One night in a mountain hut, it fell to Bohr and Heisenberg to clear away after supper, and the elder scientist remarked to the younger that “our language is like dishwashing: we have only dirty water and dirty dishrags, and yet we manage to get everything clean.”
A good myth, or “embroidered anecdote,” from a lecture by Hollis Frampton. He was recounting a meeting between the video artist Nam June Paik and the filmmaker Stan Brakhage. (“I can imagine Paik showing us video in a handful of dust, and Brakhage striking cinema from flint and steel.”) Brakhage was the kind of guy who painted and scratched film stock directly, and made movies by sandwiching leaves and moth’s wings between strips of tape and running them through the projector; Paik built synthesizers for manipulating the texture of video. “Paik was showing Brakhage his newest synthesizer, putting it through its paces. I can imagine Brakhage as he watched Paik elicit from the contraption, at the turn of the wrist, visions from his inner eye that he had labored for twenty years to put on film, feeling tempted by this new and luminous apple. ‘Now,’ said Brakhage to Paik, ‘can it make a tree?’ I can imagine Paik’s ready smile, which seems to come out of innocence, a little slyness, and the pleasure of feeling both ways at once. ‘Too young,’ Paik replied. ‘Still too young.’”
On the train, daydreaming of what a skyscraper would look and feel like if it took a thousand years to finish one, like Köln Cathedral. If, in Manhattan, we were working on skyscrapers that we’d started around 1900 and expected to finish in nine hundred years. (Patrick Geddes: “A city is more than a place in time, it is a drama in time.”)
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Otto Gross: rogue psychoanalyst, ex-botanist, proponent of free love, anarchist, addicted to variety of drugs, part of the proto-New Age circle at Ascona, friend of D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, Werfel, and part of that cult of the Gebärde, the splendid gesture of art and living that would somehow dispel all the barbarism and convention that stood against them. (At once an astonishing and vital historical figure and by all accounts a man you couldn’t trust to take care of a cat for a few days.)
In 1899, in his youth, Gross sailed as a ship’s doctor with the Kosmos down the coast of South America. In later life, he often referred to the experience of standing at Punta Arenas, on the southernmost tip of Chile, and looking to Tierra del Fuego in the south, a land not yet under the dominion of any state. (“Tierra del Fuego,” because Magellan could see the fires of the Yaghan from the sea.) A country for the dream of anarchism, perhaps a country of the future. On the beach at the cold sea, the ship’s doctor looking to the open country.
“Thus in December in the streets of Berlin could be seen a starving and ragged man, running through the snow flurries, who howled aloud in front of him, and then huddled himself together, to get his fingers and chest warm. People stopped to stand and laugh at him.” So Gross’s last days, in 1919, described by his friend Franz Jung.
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Roomtone is the sound of a space in the absence of any intentional sound. It’s what you record for use when you remix the sound for a movie. Roomtone means that everybody stands still for a minute, a full minute, or two, for the ambience: distant traffic. A stray breeze, and the shape that silence takes in a particular room, diffusing like a gas or collecting on the surfaces. If a plane flies by, you have to start over, because any noticeable marker will be repeated endlessly in postproduction, becoming obtrusive, maddening. The silence is a landscape that seems infinite because there’s no reference points. / When you stop to listen for it, roomtone saturates a space in the same way light does. They both saturate your skin when you stand still, the production assistants stare at their watches, the sound engineers slouch behind their equipment watching for spikes in the waveforms that will stand out to the ear like a single tree on the horizon.
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A world of true and immediate physical location: John Gerard, in the Herball, says you can find the uncommon yellow archangel “under the hedge on the left hand as you go from the village of Hampstead neer London to the Church.” John Aubrey begins his notes on Hobbes by telling you how to get to the house of his birth: “In Westport, being that extreme house that points into or faces the horse-fair; the farthest house on the left hand as you go to Tedbury, leaving the church on your right.”
The Yanomami cosmos is many-layered. We live in heika misi, “this layer.” The sky is called “hedu ka misi” — the layer of the anaconda, rainbows looking like anaconda scales. On “the back of the sky,” the dead live. Above that is “duku ka misi,” the layer that is luminous and newly-formed — the dead die a second time and ascend to that level, the highest in the universe, as winged insects.
The four vocabularies of English: Old English, French, Latin, Greek. As in: Fire / flame / conflagration / holocaust. Or: Sickness / malady / infirmity / epidemic. (Charles V of Germany spoke Italian to women, French to men, German to horses and Spanish to God.) (Old English cearm: lovely sounds. In Chaucer’s time, birdcharm was birdsong, and churchbells were charming the hour. Glamour, the power of beauty to enchant, is grammar mispronounced.)
“Calea zacatechichi is a Mexican shrub that induces a divinatory state in the user while dreaming. After smoking and drinking an infusion of the leaves, one goes to bed and dreams. In those dreams, one is likely to find lost objects, people and/or animals. On waking, the subject now knows where to go to find those lost objects, people or animals.”
“[Goethe’s] ingenious experiments with pin-holes allowing light into dark rooms, heating his penknife to high temperatures so as to have sheets of color spread across the blade, having films of oil catch the light by dropping oil onto water, brandy and other fluids, opening up fissures in rock crystals, plunging transparent heated glass into water such that the cracks exhibit colors of great beauty, and boiling chocolate so as to observe the color changes spreading across the surface of its bubbles … “
Can holding lots of contradictory opinions be a kind of lateral structural bracing for the mind, making it less likely to collapse under pressure?
“‘Es Dringen Bluten Aus Jedem Zweig’: the tiny mistake of writing a ‘U’ instead of a ‘Ü’ twists the text from ‘flowers blossoming from a branch’ to ‘blood runs out of every branch.’” (Blood runs out of every branch!)