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Just reading Tropic of Cancer and getting my brain nuked to pieces. Somethings are just so electric you must act, must create or otherwise you are not receiving them properly. I was gonna write something but now its gone… Henry Miller is a prick. But as I gorge myself on cheese flavored ricecakes I can profess that things taste better after reading him. He makes me long for Paris, whilst simultaneously reminding me why I should forget about it. I’m looking around for inspiration. Got Floyd on, read Miller, yet I’m coming up with nothing. Miller reminds me of Nietzsche, the exoneration of experience and the body over thought. I just realised today that in the past couple of years which I have not been reading Nietzsche I have followed him devoutly. I have reevaluated all my values. I am more an individualist than ever (in life), and more left leaning than ever in political theory. The priest does become thoughtful out of inadequacy. Have I found sacred games? I have found games, which on days to me are sacred, and that is enough. I am not envious of the religious. Reading the paper today I learn of a disgraced politician, a rightwing Christian, who was let go of due to insulting, blatantly, Muslims. Religion is simple, contrived formulae for happiness. Sometimes effective, sometimes not (it has eloquent contrivances and its standard, rank and file believer garbage). The parenthesized distinction is from Nietzsche, of course. The eloquent is what Erasmus and other fine human beings followed. They didn’t really need to compare themselves with others (the Gentiles, nonbelievers). They actually followed God… singularly and fearfully (that is, with doubt, uncertainty… certainty is a philosophical, socratic idea and has nothing to do with religion). I have entirely given up the idea of Richard Kearney’s, Mark C. Taylor’s, John D. Caputo’s, Thomas Sheehan’s, Kierkegaard’s, Pascal’s God could be believed by the masses. I once realised the question: Is everyone smart enough to reach heaven, the Kingdom of God [i.e., in this life, are people simply smart enough to fathom what is required, the choice, to live with God, with the few bright stars in the sea of pitch black night]. The aesthetic, not omnimax God (only the junk theologian’s, like idiot’s dumb enough to write non-fiction, but dumb enough for it to be simply popular, and near entirely untrue with just a semblance of accuracy).
I have more hate to spew. Why? Because people are not like me. What goes on in my head does not go on in theirs. I don’t know the answers. I just know how to not walk in circles and to not travel blindly. In politics, even in this excuse-less country, people don’t vote, think, or be for the right reasons. It is so easy to simply get what the political parties propose. Yet most human beings, even the upper middle class (who are sufficiently, no, beyond sufficiently educated and able) don’t digest politics, don’t follow it correctly, that is accurately, that is, with the ability to identify who stands for what and what policies actually mean and what effects they will have in real life. Simply reading the newspapers (that is, scanning it, reading 5% of its articles) maybe 5 days a week, and catching a bit of the evening tv news, lets say, 5 days a week is enough to ‘get’ politics. I am clearly a Liberal, as just demonstrated. I believe a citizenry can Actually be educated. I believe it is not a pipe-dream that most could make a sufficiently intelligent decision come the roughly every 1000 day election day. All they have to do is the above around the election period of, you know, about a month. They don’t. Hence we all deserve to burn.
What do I think of art? I think of it as a largely individual process, in that what is art is simply that which makes the individual value something, feel something is significant (that could be a painting, the World Cup, pornography, etc…). I love groups that create or digest it together, yet like vision going through the individual’s pair of eyeballs art must go through that individual’s orifice known as the soul… Things are complicated though when a culture downplays art, as exists now. As Peter Carey has said, it effects democracy, it effect’s a society’s ability to think hence to make decisions. Discussing art is a human pastime: Greek’s at the festival for Dionysos (I’m too liquidated to remember it), poetry spoken to a crowd, etc. Our age is incredibly smart and incredibly stupid. It is cliche, yet when a society doesn’t listen to speeches which last for hours (a la 19th century), oration of any sort (public shit without projectors) but instead digests its info in fucking sms size packets then seriously the species will flatline in decades, not millennia.
I fucking hate the truth. I wish art were MORE fanciful, MORE fiction. Art is often truer than fiction. And truth is incredibly hard to bear. Like
Nietzsche’s Last man vs other distinction. I probably should read more genre fiction. I try to read more contrived, popular fiction. But no matter what I can stomach I seek out truth. It kills me, depresses me, makes me generally unpalatable. Even my time wasting is honest. This year, and just half way in, has been a great teacher. Fuck everything.
Literary Crickets, The Most Hated Pests Of All
Roland Barthes
George Steiner
Walter Benjamin
(names bandied around in my mind: Susan Sontag, Paul de Man, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Erich Auerbach, Hugh Kenner, Frank Kermode, Stanley Cavell, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Guy Davenport)
I adore the idea of a writer who can always keep you on edge, who like a good story always keeps you on your toes. Nietzsche is the archetype for me, someone who endeavored to make every sentence reverberate through the entire being of it’s reader. Full commitment of consciousness is required. The writers above and those parenthesized are not comprehensive or anywhere near complete. Like the aspiration the ‘list’ is simply meant to nudge me, to push me in the direction I want to go (which in this instance includes knowing a circle of thinkers on literature who always have me stimulated).
Poetry, Emergence, Sublimation (totally draft)
*polish me polish me*
Paz – form and meaning
Love as content, idea. One idea. Yet, why is some poetry about love better than others? Style and form
Poets also are not fully aware of what they create and why it is create. Because also, as above, it is not the idea/intent/mystical and not intellectually grasped thing inspiration that makes create poetry, but the writing and its constitutive wording and style from which the magic of poetry stems. Which is why its when its in print and done and sorted, written, polished, is poetry admired. After the magic of the production process.
Freud initial energy, then sublation
Science, phenomenon of emergence, entropy, always more coming into existence. Poetry is something radically new, a stanza never formulated/written for instance, which is why it has such power. Its meaning it potent because it is new, original, yet it was inspired largely by humdrum, everyday life but given majesty through the unique form and style of poetry.
Desire
Desire
tr.v. de·sired, de·sir·ing, de·sires
1. To wish or long for; want.2. To express a wish for; request.n.1. A wish or longing.2. A request or petition.3. The object of longing: My greatest desire is to go back home.4. Sexual appetite; passion.(link 1)
We both have too many words and not enough. I have no idea what desire means. That is, I have no idea what it precisely means which is unique, which is not equal to ‘want’, ‘demand’, ‘value’ etc. I believe the word desire is most useful in the same sense as ‘finding important’, ‘beholding as valuable’ and ‘significant’. It is thrown around so often though (psychoanalysts are responsible for a large amount of the usage). I also have the belief that if a word is continually used it must serve a unique purpose (which no other word so accurately fits), and although this common usage isn’t as conscious as my understanding of words, and these words in particular, I nonetheless feel on my nerve endings that I haven’t roped in a meaning yet.
Lacan said:
“thus it is, rather, the assumption [assomption] of castration that creates the lack on the basis of which desire is instituted. Desire is desire for desire, the Other’s desire, as I have said, in other words, subjected to the Law.
(It is the fact that a woman must go through the same dialectic, whereas nothing seems to oblige her to do so- she must lose what she does not have-which tips us off, allowing us to articulate that it is the phallus by default that constitutes the amount of the symbolic debt: a debit account when one has it, a disputed credit when one does not.)
(Lacan 2007, 723)
You can’t desire what you have. That is point one. Second, you desire what you desire because you believe it is normal, appropriate to desire it, the Other desires it (e.g. in a capitalist society the law of the land is to get a job, so without really thinking about it you are suddenly looking in the classifieds!). A final necessary point to remember is there is always context, always context prior to desire. Lacan says there is always language before desire; the point is the same. What language means to Lacan is we need words, we need the means to identify things to be able to want things (e.g. we need to be able to say we want apples, for instance, and furthermore that we don’t want oranges. Language implies the ability to identify more than one thing, as to be able to discriminate, pick, hone in on: desire). By the way, all three of the rough points sketched above are of equal value, one is not more necessary than two etc.
Interesting point: ‘it is desire that drives the process of symbolization’ (secondary literature on Lacan on desire. Homer 2005:57). I like this idea. It eludes me (yes, I grasp the irony), but it feels true. Like a pet name for a beloved that suddenly bubbles up from the lover’s mind and jumps out, the words, language we throw at things is in part automatic. Our desire makes us speak. To keep the words flowing is to desire.
Bibliography
Lacan, J. (2007) Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W. W. Norton & Company.
Homer, S. (2005) Jacques Lacan (Routledge Critical Thinkers). Routledge
Eyes Wide Shut Review
This piece of writing is far from total and final. Just having finished watching Kubrick’s banquet of a final film I was nonetheless stimulated enough to write something about it.
The film, as I see it, is fundamentally about the individual and the individual’s mind (which is portrayed as having Freudian depth, that is, initial ideas and conscious awareness, with a depth ocean of unconscious drives and impulses), the couple (the individual with another, portrayed in the film with the husband and wife protagonists), gender, love, sexuality, stimulation/experience and lastly a little portrayal on masses of individuals, that is groups and/or society at large. The film is approximately 2 and a half hours long and since Stanley Kubrick can say a lot in a 30 second scene the film is full of content, hence much to dissect. Although I think one point is we never get to the bottom of things, like the human mind inevitably has an unconscious and there is always a background which we can never fully be conscious of (for as we focus on something else there is then a new background, ad infinitum). Hence the film left me, and undoubtedly other viewers, feeling ambivalent, both satiated and a little bit hungry. There is a plot with so much we can’t absorb it all at once, yet at the same time we saw the picture and could provide an accurate plot summary (albeit sketchy, all summaries by definition are).
The film is focused upon Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his wife Mrs. Alice Harford ( Nicole Kidman). All the themes mentioned above are central and are portrayed through the lens of these two characters. Their relationship is also central, and the ability for humans to relate to each other in general, and especially over the long term (i.e. in marriage) is examined. We see at the beginning their marriage is in autopilot, so to speak, with Bill not looking at Alice when asked to comment about her appearance and so forth. Then as the couple arrive at a lavish party both separate and spend time with others at the party,with clear flirting happening with Alice and a wealthy gentleman (Sandor Szavost) and perhaps more benign flirting with Bill and two women. Another important theme is neglect and active immortality/infidelity. Bill promises to meet his wife by the bar but wanders off and is seen spending time with the two young aforementioned women. Much of the film we see Alice at home by herself, highlighting the notion of men neglecting women by simply absence. Alice meanwhile at the party is after a couple of drinks nearly succumbing to the wealthy gentleman and agreeing to sleep with him but at the last moment not. Sartre’s notion of bad faith seems to be at play here.
The next scene involves Alice and Bill smoking marijuana. One of the most important conversations in the film takes place here, perhaps due to the uninhibited nature of Alice and Bill smoking marijuana or perhaps not. A running theme is how completely can people be seduced and simply compelled, like machines, to do certain things after the right buttons have been hit, so to speak. Anyway, gender and sexuality is largely discussed with one of the central quotes being, I believe:
ALICE Does that mean that all men, with _possibly_ _some_ _exceptions_, want to screw all beautiful women, married or otherwise? BILL I suppose, basically, yes. ALICE So does that mean you wanted to screw the two models? BILL I did say with some exceptions. ALICE And of course you're an exception? BILL Yes. ALICE How come? BILL Because I love you. ALICE Any other reasons? BILL Because we're married. ALICE Any others? BILL And because I wouldn't lie to you or hurt you. ALICE So basically what it comes down to is that you wouldn't screw the two models out of _consideration_ for me, but otherwise you would. (link 1)
Whether women are sex objects or not is discussed. The matter is another running theme, how much is sexuality apart of our humanity? Sex is a physical act, it can rather clearly be agreed upon when it takes place. Sexuality on the other hand is more than physicality, it is like the mode of sex and is heavily psychological (the commonplace sitcom theme that women ‘have to be in the mood’ is rather the same). Because sex is physical appearances and the body hence stimulate sexuality. Moreover fantasy, which is psychological (you can fantasize regardless of physical environment, just by thinking) can stimulate sexuality. Some people, who have fetishes, need certain things to get into the mode of sex but often will constantly and without volition become sexual after their certain, specific thing become aware to them (like the young girl in the costume store seems a specific stimulus on the two men she is with). As Bill and Alice therefore say, first meetings between men and women may have a sexual desire (if an unconscious desire), as people see appearances first as they meet. Yet can this default sexuality, which the film overall clearly states is pervasive, be switched off, be overridden? Three answers to override sexuality are given (by Bill to Alice): love, marriage and will not to deceive or hurt (which are pretty much all the same. Love I believe is the best term).
Another problem is infidelity by fantasy, that is cheating on someone with intentions, ambitions or openness to sleeping with someone other than one’s partner (not the act of sleeping with another itself). As Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:27 [NIV]):
27“You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery.’28But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.
I always considered this a very radical saying by Jesus. Can we control our fantasies? Can we control what pops into our head? It seems precarious that we can control all the fantasizes that pop into our heads, as Alice speaks long about in the smoking marijuana scene:
ALICE Well, last summer at Cape Cod - I don't suppose you remember one night in the dining room, there was a young Naval officer sitting near us. He was with two other officers. BILL As a matter of fact, I don't. But what about him? ALICE The waiter brought him a message during dinner, at which point he left the table? Bill waits for her to continue. ALICE Well...I first saw him that morning in the lobby. He was checking in and he was following the bellboy with his luggage to the elevator. He glanced at me as he walked past but didn't stop until he had gone a few more steps. Then he turned and looked at me. He didn't say anything. He didn't smile. In fact, it seemed to me that he scowled. Maybe I did the same thing. ALICE stops for a moment. ALICE I was very stirred by him. That whole day I lay on the beach, lost in dreams. She stops. BILL Go on. ALICE thinks about how to continue. BILL stares at her. ALICE That afternoon you and I made love and talked about our future, and our child. Later we were sitting on the balcony and he passed below us without looking up. Just the sight of him stirred me deeply and I thought if he wanted me, I could not have resisted. I thought I was ready to give up you, the child, my whole future. And yet at the same time - if you can understand it - you were dearer to me than ever, and I stroked your forehead and kissed your hair, and at that moment my love for you was both tender and sad. At dinner I wore a white rose and you said I was very beautiful. It might not have been just an accident that he and his friends sat near us. He didn't look up but I actually considered getting up, walking over to him and like someone in a movie, saying, 'Here I am, my love, for whom I have waited - take me.' Well, it was about then that the waiter brought him the envelope. He read it, turned pale, said goodbye to his friends - and glancing at me mysteriously, he left the room. ALICE stops for a moment. ALICE I barely slept that night and woke up the next morning very agitated. I didn't know whether I was afraid that he had left or that he might still be there... But by dinner I realised he was gone and I breathed a sigh of relief. Long silence BILL And if he hadn't left? Alice doesn't reply. ALICE I don't know. (link 1)
There is a stereotype about human sexuality that men are like moths to a flame, swirling around beauty and sexuality with limited control after encountering it. And as noted before there is the belief that women need time, to be wined and dined (‘romanced’) to ‘get into the mood’. Yet as Alice illustrates this is myth and women can be as helpless and as frail as men regarding sexual impulses. Bill’s face during this confession reveals clear shock upon learning this, as many man would if their precious stereotype which holds together the illusion of female submissiveness was shattered. I think further that Western society at large (and also other societies) are scared to death by female sexuality as the documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated exposes. The belief that women pretty much don’t have sexuality and it is only a characteristic of the ‘active’ male is, I believe, a lingering myth still existent in society. There is perhaps a complicated situation at this point in history though, as perhaps three waves of feminism and perhaps a new reactionary culture of women flaunting sexuality is around, which seems to be exploited by popular mass media and corporate interests. Societies have never had too much (immediate) trouble though being hypocritical and/or contradictory.
Bill has to leave after the confession due to a phone call and his job as a doctor demanding his presence elsewhere. It is worth dwelling upon Bill’s job as a doctor. As in the long conversation it is brought up:
ALICE Now try to be honest. When some really great-looking woman comes in to your office to have her tits checked out, don't you ever think about screwing her? BILL Come on, give me a break. I'm a doctor. It's all very impersonal. And anyway my insurance requires that a nurse is always present. ALICE You're being evasive. When you're feeling her tits, is it never any more than sheer professionalism? BILL Basically, that's all it is. ALICE Just basically? BILL Oh, come on. There are no absolutes in anything. ALICE No absolutes... Okay. Fine... And does the same thing go for women? While they're having their tits squeezed, do you suppose your lady patients ever wonder what your dick might be like? BILL Definitely not. ALICE And why is that? BILL (laughs) Because they're too worried about what I might find. ALICE You know what I mean. BILL No, again. Not most of them. ALICE Why? BILL Well, I suppose that most women are programmed differently from men ALICE Oh, yes, I forgot. Millions of years of evolution - right? Men have to put their sperm into as many women as they can, but women stay at home with pretty pink things and take care of the children? BILL A bit oversimplified but something like that. (link 1)
The last bit ties in the point made before about men repressing the sexuality of women. In general people don’t like to recall how many times at the end of the day they had passing sexual thoughts when they are out amongst people or more drawn out sexual fantasies. Like meals people simply don’t keep track. Like the act of defecating and urinating, which we all have done thousands of time, we repress, put out of mind. People like to believe they are like doctors: aloof, removed, slick and clean without messy intimacies and stimulations. That Bill is a doctor adds great drama, the tension between sexuality and his job, his professionalism is portrayed very well by Kubrick.
This is a jump to the last bit of dialogue (it should be noted furthermore this is from the original script and the action is shot elsewhere but I’m 99% sure the dialogue is word for word). And here:
BILL What are we going to do now? She gazes into his eyes. ALICE I think we should both be grateful that we have come unharmed out of all our adventures, whether they were real or only a dream. BILL kneels down in front of her. BILL Are you really sure that? She takes his hands in hers and looks at them. ALICE Only as sure as I am that the reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, is not the whole truth. BILL And no dream is entirely a dream. She presses his head to her breast. ALICE But I think we're awake now.. And for a long time to come. BILL (whispers) Forever. Almost before he finishes the word, ALICE lays her fingers on his lips. ALICE (whispers as if to herself) We should never look into the future. They kiss tenderly and lie down on the bed, dozing a little, dreamlessly, close to one another - until with the usual noises from the street, and a victorious ray of sunlight through the opening of the curtain, there is a knock on the door and their seven-year-old daughter, HELENA, runs into the room and, laughing, jumps into their bed. And a new day begins. The End (link 1)
Roger Ebert (link 2) dismissed this as a film which ended wrongly tying up too many loose ends, which he believes are what makes the film rich (i.e. the unsolved loose ends). Like I said above, the sense of the film being an experience, a whole so much larger than its individual parts is rich and reflects life aptly and artistically, yet I believe the film also wisely suggests how to try and live. The ending does this, and like Woody Allen’s new films the final word is optimistic: that the great soup of many things which makes up the human being will not fall to pieces and will not with certainty fail under the pressures of a relationship. Eyes Wide Shut states it is possible to manage a relationship, a marriage, a union. Importantly, though, moments of frailty and near disaster between Bill and Alice are made to strengthen the relationship, and efforts for truth are abandoned so togetherness, happiness and perhaps a sense of justice (that both Bill and Alice intend the best for each other, Kantian, intention focused justice) is possible ‘I think we should be grateful that we have come unharmed out of all our adventures’. It is acknowledged even that bothering to hold people fully accountable and to map out truth is futile ‘only as sure as I am that reality of one night, let alone that of a whole lifetime, is not the whole truth’. The point is solidarity, to remain together and work, apply effort to remain together ‘but I think we’re awake now… And for a long time to come’. The point is not to assume absolutes, as is stated in the first long conversation and by Alice silencing Bill when he says ‘forever’ with ‘we should never look into the future’. The point is to work at the difficult task of cultivating the best of all possible relationships in the now. Only by vigilant care towards each other and intending the best may a couple, a union endure.
The Neon Fireplace 
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