Monthly Archives: January 2010

this week on the avant guardian \/\/ nature doesn’t ask your permission

January 31, 2010
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this week on the avant guardian \/\/ nature doesn’t ask your permission

“For pity’s sake,” they’ll shout at you, “you can’t rebel: it’s two times two is four! Nature doesn’t ask your permission; it doesn’t care about your wishes, or whether you like its laws or not. You’re obliged to accept it as it is, and consequently all its results as well. And so a wall is indeed a wall… etc,. etc.” My God, but what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if for some reason these laws and two times two is four are not to my liking? To be sure, I won’t break through such a wall with my forehead if I really have not got strength enough to do it, but neither will I be reconciled with it simply because I have a stone wall here and have not got strength enough.” -Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From The Underground

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internal harmony

January 28, 2010
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internal harmony

My infant spirit would awake To the terror of the lone lake My infant spirit would awake To the terror of the lone lake Yet that terror was not fright But a tremulous delight And a feeling undefined Springing from a darkened mind Death was in that poisoned wave And in its gulf a fitting grave For him who thence could solace bring To his dark imagining Whose wildering though could even make An Eden of that dim lake But when the night had thrown her pall Upon that spot as upon all And the wind would pass me by In its stilly melody -Antony & the Johnsons

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a whisper in the vortex

January 26, 2010
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a whisper in the vortex

“The will to system is a lack of integrity.” ~ Nietzsche I must confess that I’m finding it harder, more laborious, to write my regularly-scheduled column for TAG. It’s not that the project is losing its charm for me, because as time goes on I’m finding the work of my fellow writers to be getting better, and the work of the new additions to the stable is maintaining that trend. It’s rather that I seem to be going through one of my periodic nigredo phases, when I tend to regard the productions of my ego with a sort of nausea, perhaps a “metaphysical masturbation” which tosses its generative fluid out into the objective world around me just so I can hold a card game with myself. Indeed the guileless generation of horrifyingly mangled mixed metaphors is par for the course when this happens, so I’m glad I got that writer’s rubicon out of the way right here in the first paragraph. I would like to observe that the weekly themes our Editor has tossed at us seem to unerringly reflect something of earth-shattering personal importance going on at the time, or at least it sure looks that way after I’ve

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this week on the avant guardian \/\/ external lack of cohesion is internal harmony

January 25, 2010
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this week on the avant guardian \/\/ external lack of cohesion is internal harmony

The harmony of the new art demands a more subtle contruction than this, something that appeals less to the eye and more to the soul. This “concealed construction” may arise from an apparently fortuitous selection of forms on the canvas. Their external lack of cohesion is their internal harmony. This haphazard arrangement of forms may be the future of artistic harmony. Their fundamental relationship will finally be able to be expressed in mathematical form, but in terms irregular rather than regular. -Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art Images via Web Museum, Paris

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galaxies composed of thoughts

January 21, 2010
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galaxies composed of thoughts

A galaxy so distant- far beyond the human gaze Unseen to most available to just the one whose right it is to drift among the skyborne joys of this far galaxy. -sally odgers

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the infiniteability of stories

January 20, 2010
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the infiniteability of stories

Last night at Barnes and Noble my partner and I stumbled across the book Cake Wrecks, and spent the next 15 minutes laughing to the point of tears.  Three hours later, after watching a movie we thought about the book and had another laughing attack.  It was almost unbearable.  There’s just something inordinately funny about someone doing their job to the letter of that job description.  Or maybe the cake makers were fucking with the people who requested the cake because they wrote in the wrong line.  Whatever the case, a more complex form of communication than the little cake request cards is obviously in order. It is not, I should point out, only human errors that fascinate and amuse me.  There is also something deliciously delightful about human actions made for a particular audience that end up reaching a mass audience.  Found magazine is, I think the best example of such pop-culture knick-knacks.  Reading the magazine reminds me of wandering through consignment shops, thrift stores and second-hand stores.  I’ve sent my fair share of used clothing to the Goodwill and rarely is there a piece of it that I will miss.  It might as well be going to the

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decomposed before a million universes

January 19, 2010
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decomposed before a million universes

My life is measured by this glasse, this glasse By all those little Sands that through passe And see how they press, see how they strive, which shall With greatest speed and greatest quickness fall And see how they raise a little Mount, and then With their own weight do level it again But when they have all got thorough, they give over Their nimble sliding downe, and move no more Just such is man whose houres still forward run Being almost finished ‘ere they are begun; So perfect nothings, such light blasts are we That ere we are, ought at all, we cease to be Do what we will, our hasty minutes fly And while we sleep, what do we else but die? How transient are our Joys, and how short their day! They creep on towards us, but fly away How stinging are our sorrows! Where they gain But the least footing, there they will remain And how groundless are our hopes, how they deceive Our childish thoughts, and only sorrow leave! and how real are our fears! They blast us still Still rend us, still with gnawing passions fill; How senseless are our wishes, yet how great!

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composed before a million universes

January 18, 2010
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composed before a million universes

I have said that the soul is not more than the body, And I have said that the body is not more than the soul, And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is, And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroud, And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth, And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times, And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero, And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe, And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes. -Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

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loas to haiti \/\/ and its convulsive beauty

January 14, 2010
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loas to haiti \/\/ and its convulsive beauty

“…and no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of force, and there is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.” – Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal Thinking of the Caribbean this week, for obvious reasons. One of the happy aspects of surrealism most people don’t think of was that it opened the door to a number of poets and artists from the Third World. And not just because surrealism was about the “exotic.” Breton’s slanted idea of beauty confirmed what people of African descent suspected: that Western aesthetic ideals were incomplete and exclusive. Years in Louisiana, Florida, and NYC have given me a sense of identity with the Caribbean. But in the inevitable global paroxysm of sympathy after a disaster like this, and what will inevitably be its rapid fading from the awareness of the 24-hour news cycle, I get conflicted. Is there anything beyond a few friends and the coincidences of place (“spots of time”?) that have drawn my allegiance to Haiti and its neighbors? Artists of Negritude saw that “convulsive beauty” is appropriate to the Caribbean, with its precarious islands, diasporic cultural confusions, and political unrest. Likewise it is to postmodern America–

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that beauty which convulses and expands

January 12, 2010
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that beauty which convulses and expands

The Sacred Geometry of the Tree of Life, Part Two Sephira VI: Tiphereth Carrying forth the theme of symbolic geometry of the Tree of Life (Figure 1) begun with Part One of this series, the sephira of Tiphereth, being the manifestation of the “idea” of the number 6, is symbolized by the simplest six-sided volume, the cube. The cube is thus the second iteration of the square (the first was with the base of the quadrangular pyramid representing Geburah). In addition to the cube, two traditional symbolic correspondences with Tiphereth are the heart and the sun—the combination of these two symbols should hearken back to last week’s column on the “Mystique of Blood and Light.” The cube is the first geometric figure in this series possessed of symmetry along all three spatial axes of length, breadth and depth (or x, y and z in the Cartesian coordinate system). Thus, a 3-dimensional cross is implied by its shape, as is the point at which all three axes converge—the center of the figure. Kether—the point—is thereby implied, as it was in the sephira immediately preceding, the pyramid (Geburah). In fact, given the square comprising each of the six faces of the cube, its volume

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