A moving prism

Memory - Rene Magritte (1948) » The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence. A coquettish, even cheerful nihilism. One recognizes the imperative of silence, but goes on speaking anyway. Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that. Beckett has announced the wish that art would renounce all further projects for disturbing matters on "the plane of the feasible," that art would retire, "weary of  puny exploits. weary of pretending to be able,of being able, of doing a little better the same old thing, of going further along a dreary road." The alternative is an art consisting of "the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with theobligation to express." From where does this obligation derive? The very aesthetics of the death wish seems to make of that wish something incorrigibly lively. - The Aesthetics of Si...

Bellmer, Hans: Madame Edwarda » Anguish only is sovereign absolute. The sovereign is a king no more: it dwells low-hiding in big cities. It knits itself up in silence, obscuring its sorrow. Crouching thick-wrapped, there it waits, lies waiting for the advent of him who shall strike a general terror; but meanwhile and even so its sorrow scornfully mocks at all that comes to pass, at all there is.  - Madame Edwarda | Georges Bataille;

Z | Costa Gavras, 1969 Concurrently, the military banned long hair on males; mini-skirts; Sophocles; Tolstoy; Euripedes; smashing glasses after drinking toasts; labour strikes; Aristophanes; Ionesco; Sartre; Albee; Pinter; freedom of the press; sociology; Beckett; Dostoevsky; modern music; popular music; the new mathematics; and the letter "Z", which in ancient Greek means "He is alive!" - The closing moments of 'Z'

» There is only one form of liberation for those who are continually submerged in suffering: to elevate suffering to the level of one’s own perspective and to transform it into an aid for one’s way of seeing.  – “Letters on life”, Rainer Maria Rilke

 Painting by: Hilma af Klint (1862–1944 ) » The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter? The poem intends another, needs this other, needs an opposite. It goes toward it, bespeaks it. For the poem, everything and everybody is a figure of this other toward which it is heading. The poem becomes conversation – often desperate conversation.  - Collected prose, Paul Celan; 

George Bellows, The Barricade, 1918 » There’s a terrible game here, a game which conceals a trap, in which the intellectuals tend to say what is good, and people ask nothing better than to be told what is good—and it would be better if they started yelling, “How bad it is! Good, well, let’s change the game. Let’s say that the intellectuals will no longer have the role of saying what is good. Then it will be up to people themselves,  basing their judgment on the various analyses of reality that are offered to them, to work or to behave spontaneously, so that they can define for themselves what is good for them. What is good, is something that comes through innovation. The good does not exist, like that, in an atemporal sky, with people who would be like the Astrologers of the Good, whose job is to determine what is the favorable nature of the stars. The good is defined by us, it is practiced, it is invented. And this is a collective work. — Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual ...