A moving prism

Entr'acte , René Clair - (1924) The virtual image which becomes actual does not do so directly, but becomes actual in a different image, which itself plays the role of virtual image being actualized in a third, and so on to infinity: The dream is not a metaphor but a series of anamor phoses which sketch out a very large circuit. [....] When the sleeper is given over to the actual luminous sensation of a green surface broken by white patches, the dreamer who lives in the sleeper may evoke the image of a meadow dotted with flowers, but this image is only actualized by already becoming the image of a billiard table furnished with balls, which in turn does not become actual without becoming something else. These are not metaphors, but a becoming which can by right continue to infinity. In René Clair's Entr'acte, the dancer's tutu seen from beneath 'spreads out like a flower', and the flower 'opens and closes its corolla, enlarges its petals, and lengthens its st...

Berlin, Unter den Linden, 1945 It could happen to someone looking back over his life that he realized that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its course originated in people who everyone agreed had the traits of a “destructive character.” He would stumble on this fact one day, perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the better his chances of re presenting the destructive character. The destructive character knows only one watchword: make room. And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred. The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroying rejuvenate, because it clears away the traces of our own age; it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the destroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, out of his own condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to such an Apollonian image ...

» I shall not be alone, in the beginning. (I am of course alone.) Alone. That is soon said. (Things have to be soon said.) And how can one be sure, in such darkness? I shall have company. In the beginning. A few puppets. Then I'll scatter them, to the winds, if I can. — Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

» Oh starry starry night! This is how   I want to die: into that rushing beast of the night,   sucked up by that great dragon, to split   from my life with no flag, no belly, no cry. - Anne Sexton

From “The Earthly Paradise.” I. The Singer’s Prelude  __William Morris (1834–96)

» The Student of Prague | Hanns Heinz Ewers, (1913)  „Und wo immer ich ruhen wollt‘ und wo immer ich sterben wollt‘ und wo ich ging/ und wo ich schlich- trat vor mich hin zu jeder Zeit ein fremder Mann in schwarzem Kleid/ der mir- so wie ein Bruder glich. – Alfred de Musset-"

Debord  often cited a letter of Marx's, saying that 'the hopeless conditions of the society in which I live fill me with hope'. Any radical thought always adopts the most extreme position of desperation. Simone Weil said 'I do not like those people who warm their hearts with empty hopes'. Thought, for me, is just that: the courage of hopelessness. And is that not the height of optimism?  — from  an interview  with Giorgio Agamben

Watch out for intellect, because it knows so much it knows nothing and leaves you hanging upside down, mouthing knowledge as your heart falls out of your mouth. — Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems ( + )

I do not come with timeless truths.  My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances.  Nevertheless, in complete composure, I think it would be good if certain things were said.  These things I’m going to say, not shout. For it is a long time since shouting has gone out of my life.  So very long… Why write this book? No one has asked me for it.  Especially those to whom it is directed.  Well? Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it. — Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon

The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides, c. 1824–27. William Blake -- Escape but not forever, the presence will come, the hour will come, a strange truth enter the universe, death shows its Being as before.

» But what if the truth is neither in the represented nor in the representation? What if the truth is in its material configuration? What if the medium is really a message? Or actually—in its corporate media version—a barrage of commodified intensities? To participate in an image—rather than merely identify with it—could perhaps abolish this relation. This would mean participating in the material of the image as well as in the desires and forces it accumulates. How about ackn owledging that this image is not some ideological misconception, but a thing simultaneously couched in affect and availability, a fetish made of crystals and electricity, animated by our wishes and fears—a perfect embodiment of its own conditions of existence? As such, the image is—to use yet another phrase of Walter Benjamin’s—without expression. It doesn’t represent reality. It is a fragment of the real world. It is a thing just like any other—a thing like you and me. — A Thing Like You and Me , Hito Steyerl

» The young man thought, I'll just stay here, I'll just stay here. but then he rose and followed the others onto the bus.  [...] there was nothing else to do. just to listen to the sound of the engine, the sound of the tires in the snow. - 'Nirvana' A poem by Charles Bukowski, read by Tom Waits 

Walter Benjamin: 1892-1940 | written by: Arendt

The Hours , Stephen Daldry (2002) Dear Leonard. To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours. 

Unfortunately I am afraid (as always) of going on. For to go on means going from here, means finding me, losing me, vanishing and beginning again (a stranger first, then little by little the same as always) in another place, where I shall say I have always been, of which I shall know nothing (being incapable of seeing, moving, thinking, speaking) but of which little by little - in spite of these handicaps - I shall begin to know something: just enough for it to turn out to be  the same place as always, the same which seems made for me and does not want me, which I seem to want and do not want (take your choice), which spews me out or swallows me up (I'll never know), which is perhaps merely the inside of my distant skull where once I wandered, now am fixed, lost for tininess (or straining against the walls, with my head, my hands, my feet, my back), and ever murmuring my old stories (my old story), as if it were the first time. ― Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable , P12

“Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” ― Augustine of Hippo  +

L'intrus" by Jean-Luc Nancy, (English transl. by Susan Hanson)

The Trial, Orson Welles - 1962 » Narrator: Before the law, there stands a guard. A man comes from the country, begging admittance to the law. But the guard cannot admit him. May he hope to enter at a later time? That is possible, said the guard. The man tries to peer through the entrance. He'd been taught that the law was to be accessible to every man. "Do not attempt to enter without my permission", says the guard. I am very p owerful. Yet I am the least of all the guards. From hall to hall, door after door, each guard is more powerful than the last. By the guard's permission, the man sits by the side of the door, and there he waits. For years, he waits. Everything he has, he gives away in the hope of bribing the guard, who never fails to say to him "I take what you give me only so that you will not feel that you left something undone." Keeping his watch during the long years, the man has come to know even the fleas on the guard's fur collar. Growing ch...

This land is yours. Viva Zapata, (1952) / Elia Kazan But you must protect it.   It won't be yours long if you don't protect it.   If necessary, with your lives, and your children with their lives.  Don't discount your enemies. They will be back.  And if your house is burned, build it again.  If your corn is destroyed, replant. If your children die, bear more.  If they drive you out of the valley, live on the mountain, but live.  You always look for leaders, strong men without faults. There aren't any. There are only men like yourselves. They change. They desert. They die. There are no leaders but yourselves. A strong people is the only lasting strength.

» She was being brutally saved. Redemption without delay! But is one saved by a coup de grace? Or else hit, thrown, struck down!? - By going, my poor fairy, my myopia, you are withdrawing from me the ambiguous gifts that filled me with anguish and granted me states that those who see do not know, she murmured. - Do not forget me. Keep forever the world suspended, desirable, refused, that enchanted  thing I had given you, murmured myopia. - If I forget thee, oh Jerusalem, may my right eye, etc. - Ah! I see coming in place of my diffuse reign a reign without hesitation. - I shall always hesitate. I shall not leave my people. I belong to the people of those who do not see. [...] - Savoir, Helene Cixous

Words are loneliness. I left a couple of words for you on the tablecloth last night – you covered them with your elbows. — Tropic of Cancer , Henry Miller