PLATONIC IDEAL DIALECTIC

There is no bigger space than nihility.

Artificiality is the way to enjoy naturalness. What I enjoy of these vast open spaces, I enjoy because I don’t live here. Anyone who has never been oppressed doesn’t feel freedom.

Civilization consists in giving a thing a name that doesn’t compete with the thing and then dreaming about the results. The object really becomes something else because we make it become something else. We manufacture realities. The raw material continues to be the same, but the form that art gives it keeps it from being the same. A pine table is a pine but it is also a table. We sit at a table, not at the pine. Love is a sexual instinct, yet we don’t love with a sexual instinct but with a presupposition of another sentiment. And that presupposition is, in effect, already another sentiment.

Until the advent of television emptied the movie theaters, it was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive. Example: It looks good to wear a raincoat even when it isn’t raining. But whatever you took home was only a part of the larger experience of submerging yourself in lives that were not yours. The desire to lose yourself in other people’s lives … faces. This is a larger, more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. Even more than what you appropriated for yourself was the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie — and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image. The experience of “going to the movies” was part of it. To see a great film only on television isn’t to have really seen that film. It’s not only a question of the dimensions of the image: the disparity between a larger-than-you image in the theater and the little image on the box at home. The conditions of paying attention in a domestic space are radically disrespectful of film. Now that a film no longer has a standard size, home screens can be as big as living room or bedroom walls. But you are still in a living room or a bedroom. To be kidnapped, you have to be in a movie theater, seated in the dark among anonymous strangers.

His love of the ocean had profound sources: the hard-worked artist’s longing for rest, his yearning to seek refuge from the thronging manifold shapes of his fancy in the bosom of the simple and vast; and another yearning, opposed to his art and perhaps for that very reason a lure, for the unorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal—in short, for nothingness. He whose preoccupation is with excellence longs fervently to find rest in perfection; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

He looked at his comrades, and his mortal eyes met the timeless, petrified eyes of history. For the first time the robe of greatness had fallen upon their shoulders: they were the fabulous soldiers of a lost war, human no longer, but statues. I’ve spent my life reading, yawning, tinkling the bell of my own little problems, never managing to make a decision—only to find that I have decided, that I chose this war and this defeat, that today has been waiting for me since the beginning of time. Everything’s got to be done over again, and yet, there’s nothing that can be done. The two thoughts interpenetrated, cancelled one another out. Only the unruffled surface of nothingness remained.

A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors.

He who wishes to approach his own buried past must act like a man who digs. This determines the tone, the stance of real memories. They must not be afraid to return again and again to the same fact of the matter, to strew it the way one strews soil, to churn it the way one churns the earthen realm. Because facts of the matter are only deposits, layers which deliver only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the true assets hidden within the inner earth: the images which, torn from all former contexts, stand-like ruins or torsos in the collector’s gallery-as the treasures in the sober chambers of our belated insights. And, in order to dig successfully, a plan is certainly required. Yet just as indispensable is the spade’s careful, probing penetration of the dark earthen realm; and he who only keeps the inventory of his finds, but not also this dark bliss of the finding itself, cheats himself of the best part. The unsuccessful search belongs to it just as fully as the fortunate search. This is why memory must nor proceed by way of narrative, much less by way of reports, but must, rather, assay its spade, epically and rhapsodically in the most rigorous sense, in ever new places and, in the old ones, to delve into ever deeper layers.

All memory is individual, unreproducible-it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.