FuturePresent

transience

On the 20th Anniversary of The Fall of The Berlin Wall
The lessons we don't learn from history: leaving a temporary mark on what remains of The Wall, East side, Berlin
CC cláudia gabriela marques vieira

'profound whatever'

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death 1.1
a butterfly in the pool, La Luna, Tuscany
CC cláudia gabriela marques vieira

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I've just began re-reading Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1985) after sixteen years: thinking about Nietzsche's idea that we exist between 'eternal return' and 'absence of return'. 

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times...the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht)...Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes [us] to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and [our] earthly being, and become only half real, [our] movements as free as they are insignificant (Kundera, 1985: 2).

A friend of mine, Iain Mackie, introduced me to Josh Raskin's I Met the Walrus (2008), the soundtrack of which is Jerry Levitan's interview with John Lennon (1969). I think Lennon may have had this dichotomy in mind, when he referred to the "profound whatever" (interview with Jerry Levitan, 1969). Could it be that we live in, "a world that rests essentially on the non-existence of return, [where] everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted" (Kundera, 1985: 4)? Or, refuting Parmenides' dialectical thinking, do we exist at once through the 'lightness' and 'heaviness' of being, until the two become ambiguously deceptive. Indeed, from a certain perspective, transience and infinity may be perceived as one, made both of 'heaviness' and 'lightness'.

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When Nietzsche Wept: Eternal Return (2007)

director and writer: Pinchas Perry
script based on Irvin D. Yalom's When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession (1992)

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I met the Walrus (2008)

director: Josh Raskin
illustrator: James Braithwaite
soundtrack: Jerry Levitan's interview with John Lennon (1969)

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"i am a brave girl captain"

I don't remember ever being so scared as I have been over the last few weeks. But I remember now that, like Mary, "I am a brave girl captain."

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Image left: Still photograph of the animation The Poster Children, transmediale 09: DEEP NORTH.
CC Claudia Vieira

Image right: Ludo, Ivor Cutler, 1974.
A total enfringement of copyright, but I like to think of it as free promotion: If you haven't heard Ivor Cutler before, give him a try: Ivor Cutler: open.spotify.com/artist/60SKMJ5AgD6DuxTNbVrrSQI wanted to add this to 'dreams' set on flickr, and to this post, you see.

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plasma

 

...of red balloons and plasma mebranes, Edinburgh Festival 2008 CC Cláudia Vieira

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Blogging at dawn from my office of light. A friend left me two gifts a couple of nights ago. One, the hand-written version of an untitled poem by Denise Levertov below, the other, a copy of the Nan Goldin interview ‘The Labour of Love’. They sparked ideas about love, networks and magnetism.

 

If Denise Levertov is my new muse, Nan Goldin is my choke 

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For those of you who prefer text, here is an electronic version of Denise Levertov untitled poem: 

'Often you seem to be listening to music
that others cannot hear. Rilke would have loved you:
You never intrude, you never ask questions
of those, crying in the dark, who are most near.

<>You always keep something of yourself for yourself,
In electronic bars, even in bedrooms.
Rilke would have praised you: your nearness is far,
And therefore, your distance like the stars.

Yet some things you miss and some things you lose
By keeping your arm outstretched, and some things
You’ll never know unless one, at least, knows you
Like a close up, in detail –

Blow, by human blow.’

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The second text is ‘The Labour of Love’, Anja Cronberg and Christian Barbe’s interview with Nan Goldin , published in Acne Paper, No.7, Autumn 08. I stopped reading after the lead quote: “What we call falling madly in love with someone is not so much evidence of how deeply we care for our lover, but more the relief that we’re not alone anymore.” (2008: 107). I could have read on but there are so many other things I'd enjoy more.

There was purpose in each of these gifts. I think I thought I knew why my friend had offered me these gems from her scrapbook of dreams. Shared experiences; sharing experiences. I recalled one person in particular, and sensed my friend had made that connection long before offering this poem to me.

Yet, re-reading Levertov makes me think we all shun close-ups to a greater or lesser degree, we all distance ourselves from each other sometimes, oftentimes, sometimes. Some people we let nearer, some less. So near, so far. Attraction and repulsion. Our psycho-cultural metanarratives often enact this self-protection, both from harm and from the dilution of self in polyvalents. Sometimes it’s about preserving that space in which each of us just is. Alone. That space, fresh and stale, where only ‘I’ breathes. And some things we do miss and some things we do lose. Many things trail into the tragic pelagic.

There are moments when people connect fundamentally, others when it seems entirely impossible to relate each other's inner worlds. Lately, I’ve recalled the rule of attraction, and close encounters of the first kind drift into the current. Though sometimes against it, still.

If Denise Levertov is my new muse, Nan Goldin is my choke. Nan seems bitter, her feminism, hyperbole. Falling in love to me isn’t something that fills in the loneliness and emptiness (or not just that in some spaces, places, cases). It’s far deeper, mutual, selfless and selfish. It’s understanding one’s body, letting someone else understand one’s body, understanding a body that is different to one’s own, letting one understand it. This body is our own, tuning in and out of singularity, in waves of meiosis and fusion. We interconnect through light and magnetic force, perhaps close to the one the Sanskrit call Prana. At the cellular level, meiosis and fusion recur: constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing; fizzling plasma, realigning ourselves perpetually along the magnetic line of force.

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And so, we have different experiences of love, Goldin and I.

To me our ways of seeing are our 'reality', we evoke it. Positive charge leads to/is led by positive push/pull.

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But then I do sit alone at dawn in my office of light.

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little revolutions

equality (not sameness)

The photographs above are part of the project Transindividualism (ongoing).

 

 

This post is based on a response to a question posed by a BA Television Production student of mine on a facebook multi-recipient message, in connection to her dissertation:

"DO YOU FEEL THAT FEMINISM IS STILL RELEVANT TO TODAY'S SOCIETY?"

Response criteria: 'yes'/'no' format; followed by a single sentence explanation

 

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MY RESPONSE

YES

Major feminist revolutions happen occasionally, minor feminist revolutions happen continuously, in various sites. Simultaneously, I'm reminded every day in, some times explicit, some times implicit, ways that patriarchy continues rife.

Yet, the question itself is problematic for me: I think the emphasis should be on equality (read equal, not same), irrespective of gender/ sexuality/ age/ race/ nationality/ class/ etc. At this point, I can think of three groupings that make this more complex:

1. religion - from my perspective, opting to be part of an organised (if not personal) religion is a grasp for rooting/routing in a complex world

2. (dis)ability - there are individuals that are able to cope with the world we've manufactured better than others (physically/psychologically/other-ALLYs i can't think of speedily)

3. economic - itself a category of capitalist inequality

Individuals in these groupings may have unequal needs to others. Tend to think some need extra empathy/sympathy. But I'm just being patronising and acting out guilt, I know. Note also that these inequalities may not be as clear-cut as first imagined: we could argue (though perhaps not very convincingly) that it's the economically affluent who need sympathy, for instance, for we may make assumptions that they can't perceive the value of the free things in life. Alternatively, we may want to commiserate ourselves as inhabitants of technologically-developed parts of the world, for as global meltdown progresses, our too substandard pharmaceutically-aided GM-ed immune systems will be less able to cope than, say, a child miner in The Congo or a child litter picker in Nairobi, toughned accumulatively by her everyday contact with the pollution we've generated (see a Comic Relief '09 clip of Simon Cowell's visit to Nairobi's litter-picking children).

 

Relating this back to gender, there are instances when/where some men get a raw deal in comparison to women. Think, for instance, about current inequalities in maternal/paternal leave. Other individuals in (seemingly dominant) groups may experience similar inequalities.

And there are times when I relish being treated like a princess, though by an equal prince/ss. Just because I ask my partner to fix the leaking kitchen sink tap because it saves me the bother of grappling with unknown handy-(wo)man tips, doesn't make me unequal to him, or he my dog.

Long live the little revolutions in (re)thinking and (re)doing.

This is longer than a sentence.

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The 'Bono Effect'? Simon Cowell with children in Nairobi, taking an educational break from their daily litter-picking (Comic Relief 2009).

 

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For a more in-depth exploration of issues of identity, as discursively constructed through media representations, take a look at the Media and Identity lecture series I developed for second year undergraduate students on BA Interactive Media, BA Television Production and BA Scriptwriting at The Media School, Bournemouth University.