship between the two, perhaps one of opposition, perhaps one of kinship. It seems to say to art that we approach it with either hope of connection or suspicious reticence.

Empathy = feeling?
Criticality = thought?

There is much to stew on here.

Just touching in very quick. Reading Kazantzakis' God's Pauper. It's amazing. Got me thinking about religiosity as a beautiful thing. Sublime!

What Can We Make Structures Out Of?

What can we make structures out of?

words, sentances, syntax.
belief, ideology, knowledge.
experience, book learning, imagination.
habit, ritual, the sacred.

is madness the lack of structures or possessing malignant/faulty structures?

if we keep digging to find the treasure, to uncover the real special something underneath, we threaten the ground we stand upon. where and what are the foundations? how are they made when presumably we can continue to dig deeper, and deeper, and deeper, and ...



did I put this one up already?

I was watching the small fish basking in the sunlight in the harbour today. They do this a lot. When they think we are not watching, they drift up to the surface, sneaking a few rays, watching warily for one of us blundering humans to scatter them back into their shadowy hiding places. The whole shoal hangs unmoving just beneath the surface in stillness.

I Am Going To Start Using Titles Now. Better For Organising.

Still thinking on structure.

These are two mediocre photos from my recent snaps. The flower might be nice because of its very delicate and papery stance against the thorns below. I wish the plastic bag photo was in better focus - and I do have one like that, but this has the shadow and I like the unreality of it. I can't see an image like this without thinking of American Beauty, not a bad thing.

Just listened to another Frieze podcast, this one on art criticism: Empathy and Criticality, how should one respond to being affected by art?
Tough listening but invigorating too. The critics stuck fast to their position as newspaper reviewers/writers and eschewed any kind of ideology or objectivity in what they do. They came across as quite arrogant and incredibly self-assured (always a bit suspicious), but if they are paid to have opinions then I'm not surprised.

It was quite refreshing to think about opinion arising from having seen a lot of art and nothing more - no intention in the approach to the art, no looking for something.

How do we look at art? What are we looking for?

There was stuff though that I didn't agree with, like, continuing the idea that looking at art is decipherment - 'working it out'. I have problems with this model. And also the idea that criticism is translation. There may be an element of that in criticism but it reflects badly on the art. If there's a problem then it is in how we look, not that art needs translating for us to get something from it.

Funny, I was reading something yesterday about this, hang on, ok, on signandsight.com in a review of Notation, calculation and form in the arts. They say: "There are images which are tricky to slot into the index of representation. Perhaps because they consist of numbers or writing systems and as such are intended not so much to demonstrate as to be deciphered". (1) So there is a divide between decipherment and demonstration? Not sure that this is always true.

Sketchy thinking, ideas, analysis on dating sites.

When we join a dating site we write something about 'who we are' and 'what we are looking for'. Sometimes we write this first, when we join, before looking at other people's writing. Sometimes we write ours after. A lot of the time we start with 'I don't know what to write here' or 'this is weird for me'. Either way there is a process that takes place upon our engaging with the dating community:

Presumably we approach the site with sincerity and hope. The hope may well take the form in our minds of a roughly sketched partner of perfection.
When we read other people's profiles we assess our own in relation to theirs, seeing what other people write as the blueprint. We shop around for ideas and we see that other people are more savvy about the internet dating process.
We re-write or edit our writings to communicate with an impression we gathered from reading other people's profiles, our assessment was a social one.
Hence all the profiles that say the same thing.
When we don't partake in this process our profile fails to involve itself with the language of internet dating and subsequently it is unreadable or fails to offer meaning (within the framework of internet dating).
As a result it would appear from Guardian Soulmates that all people are the same: like: travel, walking by the canal, etc.

Personality traits are 'memes'? of personality that we adopt or not. GS is a chance to showcase the particular memes we subscribe to.
Successful profiles are the ones that seem to lead the way in social currents
Confidence pitted against non-confidence being the flipside/darkside of the same thing - celebration comes in validation of someone's alterity or sophisticated antithetical nature
When we read a profile we don't look for the facts but more the ability of the writer to communicate, looking for a similar skill at this form of communication to ourselves. We use identification for this...

Another subjectivity machine, composer, program, curator...


Blah blah......

Aesthetics coupling, making solid in time, construction,
belief beasts interest,
abstract drawing
order.

Sense Uranus op. Saturn,
virtual awe axiom,
beginning, brain conflict
flowers intuition, love make.

Contradiction, hairline crack mimesis,
shattered, spring,
Chania Crete, Saturn Return,
angel elegance happy.

Line incoherent,
pigeon twisted,
affetti feet grief.

Mezzanine the slack,
virgo.
Άνοιξη Neptune difference,
electro.

So many reasons to write, and yet, there is a judgment system to determine whether the writing is worth something.

I think sometimes that what we absorb from around us - ideas I mean, though they can come to us in many forms, may only become absorbed when the conditions are right, ripe?. I think sometimes that something is too different, too whack for us to be able to integrate it within us without causing a damaging split. Ideas somehow take on a materiality when they get inside of us. Sometimes we just need to wait until something has become a little more divested of meaning.

I have been thinking a lot about the semiotics in fashion recently. I am imagining that we, as in the person we think of ourselves as, is not to be found within our bodies, and instead we are purely responses to everything around us. I imagine that we turn ourselves inside out so that skin becomes flesh, then this exchange we are imbibed within impresses itself onto our pliable natures or putty-like brains and the indentation then creates a delta or rift or mountain range of peaks on our surface for more stimuli to travel over, react to. This is what I think we are.

Fashion likes to mirror this basic process of interaction that makes what we are and displays to us the currents and trends of the time, taking into account of course the non-trendy trends, using visuals and identification to attract us or repel us as each case determines. I like the thought that something fashionable can travel over and through humans like a viral game of tag and sometimes we join in and sometimes we don't. I don't think we can choose. That woman with the red shoes that I saw tonight has infected me.