Tools for Conviviality Put Into Action: Ivan Illich and Valentina Borremans at CIDOC and Beyond
photo: James S. Roberts (Northwestern Digital Libraries Collection, educational license)
In a series of talks at seminars and conferences this year, I will be discussing the lives and work of Ivan Illich and Valentina Borremans, as they established Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC) at Rancho Tetetla in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1965 and their trajectories after its closing in 1976.
The conclusion I reach in my talk, after tracing out the story of Illich and the buzzing hive he attracted around him, led here by Borremans at CIDOC, is one that most scholars of Illich’s intellectual work seem to not reach. Or if they do reach it intellectually, they seem to leave it there and not embody its call. I believe Illich saw the writing of our current crises on the wall and his work was a call to those who could hear: return to the vocation of the friend!
Though Illich is best known for his popular social critiques of the 60’s and 70’s such as Deschooling Society, Medical Nemesis, and Gender, many do not realize that in his later years, from the 1990’s onwards, he distanced himself from this work as he saw the emergence of a new era dominated by digital systems (cybernetics) from which there would be no prescription or cure, due to perverse incentives. The eventual conclusion he seemed to reach, though he was clear to not have answers, was even more radical than his earlier books because it landed in a place that no popular revolution, no rebellion, and no political movement can ever go: living modes of askesis, non-power, and friendship.
Valentina Borremans was a fascinating person though not nearly as well known or published as Illich. She is key to the story of CIDOC as a close associate of Illich who helped develop his ideas around Tools for Conviviality more concretely. I call Borremans a ‘radical librarian’ who was self-taught, committed, and resourceful; she created the extraordinary library and documents collection at CIDOC and was credited by Illich as being its director. She compiled and published Reference Guide to Convivial Tools in 1979. Borremans was also a deep sea diver with Jacques Cousteau and played washboard in a jug band. Illich quotes her in the mutually agreed decision to close down CIDOC, “she realised that the soul of this free, independent and powerless thinkery would have been squashed by its rising influence... [a positive] atmosphere invites the institutionalisation which will corrupt it.”
In future talks we will connect Illich’s ideas of sacred relationship with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Martin Buber, Simone Weil, Edith Stein, Jacques Maritain, Jacques Derrida, Charles Peguy, . However, my own exploration of Illich’s work also moves in a direction away from textual hermeneutics and toward the embodied work of Iguebike philosophy, the Zapatista Movement, indigenous societies, Masanobu Fukuoka, Maria Lai, George Dyson, Henry Flynt, Jerzy Grotowski, Jonas Mekas, and many others.
The problem of the unanswered question: to cast a wide net in the sea of ‘Jewish semiotics’
Baruch Spinoza, Maimonides, Saadia Gaon, Emmanuel Levinas, Natan'el al-Fayyumi, Bahya ibn Paquda, Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, John von Neumann, Jose Faúr, Jacques Derrida, Marcel Marceau, Vilém Flusser, Rachel Bespaloff, Lev Shestov, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Franz Boas, Karl Marx, The Marx Brothers, Qasmuna, Edmund Husserl, Henri Bergson, Richard Feynman, Edith Stein, Allen Ginsberg, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Simone Weil, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Georges Perec, Alejandra Pizarnik, Roberto Bazlen, Hermann Broch, Marcel Schwob, Clarice Lispector, György Ligeti, Elias Canetti, Italo Svevo, Primo Levi, Tristan Tzara, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Di Khalyastre, Marc Chagall, Victor Brauner, Gherasim Luca, Gabriel Pomerand, Marcel Janco, Mark Rothko, Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, Alfred Schnittke, Meredith Monk, Eleanor Antin, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Hiller, Simonian Olinde Rodrigues, Eli Lissitsky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Rahel Varnhagen, Hermann Cohen, Ernst Cassirer, Hans Blumenberg, Hans Jonas, Lou Reed, Ivan Illich (yes, his mother!), Sulayman Hayyim, Emrānī, Nathan Altman, Ariel Dorfman, Jerome Rothenberg,, Joey Ramone, Luis de Carvajal the Younger, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Max Picard, Nathalie Sarraute, Albert Cohen, Joseph Kessel, Joseph Roth, Dziga Vertov, Chantal Ackerman, Maya Deren, Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaître, The Lettrists, Ionel Gherea, Naum Gabo, Diane Arbus, Jean Starobinski, Max Jacob, Sol Lewitt, Lawrence Weiner, Allan Kaprow, Barbara Kruger, Hannah Wilke, Robert Capa, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Simone Forti, Charlemagne Palestine, Richard Teitelbaum, Morton Subotnick, Lawrence Halprin, Anna Halprin, Laurie Spiegel, David Behrman, Alvin Curran, Barbara Rose, Julian Beck, Emma Goldman, Fraye Arbeter Shtime, Ion Călugăru, Benjamin Fondane, Peter Altenberg, Stefan Zweig, George Steiner, Elfriede Jelinek (father), A.L. Zissu, Yaakov Yosef of Pollonye, Rav Nachman of Breslov, Tali Kupferberg, Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, Hayyim Vital, Francesa Sarah of Safed, Joel and Ethan Cohen, David Cronenberg, Benny Goodman, Jules Dassin, Cecil B DeMille, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Fritz Lang, Jerry Lewis, Sidney Lumet, Jean-Pierre Melville, Otto Preminger, Emeric Pressburger, Gillo Pontecorvo, Sydney Pollack, Roman Polanski, Erich von Stroheim, Billy Wilder, Serge Gainsbourg, Mike Leigh, Mike Nichols, Bracha Ettinger, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erwin Panofsky, Gustav Landauer, Stanislaw Lem, Moacyr Scliar, Boruch Alan Bermowitz (Alan Vega), Martin Reverby (Martin Rev), Lenny Kaye, John Zorn, Ghédalia Tazartès, Nan Goldin, Carolee Schneemann, Meredith Monk, Erich Neumann, Erich Auerbach, Morton Feldman, Chaïm Soutine, Maurice Sterne, Jacob Epstein, Leonard Baskin, Barrett Newman, Max Weber, Stan Getz, Murray Gell-Mann,
In his fascinating book, Golden Doves with Silver Dots, José Faur explains how the 20th century emergence of structuralism, semiotics, linguistics, and critical theory mark a major development in ‘Western’ hermeneutics, allowing a more accurate and thorough understanding of rabbinical exegesis/interpretation (derasha). By connecting these radical developments of postmodern theory with the ancient mode of rabbinical reading of sacred texts, Faur actually shows that structuralism, linguistics, and deconstruction represent a break with limited Western traditions of textual analysis (which were tied to Greek philosophy and later, Christianity) thereby allowing a deeper understanding of the diachronous and synchronous modes of interpretation into meaning-making practiced in rabbinical readings. In other words, Faur shows how these postmodern developments are more accurately asynchronous ‘discoveries’ of a slower Western mind that is late to the party, where critical analysis and creative deconstruction of semantic and lexical meanings in ancient Hebrew texts has been present in Judaism since the first centuries CE. Faur demonstrates how the postmodern critique of the text allows the Western academic mind to finally have access to the premodern structural hermeneutics of the rabbis, which forms the Oral Law and its commentaries.
Some of the most elucidating passages in Golden Doves with Silver Dots clearly explain the stark differences between what Faur calls ‘natural law’ with Jewish law, contraposing Greek thinking with rabbinical thinking: “Whereas Heidegger conceived of the poet as a Maker, the Hebrews conceived of the Maker as a poet.” Thus, unlike the Hegelian project of man to create his own poem and the Heidegerrian man thrown into being his own poem, Faur explains that Hebrew man lives inside of the Maker’s poem as a character who hides the author’s omnipresence and interprets it through experience and close reading. This synchronous mode of interpretation, Faur explains, means that the Tora has no before or after, it is the poem of the universe that lives outside of chronology.
In my ongoing work on ‘Jewish semiotics’, I look at how Jewish thinkers in the arts, psychology, philosophy, social sciences, and literature perhaps unconsciously have participated in their birthright of derasha on lower levels outside of religious texts, a fractal pattern of questioning, struggling with faith (Job), radically deconstructing, and reorienting the readings of secular text and art to become innovators of creative reinterpretation in their fields. These contributions would revolutionize the modern world (Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Proust, Husserl/Bergson, Arendt, Rothko, Fritz Lang, et al) by reading artistic and social structures and deconstructing, analyzing, reforming into new theories that created meaning in novel and genius derasha of the secular. Of course, novel reinterpretation and creative innovation in reorganizing theories extends far beyond Jewish thought, so this is not a provincial or identitarian study, rather a pattern analysis that stems from my own intuition and is supported more concretely by Faur’s groundbreaking work [I also examine an inherent relationship between the outsider status of diaspora Jews in the secular world (restricted from full access to nationalism, belonging, and acceptance until very recently) and their position of analysis and deconstruction.] The unlikely combination of chacham, rigorously trained in the martial arts of biblical exegesis, and philologist who is equally trained in modern linguistics and postmodern structuralism, José Faur shines a light of genius where these two unlikely worlds dovetail.
light work: series of installations, performances, and compositions 2021-2024
‘at 639 Hz stained glass enters the stream’ : installation swish projects 2022 san diego, california / music performance jacumba hot springs 2021
‘score for a light chord’: installation mortis studio san diego, california 2022 / modified installation art brussels 2023
‘forever calling to the shore’ (composed by sean francis conway): performance le centquatre paris, france 2022 / performance space4art san diego 2022
‘room for a container of light’: installation momus experimental center for the arts thessaloniki greece 2024
‘as a thread bound fast to the sun’: site-specific installation oaxaca mexico 2024
The Open Composition and The Rejection of Closure
In reading Lyn Hejinian’s landmark talk-turned-essay, “The Rejection of Closure” (1983), I saw an immediate parallel between her view of the Language Poetry approach and my practice of musical composition. I call these pieces of music open compositions because while they are not freely improvised, they are compositions that open up space for spontaneity or physical context to inform the production of sound in the moment. Of course, I hardly invented this approach and we can see it in classical, jazz, and many traditional musics from different cultures. Perhaps classical Indian music is a supreme form of open composition with the raga tradition, in which a drone usually played by a tambura or sitar lays the foundation, while the time of day, the instruments on hand, the school of the vocalist, will all create a composition by performing it, all while holding true to the structural integrity of the raag. The radical reinterpretation of jazz standards that evolved with bebop is another high-level form of open composition. This moved further with aleatoric music, the Cageian influence, and the fluxus movement…sometimes becoming so open that all of the contents nearly spill all over the floor. But whether an open composition retains enough form to still be consistently recognizable or whether its elasticity stretches to nearly incomprehensible edges, the proposition of Hejinian in rejecting closure for something in which language can be free to question and carve out new paths is what connected with me while reading. In fact, in Hejinian’s vision it is the reader who ‘completes’ the poem instead of being told what to believe or how to feel or who did it! In this way, she marks the act of writing and the work of open language as fundamentally relational. As the reader complete the poem, the listener completes the song.
repeating historical cycles of murder, blood vengeance, and dehumanization is perpetrated by fear, insecurity, weak leadership, poor character, and a lack of wisdom.
-Max Picard
Jerzy Grotowski’s “Holy Actor”
(Transcendence through induction)
The holy actor’s technique is INDUCTIVE (removal of artifice, decoration, added layers of ‘tricks’) because its only true aim is SELF-PENETRATION. The profane actor’s technique (what we have been conditioned to think of as an actor’s arsenal) is DEDUCTIVE, concerned like the broader society with accumulation of wealth, with what Grotowski pejoratively dubs the way of the ‘courtesan’. Never one to to mince his words, Grotowski describes the craft of the deductive actor as socially supported prostitution, that there is little difference between what used to be called a courtesan and an actor who provides entertainment, confirmation of our conscience and righteousness, or who holds the affected tone of an ‘epic’ performance.
The holy actor is diametrically opposed to every value of the deductive technique. Instead of accumulating wealth, the virtue is poverty, as in ‘Blessed are the poor…’ This is the the true meaning of Grotowski’s Poor Theater for which is he is best known. In the holy actor’s sacred mission of self-penetration, nothing less is required than the revealing and sacrifice of the innermost part, that part which is most private and most painful to confront and own. The only route to access this raw self, devoid of artifice or pride or a veil is through HUMILITY. Not the false humility of the fake mystic (just a covert courtesan in Grotowski’s eyes), but the true gut-wrenching, heart-searing humility of one who has the courage, honesty, and will to confront not only the shadow inside, but the defenseless child, the heartbroken adult, the frightened neurotic, the lustful hedonist, all of it, over and over.
Grotowski does not mean that the holy actor should make a spectacle of his smallness by vomiting out his ‘truth’ onto the stage, much as we see in today’s zeitgeist of performative identity activism that often cloaks good ole-fashioned narcissism in a nice baggy sweater.* What Grotowski proposes is the formation of a highly personal, sensitive, and rigorously trained language. This is a holistic language of form, expressed through the body with sound and movement. A language with a vocabulary that is always contracting and expanding, being refined, becoming more true to oneself. The training of a holy actor is analogous to the path of becoming a tonsured monk. One must walk through the fire of her own soul, her own lies, her own masks, her defenses and projections, to arrive at the poetry of her own language through bodily expression. Holy actors are not piling up techniques like parlor tricks or a tool box. We could say that instead they are becoming vessels, drums of flesh and bone who can percuss themselves into a trance in order to express immediacy, to express impulses which waver on the borderline of dream and reality. The trance for Growtowski is not a path to dissociation or forgetting but a path to access of the subconscious, of a pure embodiment that even includes the spectator by incarnating his own complexes and contradictions in that of the holy actor, who represents us all. A trance of this sort is something the audience member is incapable of achieving because he has not extensively trained, self-penetrated, and self-sacrificed like the holy actor. The spectator gets it easy; he gets to come and participate in this ritual of poor theater and then leave and go back to his life, hopefully somewhat transformed and questioning himself, but maybe not. The actor stays there, working, training, investigating; there are no breaks- only an unrelenting encounter with truth and reality. The holy actor takes to heart the words of Gurdjieff, “Life is only real then, when ‘I Am’”.
It is only this sort of purified holy actor, following this curve of induction, penetrating herself, sacrificing her worldly desires, who can properly occupy the poor theater of Grotowski’s vision. This is the theater of virtuous poverty, a poverty that cleanses and subtracts. The sets have been skinned to the bone; there is no risen stage or amplification. The audience is faced with brutal, unexpurgated truth in the hearts and souls of the actors. The revealing and sacrifice of the holy actor’s inner core becomes a mirror for the spectator who is ready to pay attention and see the truth about his own poverty of spirit by experiencing the play. In the many definitions of theater discussed by Grotowski, he boils off all the liquid into a distillation of what he views as theater’s essence: actor and spectator, cast and audience. That’s it. The most stripped down, self-penetrated view of what we have left when the decoration and shiny distractions are removed.
In reading Grotowski plead for his own holy theater, it strikes me that the entire point of this drive to create a theater so barren of falsehood is not to just ‘make work’ or ‘be creative’ or ‘follow the muse’. Rather, it is the drive of life and death itself; it is everything; it is about you; it is about me; it is about who we are, why we are here, and what shall we do. This holy actor is an ideal and rarely attainable in its pure form, but that’s okay according to Grotowski. None of us are saints and maybe no actor is ever truly holy, but even so “we can… move consciously and systematically in that direction, thus achieving practical results.” Like all paths of chastity, renunciation, and obedience in today’s world, very, very few actors will have the motivation, desire, or understanding necessary to embark on this path. It was true in Grotowski’s time and is probably much more true in our time today. On the other hand, I sense around me many people who are seeing through the veneer of what the other way of living gets you in this world and what it turns you into in this world, and maybe they are starting to say NO. Saying no to what is below allows one to say YES to what is above. Of course, Grotowski was an adamant unbeliever** and always pointed out that his talk of holiness was only a metaphor. I have a feeling that people like he and Tarkovsky, and maybe Lispector, all had a deep desire to be true believers, and in place of their paucity of belief was created a profound and faithful art, often much greater than that of those who claim to believe. There is still a ‘below’ and an ‘above’ no matter what one believes and we all know it, even if we have tried to talk ourselves out of it. I count Grotowski as a voice crying out in the wilderness, a prophet of theater and the arts who sensed what was coming and knew there was only one answer- a difficult and unlikely answer, but a true one.
“The poor theater does not offer the actor the possibility of overnight success. It defies the bourgeois concept of a standard of living. It proposes the substitution of material wealth by moral wealth as the principal aim in life. Yes who does not cherish a secret wish to rise to sudden affluence? This too may cause opposition and negative reactions, even if these are not clearly formulated. Work in such an ensemble can never be stable. It is nothing but a huge challenge and, furthermore, it awakens such strong reactions of aversion that these often threaten the theater’s very existence. Who does not search for stability and security in one form or another? Who does not hope to live at least as well tomorrow as he does today? Even if one consciously accepts such a status, one unconsciously looks around for that unattainable refuge which reconciles fire with water and ‘holiness’ with the life of the ‘courtesan’.
However, the attraction of such a paradoxical situation is sufficiently strong to eliminate all the intrigues, slander and quarrels over roles which form part of everyday life in other theaters. But people will be people, and periods of depression and suppressed grudges cannot be avoided.
It is nevertheless worth mentioning that the satisfaction which such work gives is great. The actor who, in this special process of discipline and self-sacrifice, self-penetration and mounding, is not afraid to go beyond all normally acceptable limits, attains a kind of inner harmony and peace of mind. He literally becomes much sounder in mind and body, and his way of life is more normal than that of an actor in the rich theater.”***
*This does not mean that all performances involving the theme of identity are empty or narcissistic, some are very necessary, powerful, and true. But we should all admit that there is more chaff than wheat by now.
**I say unbeliever instead of non-believer. Unbeliever for me signifies ‘unable to believe’, while non-believer signifies ‘unwilling or opposed to believing’.
**Jerzy Grotowski quoted in ‘The Theater’s New Testament’ chapter of Towards a Poor Theatre.
Jerzy Grotowski’s ladder of artisanal crediblity
(not an amorphous soup of good will and our own illusions!)
“Yes, it’s very important to make, in Art as vehicle, a Jacob’s ladder; but for this ladder to function, every rung must be well made. Otherwise the ladder will break; all depends on the artisanal competence with which one works, on the quality of the details, on the quality of the actions and the rhythm, on the order of the elements; all should be impeccable from the point of view of craft. Instead, usually if someone looks in art for his Jacob’s ladder, he imagines that it depends simply on good will; so he looks for something amorphous, a kind of soup, and he dissolves himself in his own illusions. I repeat: the ladder of Jacob should be constructed with artisanal credibility.” - Grotowski
Competence= quality of details, actions, rhythm, order of elements= well-crafted rungs of the ladder will keep it standing tall.
“lampenfieber “ = stage fright
“What’s the point of it all you might ask. The point is the creative moment in which something happens outside of time. That cannot be erased. The universe has affirmed itself in the individual.” - Ernst Jünger
once we are confronted with aporia , we break through beyond places that our analytic mind cannot reach. (koans, riddles, oblique aphorisms, silence)
“Acaso hubo búhos acá” - Juan Filloy palíndromo (there were owls here)
They don’t make people like Juan Filloy anymore because the craftsmanship of people-making has deteriorated over the last 100 years.
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QUOTES FROM MY NOTEBOOK
“whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”- Wittgenstein
Karl Kraus did not slant the truth like Emily warned, he told it straight, but he was often wrong too. But good humor lets one get away with being wrong often.
Karl Kraus one-liners:
“The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people worse than they are.”
“Democracy means the permission to be everyone's slave.”
“Technology is a servant who makes so much noise cleaning up in the next room that his master cannot make music.”
“Progress makes purses out of human skin.”
And this zinger:
“They have the press, they have the stock exchange, and now they also have the subconscious!”
-some classic Viennese anti-semitism from Karl Kraus directed at Freud and the psychoanalysts, people have no idea how deep antisemitism runs in the hearts and minds of Germanic people, even if they don’t want it…..(of course, one could argue that Freud is the result of secularization and scientistism, not Judaism!)……And then there is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, but even that is fraught! See: https://jsr.shanti.virginia.edu/back-issues/7127670-2/the-legacy-of-anti-judaism-in-the-works-of-dietrich-bonhoeffer/
“Truth has a bitter taste for most people and will only subvert the accepted order of things to no good end when poured out all at once (as Martin Luther has done in his torrent of pamphlets). “ - Erasmus
The wisdom of willful delusion:
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” - Emily Dickinson
“mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur (“the world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived”)- Stanislaw Lem
“esperto di molti beni e molti mali”= expert in many goods and many evils
‘what does the shipwreck of the world concern me, I know nothing but my blessed island’
-Hölderlin
“If the first casualty of war is the unwelcome truth, the first weapon of the discontented is the welcome lie.” adapted from :: “in war, truth is the first casualty” - Aeschylus
Virgil’s antidote: knowledge of causes
“Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas” - Virgil, Georgics books 2 verse 490.
(fortunate who was able to know the causes of things)
Who said this?
“Writing is the opposite of working…all the amusing books are efforts that went against real work.”
Juan Filloy was ‘un hombre de tres siglos’ (a man of three centuries) who was born in the 1890’s and lived to the age of 106, passing in the year 2000, just shy of completing his 107th orbit.
The legendary Argentinian writer from Córdoba was also at various times a swimmer and a boxing referee. He was a polyglot, speaking seven languages. Most of his life was spent in Rio Cuarto where he served as a magistrate. He wrote 55 novels, all of which were given titles with seven letters: Op Oloop, Caterva, ¡Estafen!, Aquende, La Purga, Metopas, Periplo, Sexamor, Tal Cual and Zodíaco are among the best known. He also composed over 6,000 palindromes and coined words which have passed into general usage.
on literature and sleep
Sleep is the one part of life that doesn’t need to get anywhere or go anywhere. There doesn’t need to be a plot, a traceable rise and fall, tension and release, a linear progression, or anything tied to time. Sleep of course can be measured in time by those who are awake, but for the sleeper there is no time, only sleep. So while sleeping, sleep is eternal and lies outside of time. We do not check the clock while we sleep, and even if we check it in a dream, it is not the actual time of our present body while we are sleeping, it is only a phantasm of time. That doesn’t count.
It occurs to me that one only of the arts shares this trait of timelessness with sleep: literature. Because language is endless and does not track to passing time, language is eternal. Music is the most physically present art in that it occurs via the passing of time. In fact, if time is not passing there is no music, because music needs the dimension of time in order to unfold. Music sacralizes the passing of time, which is an important part of its beauty. It reminds us we are alive, right here and right now and it can act as a finely woven rug as time is passing before our ears. But literature is decoupled from time. In a book, I could have written the last page twenty seven years ago and this page within the past year, but if I don’t say anything about the delay between the pages, you the reader will never know. You could have read the last page 27 years ago and this page right now, but the book is unchanged from the delay and the writer has nothing to do with your procrastination in continuing his book. The time within the writing and reading of the book is hidden and does not pass on the pages. Sure, time can pass in the span of the story I’m writing, if it’s such a story, but again, that is more like dreaming of checking your watch, only a phantasm of time. That doesn’t count.
What about painting? I hear you asking. No, painting is firmly rooted in time because paint is not endless like language, it has boundaries of space and time. Sure, I can attach another canvas onto the first but that is cheating and can’t go on very long like that because there will be no room that can hold all those attached canvases. You can’t make a painting become a book. It is a solitary object created in the past that hangs on a wall today, as time passes. But doesn’t a book do that too? I hear you asking. No, a book is a trail of language that just so happens to use a paper page in its common form but that does not define literature like a canvas defines painting. A paper page is only a placeholder for literature. Literature exists off the page, while a painting does not exist off the canvas because it is tied to space and time. Literature can live in the cloud, it can fill an entire universe, it can have no boundaries or limits because of its new placeholder, the digital page, or its old placeholder, memory. If you digitize literature, it is still literature; if you memorize literature it is still literature. If you digitize a painting, it is now an image of a painting; there is no paint there, it’s no longer a painting. If you digitize music, that music only exists while it is being played in a span of time that begins and ends. But a book does not have to end…it can be eternal, limitless, and infinite, just like language. Literature is a vessel of language and language is spirit, not material…it fills metaphysical vessels, not physical ones. You see my point then…I’m probably driving it a bit too hard, but literature is not embodied, it is not in time and it is only in space to the degree in which it is printed in a material medium. So this is my long-winded way of saying: literature is like sleep, full of dreams and timeless.
This is why sleeping and literature are kissing cousins. They are quite different but of the same family of human arts. Sleeping is an art? I hear you asking. Yes, I boldly declare the art of sleep, but only because I have experienced that art in motionless eternity, in the sleeping form of a lover. Until then, I never knew sleeping was an art and a very fine one at that. Sadly, one I have no facility for creating well, unless you like your sleepers unrefined and messy, maybe like art brut or outsider art. Then you could categorize me a brutal sleeper or an outside sleeper, coloring outside the lines of sleep and defiling the beauty of sleep with my own idiosyncratic way of sleeping in fits and starts. Only young people and fools would find that sort of art meaningful or rewarding or worth mentioning. No, I have experienced watching an elegant sleeper, an artful sleeper and ever since I have to hold this very high standard, one I probably will not witness again. How many women can sleep like that? Not many, not many. But what about men? I hear you asking, can’t men be artful sleepers? I can’t say for sure, but I lean towards no. Maybe there is such a subtle, fine, soft and elegant man somewhere that can sleep as high art but I haven’t met such a man and am not sure any exist anymore in our coarse world. But sure, there could have been many such men in the far past…it is possible.
Now you understand how my love for the way she sleeps is eternal and unconditional, while my love for the way she awakes is finite and conditional. I no longer love the waking person, but I will always love the sleeper. Can’t we have a relationship like this with a person we’ve shared intimacy with? Can’t we relate to their waking self and their sleeping self as distinct reflections of one person? Do we have to love all of a person? Can’t we love the sleeper and shun the awakened?
(All of this is really just to recommend the book On Elegance While Sleeping by Viscount Lascano Tegui)
on piano as spaceship
The piano is a very unnatural instrument. You can’t take it to the park and strum it, you can’t carry it over your shoulder as a nomad, you can’t sit cross legged on the ground and play it. It is a horizontal harp engineered to be played like a big drum with hammers by all ten fingers. It’s a ten-fingered stringed percussion chamber, mediated by keys and hammers covered in felt.
It’s a science fiction instrument that must have been like something from outer space when it first emerged as the harpsicord and it’s precursors. It’s an entirely acoustic instrument that covers the tonal range of an orchestra and can produce a storm of tremendous volume and emotion. A maelstrom of sound that can fill a room like an ocean, like jetliner, like a spaceship. The piano is my spaceship, that’s why Sun Ra knew he was not from this planet but from Saturn, because he understood that the piano is Saturnian in nature.
How many pianists have been running away from their purpose instead of toward it, avoiding the weight of that big responsibility to be a pilot of their own spaceships and help take people on voyages outside of their small selves. But if I can’t commit to going there first, how can I expect anyone to come along, to join me on the ride so that maybe they’ll take others on voyages too..
The piano may be heavy in terms of earthly gravity but it can be incredibly light when it takes flight, light as a feather, as a flower, as a cloud. It’s up to the player, to the pilot of the craft, whether tonight it shall be an interplanetary vehicle or a small creaky ship on the turbulent seas. The beauty of the piano is that it can be both at once…outer space and blue ocean, upper atmosphere and rumbling volcano, sailing through the moons of Jupiter or spelunking into a cave of stalactites. As pilot I can wear my heart on my sleeve to tell it like it is or be a sly poet and leave you guessing; I can be as innocent as doves or as clever as serpents; I can see right through you with piercing eyes or close them and let you be. This is the power of the piano pilot, captain of the hidden mystery inside this unnatural but very human instrument, a paean to our intellect and spirit, our thoughts and feelings, our calculations and intuitions, our chastity and our promiscuity.
The art of the piano is knowing how and when to use it, and how much, and how softly or how fiercely, when to thrust with rhythm and when to sit cross legged on the shore. When to dive and hold one’s breath, when to surface into the summer sun. To be coral or to be kelp, to be jellyfish or to be shipwreck, to be Orion or Cassiopeia, to be gospel or sutra.
(Read while listening to Monorails and Satellites, by Sun Ra)
Xenakis notes
“I learned that I should no longer look to someone else for what existed in me.” - Xenakis
‘I think that the instrumental realm is richer than the electronic: an orchestra is made up of individuals, and each individual can transmit an infinity of sounds. The composer can obtain the greatest configurations that he could hope for. It suffices to imagine them, then to transcribe them onto paper. The human orchestra machine thus lends itself to the most complex, abstract speculations.’ - Xenakis on why he preferred acoustic music over electronic.
‘The problem is not one of complexity but of power and freedom of action. A bad composer, a bad artist does only what he has been taught. He is incapable of making a creative blunder. To make such blunders- even brilliant ones! - one cannot have mental rails. Freedom then means total responsibility. One can go everywhere. One choose to go there and not elsewhere.’ -Xenakis
[relates to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: the bad artist is stuck in BEING, the creative artists embrace the freedom and responsibility of NOTHINGNESS.]
‘Music cannot lead to mysticism. The imbeciles who listen to it that way are the mystics. Mysticism is a drug. One thinks that one is making mysticism- look at Messiaen!- but the high value of his music is elsewhere: Religious sensitivity evolves so quickly that before long this mysticism takes on the appearance of superficial froth, linked to the color of the times.’ - Xenakis
[musical atheism!- I completely disagree with Xenakis here, his attempting to to detach the mysticism from the value (mysticism is worthless, musical content is the value) is his atheist/computational bias but it is not possible- look at Bach!- that doesn’t mean mysticism in music is ‘good’ or will create value or quality, usually not!- but that’s not because of mysticism, that’s because of the composer/performer.]
he says about Bach, whom he loves: ‘the proportions and form are the hard body of the work.’ [i.e. not the mysticism! But Bach would wholeheartedly disagree, so who should we trust?]
‘A work of art….remains thanks to its hard yolk. It is neither the perfumes of an era nor the mysticism which gives it this power.’ -Xenakis
[even though I try to argue against his anti-mystical bent, I love this idea of the ‘hard yolk’ having the staying power and do think it’s true. Without ‘hard yolk’ we have fluffy, stupid new-agey garbage or cloying religious music. But Xenakis tries to separate the mysticism OUT of the yolk, which is where I think he is wrong- in the great mystical composers, the profundity of mystical feeling IS actually in the yolk. Without it, the music would become dry virtuosity or cold calculation.
Imagine La Monte Young without his mystical intent: “…if people didn't feel swept away to Heaven, I was failing. And I really feel that is an absolutely essential element.” - La Monte Young —Xenakis would absolutely hate this quote! ]
Vaneigem’s garden
“A minute correction of the essential is more important than a hundred new accessories. All that is new is the direction of the current which carries commonplaces along.”- Raoul Vaneigem
“Because our ideas are in themselves commonplace, they can only be of value to people who are not.”- R. Vaneigem
“there are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies.”- R. Vaneigem
“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths.”- R. Vaneigem
“For me -- and for some others, I dare to think -- there can be no equilibrium in malaise.” - R. Vaneigem
“Daydreaming subverts the world.” - R. Vaneigem
Christ’s life: mystery, strangeness, pathos, suggestion, ecstasy, torment, love.
The idea that we all die when it’s our time, whether it is by our own hand or not.
life is not for collecting experiences, though they are worth savoring. life is for arriving at an unspeakable destination inside of yourself only found through fighting a brave war and making a resilient peace.
CARLO EMILIO GADDA on death as collapse of relationship, as dissolving of unity, as an untying of organized reality:
“Death seemed to Don Ciccio an extreme decompounding of possibles, an unfocusing of interdependent ideas, formerly harmonized in one person. Like the dissolving of a unity which cannot hold out any longer, the sudden collapse of relationships, of all ties with organizing reality.” - CE Gadda
Szentkuthy gems (ongoing repository)
Szentkuthy composed an oeuvre both imposing and complex, centered on the conflict between art and life, or the aspiration for holiness and eroticism. It includes fictionalized biographies of musicians such as Handel, Haydn, and Mozart, artists like Dürer and Brunelleschi, writers Goethe and Cicero, and historical figures Superbus and Luther, etc., written in the form of collections of fragments or notes with a wealth of audacious metaphors. For the experimental side and erudite aspect of his work, he is sometimes compared to the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. However, in My Career, Szentkuthy stated that he "never, in any shape or form, considered Prae to be a work that belonged to an avant-garde. [...] When people pigeonholed the book with ‘surrealism’ and other ‘isms’ I felt a bit like Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who on being taught the difference between poetry and prose, exclaims in astonishment, 'Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it!'
[Note: people over-compare others to Borges! Everything is Borges, Borges, Borges. I love Borges but it’s too much... There is no place to compare Szentkuthy to Borges, a very stupid and lazy comparison. Wikipedia is not a good source for most things. Being ‘experimental and erudite’ does not equal Borges! ]
The best definition of making true experimental work:
“If Prae and other works I have planned are experimental, then they are so in a specific biological sense: not an apprehensive, exaggerated self-consciousness, but experiments of primal vitality, which are in a special biological relationship with form (cf. the ‘forms’ of protozoa: experiment and totality of life are absolutely identical, they coincide).”
-Szentkuthy
“Ultimate question is a very good term because in this world of ours everything remains a question, at least for the examining brain. As a result…, it is of much more value to catalogue issues that reach to the very foundations of the world than to give premature answers and solutions.” - Szentkuthy
“a mystic penchant for self-torment” -Szentkuthy
“The most primal principle of life is theatrical: the jellyfish in the fairylike-fatal underworld of the sea, the coconut periwigs in the Gothic fan-towers of palms, the fetid head of an embryo at the end of the umbilical cord, jasmine, horseradish, sicknesses: these are all theatrical, colorful, simulating and subterfuges. Not lies, just masks, mimics. That is what history is too; that is the darkest instinct of life. That and art. The darkest and also the loneliest.”
Excerpt From: Marginalia on Casanova
Szentkuthy’s major theme of the erotic (in balance/opposition to the mystical):
“a woman on Gellért Hill in Budapest is cutting her toenails in the sun. That, too, is ‘coquetry,’ there is no doubt about it. The vulgar intimacy is erotic. Go your double route, Eros, on the high-minded ways of geometric metaphors and facts — go on the kitchen-smelling pathways of vulgarity & demotic sloppiness.” - Szentkuthy
My capsule in-progress review of St Orpheus’ Breviary: instead of Borges, I compare/contrast him to Musil.
I'm also reading St. Orpheus' Breviary (Marginalia on Casanova) by Miklos Szentkuthy, a philosophical meditation cloaked as exegesis of Casanova's life and works. I've already read Szentkuthy's The One and Only Metaphor and loved it- feeling the same about this so far. Strange, illuminating insights on theology, love, sex, Freudianism, history, society, death, and pretty much everything under the sun. Like Musil in the shining of light on every facet of each issue… but a bit more sensual, irreverent, less severe, more 'irresponsible' in his declarations.