The heaviest burden

from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra...

"What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your lonelinest solitude and said to you: 'This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence - and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again - and you with it, you dust of dust!' - Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!' If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you; the question in all and everything: 'do you want this again and again, times without number?' would lie as the heaviest burden upon all your actions. Or how well disposed towards yourself and towards life would you have to become to have no greater desire than for this ultimate eternal sanction and seal?"


Resonate, 2005
Kathryn Cornelius
T610 mobile phone digital photograph

when was the last time

you felt like this was the last time?

...that the final vowels had been laid into place, ordered like dominos, set and ready for the verbal take-off, launch pad, breaking point?

when was the last time you heard the words loud and clear?

...the words for the pit of anger that sits deep in your gut and makes a nest there,
the words that screech out in stark pink venom, the consonants barely holding together the energy tearing open the seems?

when was the last time you got the message
heard the call
answered the door
turned around
and gained two inches to your height because that was the right thing to do. the right thing to say.
retreat::silence
silence::solitude
solitude::heal
heal::to wrap your arms around it, feeling the kern of each letter and loving it as the last.

other people's words seem much more interesting 'cause they ain't mine

feeling a quiet escape in the post-thesis state of decompression, i have been happy to read the wisdom of others -- this quote is from the wisdom of the heart, by henry miller:

(talking about Erich Gutkind's The Absolute Collective: A Philosophical Attempt to overcome our broken state)

"The man of today, the man of the transition period, split and straddled as he is between two worlds, pregnant with the germ of the future, is veritably crucified by his duality...The climate of this opus is a sort of spiritual equinox in which life and death are seen to be at balance. Is it necessary to add that it is precisely at such moments that the miraculous nature of life reveals itself, at just such moments that the whole order of life can be reversed, or transcended?

...We stand at the threshold of a new way of life, one in which MAN is about to be realized. The disturbances which characterize this age of transition indicate clearly the beginnings of a new climate, a spiritual climate in which the body will no longer be denied, in which, on the contrary, the body of man will find its proper pace in the world...

Thus, the complete destruction of our cultural world...The old grooves of race, religion and nationality are destined to go, and in their place we shall see, for the first time in the history of man, a community of interest based not on the animal in him but on the human being which he has so long denied. The fight is between the death instinct and the life instinct. It has nothing to do with culture, or bread, or ideology, or peace or security. The schism has grown so wide that it is either self-destruction or a totality never before imagined. With each new conflict one is made increasingly aware of the real battle, which is inner, and which is nothing but a warfare between the real and the ideal man."

Though this was published in 1941 (and Gutkind's essay in 1932), Miller's approach to the binary of inner versus outer, real versus ideal, is akin to the negoitations of polarities that, to me, are becoming much more pressing in importance. Increasingly, self-definition mirrors a list of categories one ascribes to and feels membership with, both constructed by and for systems of organization such as demographic groups for marketing purposes, inner office politics, and online systems of identity management using metadata. As the outside informs more and more of what the inside feels, the inner conflict will seep out of the pores and manifest in verbal violence, frantic gestures, and worse, large-scale community deterioration, civil warfare, and inter-continental apathy. With so many mechanisms for distraction in everyday life (personal technology, adrenline-addicted dramas, the cacophony of over-abundant communication), little space and time is carved out for quiet, for reflection, for thoughtfully mediated exchange between individuals, and for true renderings of the aftermath of experience (digestion).

So, it's a little blank here these days. Deliberately so. Pages are sometimes best left unmarked, empty terrian.

A single note can affect a multitude of sounds if given the chance to ring long enough, and alone.

consider this part of an extended collage

...the writing here has been sparse, found more than forged, but still fresh, for me (at least). so, hence, the collage.


and another piece, recovered from a book i thought i threw out years ago. this writing was on the tube in london as a part of their art in the tube series circa 1998.

25th April 1974

This is the dawn I was waiting for
The first day whole and pure
When we emerge from night and silence
Alive into the substance of time



---I like some of the use of the structures of time, the things about nature we've picked up on in order to aid our construction of various durations and their social meanings. however, anything that tends to be so bounded to words or phrases that typically are used in large-scale philosophical applications (such as "dawn," "alive," "substance of time") can turn me off a bit...Well, hey, I wasn't even twenty when I noted observing this writing, but now I realize the importance to my own work, my own interests, to have some sort of "in my personal radius" item - word, metaphor, etc. - to secure a filament flung out to, in order to communicate the emotion of meaning...


well, and with that given, another shall follow - eventually -


(hey, it's hot outside.)