March 09, 2015

Ygdrasil, Herbst in Der Auvergne2010Anselm Kiefer b. March 8, 1945

Urban KoansJordan Mounteerlemon hound

(I) Bricked corridors, buildings bunched elbow-to-elbow in the blue-shift of coastal rain. Street-lamps duck and blush as we pass, fluoride-gazes eschewing all but their own perimeters of pavement, vision hung like a bell in some Pavlovian stoicism. In a corner café the woman beside me uses “logistic” too often to describe the process for naming her first daughter. Magnetic interferences of other lives, their corners flush. Rogue patterns inter-splice our own – how at this age all my friends are institutionalized by marriage, how right angles fashion themselves in every sky-line silhouette and turn of phrase, how the word alone in this city is anaphoric to being.

The Sufficiency of Beauty in an Hour of HappinessJordan Mounteer

I can recall with an almost eidetic precision the way a day could stretch on almost into the illimitable. Childhood was spent in the spontaneous pursuit of random wonders – building stone dams and reservoirs in a creek for hours, constructing tree-forts and exploring the back forty behind our homestead. Even the earliest artistic acts of drawing other worlds, writing short stories replete with characters born from my own imagination. The consequence of youth, of a capacity for events and details to imprint themselves, the fluid spree of long-term memory. It is with age, seemingly, that the novel is less abundant, and therefore time seems to accelerate – you can scarcely believe the speed in which a week, or a month, or a year is relegated to the past. No, that seems arrogant. I think instead we are simply less surprised by the novelty of our lives, after a time. For some of us this becomes a ‘waiting around’ for what we anticipate or expect of our lives. For others, it is simply a weariness, or a dissatisfaction with our lot, which precedes this acceleration. The obvious counter-point to this claim is that happiness must follow, or be simultaneous with, the extinguishing of desires.

A Global History of Post-humans Rick Searle reviews Ynval Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of HumankindUtopia or Dystopia

The quirk of human nature that for Harari made both the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolution possible and led to much else besides was our ability to imagine things that do not exist, by which he means almost everything we find ourselves surrounded by, not just religion, but the state and its laws, and everything in between has been akin to a fantasy game. Indeed, Harari left me feeling that the whole of both premodern and modern societies was at root little but a game of pretend played by grown ups, with adulthood perhaps nothing more than agreeing to play along with the same game everyone else is engaged in. He was especially compelling and thought provoking when it came to that ultimate modern fantasy and talisman that all of us, from Richard Dawkins to, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi believes in; namely money.

hortus conclususAnselm Kiefer 2009

What Is Called History at the End of Modernity? (Part II) James Livingston

(....)

What is the point? Is there a usable past, a question that already presupposes that the past as such is unknowable, and so must be subdivided according to our present purposes? I used to think so. I ‘m not so sure anymore. The cultural function of the modern historian, I used to say, is to teach his or her fellow citizens how to learn from people who differed from us due to historical circumstances, which include the range of plausible ideological or intellectual commitments. We “go back” to the past in the hope of equipping ourselves with the experience, and perhaps the wisdom, of those who have come before us. We “come back” to the present with a wider range of choices, accordingly, because now we know not what to think but how to think differently, by adopting assumptions about the human condition from the past that our fellow citizens probably cannot share.

I’ll set aside my doubts about a usable past for a moment. We don’t study history if we’re not interested in the impending future, that is, if we don’t think our choices in the present will shape it. Instead, we’ll get old-time religion—the kind that comes before the Reformation, the kind that comes in the form of resignation and retreat from the profane world—or we’ll indulge in conspiracy theory; both of these attitudes toward history typically relocate agency from the realm of the possible, which is the region of the political, to the prerogative of the supernatural or, what is the same thing, the unidentifiable “powers that be,” who are god-like in their omniscience.

Insofar, on the other hand, as we get interested in the impending future as a political issue subject to our choices, we’ll acquire a stake in identifying the problems and deciphering the possibilities of the present. If we see real possibilities for progress in our present circumstances, we’ll get even more interested in that impending future—more optimistic about solving those problems. But the only way to see the possibilities and to identify the problems of the present is to study the past.

In other words, we study the past so that we can shape the future. Our hopes for the future, and our fears about it—our political assessment of the present—will determine our approach to the past. And vice versa. Having political commitments in the present requires us to do history. Notice that, as a result, our study of history prepares us not for “the” future, but a future.

WinterlandAnselm Kiefer 2010

Liminalfrom a treeplanter's journal Jordan Mounteer (....) The pure, clean drive toward liminality and what lies on the other side of it, a life alone in these aisles of mist. Like a wounded beast flung into the bush to die, I have never been afraid of death, which clings like sweat to every surface. Only of growing old enough to see it like it is, a black stag watching me with black silent hooves from between black trees.

Für Rabbi LoewAnselm Kiefer 2010 - 2012

Crystals of Eternity Larval Subjects

Perhaps it’s like this. The eternal and universal are not something that is already there, but rather are something that is produced. Here, of course, I’m dancing with Badiou. If it is true that the eternal and universal are something produced, then they are also wagers. No one can know in advance whether something will be eternal or universal. Only time will tell. This entails that both universality and eternity will perpetually face challenges. At any moment these crystals of time could fracture and shatter to pieces. I am here, above all, thinking about works of art. The eternal and universal work of art– song, painting, sculpture, prose, poem, architecture, etc. – is slippery.