Author Archives: d.perry
“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.”
Throughout his writing on drugs Benjamin circled around the German term Rausch, usually rendered in English as “intoxication” but with deeper resonances: its underlying literal meaning of rush, roar, or thunder and, prominent for Benjamin, Nietzsche’s use of it to denote Dionysian ecstasy, the rending of the veil of appearances to reveal the primal life force. In its grip, as Benjamin wrote in his wanderings around Marseille on hashish, “images and chains of images, long-submerged memories appear”; the borders between subject and object weaken, imagination bleeds into reality, the world comes to life in new ways.
It is not purely a dream or a fantasy but “a continual alternation of dreaming and waking states, a constant and finally exhausting oscillation between totally different worlds of consciousness.” “Intoxication” suggests a transient state of impairment, but Rausch describes an “ecstasy of trance” that holds out the possibility of reenchanting the world without demanding a romantic or religious leap of faith. It is not an effect of the drug per se but “a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium or whatever else can give an introductory lesson.”
In Rausch, as he wrote at the end of his evening on hashish in Marseille, “our existence runs through Nature’s fingers like gold coins that she cannot hold and lets fall so they can thus purchase new birth.”
Excerpts (from https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/08/21/sartres-bad-trip/?fbclid=IwAR0QoM6Qrneq_nLvVMNKi5whUxyU8IAx2e6yIDhukJUt2E3zfGVGCiTmMNg)
“….. Reality shows operate as these sort of gateway drugs to accepting the police state. Meditative, easy to digest shows suggest that being constantly documented is not just acceptable, but it’s to be desired…. “
“No eye may see dispassionately. There is no comprehension at a glance. Only the recognition of damsel, horse or fly and the assumption if damsel, horse or fly; and so with dreams and beyond, for what haunts the heart will, when it is found, leap foremost, blinding the eye and leaving the main of Life in darkness.”
-Peake, Titus Groan, pg. 96
“Let’s drop by Rouen; Duchamp’s grave is there.” I called Teeny Duchamp, who told me to “take a taxi to the grave after getting off the train.” I was still young then, and so I hauled a heavy Portapak to his family grave. The grounds were so huge I didn’t know where to go. His epitaph reads, “It’s always been the others who died.”