Author Archives: d.perry

“The Birth of Tragedy is driven by the famous contrast between Apollo and Dionysus, “the two art deities of the Greeks,” and by the “tremendous opposition, in origin and aims, between the Apollonian art of sculpture and the nonimagistic Dionysian art of music” (BT 1). Nietzsche aims to show that Attic tragedy represents the truce between, and the union of, Dionysus and Apollo, and that it also resolves an assortment of other oppositions in Greek theology, art, culture, psychology, and metaphysics that can be keyed to the Dionysian/Apollonian opposition: the Titans/the Olympians, lyric poetry/ epic poetry, the Asiatic-barbarian/the Hellenic, music/sculpture, intoxication/dreams, excess/measure, unity/individuation, pain/pleasure, etc.

The Apollonian affirms the principium individuationis, “the delimiting of the boundaries of the individual, measure in the Hellenic sense” (BT 4). The Dionysian, by contrast, affirms “the mysterious primordial unity” (BT 1 and passim), “the shattering of the individual and his fusion with primal being” (BT 8). The Apollonian is associated with “moderation” and “restraint,” the Dionysian with “excess” (BT 4, 21). The Apollonian is concerned with pleasure and the production of beautiful semblance, while the Dionysian is fraught with “terror,” “blissful ecstasy,” “pain and contradiction” (BT 1, 5 and passim). The Apollonian celebrates the human artist and hero, while the Dionysian celebrates the individual artist’s dissolution into nature, which Nietzsche calls the “primordial artist of the world” (BT 5; cf. 1, 8).

The Apollonian is a gallery of “appearances,” “images,” and “illusions,” while the Dionysian consists in the perpetual creation and destruction of appearances. “In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism,” Nietzsche writes, “nature cries to us with its true, undissembled voice: ‘Be as I am! Amid the ceaseless flux of appearances, I am the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to existence, eternally finding satisfaction in this change of appearances!’” (BT 16, cf. 8; WP 1050).

Nietzsche insists on the reality of “alteration,” “change,” and “becoming,” noting that only a “prejudice of reason forces us to posit unity,6 identity, permanence, substance, cause, thinghood [and] being” (TI,“ ‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” 5; cf. GS 110, 112, 121). A few pages earlier, Nietzsche calls unity, thinghood, substance, and permanence “lies,” praising Heraclitus “for his assertion that being is an empty fiction,” and praising the senses for telling the truth by showing “becoming, passing away, and change.”

“It [AMM] continues to want to play and in playing fails; appears at times to be succeeding then fails and fails. The paradox is that continual failure on one plane is the root of success on another […] We certainly must not look for failure any more than for success.”

Ole Worm

“Other empirical investigations he conducted included providing convincing evidence that lemmings were rodents and not, as some thought, spontaneously generated by the air (Worm 1655, p. 327), and also by providing the first detailed drawing of a bird-of-paradise proving that they did, despite much popular speculation to the opposite, indeed have feet like regular birds.”

Sans Soleil – The Wonderful Chris Marker

“Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound… disembodied.

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I’ve heard this sentence: “The partition that separates life from death does not appear so thick to us as it does to a Westerner.” What I have read most often in the eyes of people about to die is surprise. What I read right now in the eyes of Japanese children is curiosity, as if they were trying—in order to understand the death of an animal—to stare through the partition.

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In Portugal—raised up in its turn by the breaking wave of Bissau—Miguel Torga, who had struggled all his life against the dictatorship wrote: “Every protagonist represents only himself; in place of a change in the social setting he seeks simply in the revolutionary act the sublimation of his own image.”

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One would have to read their last letters to learn that the kamikaze weren’t all volunteers, nor were they all swashbuckling samurai. Before drinking his last cup of saké Ryoji Uebara had written: “I have always thought that Japan must live free in order to live eternally. It may seem idiotic to say that today, under a totalitarian regime. We kamikaze pilots are machines, we have nothing to say, except to beg our compatriots to make Japan the great country of our dreams. In the plane I am a machine, a bit of magnetized metal that will plaster itself against an aircraft carrier. But once on the ground I am a human being with feelings and passions. Please excuse these disorganized thoughts. I’m leaving you a rather melancholy picture, but in the depths of my heart I am happy. I have spoken frankly, forgive me.”

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I wonder how people remember things who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.

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“what does ‘together’ signify in a socioeconomic system so efficient in producing alienation and isolation?

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In order to be heard, Pettman remarks, and “in order to be considered a voice at all”, and therefore as “something worth heeding”, the vox mundi “must arrive intimately, or else it is experienced as noise or static” (Pettman 83). In both the projects discussed here—Saturday and Walk That Sound—the walkie-talkie provides this means of “intimate arrival”.

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the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. (5-6)

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I felt strangely attached to, and disconnected from, those pathways: lanes where I had rummaged for conkers; streets my grandparents had once lived and worked on; railways demolished because of roads which now existed, leaving only long, straight pathways through overgrown countryside suffused with time and memory. The oddness I felt might be an effect of what Wood describes as a “certain doubleness”, “where homesickness is a kind of longing for Britain and an irritation with Britain: sickness for and sickness of” (93-94).

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as a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative […] James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop of style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. (21)

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Sophie Cunningham says that we walk to get from one place to the next, but also to insist that “what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present” (Cunningham).

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homelooseness

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excerpts (from https://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1581 and elsewhere)

Peradam is a word from René Daumal’s novel Mount Analogue, which was the source for Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain. In the book ‘Peradam’ is an object that is revealed only when someone knows they are seeking it.

‘Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when everyone has to throw off his mask? / Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? / Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this?’, written by Søren Kierkegaard in 1843.

“The world was like a leather bag filled with water, he once wrote, and at the bottom of the world was a puncture: time seeped out of it, drop by drop.

Time was like a whirlpool.

Time could be stopped if you stood between the sun and a sundial.

The present moment could be sometimes like the Mekong or Bangkok’s Chao Phraya: a vast river. The past and future were tributaries that sometimes overflowed their own banks, and spilled into each other.

Time was like a palace’s great hall, with partitions that could be taken away. Every instant that would ever be, or had ever been, might be seen all at once.

Sand pouring from a woman’s shoe: the most enchanting hourglass in the world.

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Will you abide in a world in which the spirit is dead and there is only a reverence for life?

“Once I have started, then I can be quite fast. In other words, I write fast but I have huge blank periods. It’s a bit like the story of the great Chinese artist—the emperor asked him to draw a crab, and the artist answered, I need ten years, a great house, and twenty servants. The ten years went by, and the emperor asked him for the drawing of the crab. I need another two years, he said. Then he asked for a further week. And finally he picked up his pen and drew the crab in a moment, with a single, rapid gesture.”