EYELIGHT

THE INFINITE PROJECT

DRAFT TWO

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is internationally acclaimed for his inventive installations and video and performance pieces, many of which use iconic imagery taken from childhood and popular culture combined with sexually charged and transgressive elements. In summer 2003,[ . . . . . . . .] is installing two enormous inflatable sculptures, Blockhead and Daddies Bighead, outside Tate Modern, London. Blockhead revisits one of [ . . . . .] trademark characters, a mutant cartoon character with a Pinocchio nose emerging from its cuboid head. More than 110 feet high, the inflatable sculpture is hollow, allowing

made installations our of shopping bags from designer stores, with the wrapped, luxury product still inside. But…............................

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One morning, Jan 2017 I was up early and saw something I rarely see as I usually get up at 9 am. The sunset was beautiful though. I am looking from my house toward the Tamaki Estuary.

I talked shop with this fellow as this was the kind of work I did for a long time as a lineman and cable jointer. Here a contractor has cut a telephone cable. He is jointing a lead-sheathed cable to a plastic cable. It feeds the cable box on the pole behind. The lead-sheathed cable comes from a larger joint. Chorus now also have fibre optic options at most cable boxes (on poles or in the 'underground' systems).

In the mainly working class area I am in sometimes the gardens are quite beautiful. The mix of ethnicities has changed since I was a boy in this area, when it was mostly Pakeha with some Maori and perhaps one or two Chinese and Polynesians. Then from the 80s to about now there was a huge increase in Pacific Island people. More recently as well as Chinese and Indian and other Asian nationalities, just about every nationality and ethnicity are in evidence. With house prices rising in Auckland where I am specifically house prices have risen. Now there is a mix of European (usually fairly well to do or tradesmen or professional people) and Maori, Tongan, Samoan etc and others (Turkish, Indian, Italian,....the list goes on). Also European or Pakeha.

Guy Fawkes 2014. Fireworks.

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The Yearly Panmure Xmas and Santa Parade Event 2014

The Maori group doing the haka and other dances.

A Tongan group.

The Vintage Car Group

Reflects the early European 'pioneer days'.

The increasing Chinese community.

Bueautiful young Rarotongan women. With the increase in general
obesity among PI people this is, this decade at least, sadly, a rare sight.

Obesity is an increasingly major health issue world wide and especially

with Pacific Island people. Poverty and other factors are indicative.

Some of the groups.

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terrain

concealment (debased simulacrum

marvellous bathos bathos inadequacy

It is this inadequacy of the sign as fetish that exposes the sophisticated and expensive mechanisms whereby an object or a sign is convincingly transformed. Surfaces between the object and subject, the concealment of the gap between authentic experience and debased simulacrum, between aspiration and realisation, aren’t cheap – you have to pay those brand magazines, food photographers, and graphic artists.

On the one hand, Dyer’s work of the past decade seems familiarly postmodern. Grand gestures are futile, and in place of hard work or exacting thought there is sex and drugs and clubbing, and various kinds of mind-bending music. Everything is unfinishable, belated, and philosophically twilit. The Owl of Minerva can barely crank its wings open—no doubt because it has become a fat urban pigeon, toddling between cafés for cultural leftovers. The books turn themselves inside out, like the Pompidou Center, displaying their inner workings. The book about Lawrence becomes a book about failing to write about Lawrence; a projected work about the ruins of antiquity (mentioned in “Yoga” ) gets nowhere— “Such a book would one day lie in ruins about me.” But, of course, Dyer’s books do get written: interesting books about boredom, successful books about failure, complete books about incompletion. And one can see that, far from enacting an easy ironic resignation, Dyer is really a late Romantic, a flâneur out of Rilke (but with a vinegary English dash of Kingsley Amis), eager to experience as much as possible, to travel and fall in love and meet new people, and wary of writing and reading, because, although they preserve such experience, they do so at a mimetic remove. The problem for the Romantic is that, in order to have anything to write about, he has to live—i.e., not be writing. Not for nothing is D. H. Lawrence, the savage pilgrim, Dyer’s great model.

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I read two books of reviews and essays by Dyer. Dyer, from a working class family, made it via a scholarship to Oxford. There he studied literature etc and was able to live on the dole. After finishing, and trying one job which was an anathema to him, he settled into a flat, and lived (mostly) on the dole for about 20 years. He wrote journalistic reviews and essays and later novels. In contrast to his parents, who were not only workaholics at work, but worked mowing lawns and other chores and energetic things even on the weekends, Dyer spent his time writing, smoking pot, dallying with young women. Later he managed to travel The favourite essay (he writes great reviews of photography books and also writes about Rilke and Rodin. I like him had read some D H Lawrence as well as Pig Earth by John Berger. This is somewhat of the harsh depiction of peasant life as Earth by Zola. Berger, who Dyer also wrote about, also did an art documentary and produced his famous book Ways of Seeing.

One of my favourite essays is Dyer's search (by now his novels had sold and he traveled somewhat) for the perfect coffee and donut. The place had to be right. He needed to see mostly the same waiter or waitress but not to engage in conversation too much. It had to be perfect....

I am similar to Dyer in my massive ability to procrastinate when it comes to writing. But in my life I have had about 50 jobs. Almost all of those were labouring or factory or storeman jobs. Then I trained as a lineman as a young married man with a son. Before that I had worked at Berger Paints in Panmure and then I think it was Fletcher's Fibre-Glass plant on shift work. When I "retired" in 1987 I then started a business which failed, and two other (one fencing, the other clearing rubbish).

Of those factory jobs and my time at the Railway Workshops and many other places including the freezing works there are many interesting and amusing stories or events and people I met. I will add these to my I Project and or Eyelight (probably on my other Blog which is a part of Eyelight but which I call the 'control' Blog. ................................................................................

Dyer has written books about failure and indeed via his American namesake, the popular psychologist philosopher Dr. Wayne Dyer, whose philosophy and ideas have assisted myself in my life: this brings me to my theme or one of my concepts I wish to expound and that is the concept of 'failure.' (And by association, 'error'.) Indeed it is what I call THE NECESSITY OF FAILURE. I will expand on it. But it is that we put too much emphsis on fame and monetary success etc while neglecting the need to be able to fail or 'stuff up' at things and yet to still know that one can consider oneself a worthy being. Nor is it necessary to produce "great works" or to be able to quote endless facts and figures, get wonderful academic results or anything. It would be nice to win Lotto but you can fail an win lotto also! The point is that the real test of a person's intelligence is the way he or she is able to be happy in most areas of life and to know that making errors, having problems (being short of money and incurring illness, having to do repairs, trying things and 'failing' (but of course in reality it is only failure if you thus define it. This is where we can learn from animals. The white dog just barks. It doesn't try to out do the brown or the other dog. Animals, and humans are just complex animals it seems, don't compete over such things. We need to live every moment of our lives as intensely as we can and maybe live as long as we can, knowing that if (say) "making it" in some way or acheiving certains goals cause anxiety and depression: and block our deep enjoyment of life, then we have reached what Dyer calls and erroneous zone. We are attempting something wanting an external reward.(So people become over obsessed with winning all the time).

In the same way each of us can define our own intelligence.We are all intelligent if we know there are difficulties in life that we cannot always solve but we can be maximally happy. We have to ask what good has say, the "wonderful achievement" of scientists done us if that has lead to nuclear bombs, wars, and so on. That is if we have to pay with the benefits with seeing now the planet possibly in a terminal decline. So it is that mathematics is less important than say learning a language or doing art or just doing anything one enjoys doing. Thus we have too many competitions, famous people, film stars, Presidents, and so on. Each of us on this earth are valuable.

We are thus all valuable or none of us is. "Love one another" it says

in the New Testament. I believe that the Koran also has messages of mercy. Unfortunately history has not dealt kindly with the Islamic people or the people of the colonized nations. Their religion deriving like the Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism, ultimately derive from Hinduism as in ancient texts such as the Muhabaratta.

Richard Taylor 1 circa 1976

Kiddeater - first my daughter's then Mum and mine, then mine.

she died in 2006....I played Mozart's Requiem over many times

that day....I do not place humans above animals....

Richard Taylor 15a circa 1968. The child was the daughter of Glen Turner's sister:

taken at his place in Bagnall Ave GI. Glenn and I played chess "matches" at his place.

Glenn mostly won. Working class people and very kind, Glenn's father Mal was a

communist and sold The People's Voice in the area. I later got interested in reading

that. Glenn in a typical father-son struggle had violent arguments an even physical

fights with his father....

Maungarei (Mt Wellington) crater with the side of the

water reservoir showing. Maori lived on and around

the mountain. Middens and terracing as well as remains

of kumara pits and locations of different whare can be

seen.

Our planet was covered with lush growth and

impenetrable forests long before man made his

appearance. In these difficult conditions his travel was

restricted by trees, but these also afforded him

protection. He looked upon trees as his parents and

general providers. His kinship was even closer than to his brothers of the animal world; and as animals differed, so did trees; some were beneficient [sic.] while others were cruel. With the incessant play of natural forces they also had beauty, sound and movement.dd caption

11kv to ~400v transformer.

I think this spiral inscribed stone at the Tamaki Estuary I found one day might

commemorate or mark where approx. the Mokoia Pah once stood before

Hongi Hika attacked it about 1840-50 or so. But I am not sure it is a mystery.

Dionne my second child and other images.

My father in law. Polo Manoah.

My father, Leslie Stuart Taylor.

The Endless Book
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The Endless Book is a "project" I set myself from about 1998. In 'K Road' I found a note book whose size and shape I knew I wanted. It was in a Trash and Treasure shop in St. Kevin's Arcade. It even had an ex-owner's name. Because I liked the line spacing, and the paper, and the rounded edges I knew I wanted to fill it with words.

What would I write in it? The answer was anything. I would just write. There would be no plan as to what to write as, such a plan would probably mean I wouldn't write in it or make any progress in it (or with it). I would simply write whatever occurred to me each time I made an entrance. This eventually became only when I was somewhere in town or anywhere like that and or I was at a coffee bar, often just after I had indulged my other obsession, that is buying second hand books. Or I was in 'K Road' at Starbucks which I liked, or in Panmure or anywhere where I had my book.The restrictions and rules for my writing were only these. One: the book would have no full stops.Two: Nor would it start with a capital letter. Three: There would be no full stops or question marks. Questions were to be posed as questions. The book would start in medias res so to speak, and at the end it would simply stop when I ran out of pages....unlike Finnegans Wake it would not circulate,that is it would instead appear as if it were an endless stream of words.

Each time I stopped writing I would leave of with something such as: '... and it was now, this day,that my thoughts turn to.....' Ready for the next entry. By the time I wrote in it again (this took place at random times, nor did I know what I was about to say although I might refer to the place I was in or to a book I had just borrowed from a library or the scene around or somewhat to something previously said) I would just continue with a quick look through some of what I had written. But it rarely had much if anything to do with what had been said before, but I would glance through it each time.

Another rule (I realize I have stopped numbering)....was that whatever happened to the book would be part of the book and in a sense of course the book was a kind of sub-Infinite Book. It would in theory be a unique book: thus not even really publishable as publishing it would ruin its integrity although I have never been certain of that. The book in fact, forgotten by me, lay in the bottom of an old Holden I had had for some years to carry books to the Saturday K Road Markets where I sold books from 1998 to 2004 when I broke my leg. (I then started playing competitive and club chess again). Later I found it. Rain water used to accumulate in the passenger's side of the car until I drilled a hole in the floor! Lots of it were rather ruined and some I could write over. By now my eyesight was worse and I saw it as a mass of words, in fact this happens to me with some of my other writing.....

In any case that it was bent by the water and changed etc by nature if you like. I liked this after the initial annoyance. It was now 'of the process' and a part of the totality so to speak. So I let this be a part of what this 'project' was or is. That parts of it had now mysteriously disappeared I also liked....the gaps were created also by chance. I know some conceptual artists use this idea, so in a sense this is also a conceptual art work; although I don't like putting anything I do into any category of art or poetry: I like to think of it as just a process no more or less important than eating

or whatever else people do in life.

The important thing was to fill it up with words and maybe ideas or gestures toward ideas and meaning if meaning there was. Quotes and conversations or random observations, nothing was to be certain or planned. Thus another 'rule' is that it is process, or of the process as outlined (so the water damage is part of it).. I know this is an old idea but it is central to EYELIGHT as well as The Endless Book, although at first and possibly now it still except by my placing it here, was or is not necessarily part of the totality of The Infinite Project....contradictorily a few pages of it I had published in one of the Brief Magazines edited by Jack Ross. It was in script. It is of course, thus a different book, but the same.Again I am relatively indifferent to the book. It is true I am fond of it, but I doubt I will have the energy to 'transcribe' it, although, indeed some of it is in one of the issues of the magazine Brief. As it is I can hardly read much of what I have written there as my handwriting is terrible. However I have enjoyed writing it. I think I have been intermittently adding to it for about 16 years now! In theory it was to be a unique book of which there was one copy. Again the idea of it being a book was possibly more interesting than its being 'finished' or worked on over and over or edited and so on. These marks on the Endless Book are just that: marks. All our marks will eventually disappear. Or will they? We live as if this were not the case. It is, in any case, an example of an idea-object, a kind of conceptual art work perhaps like those decaying things that some artists photograph, or in one case someone had a photograph of a place as well as say a recording of ice melting. There are things such as Richard Long's conceptual works. Long walks across parts of England leaving his trace. But there are other similar conceptual art ideas.

More re Richard Long here: Richard Long

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Victor about 2006

People criticise 'suburbia' and 'consumerism' and so on, but I love these suburban houses. I am glad to have been able to live in such an area. This level of wealth is all one needs. We also naturally consume things or why would we exist on earth? We are complex animals and as such, we consume.

I also value banks and credit systems and money itself. These wonderful parts of

capitalism are what saved the people of the Western World after the depression.

the painting is responsible, to a degree, for its own dissolution

rather than parodying (the) ‘conceptual confusion that exists between understanding materiality and vision, expressed in the usual symbiosis between materiality and vision, expressed in the usual symbiosis between material and support…by endangering the conventional relation between the two.’
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Airedale Street where Auckland's main telephone exchange used to be and may still be.

In Wellesley Street there was a rotary telephone exchange, which in the 70s to 80s was already outdated compared to the other BPO 'step by step' exchanges. Then cross bar exchanges were introduced and then slowly the switching systems were basically computer controlled. They and some of the earlier systems can actually look ahead and 'decide' the lowest traffic trunks for the most efficient switching. The old Wellesley Street exchange has since been dismantled. An Auckland sculptor who I used to see around used part of it in a sculpture. I think some of it is preserved. It was rotary. Inside the exchange there was a continuous noise as long rotating shafts with gears engaged other shafts with gears set at 45 degrees. Exactly how they worked I forget now. They used relays but were more electro-mechanical and it all looked a bit like Babbit's computer (which, with persistence, would have worked). The step by step exchanges use many relays and each phone owner or user has a designated 'place' which is automatically sought by the first 'finder' when a person lifts his telephone. Simultaneously dial tone is applied via a parallel circuit. This tone indicates you are ready to dial. Now across 50 volts each turn of the dial causes the relay to respond by moving up. So the first two numbers might be 37. In NZ this means that the relay bank moves up 7 places then turns 3. (The reverse of other countries). This refers to the old and indeed obsolete dial phones. The later exchanges were designed to respond to a dial or a push button phone generating a tone. From the Airedale Street the main cables radiate out and spread out like the slowly decreasing sizes of the branches of trees.

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Graffiti on the railway bridge near Maungarei.

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When I saw these they reminded me of J G Ballard's Crash. These are by the Mt. Wellington Fire Brigade station and training facility. The cars are used to practice rescues and fire drill and so on. The graffiti artists or vandals, however one feels or thinks of them, get onto these also.

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That peril comes in a large part from commitment to process '....it is of the process.'

-the use of the entropic by Smithson Peter Peri the detail was so great that the real seemed to overwhelm itself, and become abstract
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Mysterious signs written by the Council. I classify this also as part of my graffiti art.

The Auckland City Council put the rates up every year. And not much is gained by anyone who pays rates except that they get poorer.............................................

But not much has changed. My father, as an architect for Hellabies Meat Company, had to deal with what he called 'The shitty council.' This was because of the mass of Soviet style red tape that still clogs the Council. When you try to contact them, you have to wait listening to terrible canned music. Then generally you find no one can help you. The Council now controls the entire "Auckland are" which is a big part of the land area of the North Island if not the whole of NZ. ....................

Now they have security people in libraries bothering me about wearing my hat. As if somehow preventing people wearing hats might make the library safer. The Council are all massively over paid and contribute very little to Auckland. Meanwhile they keep increasing rates year by year. The only good Mayor we ever had was Sir Dove Myer Robinson who made sure we got a good sewerage system. He also wanted an electric rail network, using systems he had seen in the US and Japan but he wasn't listened to in the 70s. Now the traffic has massively increased and the Council and Government spend millions. These millions of tunnels and more concrete and less trees achieve nothing.

We are entering the age of J G Ballard's Crash .......... ..............................................................................

It's great for some! ......................................

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Hang it all Ezra Pound! There is your instantaneity of history, your staring through and out of time, and my staring. Hang it all!

WHAT AM I ?

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‘She exults – she exults as she –

… she wants to absorb him. She wants to draw him out and absorb him. She wants to draw him out and absorb him until there is nothing left of him, even for himself.

a-n-d baa` a'ttt led and broooded bitterly

WHERE DID DAVE THE LOCAL ALCI GET TO?

[his body roused to a wave of flame by her hands

and so the mother sat

WHAT!?

…not only brings a critique of the process of sign - the destination of the sign – she returns, by a rather unexpected route, to that subject for Art which so concerned the post-minimalist generation – the phenomenological relation of subject and object

…Silver-coated with Humbol enamel, McCarthy’s humble plastic bottles and boxes assumed the allure of ‘designer packaging’ – those disposable wrappings of luxury goods that, despite their ample disposability, make the completely frivolous, completely necessary – so that containers for toilet cleaner or fabric conditioner started to look like video cameras. [65] Here she was, perhaps exploring the same terrain as the Swiss artist

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How do we surmount the problem in art and writing and in indeed other areas of human endeavour of moving toward or of operating in one style or modality only? Specifically in literature, how do we or I accommodate say 'confessionalism' which I both like and don't like, and other modes that I like such as multiplex and or complex writing, and also 'philosophic writing, history, the mundane of us all, politics and popular and other culture and in fact all aspects of human activity and interests, and of all languages cultures, religions? And how to be both complex and maybe strange and or beautiful or at least stimulating (or dull or whatever) and also delve into things many people think are not interesting as well as those the working people and people of the world interest themselves in, as well as taking in, so to speak, the more strange and intense and perhaps challenging aspects of human knowledge or endeavours as well as our failures and ongoing lives in all aspects of these? This is part of the problematic I address here: or I try to do so...

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GOD SIMULTANEOUSLY IS AND IS NOT. THIS MAY SEEM IMPOSSIBLE AND TO VIOLATE THE LAW OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE: BUT IT CAN BE SHOWN THAT ALL EPISTEMOLOGIES AND ALL PROOFS EITHER FOR OR AGAINST THE EXISTENCE OF A SUPREME BEING ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO VERIFY IN A NON-LIMITED SYSTEM.......

This is indeed part of a complex philosophic system I have evolved. However it doesn't really go beyond certain basic epistemological laws (I am mainly interested here in the knowledge problems requiring belief, justification of belief, and that a thing be true as some of the criteria and these methods are well known. Added to this is my use of either an 'everyday' or what I call a kind of Wittgensteinian-Humean Space [a normative "field" which in fact we all operate, and in fact we have to, as philosophers and indeed as humans whoever we are, remain mostly in this "space"]; simply put it is Hume's concept of common sense and Wittgenstein's and Hobbes' recognition of the problematic nature of language operating in the huge [real pseudo-Absolute] gaps in what might be a continuum in any Perfect Logic Computer as postulated by Turing and indeed to possibly overcome the limitations or problems that "infinitize" in Escheric moebs or crazyloops as I coin them: that is the contradictions such as Russell's Paradox and other antinomies encountered by Russell and Whitehead in their attempt to establish mathematics on to a logical basis: in fact to set logical sequences and certainties in a beautiful and seemingly perfect system. Even if this, by the way, had succeeded (and the achievement of such as Russell and Whitehead is huge), then not only language, but indeed hiding behind -- metaphorically of course -- the Devil of Epistemological non verifiability would still stare insanely and imperatively up from the endless lacunae hidden in the infinita of the Continuum. These lacunae expand at a near-infinite speed (or take infinite time to reveal themselves): the effect is of say Flaubert's The Temptations of St. Antony modulated and multiplied to a great exponential number and gone totally crazed, full of dancing colour while Antony who is seeking 'truth' and is constantly tempted (he finally merges into the totality of living things in a kind of gnostic frenzy as he embraces the power of the eternal double bond of the Excluded Middle allowed: and he can only fly amazed in the unlimited universe "without end"; as indeed his Devil, rightly, explains: here the universe is seen as infinite but even a "finite" universe contains inside its impossibility and complexity, infinite unfolding potentials of garish or beautiful to hallucinatory rippulations into the dark shuddering ecstatic insane of unkowablility sets All alight....

...and yet all we require is that a person not believe [not in some old-fashioned theological sense] and by this I (and anyone else) would have to understand this strange phenomena called belief or to believe or to phenomelogically accept. This is not a credo, it is a state whereby the mind-spirit-psyche in some way probably never to be known by science [as indeed science cannot operate without philosophy and religion and logic-illogical methods; and it cannot operate in some totally objective field, no thing or ideation can survive the vacuum of such total neo-absurdity: the angels of Illogic, rightly, would destroy such with their Burn Bombs...]: that is some action, complex and through time, perhaps even involving quantum jumps and jerks (but we don't need to invoke quantum mechanics at this stage); what we are searching for is something like a movie slowed down, and slowed down: just as we might magnify a thing to be studied, or analyse it with x-rays, or whatever but in this endless slowing and expanding what we begin to focus on is a local infinity, and indeed, it is known from such as Cantor that these infinities, these immense abysses of impossibility and terrible beauty are fragmented into universes of beginnings that add to no endings and add themselves to further expanding beginnings....we chase nothingness....we are lost. But if we can go to a lower level of absoluteness, to a transfinite level, and allow ourselves enough such levels, we might arrive at what we commonly call belief [but we have assumed Language, and this we must or we enter further spider infested loops and spirals]: this belief or unbelief [these are interchangeable and require a kind of inner Kierkergardian 'leap of faith'], if this oscillating beleivunbeleivedednessmess we would allow this and be confronted by the incontrovertible ability or fact that a human being [and we are in a subjective space, there are no objective facts as such, no "real" (even if we can define 'real' or 'reality' themselves as a conceptions) knowledge actually grasped or graspable via any knowledge system as indeed belief , this strange state we cannot ever understand any more than we can consciousness itself; belief can at anytime and for any reason become unbelief. A that is A can become, in my universe, not A. The Law of the Excluded Middle operates in the 'real' world, which is social world constructed by language. And indeed as we communicate we never totally or absolutely "connect" as far as we can ascertain. That is the nature and complexity of the world we are in, that is the Earth alone, is so enormous, that there is no way of ascertaining any certainty of knowledge as knowledge requires belief. And even in the "simpler" albeit poetic scenario of the huge opening gaps of a renewed St. Antony or indeed of a revitalized and resurrected Flaubert, say the Flaubert of Bouvard and Pecuchet: even there we might cross the gulf but looking aside we see glaring at us the non-perfect-continuum or the non-continuum of Language itself.....

But if we accept a lower level of urgency, a normative field, the one we play or live on daily: the one where we accept the laws of thermodynamics, those of Newton, that we must love our children or our fellows and that we generally aim to live in goodness and so on, then we can find a workable reality, a form of progress, a form of reality. We do this so as to stay sane, and I join you in this, living in hope: hoping that good people can bring about positive changes and so on. For this, of course we all know, we need love.

This is the "space" we need to work in. But there are ominous voices calling. We cannot ignore either several thousands of years of human thought and struggle or the postulations of the philosophers: and indeed we can begin with Plato (though the pre-Socratic philosophers, the Chinese and more we must remember but will get to them in due time).

Living with Impossibility: How G is Simultaneously and Eternally not-G. By Richard Taylor.

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Who?

Do I inhabit that genetic engine of the other dream in the hidden house - or do I fall upon the bleeds of life wicked in the woods?
Make me thy lyre ... make me liar. Ha! My bride ... be leaf. Ha Ha-ha-ha Ha!!

om 37 Some examples of who or what i ....

Who?

Do I inhabit that genetic engine of the other dream in the hidden house - or do I

fall upon the bleeds of life wicked inn the woods?

Make me thy lyre ... make me liar. Ha! My bride ... be leaf. Hakka!!

Back of the RH wall of my room the self portrait is one my father did of himself perhaps before leavng from London to come to NZ about1926 or so. The "abstract' was done by T The painting in black and brown to the left beside Parmigianino's Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror and just beneath my father's self-portrait was given to me by the poet and artist and my good friend Nick Owens. He died of heart failure about 1995. His poetry in At All Times When Loving is excruciatingly beautiful and moving poetry - especially when one knows some of the tragic aspect of his life - as I do. He also worked at the Whitecliff Art School at one stage teaching photography.

My children went there for art lessons some years.

Parmigianino was a mannerist artist who John Ashbery must have been fascinated in or by - he was at one stage an art critic - he took this self portrait in a convex mirror as the starting point of his Pulitzer Prize winning poetry book Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. It is fascinating. I did a pastiche of it which is possibly of equal brilliance or

it's rubbish

(I possess a book about Mannerism

"where sub speciae aeternitatis is my little joke"

there is also pile of my ex library collection of novels by Joyce Carol Oates - I recommend her short stories and Bellefleur - a book that is one of the most agonisingly brilliant books I have ever read. I blundered onto Oates via a book - the only book I have read by Updike [since writing this I have read (a lot of) his Rabbit Series and In The Beauty of the Lilies ] - a book about books - called Odd Jobs

Yearsago - briefly I was in the Cubs - I couldn't ever tie my woggle - but we used to do "bob a job" - but because I was embarrassed by my inability - my failure - my terrible failure - to tie the woggle - I drifted out of the Scouts. My father was in the second scout group ever formed - at Chiswick London. In the Scout den they put all the hundreds of pictures and drawings he had on all around the walls. he went to Copenhagen one year to a Jamboree and he said that the Germans were the best singers - the singing was beautiful.

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I ( and him also) love Bach's Cantatas

he is here

The English are kind and gentle. My grandmother loved me (she made marvelous scones - she always made me scones) - she had twinkly blue eyes and would say "be off with you!" and "when I'm dead and gone" and so on - all my relatives are English.

They lived in Devonport and we would all (Gillian, Susan, Richard, Dennis) visit most Sundays and travel across by Vehicular ferry (in the 50s this was - there was no harbour bridge) - we would buy white bait and later have whitebait fritters.

My father had an old car. My mother used to read books to me.

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R.. .. . . . . .

REAL MAGIC!

The final position from a "real" game of chess (an earlier position is given below.) By reverse magic the position is transformed. Through the Looking Glass was the book that lead me into the "addiction" of chess. The pawn on c2 is one move from becoming a Queen which is what would happen on the "8th" rank to Alice, as in the book

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This is an example of what we might call a provisional closed system ( I cannot allow a completely closed system, although of course these are necessary in the Laws of Thermodyamics such as that defining entropy). Let us or let me be cautious here and the systems and or system I propose is to use a kind of negatively tiered series of fields, from a theoretically Platonic-Dawkinsinian-Positivist-"Naive" field to a Certain Religious or Unreligious G or no-G Absolute Field (here Dawkins is invoked. This is no aspersion to his writings which I like very much but it refers to his contention in one of his early and very famous book that he had 'solved the mystery of existence'. Paradoxically such a certainty of invocation implies not a refutation of God or the possibility of an Unknowable Deity (something perhaps as accepted by many Islamic scholars and other religious practicioners or 'believers' [we haven't yet dealt sufficiently with the problematics of belief to utilize this expression without epistemologic and lingiustic contention and complexity here): so we can at least begin with this field where we can, say, discuss (but not even yet quite affirm or deny, but indeed we find in this first field that we are able without incurring too much socio-psychic stress and strangeness to investigate Deep and Certain Knowledge and or its Impossibility of Deep Unvertainty etc. However there is a need for a gradually diminishing series of knowledge or operational fields leading to the Normative Field which is the Wittgenstinian-Humean Field mentioned above.

[At this stage there is no need to invoke probability density functions]............................................................................................

And here we can breath easy, or easier. We are or can realise that we a re playing a game. Or we can or are leaving off concepts of absolute infinity or the ever insistent problematics of such as Godel's theorem or Russell's Paradox, or the problem of infinite regress, the Cartesian cogito and the problem of "the evil genius in whose mind we are but a dream, or that we are in fact in an endless regress of virtual constructs [we are the actors in a game in which there we are the actors in a game in which we....the well known abyse en abime, the perpetual descent, possibly to paranoic madness of Nakobovian intensity....these are put aside as we accept].

Here in Fn as I shall call it, lacking a function for a subscript, in the 'normative field' we can live and act as if we had free will and so on. Here we can postulate within the chess game seen that it is checkmate in the above chess position as the King, by the rules, cannot take the R, is in check, cannot move to d7 as that is moving into check and this is forbidden by the rules, and thus with all possible moves impossible because forbidden by previously agreed rules. In this case it is indisputable that it is checkmate. We have a closed system, or a simulacrum of one.

But it is clear that Carroll (whose works are a fertile field for almost all aspects of philosophy and the logical systems accompanying it and mathematics and also of the paradoxes of language) is playing with the possibility or the question of another kind of world. Is this deliberate you might ask as an aside. No one can know, but Caroll was a mathematician. I believe he took an interest in Non-Euclidean geometry and his playful but quite clear 'Carolingian Categorical Logic' is interesting and studied: as are his many paradoxes.

Clearer and more clearly a closed system would be the proposition that A implies A, and A can not be allowed to be not A. Therefore A---> n-A is INVALID. This seems 'obvious' but my claim is it can operate only under relatively less rigorous fields. So the field we are now in, accepting these rules and say accepting that the reality is we are alive, that certain things are very likely to be untrue is a good place to be as we can, say get on with using Newton's Laws, or getting into protests against injustices and so on and indeed being happy, productive humans. As 'Westerners' we can go along with Dawkins somewhat and accept the "Truth" of evolution and much else. 1 + 1 will be 2 and so on.

But we have an immediate problem even at this "commonsense" level. The problem is that a closed system is as likely to accept that evolution is nonsense or that there is or is not a God as at any other level. This is because of the obvious fact of the problem, again of belief [which in itself is almost infinitely impossible to define but we will use it not in its theological meaning but as in the above postulated example of say, to simplify, a state of mind [as along as we recognise that such a "state" is in fact a transfinitely complex and ontologically transpierced and almost transcendentental "explosion" of connotations, deferred meanings, differences and so on]. This belief problem means that we are still stuck in non-knowledge given our "status" in the sense of "state now" as used say on Face Book and other places. That said, in most cases we can 'go along with accepting that we are real, that we know we are, and many other things that would otherwise make human understanding and the ablity to operate problematic. But because of the problem of belief, haunting the shape of our vase of comprehension etc it is as if we need to be able to either oscillate throughout the near infinite fields (from Fn to Fa). As a quick example of the difficulties in finding the kind of certainty Dawkins yearns for, we can ask how to define the volume a sphere. This was done by Archimedes about 2000 years ago. He also proved inter alia that the odd numbers are infinite in number. The proof in mathematics books, of this last mystery, is beautiful and very easy to understand. But if we attempt to move towards Fa, our Platonic absolute field, it can be shown that it is impossible to determine either. It is also questionable that anything can be known under or in such a Field.

To this you might object with a simple 'Why?' ...... how can it be claimed that nothing can be known etc, after all we don't need to get to that absolute field, the universe has constants that are constant and so on. The difficulties in fact are enormous. But we can start by critiquing Archimedes on his discovery of, for example a) the volume of a sphere (he wrote a book on his methods which showed he mentally 'sliced up' a theoretical sphere, in a process analogous to the summation incurred in integral calculus, of these infinite infinitesimally small slices) b) the proof that (say) the odd numbers are infinite.

The problem in both cases, that to acheive the Fa Field, the absolute space we yearn for, we require an absolute infinity. Now the proof of either works. Sphere volumes are well covered, and infinite series are well known. This is true, but we require Absolute Certainty here (or we lack knowledge of what something is as well as indeed any other knowledge -- for now I leave aside the problematic of belief as we can concatenate all fields, that is F1 to Fn or the theoretical Fa or absolute closed field knowledge space. If it can be shown we require absolute certainty (say in disproving or proving the existence of God, something that Dawkins, who says he has 'solved the mystery of existence', has done (his "God Delusion" we are tempted to say is an Illusion, but we play))....The objection to both a) and b) is that we need to count to infinity. We will only convinced, those of us who - for whatever reason (there doesn't require that there be one) do not or cannot believe in absolute infinity, or the method of calculating to infinity, or indeed any number of clever mathematical proofs. None of these convince. Nor do probabilities. We cannot really have these in an absolute space. Thus, the only hope is to count up to infinity, and in the case of prime numbers, we have to count those beginning at 2. The artist Opalka spent the last several years of his life painting from 1 to (a very high number) before he died. Infinity eluded him. No one has counted to infinity. IF we want to use an absolute infinity and exult science over religion or religion over science we have great ambiguities waiting to destroy us. Of that which we know not we know not and cannot, as say, Dawkins, or religious ministers, or anyone, cannot speak: as we are in a necessarily unconputable and unkowable Universe.

We need thus to actually experience or see or hold in our hands an absolute infinity. Added to that the neurologic-psychic-religious-philosophic problems of the complex of the process or phenomena we call 'belief' (apart from the almost incalculable ways humans experience this 'process': in Through the Looking Glass Alice races it seems at near infinite speed with the Red Queen but finds she has gone nowhere, in Keat's great poem Ode to A Grecian Urn we have a similar dilemma: so much am I interested in this phenomena I will quote (part of) the poem herein):

Keat's Ode on A Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

....................................................................................................

..............................................................

And indeed the vase shows such things depicted perhaps 2000 years ago: but the action is stopped, the youth is forever in love, there is no death it is as if Keats had the urn in his hands (it is unlikely he was not a rich man, he may have seen it at a museum or seen an image of it. And:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

And in a dream in Jack Ross's Tree Worship his dream is of a man tormented by events trying to walk off a beach, but with each step he slips, and he even longs to dive into the almost malevolent nothingness that seems to hold him in its terrible and amused grasp. There are many examples of this phenomena in literature and life....

But I continue:

However, I will explain (soon) why I deeply value this doubt (and, indeed, Keat's theory of 'negative capability' might here be evoked); this unknowing, or this uncertainty. So far we really haven't needed to know anything to refute science and religion in one fell swoop: or have we done so?

Of course we haven't. There are no refutations or certainties. Obviously, because we cant establish knowledge or certainty, we cannot know whether anything, let along Dawkins' 'God Delusion Illusion' is true or not....We cant even establish or even begin to establish truth or reality as we require or need to use a concatenation of an infinite gradation of fields from Fn to Fa into a single endlessly oscillating and writhing Impossibility of Itself.. (No Fa was not a joke, but I perceive one, so lets stipulate Fa to be Fn). (And indeed, we can acknowledge as we do so, the serious but also deeply comic project we are sailing inside....

Living with Impossiblity: How G is Simultaneously and Eternally not-G. By Richard Taylor.

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A position from the same game (above but at an earlier stage real), "A Grade" game I won. I am white. Here I threaten either the win of a Q or a forced mate by Nf6+ But Black's knights are badly placed and as b4 is threatened black is lost. I have to comment though, that I misplayed the opening of this game and in this tournament I lost more games than I won. Chess is a very difficult game and there some very clever players out there trying to beat you!

This 'vis of the red Queen and Alice racing faster and faster included all my soul

since I read that as a boy.

The most curious part of the thing

was, that the trees and the other things

round them never changed their places at all :

however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything.

The Borrowed Hat

The brain, a thin faced, balding prima donna, scratches

its chimera, deeply concerned about the missing

enquiry. Indeed, nothing had been said of this, or the

book of magic dropped on the distressed volcanic

insistence on variance, creeping, whose utterances, the

psychic dance of which, various manifestations, whose

social accretion, and the general Lebensraum or

Weltensraung: and that which, even if only evanescently,

ballooned into the impossible ontological, whose truncate

avowals spread as the wings of a bourgeois liberality, the

massacred mannerist, always so quietly grandiose.

Something about the ablutions, and the various regressions:

all in all not sure if a) was contingent on b) or d), and had

fallen asleep like the red and white queens in Alice in

Wonderland only to transfigure the night into some sort

of pattern, beautifully devoid of meaning, and

inscrutably inscribed.

:“a hill ca’n’t be a valley, you know. That

would be nonsense——”

The Red Queen shook her head.

“You may call it ‘nonsense’ if you

like,” she said, “but I’ve heard nonsense,

compared with which that would be as

sensible as a dictionary.”

Alice curtseyed again, as she was afraid

from the Queen’s tone that she was a

little offended: and they walked on in

silence till they got to the top of the

little hill.

For some minutes Alice stood without

speaking, looking out in all directions

over the country—and a most curious

country it was. There were a number

of tiny little brooks running straight

across it from side to side, and the

ground between was divided up into

squares by a number of little green

hedges, that reached from brook to

brook.

“I declare it’s marked out just like a

large chess-board “ Alice said at last.

T h e d e e p A m b i g o f

B L A C K S P A C E

doth initialate....

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'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.
And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.
"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.
'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

A great poem of haunting magic written by Carol the mathematician and logician - I understood it instantly as an 8 year old at school.

Magic, Chess, Poetry and Mystery.

her heart began to beat quick with excitement

she went on. “It’s a great huge

game of chess that’s being played—all

over the world—if this is the world at

all, you know. Oh, what fun it is

How I with I was one of them I

wouldn’t mind being a Pawn, if only I

might join—though of course I should

like to be a Queen, best.”

She glanced rather shyly at the real Queen...

ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

I haven't posted on here for some time. (This was interrupted by a huge debate on about whether 9/11 was an inside job or not on Reading the Maps in which most of what I said was of course taken out of context and mangled and misunderstood...but I want to do something about my trip to NY in 1993 as I have photos of the World Trade Centre and other things of interest.)

I have been thinking of what steps I will take on this Blog, and why I am doing it and so on. In fact EYELIGHT started by accident. (I was trying at the time to make comment on a Blog, and found myself with a Blog myself!)

I am also aware that EYELIGHT may seem to a lot of people rather sparse and gnomic. I mean: "What is this guy doing? A lot of this doesn't make sense?" (Some would say all!) And indeed this Blog wasn't meant to seem "distant" or difficult. I did want to make a "total composition" which it still is...but that doesn't preclude that I talk more or less directly to those reading here.

I have been rather "laid back" during Xmas and now it is pretty warm and humid (with some beautiful days) I am almost apathetic. I'm now 62. I find myself thinking more and more about death: or time. I mean one keeps doing calculations . When my father and I learnt chess together, I must have been about 9 or 10, and he must have been say 50 or 51 as he was born 1907, in London, and I was reading Alice Through the Looking Glass and this fascinated me and I asked him what chess was. The book by Lewis Carrol was based on a chess game.

the queer conceptuals, and the profile of

the queen in a circle, her finger bossing up. I’m mad.

Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began : all she remembers is, that they were running hand in hand, and the Queen went so fast that it was all she could do to keep up with her:

and still the Queen kept crying “Faster ! Faster !” but Alice felt she could not go faster, though she had no breath left to say so.

The most curious part of the thing was, that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all : however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. “I wonder if all the things move along with us?” thought poor puzzled Alice. And the Queen seemed to guess her thoughts, for she cried “Faster ! Don’t try to talk not that Alice had any idea of doing that. She felt as if she would never be to talk again, she was getting so out of breath

on' of the red Queen and Alice racing faster and

faster included all my soul since I read that as a boy.

Iin stepping below and this poem -

the queer conceptuals, and the profile of

the queen in a circle, her finger bossing

up. I’m mad. But the telephone, ringing

with a sort of mannerist or neoclassic

preciosity in my radioactive head because

I’m funnily on the other side of the

world, has only news of the brilliant

dead. Generally these latter do lodge

themselves in smudge land, where its easy,

once you’ve practiced, to cross across to

a charcoal nightmare of a cat lion or a

god - bull transforming a swan into a

multicoloured Parsiphae of fire that evils

itself inside your nerve’s nerve: some

agony or so of Pollock. Now. These hunk

pieces go there, this red here, and this

bright blue over there there: at this

immediate veer, it will or should , as you

could would or might not, be observed into

one of the fractures that the vast,

useless shield expands itself into a new

world ... under stones, they shudder, and

the leopard snarls as you get arrowed

into your heels, but of this there is not

much known except perhaps a contradiction,

deeply in discourse with itself.

A page from Through the Looking Glass - a book that so fascinated me as a 9 year old. Caroll himself was a mathematician and a logician. The book is based on a chess game. Alice is a pawn I didn't then know what chess was. This book started me on a "journey"into my huge obsession with Chess. A game I play competitively. I was second in the NZ Schools Champs in 1961.

........Here the board is seen sweeping way to infinity in Carrol's impossible but magical world................

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“I declare it’s marked out just like a

large chess-board “ Alice said at last.

"There ought to be some men moving

out somewhere—and so there are!"

She added in a tone of delight, and

her heart began to beat quick with excitement

she went on. “It’s a great huge

game of chess that’s being played—all

over the world—if this is the world at

all, you know. Oh, what fun it is

How I with I was one of them I

wouldn’t mind being a Pawn, if only I

might join—though of course I should

like to be a Queen, best.”

She glanced rather shyly at the red Queen...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Later I would write a poem when I did "Carolingian categorical logic"as a part of philosophy, as Caroll himself was logician also, and the weirdness of logic is right throughout his book,as is the metaphysical mystery of the "smile" remaining of the Cheshire cat when the cat's face is gone... still a puzzle to philosophers. Hence in this book, mathematics, logic, mystery, magic, art time, metaphysics, poetry, literature :

Human Hands

Illogic logic dreams

Its logic in logical logs.

The illogic logic logs

Know that babies are illogical.

Illogic logic wakes and screams.

The night is turning red and black,

And I wake into a fear:

But logic, and that queer space,

Rises, and horses are sleek,

And fleet, so that the gathering hooves.

And chocolate is beautiful

But illogical.

We struggle, each with their torment,

For it is April, and winter windeth quick.

What is that car that bus that truck,

And many travel, and many return.

Illogic logic rocks the cradle’s hand,

And kind is the agèd face

That the eagle descend

To devour the brains

That were so busy then.

This is a dark and will become

Not so in illogic logic time

That floweth so in wills so sweet.

Illogic logic knows the unseen waterfall,

The heaved, gnarled rocks, basaltic bubbles.

Illogic logic searches with bright light,

Gloves droop drop —

And human hands emerge.

Not a microwave tower (on which I have worked) , but a "construction". What is it? It is that question that makes such engineering things"beautiful to me. The functional beauty, the shape and stucture, and the"mystery" of the what and why of what they are. As with mathematical symbols and equations...

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'...Always the magic of words has affected me almost like a fever...'

The shelf built by my father with some of my mother's and my grandmother's selection of books by Charles Dickens an one 'Jane Eyre' (which I read at school and enjoyed greatly). I started withe The Pickwick Papers and read what I thought were all of Dickens works. [And we all read most of the books by the zoologist Gerald Durrell - one book by him is seen there. In those books he refers to his brother (Larry Durrell (who at that time was not well known) as an aspiring author. Strangely I have never read anything by him. I was also a member then of the Scientific Book Club.] and I was 'top' in Biology - my prize was Stevenson's 'Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde'

Texts and Pretexts - my father's old edition (blue book on the left). And a more modern edition of an old novel by Huxley Huxley taught Orwell (Eric Blair) as a young man and gave praise when the latter's novel 1984 appeared. 1984 and Animal Farm are two favourite books of mine I also read as a teenager but also more recently. Orwell became almost an obsession for while. Also Victor Hugo, Dickens, Sherlock Holmes, Joyce Carey, Golding, O'Henry, Ryder Haggard, du Maupassant, Conrad, Dostoevsky, Somerset Maugham, James Joyce and others...

'Magic' , a chapter from Huxley's anthology or "philosophy" book of poetry and ideas texts and Pretexts (1935) that I perused endlessly, over and over, almost frenetically, as a teenager in the mid 60s. For me he has the best translation of Sappho from the Greek I have ever seen and his comment on it is deeply beautiful.

Nor do I need to know what music is "about" (most songs, even great songs, have words that are hopelessly banal and would spoil the mysteriousness of such a song or aria if in say an opera sung in Italian (I heard the whole of Verdi’s great opera Aida as a boy [I did know what (somewhat) that was about (it is similar to Romeo and Juliet in theme)] but much of the opera I heard was incomprehensible to me.. being in (usually) a European language and I don’t know any language except English.

(I have not "planned " this writing here by the way I am just drifting from one thing to another! But THAT is and already was the "method" of my Blog here. I am not now planning much. But I will try to stay reasonably consistent - but remember that is a part of my way, and I move or flow from one subject to another as my mood and thoughts change and indeed as perhaps I change, and you too...? No?
But in this way of engendering a kind of "magic" I recall as teenager that one of my favourite books was Aldous Huxley's Texts and Pretexts. Brave New World was the only other book by Huxley I have read [More recently I have read Chrome Yellow and Ape and Essence, both are good but the second book has a great introductory story that I wished Huxley had continued....] I read it about the time I read1984 by Orwell). In his book and in the chapter called ‘Magic’ Huxley says -

"All literature is a mixture, in varying proportions, of magic and science...The great bulk of literature is a compromise lying between the two extremes."

Here is some "magic" from an old poem he quoted (and I have never

forgotten this.)
------------- Gently dip, but not too deep,
For fear you make the golden beard to weep

This is by George Peel, and he quotes much more.

So is my writing deep in a kind of mysterious magic? Perhaps. Always the magic of words has affected me almost like a fever. Meaning less so. Oh, I do love the beauty of logic. But it was the magic or words and also the near erotic tactility and mystery of the beautiful paper and shape of the volumes of Charles Dickens I had that led me to read virtually all of his novels before I got to high school.
Before I was 15. Before then I was fascinated by words primarily, but also by the characters and the names, -

names such as Snodgrass, Winkle or Rudge and so on.

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This is indeed part of a complex philosophic system I have evolved. However it doesn't really go beyond certain basic epistemological laws (I am mainly interested here in the knowledge problems requiring belief, justification of belief, and that a thing be true as some of the criteria and these methods are well known. Added to this is my use of either an 'everyday' or what I call a kind of Wittgensteinian-Humean Space [a normative "field" which in fact we all operate (in our daily lives, in our relationships etc etc: for pragmatic reasons this is the field we need to assume is operant); and in fact we have to, as philosophers and indeed as humans whoever we are, remain mostly in this "space". Simply put it is Hume's concept of common sense and Wittgenstein's and Hobbes' recognition of the problematic nature of language operating in the huge [real pseudo-Absolute] gaps in what might be a continuum in any Perfect Logic Computer as postulated by Turing and indeed to possibly overcome the limitations or problems that "infinitize" in Escheric moebs or crazyloops as I coin them: that is the contradictions such as Russell's Paradox and other antinomies encountered by Russell and Whitehead in their attempt to establish mathematics on to a logical basis: in fact to set logical sequences and certainties in a beautiful and seemingly perfect system. Even if this, by the way, had succeeded (and the acheivement of such as Russell and Whitehead is huge) not only language but indeed hiding behind and ----- metaphorically of course ----- the Devil of Epistemological non verifiability stares insanely and imperatively up from the lacunae. These lacunae expand at a near-infinite speed: the effect is of say Flaubert's The Temptations of St. Antony modulated and multiplied to a great exponential number and gone totally crazed, full of dancing colours while Antony seeking 'truth' can only fly amazed in the etermal universe that is "without end" as indeed his devil, rightly, explains: here the universe is seen as infinite but even a "finite" universe contains inside it's impossibility and complexity, infinite unfolding potentials whose garish or beautiful to hallucinatory rippulations of the shuddering ecstatic insane of unkowablility sets All alight................................................

........and yet all we require is that a person not believe [not in some old-fashioned theological sense] and by this I would and anyone would have to understand this strange phenomena called beleive. This is not a credo, it is a state whereby the mind-spirit-psyche in some way probably never to be known by science* [as indeed science cannot operate without philosophy and religion and logic-illogical methods; and it cannot operate in some totally objective field, no thing or ideation can survive the vacuum of such total neo-absurdity: the angels of Illogic, rightly, would destroy such with their Burn Bombs...]: that is some action, complex and through time, perhaps even involving quantum jumps and jerks (but we don't need to invoke quantum mechanics at this stage); what we are searching for is something like a movie slowed down, and slowed down: just as we might magnify a thing to be studied, or analyse it with x-rays, or whatever but in this endless slowing and expanding what we begin to focus on is a local infinity, and indeed, it is known from such as Cantor that these infinities, these immense abysses of impossibility and terrible beauty are fragmented into universes of beginnings that add to no endings and add themselves to further expanding beginnings....we chase nothingness....we are lost. But if we can go to a lower level of absoluteness, to a transfinite level, and allow ourselves enough such levels, we might arrive at what we commonly call belief [but we have assumed Language, and this we must or we enter further spider infested loops and spirals]: this belief or unbelief [these are interchangeable and require a kind of inner Kierkergarian 'leap of faith'], if this oscillating beleivunbeleivedednessmess we would allow this and be confronted by the incontrovertible ability or fact that a human being [and we are in a subjective space, there are no objective facts as such, no "real" (even if we can define 'real' or 'reality' themselves as a conceptions) knowledge actually grasped or graspable via any knowledge system as indeed belief , this strange state we cannot ever understand any more than we can consciousness itself; belief can at anytime and for any reason become unbelief. A that is A can become, in my universe, not A. The Law of the Excluded Middle operates in the 'real' world, which is social world constructed by language. And indeed as we communicate we never totally or absolutely "connect" as far as we can assertain. That is the nature and complexity of the world we are in, that is the Earth alone, is so enormous, that there is no way of ascertaining any certainty of knowledge as knowledge requires belief. And even in the "simpler" albeit poetic scenario of the huge opening gaps of a renewed St. Antony or indeed of a revitalised and resurrected Flaubert, say the Flaubert of Bouvard and Pecuchat: even there we might cross the gulph but looking aside we see glaring at us the non-perfect-continuum or the non-continuum of Language itself.....

* No scientist, thinking that he or she is acting in some objective way divorced from the human socious, the total human society, can ever understand human or even animal sentience and consciousness, or indeed such questions as why something comes from nothing. All scientific knowledge, and in fact all knowledge (except possibly that via some kind of mystical or religious insight of which for now we wont speak but it is something, in a way that Heiddeger struggled with in his struggle to 'get to Being' or Dasein, and his approach involved the use of the poetry of Rilke, Trakl, Holderlin (but not that of Celan whose case is unique in many ways and also deeply tragic). He also wrote poetry in some of his own writings. It is the struggle to deepen and intensify. Perhaps via some kind of aesthetic magic or mystery, some ecstasy, of the flesh or art or say watching a beautiful dance or skating pair, or a great athlete, or a sunset: at certain moments, maybe not quite Dickinson's '...certain slant of Light...' but indeed some of Dickinson's writing seems to reveal someone who is 'looking into the heart of light, the silence'...at these moments, at these perhaps Joycean epiphanies, when God is 'A shout in the street.' at certain moments these deep things, eternity or infinity is revealed to us, but only as a shutter goes up for a moment, only to close: it is there, we think, we are certain. Then we are not so sure (hence Browning's Death in the Desert and Browning's endless struggle with belief. Dickinson 'followed' Elizabeth Barrett but perhaps Robert as well as those strange geniuses, the Brontes, particularly Emily of 'Wuthering Heights' and her poems. But science only describes things. Newton gives the relationships of gravity and motion, forces, acceleration; others develop the laws of thermodynamics and discover the 'rules' that define quantum levels, or electron shell levels. These are things discovered that fit into the universe in so far as it is known, and in so far as such models work. They are in a non-absolute Frame (as I define it above, again my Frames are models also). Thus it can be said, that it a rigorous philosophic sense (science is essentially meaningless in terms of real knowledge, or knowledge in the sense of the quiditas (the essential whatness of things), for without philosophy and religion and indeed a certain emotive or sentient level, a certain Heideggerian sense of Being, or a feeling [whose nature is also as mysterious as say 'gravity' or 'energy' or 'primal causation' etc]), nothing can be known. However it is an endless conundrum. This poem by Alan Curnow, one of my favourites by that poet seems to reflect this existential and phenomelogical dilemma:

A LEAF

The puzzle presented by any kind of leaf,

One among millions to smudge your airy sceneries

Or among millions one your window tickler

Gust upon gust agitates, a trifle sharp

Enough to murder sleep:

Shape of a leaf, shine of a leaf,

Shade of a leaf yellow among yellow leaves of

The prophet Micah with a slip of perished silk

Marks nothing, still is a character, a syllable

Made flesh before the word:

Bud of a leaf, blade of a leaf

Given a strange twist, given for something to do

With deadly baffled fingers happy to squeeze

Blood from a conundrum: insoluble but endlessly

Amusing in the attempt.

Alan Curnow (Poems 1949 - 57, The Mermaid Press 1957 )

Here the mind dwells endlessly on 'the blood of a conundrum' (Curnow's training as a Priest is here, the blood could refer to that of Christ's, or it gives emphasis, as does the 'nod' to Macbeth, where Macbeth, having murdered Duncan and his guards, now hallucinates a voice that shouts: 'Death has murdered sleep!' And the other big point is here: the mystery of leaves, of the complexity and intensity of nature, the endless variations, The Mystery indeed, is insoluble, but ' endlessly / Amusing in the attempt'...

Living with Impossiblity: How G is Simultaneously and Eternally not-G. By Richard Taylor.

======================================================================

from The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski

'Knowledge or Certainty"
"...These pictures do not so much fix the face as explore it; that the artist...as if by touch; each line...strengthens the picture but never makes it final. We accept that as the method of the artist...

..But what physics has done is to show that it is the only method to knowledge.

There is no absolute knowledge.

And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists open the door to tragedy.

All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility. That is the human condition; and that is what quantum physics says. I mean that literally.

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------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------

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There is one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried evangelist, St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures,wide-rolling, watery prairies and Potter’s Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions ofmixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that wecall lives and souls lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness .

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This Plato world of mystical
mathematicism – it appealed to me, I to it. We sat, the Geist and I, looking at each other…or did we look through each other to an infinite regress of teapots
and inkspots in fervent mirrors?

ions of fabricated life.

The revelled, and they travelled, and they flew back…

but how did all this begin?

I like ideas, or the feeling of ideas, or the feeling and the excitement of having an idea…but I cannot resolve anything…well…not much…I am too much
myself…

I need a big car…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The car continued on. I looked around, discovering the colours and shapes of an unknown city

The infinite cave of
memory, immeasurably full of immeasurable things…

Was it the numbers?

…pointless to describe

surely this has to lead to something?

'Will we not ‘reach conclusion’ …

even in a

Conglomerate

amenable to subtle shades

Brave man, woman, child, being – living on
the edges or on the silent dots that once roaredor bubbled, sighed or sang; he
comes soon to ending brief as candles – seekinglove in the eternal coldness.

We learn as children the metaphysics of the infinite and infinitesmal calculus, although we are unaware of what we are learning..One chooses a profession that involves only five and a half centuries because as a child one day dreamed about the infinitude of vichy water tins.------------

began rummaging…

Please understand: these are my writings. I write
with different pens, this one is “uniball”, but you may not feel or see it as I
see or feel it. I must, at this moment write with this
pen. Not the other. You must understand.

[And remember or note that in the
first instance I will have written this out by hand in notebook and transferred
it here. The very process of writing is one thing I want: the pressure on my
fingers and hand, the nib moving across the page, the ink flowing to the page
and then the appearance of a mark or sign, and the beauty of that meaningless
sign. But it may acquire a semantic power… but it does not require it. We are
limited beings.

The writing becomes mine. But it is also yours. Hence it is ours. Or it is now “new writing” it is my creative ‘uncreative’ writing. Not as in that by Kenneth Goldsmith who does interesting projects in “uncreative writing”, but creative to the extent that I place them on the page n my own way. ..and might fragment them, or play around with fonts and artwork associated. Of course the base writing was by the writers I have read –I’m not claiming to have written what they wrote – but I do claim that my use (and collaging rearranging or using texts in some cases) of these various works constitutes my own work as we are ating context, or replacement and organized placement of these signs and lines by myself. Then a reader may or may not find their way to “reorganize” them as he or she reads.]

VENEZIA

IS A PEN WITH A [PICTURE ON IT, AND OIL INSIDE WHICH IS A BUBBLE AND IN THAT BUBBLE A TINY GONDOLA FLOATS DOWN OR UP A (CANAL?) IN MY PEN. DAVE WHO LIVES LOCALLY OFTEN WOULD COME WITH SMALL GIFTS INCLUDING FOOD ETC AND BORROW MONEY, ALWAYS REPAID, PROBABLY TO FUEL HIS BOOZING. I SOMETIMES TOOK HIM TO THE LOCAL WHOLESALER. DAVE WAS OR IS NOT ONE OF THOSE “LOST” ALCHIES BUT WAS ALMOST ALWAYS HALF CUT WHEN I SAW HIM. HAVEN’T SEEN HIM FOR A WHILE.

This is me – Richard! The
“reading” is reading what is on my pen.

----------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

an ebony table, inlaid

increased, she moved away…and now he was dead and she was…

…it was as if I had died or been
torn apart by blood wolves, and dark energy ideas
began to whirl,

to spin…I could

create, and I

could live forever in language and …but the the great hope seen

than (a) broke plate.

A joke. A broke joker Toby Jug drop
in a rub bin. I had, a' tha' 'ime, 'ame nofing.

and so on…

I had been rummaging among the records…

a consolation for a life of

So she carefully fastened one of the charms

The empty and haunted house is a
giant enigma of which the key is lost.

What’s missing? Nothing.
But that is everything…in a word – that flower of life Titian and Raphael took

by surprise….The figure presented such a powerful embodiment ofreality.

Thus for the enthusiastic Poussin, the old man had, in a
sudden transfiguration, become art itself, art with its secrets, its passions,
its reveries.

…by dint of drowning the contours
of my figure in kisses of half-tint, I have contrived to do away with the very
idea of drawing and other artificial methods, and give her the rounded aspect
of nature itself. Come closer…from far it disappears…

… always invisible, even though one crossed and recrossed it daily…

all those years

of
furtive

study

I thought it fitting that
my

last
hours

thought it fitting that my last hours
in the town should be spent with

an artist whose work was lost on the world.

All her journeys have begun and ended with this enormous, quiet country.

words,

phrases, fragments of= language or utterance.

There were weeks when I spoke to no one on that great estate.

They are the eyes of a man who has gazed beyond death.

the cathedral bell.

…sheets with no more than a miniscule scatter of words on them…

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

having understood virtually
nothing…

his face bore the ineradicable trace of some

As the work went on and ramified.

sudden spasm

he became abstract

art

he moved

he became

```````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Let us manifest life.

But the
tree was a seed and a stem before it bore fruit: do we not grudge it the time

...................................................................................................................................................................

of growth.

…the form spoke with
the light hissing whispers of serpents. The terns cried aloud, finding no
foothold in the air. They cried and sank…

There is no more

...................................................................................................................................................................

______________________________________________________________

Getting to the bottom of things mattered a great deal to Ester.

Surfaces, she felt, were a ruse. They couldn’t be trusted. There was so much more beneath the surface of words and people,

beneath everything in fact, and her secret passion was to plumb these hidden depths.

…this formlessness of water carried a promise of dissolution… a return
…[full of] possibility.

------------------------------------------------------------------

…loops and circles poised…

“…Facts – The Popular Encyclopedia contains nothing but facts, the facts of the world, clearly and straightforewardly

presented.” Saying this, he seemed to be sunk in a well of facts, all of which spelled the walled-in dismal hopelessness of human

life. The world’s books were boxes of flesh-eating worms, crawling sentences that had eaten the universe hollow.”

He stood baffled, looking about the dining room for some exterior sign of the fatal alteration with him. There is no God.

With a wink of thought, the universe had been bathed in the pitch-smooth black of utter hopelessness. Yet no exterior change of colour betrayed the event…three decades of exposure and ingrained dust: none fo these mute surfaces reflected the sudden absence of God from the Universe –

Thompson’s oft-repeated concerns about the growth of philistinism, and his belief that poetry is as important to human progress¹ as economics, are more relevant than ever in an era when the market and the mass media treat works of literature and art as com-

Light had felt its way in under the dry green window shade above
the spines of the radiator and was standing beside here bed when the unhappy
tangle of her dreams fell away and she dared open her eyes. Like a leak in a
great tank of darkness the light had seeped into all the familiar things of her
room.

Karl Friedrich Gauss
1777 - 1855 German mathematician and philosopher.

We are here face to face with the crucial paradox of knowledge. Year by year we design more precise instruments with which to observe nature with more fineness. And when we look at the observations, we are discomfited to see that they are still fuzzy, and we feel that they are as uncertain as ever.

We seem to be running after a goal which lurches away from us to infinity every time we come within sight of it.

…and ever since astronomical instruments have been improved. We look at the position of a star as it was determined then and now, and it seems to us that we are closer and closer to finding it precisely. But when we actually compare our individual observations today, we are astonished to find them as scattered within themselves as ever. We had hoped that the human errors would disappear, and thus could ourselves have God's view. But it turns out that errors cannot be taken out of the observations. And that is true of stars, or atoms, or just looking at somebody’s picture, or hearing…

Gauss recognised this with that marvellous boyish genius that he had right up to the age of nearly eighty when he died…But Gauss pushed on to ask what the scatter of the error tells us. He devised the Gaussian curve [this is still used by scientists, engineers, mathematicians students of or practitioners of statistics, and others – it is in the indispensable Eton’s Tables.] in which the scatter is summarized by the deviation, or spread, of the curve. And from this came a far reaching idea: the scatter marks an area of uncertainty. We are not sure that the true position is the centre. All we can say is that it lies in the area of uncertainty…

________________________________________________________________________________

Room 9A

Knowledge or Certainty

Leo Szilard teaching and Fermi. Szilard invented and patented the chain reaction. He later strongly and actively opposed the use of the atomic bomb as the war was over. See Richard Rhodes (Pulitzer Prize winning book) The Making of the Atomic Bomb and The Ascent of Man by J Bronowski.

“When Hitler arrived in 1933, the tradition of scholarship in Germany was destroyed, almost overnight. Europe no longer hospitable to the imagination.

…all knowledge is limited.

It is an irony of history that at the very time this was being worked out, there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty."

[Leo Szilard rejected Rutherford’s assertion of the impossibility of the usage of radioactivity (hence Moonshine the extraordinary book by Alan Brunton of New Zealand) – his comment was that that idea was “moonshine”). Szilard invented the chain reaction and then pushed theUS and Britain to make an atomic bomb, as he feared that Hitler was or could be building one]

BUT

“When in 1945 the European war had been won and he realized that the bomb was now about to be used on the Japanese, Szilard marshalled protest everywhere he could. He wrote meorandum after memorandum. One memorandum to President Roosevelt only failed because Roosevelt died during the very days that Szilard was transmitting it to him. Always Szilard wanted the bomb to be tested openly before the Japanese and in front of an international audience, so that the Japanese should know its power and should surrender before people died…

As you know, Szilard failed, and with him the community of scientists failed…

________________________________________________________________________________

Room 10A

The Descent of .... ?

Hiroshima - failure or victory for "the ascent of man"?
Could we caption this "The Descent of Man"?
(And the title - what of the role of women in all of this? Ascent of People? "The Ascent of Everest" ... and so on...)

The United States is the only country to have dropped an atomic bomb on a country - to have used a WOMD. The injures caused were horrific . Jacob Bronowski was an official observer of this aftermath.

[John Hersey wrote a book about the event called simply Hiroshima (which (2017) I recently read..]

The picture above shows Hiroshima blasted. It is controversial as indeed the US faced a vicious, indeed merciless, foe. (Or was it, how much is or was this unremitting 'mercilessness' part of the insane propaganda of war?)

It also probably saved the lives of thousands of heroic* US soldiers. We have the paradox of the US victory over Japanese fascism (but it is also true that the Chinese and the Vietnamese defeated the Japanese in their respective countries, losing far more lives than the US) and this terrible and almost most controversial event in human history apart from Hitler's Holocaust.**

**Or was it just a continuation of the inherent hopelessness and barbarity of human beings throughout history?

*Should we deploy this dubious term. By such usages are we not indirectly helping to perpetuate war and destruction? What if no one turned up for the war? Questions remain...

_______________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________________

‘I beseech you, in the

bowels of Christ, think it

possible you maybe

mistaken.’

The author at the pond of Auschwitz prison camp.

It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them
into numbers.

That is false, tragically false.

Look for yourself.

This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz.

This is where people were turned into numbers.

Into this

pond

were flushed

the ashes

of some four million people.

And that was not done by gas.

It was done by arrogance.

It was done by dogma.

It was done by ignorance.

When people believe that they have

absolute knowledge,

with no test in reality, this is how they

behave.

This is what men do when they

aspire to the knowledge

of gods.

Science is a very

human form of knowledge.

We are always

the brink of

the known, we always

feel forward for what is to be

hoped.

Every

judgement

in science stands on the

edge of error,

and

is personal.

Science

a tribute to what we can know although we

are fallible.

In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell:

‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may
be mistaken’.

I owe it

as a scientist

to my friend Leo Szilard,

I owe it as a

human being to the many members of my family who died at

Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as a survivor and a

witness.

We have to

cure ourselves of

the itch for absolute knowledge

and

power.

We have to close the distance between the push-button

order

and

the human act.

have

touch

people.

_______________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________________

Room z420a

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Room 333.333z

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

the? Machine?? Music??? ??????

the machine music moves mechanically as it must because it is
beautiful and is based on a legal system of repeats but nothing is
yet for sure why should it be after all the law of torts and the
thinking Thinking Thing is there, and we are part of it despite
seclusion like a sheep's or a Boffin's head, in a vision of perfect
symmetry held in a white drop as if we could know it all, and there's
need for change, but who looks on, and

who is who who he looks at who
he looks is who - but we need all these people who don't agree

because
of the machine, which, despite its

penitential and inevitable
inefficiency, is

heard to cry out at deep of night to the Great One
who is probably dead and ensconced in a dream of lubricated, or
lubricious cavortings toward spittle. and flesh, words that send
shudders up my spire wire's spine loom; one would naturally much
prefer to be the vision inside a technical robot, whose

doom scenes
see wire mass everywhere, and,

how does the spider know, because he,
too, is a constructor - or is it because the music nags us back down
the drain pipe into a parallel universe of incomprehensible equations,
or a crazed jumble of electronic, electrical, and machine parts
pushed into an eclected enclave, whose triumph is its denseness, or the

enormous significance

of an endlessly looping musical track which your
great great grandmother could well have enjoyed:

some post-Stochausian, post – Varese etc, not something tame like
The Songs for a Mad King: but it all passes, even the wind machines,
and the ape-shaped eyes, thoughts of death, leaves, corpse valleys,
memories, inscriptions.....

you turn back to The Romantics, for there is
something about you, something nobody can see:
as if you were the

one

in the

centre of a gigantic sound-shriek, and

batting up all hell, and no one
gives a fuck, especially with everything turning into grey gold

. . . something like a cat looking into your face.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

_______________________________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________________

Room 501.22 The Infinite of_______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________

My Text and Alan Sondheims's Text

___________________________________________________________________

Standing on the hillside at night. The fluttering of millions. Shells. How things. Being among the multitudes and the thoughts. Folded. Shelled in many ways. Imagine. There is surely something. One. Cup. A kind of. They were. Seeing (or hearing?) the ecstatic silence. The intellection and the bursts of rawness. “Drifts of shifts” The wrath of words. The iration of ideation. Qualm. He felt a qualm. Where has the softness gone? The man. Something explodes somewhere. We can say of a that it is not b. Judgement. The spider descends. Hard green cord round the spinning top to get it to gyrate. The whirl of many colour. We inhabited the hinter woods. He disappeared mid winterely.

Richard Taylor

_________________________________________________________________

Alan Sondheims's script and the - "… a section of what seems to be an infinite text, a text in the manner of a bandage or suture across the wound of a sememe (what reads as a sememe); a wound within, unconstrued within, the imaginary...."

is this a found script or one i created ? does it really matter? given the relatively small number of symbols, it would be reasonable to apply coding to it - a matrix/template that might slide across the apparent grid, producing meaning. one might think of this as a universal machine applicable to texts of any length; it becomes increasingly evident that meaning is a construct across symbols, neither within them nor within the dictionary translation / transliterations.

here, in this example, only in this particular example, one has a section of what seems to be an infinite text, a text in the manner of a bandage or suture across the wound of a sememe (what reads as a sememe); a wound within, unconstrued within, the imaginary. think of this as the lid of the pre-linguistic - not exactly mode, but a potential for interpretation, sliding out and against itself, as soon as one is found. nothing holds here, not even "here," not even place or placement. the lesson, where we are, where we are not, is always already unlearned.

Alan Sondheim

____________________________________________________________________
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_______________________________________________________

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.....................Steffi.Vergissmeinicht.

Redeem the time

Redeem the unread vision in the higher dream

Redeem

============================================================================================================================================

"... a bare, forked animal."

Life and Death

The memorial to local RSA workers tragically and brutally murdered at the Panmure RSA

A man dead on the road before the indifferent chess pieces... killed in a Middle Eastern conflict

Le la, le aso (Te Ra)

You must learn time, he said to the beautiful spider...

======================================================================

Plato of his cave, in The Republic. Reading and studying this account by Plato we realise the great beauty of his concept (we have huge quarrels with his "vision" of the "perfect" republic as indeed, Plato's interlocuters are quite lame, but we will set that part of his great book aside). The Cave's argument is, in brief, that humans cannot see the higher reality of things, we see only shadows, we are fooled even by our senses: we might not even credit the higher reality Plato points us toward. This higher reality argues for Perfect or more commonly Ideal Forms (nominalisms or abstractions: someone can be in love with someone, I can love chocolate, but there must be it is eventually concluded, that there pre-exists a Reality that is Love itself . It is not that Plato is provably wrong it is that neither is he provably right and in fact we are still, in a sense, inside the cave, semi-benighted. problem is that these kinds of arguments whose tests are in an absolute state or level or field; are used by such as even argue that there is, or is not a God, or who argue, as say Richard Dawkins does that he has solved the mystery of life on earth. This, incredibly (if I can pun against myself) is basically what he says at the start of The Blind Watchmaker.

Living with Impossiblity: How G is Simultaneously and Eternally not-G. By Richard Taylor.

======================================================================

The book referred above is the book to be a book that is within the "book" that is creating the book that is the book created by the book in the make of the book: and yet it is yet to be...

When it becomes as it is growing, I shall gather it in a more sequential form. In the meantimes I may put it as part 1 part 2 etc in a supplement. But for now it is the book of the book within the book and it is the book to be.....it is the book that makes and made the growing book within the making of the book which is and yet shall be made....

"Yes, that is the man who shot the man." Is perhaps an example of what happened and is to be happen. Inside time who can know what is curling, growing, wanting to be....

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An attractive and difficult work, Adorno’s Noise doesn’t fit neatly into any preconceived categories; it straddles the boundaries of essay, journal, performance, poem, and play. Even the book itself is a curious object. For example, there is something strange about the chapter titles. On the Contents page they appear at first glance in two distinctly gendered fonts, an archaic feminine script and a modern sans serif in all caps. On further inspection, one realizes that one font represents section headers, the other, chapter titles. Yet some sections lack chapters. Then there is the disconcerting appearance of the section dividers, white drop-out type on dark pages with dim images like blurry x-rays, sometimes beginning on the right-hand page with words cut off at the edge, only to repeat in full when you turn the page. These tricks of the eye are the work of designer Jeff Clark, whose contribution to the book is that of a collaborator fully engaged with the author’s thinking.

Harryman’s thought stretches out in so many directions it hard to know where to start. Indeed, Adorno’s Noise seems to perform a kind of essayistic yoga, creating new spaces inside the body that knows. Since the known is always bordered by the unknown, the work has a kind of erotic charge, as desire vies with security for the attention of the mortal. New spaces are continuously opened up then occupied, leading to a series of encounters. Hence, the exercise of thought leads inevitably to play, but it is an unrelentingly and often hilariously thoughtful play, peopled by incongruous characters with wills of their own. The play, Harryman seems to say, trumps thought, because it

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My son and I at Farmers with Santa about 1975.

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The World is a dessert to me. I am a cursed creature, condemned to understand happiness, to feel it, to desire it, and like so many others, forced to see it flee from me all the time.'”

[From [ Sarrasine by Balzac ]

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... With the arrival, it has been said, the Universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This is truly is the greatest mystery of all.

[Gide had an high opinion of the Goncourt Journals ‘ Becoming a master piece' was more or less the phrase of Edmund Goncourt' ]

[A surgeon is examining the neurons of a patient, when another patient’s hands are poker, his neurons ‘fire]

- The same neurons fire just as vigorously when Smith’s merely watches another patient being poked. It is as if the neuron (or functional circuit of which it is a part) is empathizing with another person. A stranger’s pain becomes Smith’s pain, almost literally. Indian and Buddhist mystics assert that there is no essential difference between self and other, and that true enlightenment comes from compassion that dissolves this barrier. I used to think this was just well-intentioned mumbo-jumbo, but here is a neuron that doesn’t know the difference between self and other. Are our brains uniquely hardwired for empathy and compassion !

[ From The Tell-Tale Brain by V.S. Ramachandran]

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The Human brain is made up of about 100 billion nerve cells, or neurons

(Figure Int.1)

Drawing by Victor Taylor and Richard Taylor.

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Neurons “talk” to each other through threadlike fibres that alternatively resemble dense, twiggy

thickets . (dendrites) and long, sinuous transmission cables (axons). Each neuron makes from

one thousand to ten thousand contacts with other neurons. The points of contact [synapses]

are where intermission gets shared between neurons each synapse can be excitatory or

inhibitory, and at any given moment be on or off. With all permutations the number of possible brain states is staggeringly vast, in fact, it easily exceeds the number of elementary particles in the Known Universe.

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thought stretches out in so many directions it hard to know where to start. Indeed, Adorno’s Noise seems to perform a kind of essayistic yoga, creating new spaces inside the

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If a million million automatic typers typed

every second every minute every day and endlessly

Something sometime somewhere perfectly

Would on all that surge of words and marks appear –

In someway somehow mysteriously

As hands are formed or infinity, is made by giant minds

To disappear.

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But starting in the 1990s, this static view of the brain was steadily supplanted by a much more dynamic picture. The brain’s so-called modules don’t do their jobs in isolation; there is a great deal of back and forth interaction between them, far more than previously suspected. Changes in the operation of one module – say, from damage, or from maturation, or from learning and life

experience – can lead to significant changes in the operations of many other modules to which it is connected. To a surprising extent, one module can even take over the functions of another.

Far from being wired up according to rigid, prenatal genetic blueprints, the brain’s wiring is highly malleable – not just in infants and in young children, but throughout every adult life time.

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Bartlebooth’s dining room is now virtually never used. It is an austere, rectangular room with a dark parquet floor, long raised-velvet curtains, and a large Brazilian rosewood table covered with a damask cloth. On the long sideboard standing at the back of the room there are eight round tins, each bearing an effigy of King Farouk.

* * *

While staying in Cape Sao Vicente, in the south of Portugal, in late nineteen thirty-seven, shortly before his long tour of Africa, Bartlebooth made the acquaintance of an importer from Lisbon who, on learning that the Englishman planned to travel to Alexandria in the near future, entrusted him with an electric heater which he asked him to be so kind as to deliver to his Egyptian agent, a certain Farid Abu Talif. Bartlebooth carefully copied the trader’s name and address into his diary; on arrival in Egypt towards the end of spring 1938, he enquired after this reputable businessman and had the gift from Portugal taken over to him. Though the temperature was already far too mild for anyone to really need an electric heater, Farid Abu Tarif was so happy with his present that he asked Bartlebooth to give his Portuguese friend, for trial and approval, eight tins of coffee which he had put through a process he called “ionization”, a treatment designed, so he explained, to make it retain its aroma virtually indefinitely. Though Bartlebooth made it absolutely clear that he would certainly not have occasion to see the importer again for some seventeen years, the Egyptian insisted, adding that the result of the trial would be all the more convincing if the coffee still kept some of its flavour after all that time.

In the years that followed, the tins caused endless trouble. At each border crossing Bartlebooth and Smautf had to open the tins and let suspicious customs officers sniff their contents, taste the grains on the tips of their tongues, and sometimes even brew up a cup of coffee with them to make sure they weren’t some new kind of drug. By the end of nineteen forty-three, the tins were empty – and by then rather dented – but Smautf would not let Bartlebooth throw them away; he used them to keep various kinds of small change in, or for the rare seashells he happened to find on beaches, and on their return to France he put them, as a memento of their long voyage, on the dining-room sideboard, where Bartlebooth let them stay.

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Each of Winkler’s puzzles was a new, unique, and irreplaceable adventure for Bartlebooth. Each time, when he broke the seal that locked Madame Hourcade’s black box and spread out on his table cloth, under the light of his scialytic lamp, the seven hundred and fifty little pieces of wood that his watercolour had become, it seemed to him that all the experience he had accumulated over five or ten or fifteen years would be of no use, but this time, like every other time, he would have to deal with difficulties he could not even begin to guess at.

Each time he vowed to proceed methodically and with discipline, not to rush in headlong, not to try to recover straight away in his fragmented watercolour some detail or other which he thought he could still remember properly: this time he was not going to let his passion or his dreams or his impatience get the better of him, but would build up his puzzle with Cartesian rigour: divide up the problems the better to solve them, deal with them one by one, ruling out improbable combinations, placing the pieces as would a chess player constructing an unanswerable or ineluctable gambit: he was going to begin by turning all the pieces face-up, then he would take out all those pieces possessing a straight-line edge, and with them he was going to assemble the frame of the jigsaw. Then he would study all the other pieces, systematically, one by one, taking them in his hand, turning them round and round every possible way; he would extract the pieces which held some more apparent design or detail, and sort the remainder by colour and within each colour-group by shade, and so even before beginning to slot the center pieces in he would have scored in advance three-quarters of his victory over the snares laid by Winckler. The rest would be just a matter of patience.

The main problem was to stay neutral, objective, and above all flexible, that is to say free of preconceptions. But that was exactly where Gaspard Winckler had laid his traps.

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