“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, September 30, 2015

MOOOdalities

It was almost my kind of apple except for the tiny set of stairs carved into the back descending to a long loop of spiraling peel that provided a way for what could have been small plastic monkeys to almost swing back and forth in the Munich twilight in the hands of the boy under the death clock, he was almost holding it straight up like the Statue of Liberty holding that torch that isn't really a gigantic ice cream cone, I mean it nearly is except it's made of metal and all and the fact that it's too big to fit into my face all at once, or even all at a thousand times, that's pretty true. If you don't have to exclude middles then don't forget the middle of the apple, the bit you just swallowed without noticing, those tiny cyanide pips they don't really kill you, they could almost if you ate enough I guess, they're like suicide pills inside an apple, but not really, well not that much anyway. Kinda suicide pills. Kinda suicide, is it possible, why yes, it happens every day. Turn off the old mind, it's easier said than done John, how about we turn it down half way and see what happens? I like the next bit, "It is not dying" etc that pretty much nails it, you're not dead and you're not alive, you're somewhere in between, kinda zombie with a nicer less freaked out, less I've been buried look, reasonable hairdo, but I'm not sure whether that means you're truly alive or not, especially not at that point, technically you sort of are but it's not you any more, it's some kind of visualization you, but then again, that was about 70% true before you popped it as well. Nothing quite exactly as it seems is exactly what seems to be the case whichever way you slice it. Crunch. Yeah this is definitely an apple, I just bit the inside of my cheek, that's something apples do to me, they don't mean it and neither do I, so we forgive each other. Could almost cry, almost laugh, not quite sure which pathway to travel, there's a lot of energy in here, could be a lighting effect, I'm slightly paranoid. You're neither with us nor against us but somewhere in the doorway of being with us, I reckon. That's how you look from here, it's pretty obvious you Mean Business in some way, you can pass my Turing Test any time, baby, haha, that's almost funny and you almost care, you're my kind of apple, a great crisp juicy computer of an apple if you ask me.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Have you read Bruno Schulz, Tim? Might wanna, if not. He shares similar atmospherics with Kafka (and in a way Lovecraft), but goes really on his own tangents stylistically. There's this grand physicality to everything in his work, grasping the 'fourfold' split of objects and their qualities quite amazingly in my opinion. Things are deeply real and therefore very weird.

He wrote during the 30s and died in '42, unfortunately due to being a polish jew during a very bad time in history. But I feel that these two quotes show his closeness to OOO, the 'withdrawing' of things:

“There are things than cannot ever occur with any precision. They are too big and too magnificent to be contained in mere facts. They are merely trying to occur, they are checking whether the ground of reality can carry them. And they quickly withdraw, fearing to loose their integrity in the frailty of realization.” - Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“After tidying up, Adela would plunge the rooms into semidarkness by drawing down the linen blinds. All colors immediately fell an octave lower, the room filled with shadows, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the sea and the light was reflected in mirrors of green water–and the heat of the day began to breathe on the blinds as they stirred slightly in their daydreams.” - Street of Crocodiles

D. E.M. said...

"You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."
Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Anonymous said...

If proof were possible, and analytic philosophy were anything but a set of machine-code assumptions pretending to portend proofs, I would say the poetics of this post "prove" to my dreaming self that all of you are alternate reconstructions of material relations to be. I loved the post about colours in Street of Crocodiles because sometimes I read the OOO posts in refracted streams of chakras telling me to reimagine my questions. (Adela in Street of Crocs knows this instinctively and creates the flicker (comming up for Samhain for you wytchy witches out there) by manipulating the rolleau). Well, not Larval Subjects so much, but here, yes.