affetti again

affetti (uncountable)

1. (art) Human passion and feelings expressed through gesture.

(I had forgotten what it means)

Birthday Sunflower

Through various practices in my life at the moment, I am getting better at understanding what it means to meditate - or what it means to me: going into myself, searching for the quieter tuned in side of existing. I am thinking about how this state has happened by itself in my past, and always accompanied by great creative inspiration. When that feeling of inspiration and connectedness with the world is not there, I wonder what happened.

So, I am getting better at seeing that stresses and worries, too many distractions etc. etc. are what take us away from that quiet space, but it takes experience to be able to recognise it in order to learn to prioritise it.

Which comes first - the quiet connectedness with the world or the looking? Looking - a concentrated focusing on the things in the world, probably through beauty, though I don't think beauty has a fixed meaning - I am talking about the feeling of the beautiful whereby feelings come with and cause actions from us. The inside/outside thing again, human skin as interface: do we find beauty in looking or does the beautiful find us?

These are of a sunflower that a dear friend gave me for my birthday.

Things In Themselves

Just giving myself a moment of distraction while reading Adorno's Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems. He has it that all concepts initially arise as abstractions from matter, and therefor, concepts refer to the residual material world - the two are tied, and when we conceptualise, conceptualising does not occur at the cost of the material it supersedes (idealism) but is in fact a result of the material. Things, materiality, the natural, particularities and that which changes, are accordingly elevated by this schema, without our schema merely replacing those things' materiality with another set of concepts. The material is left to exist as material, whilst not being relegated to an inferior status in relation to the immutability of concepts.

These images come from a recent trip to HMS Belfast on the river Thames in London. I managed to utterly fail at learning anything about the ship and its life at war, nor much about the lives of the men who lived and worked in it. I did get very excited about the fixtures though and took a lot of photos that I'm excited to work on. In this philosophical dualism of form and content, I wonder at the role of photography. Does the camera impose a form upon the matter? And where is the matter - in the material of objects' physical makeup, or in their relationships to human activity? I like this thought that the concept refers to its material content - it is as if the form of these objects bring with them the memory of the industry and functionality of the warship.

Last Batches of Bodmin #3

Sunny ones:

Untitled #2

Grumpy today.
Though doing this is cheering me up just when I was looking forward to really wallowing in it.

Aggregation

These two images strike me in ways different to the more landscapey shots I've already posted. Still from Bodmin, still marked by my sense of 'homecoming' obscured by the newness of everything, these shots hone in on things strewn about the place, found at the back of a garage etc. When lining up the camera's viewfinder with what my brain wants to see as a composed image, I am guided by a certainty within myself on how to order the image, a logic. Categorically I wanted to avoid photographing one thing, isolated, and instead show what happens within the frame as a conglomerate of parts to make the whole, consciously disrupting the normal edges of a thing in able to show it as aggregated within a new - or just my own - frame of meaning.

Art-speak flowing then today. Sweet.

Overview

Trying to decide which of my photos might be appreciated as a gift for my two closest friends here in Chania. These are a few of my short list:





















In the end this process has become a bit of an assessment of all the photos I took whilst being away in Greece and Egypt. A natural closure.

And More Pigeons

Yes I may be pushing up against the line between absurdity and boredom, but I am still very much in love with pigeons. It could be a little harmless anthropomorphism, it could be an attraction to their purely instinctual being. They seem to embody 'flow'. In groups their spacial awareness causes them to make evenly balanced patterns best seen from above.

And finding the odd squashed one on the road still affects me.

Derrida Drawing

Not sure if this will work but anyway...



..it's the product of the last talk on Derrida I attended at LSE, over a year ago now. I don't know if it works because the pencil is too fine really for the scan, but maybe the general idea is there - responding to the discussion with both words and doodles or free-flowing pencil marks, like automatic drawing...

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.

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.

Crete

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

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.

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.

Thought we could have something a bit porky in light of the current pandemic.

Spent much of last night trying to bend my already-sleeping-brain round the problem of making a viable table for Blogger. I had in mind that the previous post would be nicely ordered and allow me to contribute over time, the entrees lining up in their little boxes, the frame jumping to accomodate my new ideas. Fried myself.

I don't know if I like these pictures yet, though I recognise this line as the edge of a difference mirror.

just storing this here to grow something from later

affetti