“I think when it comes to memory, we are always reinventing everything, i don’t really believe in Funes perfect memory, I think again that these past things leave their marks more like sand traces than life-long scars, and we profit by molding them, not with total liberty, but with a certain degree of ‘poetic license’.”
(A.J.)
this is one of those books that put you in a special state of mind, and keep you in it for a long time. Solaris – The Other and The Alien, which – as such – bounces human mind back to itself literally.
“We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. [...] we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Humans. We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror.”
Solaris comes as a mirror of humanity in two ways: on the one hand, reflecting human inability to understand The Alien, to grasp its life-form. If (in Wittgensteinian terms) language is a form of life, and if communication comes according to rules humans can hardly interpret, then this lack of communication shows the lack of understanding the life form of the other. The only language, the only life form present is the one humans see, the one humans always already see as. And the only kind of understanding emerging from it is the one which tells us something about ourselves and our understanding and our own mind. One the other hand, Solaris reproduces beings kept deep in our psyche, hidden in the deepest parts of our mind. In so far, it reflects human psyche in its entirety. Reflection of Solaris’ reflection is a reflection of ourselves. And the Kantian project comes here in the form: to understand Solaris and its life-form is to understand the condition of possibility of this understanding, that is, to understand ourselves, while the object of thought, the Ocean-in-itself, remains beyond our reach.
“[...] humanity now had to acknowledge the neighborhood, which even though being a billion miles of emptiness away, divided from us by a whole space of light years, still stands on the paths of its expansion, the neighborhood harder to grasp than the whole rest of the Universe.” (my translation)
Solaristics – a scientific discipline devoted to the research of Solaris has come to substantial problems. For (just as Laudan says), in order for a research question to become a recognized scientific problem, the possibility of its solution has to be granted: it has to be a solvable problem. The golden age of Solaristics was over once the possility of answering the crucial questions regarding Solaris started fading away. Mainly the possibility of the Contact. And when an empirical problem looses its status, it becomes a philosophical problem. Solaristics has accordingly become a degenerating research tradition, which bounces science back to epistemology, back to Kant. Something like a punch into the face of naive analytic philosophy?
How a concordance is a book that breaks down all the words of an author and lists them alphabetically, according to how many times they appear, where they appear. Shakespeare, for example, says natural x number of times. Milton says God x times and Satan x times. Imagine having your own concordance: all your words indexed. You could find out how many times you said love. Or yes. Or your name. And what it would be like to discover the concordance of whom you love left by your door one day in August. And what it would be like to hide it under your bed, afraid. And how long it took to look up your own name.
Ray Hsu (Concordance, in “Anthropy”)
***
And would it have been worth it, after all, [...] To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it towards some overwhelming question, To say: ‘ I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’ – If one, settling a pillow by her head, Should say: ‘ That is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all. ‘(T.S.Eliot)
***
The Critique of Metaphor
Two words, just spoken out, touch each other
And dissolve into an unknown meaning
Which has nothing to do with them
For in the head there exists the one and only word
And the poem is being written just that
This word wouldn’t have to be spoken
That’s how words teach each other
That’s how words imagine each other
That’s how words lead one another astray
And a poem is a row of blinded words
But the love of theirs is quite obvious
They live on the account of your comfort
The more beautiful they are, the less strength you have
And when you use all your strengths when you die
People say: really, such good poems he wrote
And nobody doubts the word you have never said
(Branko Miljkovic, (my translation))
***
i have put these three poems in a row since i see each of them reflecting a certain aspect of the (in)finity of language, or making a point which can be related to it. having a concordance of one’s life would be similar to Borges’ Aleph, it would be an attempt at squeezing the universe into a ball. It would all be there, every word as a witness. It would be beautiful and scary at the same time. It would show the insignificance of what seemed to have been significant and the other way around. And yet, the most intriguing words would be noted under zero.
This entry is devoted to something I saw today, which really shocked me. I was going back home from a bio-shop when I saw about 20 young people being on their knees, their faces touching the street. It looked as if it was some strange religious ritual, but then I realized that these people were completely messy, their clothes were full of (already dried out) mud, their hair was sticky from something that looked terrible (might have been mud as well) so I was wondering to what kind of strange religious community they might belong… then it occurred to me that they are actually kneeing in front of another group of young people, equally big if not bigger… the site was impressive. As if gods and goddesses have come to the earth… still, something was rotten in this non-Denmarkian state… So i approached one guy – one of those who were standing – and asked why the other ones were doing that. And i get the following reply: “Oh, they’re becoming the members of our organization so they need to knee to us older members in the sign of greeting!”… I couldn’t believe my ears. “W…w….whhhhat???!!! What an idiot you have to be in order to do that???!” I asked and got as a reply “Oh thanks.”
What an idiot do you have too be to humiliate yourself, accept thise rotten hierarchical system, accept that you are doing this ONLY because you are a *new member*, so that you can become one of THEM, so that next year you can be just the same asshole, just the same pathetic mind, without any critical thinking, the mind which gave up morality, which follows the rules, which had a its chance to become moral, which was moral in one tiny second throughout which it said Yes, thus accepting the rules of the group pressure and its “collective will”…
I can see them replying “ahh, you don’t understand, this is only fun!” – but no, poor minds, there is nothing not to understand, you don’t live in a different language game, you don’t belong to a long forgotten tribe or some lost part of civilization with its own rituals which we first need to understand before being able to speak of it. No, you live in this society which knows for racism, which knows for the notion of human rights, of the notion of humiliation and moral consciousness. But you still say yes for the sake of being part of the group, for the sake of benefits which the group will give you, and you don’t wonder if maybe you should once in your life question the “authority” (hahaha, how crazy ridiculous it sounds to create an authority out of some pathetic small minds who are the members BECAUSE they are the members!) … Opportunism as a ticket to ride… DISGUSTING.
Christian and I talked today at the lunch time about the universe being determined to take a particular path, it rolls on and on, taking only one path, one possibility out of infinitely many different ones; but then at some point it develops certain form of consciousness – for example, us humans, – which can think of other possibilities, other directions, other lives of the universe. It’s almost as if the universe compensates its only-one-way by creating minds that can imagine what it itself lacks…
(It’s funny that we came to this topic by discussing how to clean all the dirty dishes in our new kitchen which has no cupboards nor a dishwasher, and Christian said that maybe we should just skip the cleaning part cause, after all, it’s not impossible that our dishes might decompose into a perfectly clean kitchen :) Well, it really isn’t impossible, but it’s zillion times less probable than winning in lottery five times in a row. But then comes an interesting point: if we extend the time to some extremely high measures, it all gets more probable, and not only that but also for example, the possibility that our kitchen turns into a dog or a bear :) It’s interesting that everyday language often deals with various (not very probable) possibilities as complete impossibilities – we need to protect our minds from being overwhelmed by an uncontrollable world; we need to set reference-pillars, “hinge-propositions” that will give us coordinates so we don’t feel completely lost… we need to squeeze the universe into a ball although that won’t be it, that won’t be it, at all…)
The sky above the port in the colour of television tuned to a dead channel is all that remains
Your body spilt over my body
Brings reality to seeing
Read the book. It’s hard to write about it in one note, so this is just an intro, or something like the first impressions… The favorite game of leaving footprints in the snow made by accidental figures – that’s all that remains… for some reason i need to bring these Octavio Paz’s lines:
...the unreality of the seen
transparency is all that remains
Your footsteps in the next room...
…
Was L. B. only a faker, a lost personality, stretched between different cultures and demands of society… or was he driven by the realization of the value of moments and their disappearance once they are prolonged, shaped into a socially acceptable form, extended into what we are or what we become once we let it all roll down… or was he someone who couldn’t accept the fact that he wasn’t what he hoped he’d be or maybe he just wanted to watch himself from a distance, leaving things as they were and himself involved in them as it all was… a bit like Orasio Oliveira from Cortazar’s Hopscotch… home – away – back home, but home isn’t home anymore, and you are not you and it’s all good as long as it remains untouched, just a trace laying in a snow, until it melts or the new snow falls over it.
It’s been a while since I last posted something on here. Too much to study… I’ve seen bunch of great movies, so maybe I’ll drop a comment on them soon… maybe not. I’ll definitely write about L.Cohen’s book The Favorite Game soon, it has some great points for discussion.
Today Christian and I concluded that nowadays philosophy is so messy, people are trying to publish as much as possible and as a result, we get bunch of texts based on insufficient education or insufficiently read literature. But nobody complains, cause the more slippery articles we have, the more room for the criticism of them, hence more publishing.
Another thing you get in nowadays (mainly anglosaxon) philosophy is such an ignorance towards traditional philosophical terms (but that’s nothing new, right…). Terms like transcedent and transcendental or ontic and ontological are so often used either interchangeably… bah
Divertimento, the first novel of Julio Cortazar.
When we were still playing life… that’s what Divertimento is about. This playing of life which comes to the point of “growing up”, growing out, the life awaits, and the games should be left behind. But the notion of game is ambiguous here… Playing because of playing, playing because one needs to remain detached from reality bares a risky path to the vanity. Not a vanity towards reality (reality – one of the most abused words ever) or “real life”… no, not that. This is a vanity which comes from isolating art from everything. (I’d say a vanity of trying to be a-political, in the broadest sense of this word… but I won’t go into that now).
The story is circular, almost like in this great movie Doni Darko. It’s the search for knots only in order to have something to unknot, creating them even there where there are no knots, just to prolong the game, while the game prolongs itself towards its end, as the string has an end, even when it’s rolled in a ball… I guess some of us love to search for the knots… it’s the feeling of complexity of reality, of its details and beauty (-> knitted scarf) But they were creating them so that they could search for them, leading themselves to the realization of this fact, painting a sword, which will cut the string… Pity noone realized that sword-fight could be a game too…
Ha!
What do you think? I had left?
You’re mistaken.
I was only standing out at the gate
– with a golden grin –
waiting to hear your laughter
at my assumed departure.
No, I cannot leave –
howsoever much “you and I” may grieve –
for I’m your conscience that’s asleep
“Asleep…tired…or it malingers”!
And if that’s a joke, you see, it was TSE –
or, to be more precise, his compound ghost –
who implored me not to leave, saying:
“There will be time, there will be time…”
And yes, I agreed.
Indeed, there will be time
to leave.
~ CR
