Black and Gold

(It was that period in life one seldom has to be up this early
when youth is just how late we stayed up.
We were like Cesare Pavese's devils in some uncertain hills of Piedmont
But to gather there at eight we were told
And together in a car, east I drove
On the highway the sun simplifies the colours of this scene
to only the difference between charcoal and gold.

This is much more than a reminder of the true function of sunglasses.)

I pointed to you the exuberant colours the 'dying daylight' has painted on the tree
your attention was to the path and how the sun turns everything gold.

I am glad to acknowledge this inaccurate definition of alchemy.
I am generous enough to forgive the sun for impersonating the touch Midas once gave.

eating paper: an umemployed metaphor

Message: Bought Teck Kee 'pao' to eat. In my hunger think I ate a bit of the paper at the bottom!

Reply: Haha that happened to me before. But more often with wrapper of 'fruitella', the sweet I used to eat

Message: Ok i think its more forgiving to eat the pao paper by mistake than the fruitella sweet paper! Although its also the hot weather melting the paper on the sweet so it gets stuck

Reply: I am always just too lazy to peel the wrapper off properly,

and also because I hate the feeling when
bits of the sweet get stuck on my nails,
when fingers are sticky -
generally, the same category of inconvenience when superglue dries the tips of my clumsy fingers (where for both situations, I would reach for the tissue despite knowing it won't help much)

I know eating the food wrapping paper
is different from our common experience
of eating an orange together with its fibre;
the banana with the skin (which is unlikely to happen);
'the few strands of hair on her cheek when you kiss her'
(I kissed her and the few strands of hair on her cheek'...
that few strands across her cheek... that one strand in my mouth I licked off, and now on my tongue...);
and definitely not, the awkwardness a guy feels when the girl brings her friend along during the first date

it is of another category, definitely

but all these experiences are surely not the experience of eating the 'white rabbit' milk candy which has the edible wrapper as the gimmick

Phenomenology of Perception - Merleau-Ponty, p.11

We shall find in ourselves and nowhere else the unity and true meaning of phenomenology. It is less a question of counting up quotations than of determining and expressing in concrete fom this phenomenology for ourselves which has given a number of present-day readers the impression, on reading Husserl and Heidegger, not so much of encountering a new philopsophy as of recognising what they had been waiting for.

'Notes on Gesture' from Infancy and History, Giorgio Agamben pp. 154 -156

IV
Because it is centrally located in the gesture, not the image, cinema essentially ranks with ethics and politics (and not merely with aesthetics).

What is gesture? And observation by Varro holds an extremely valuable clue. He inscribes gesture in the sphere of action, but distinguishes it clearly from acting [agere] and doing [facere]:

A person can make [facere] something and not enact [agere] it, as a poet makes a play, but does not act it (agree in the sense of playing a part); on the other hand the actor acts the play, but does not make it. So the play is made [fit] by the poet, but not acted [agitur] by him; it is acted by the actor, but not made by him. Whereas the imperator (the magistrate in whom supreme power is invested) of whom the expression res gerere is used (to carry something out, in the sense of taking it upon oneself, assuming total responsibility for it), neither makes nor acts, but takes charge, in other words carries the burden of it [sustinet].

What characterizes gesture is that in it there is neither production nor enactment, but undertaking and supporting. In other words, gesture opens the sphere of ethos as the most fitting sphere of the human. But in what way is an action undertaken and supported? In what way does a res become res gesta, a simple fact become an event? Varro’s distinction between facere and agere derives, in the final analysis, from Aristotle. In a famous passage from the Nicomachean ethics, he contrasts them thus: ‘Action [praxis] and production [poiesis] are generically different. For production aims at an end other than itself; but this is impossible in the case of action, because the end is merely to do what is right.’

What is new, however, is the identification along with these, of a third kind of action: if doing is a means in sight of an end and praxis is an end without means, gesture breaks the false alternative between ends and means that paralyses morality and presents means which, as such, are removed from the sphere of mediation without thereby becoming ends.

Thus, if we are to understand gesture, nothing is more misleading than to picture a sphere of means directed towards an end (for example, walking as a means of moving the body from point A to point B) and hence, distinct from and superior to it, a sphere of gesture as movement that contains its own end within itself (for example, dance as an aesthetic dimension). A finality without means is just as much of an aberration as a mediation that makes sense only in relation to an end. If dance is gesture, this is, however, because it is nothing but the physical tolerance of bodily movements and the display of their mediating nature. Gesture is the display of mediation, the making visible of a means as such. It makes apparent the human states of being-in-a-medium and thereby opens up the ethical dimension for human beings. But as a person in a pornographic film is captured in the act of carrying out a gesture that is merely a means a directed towards the end of procuring pleasure for others (or him or herself), through the sole fact of being photographed and displayed in his or her own state of mediation this person is suspended from that mediation and can become, for the spectators, the medium of a new pleasure (one that would be otherwise incomprehensible); or as those gestures in mime directed towards the most familiar ends are displayed as such, and therefore, held in suspense ‘entre le désir et l’accomplissement, la perpetration et son souvenir’ (between the desire and its fulfillment, the perpetration and its memory’), in what Mallarmé calls a milieu pur–a pure milieu–thus, in gesture, there is the sphere not of an end in itself, but of a kind of mediation that is pure and devoid of any end that is effectively communicated to people.

Only in this way can the obscure Kantian expression ‘finality without end’ acquire a concrete meaning. It is, in a means, that potential for the gesture to interpret it in its very being-means and only thus does it display it, does it turn a res into a res gesta. In the same way, if by word we intimate the means of communication, showing a word does not mean deploying something on a higher plane (a metalanguage which is itself incommunicable within the first level), on the basis of which this would be made an object of communication, but exposing it without any transcendence in its own state of mediation, in its own being as a means. In this sense, gesture is the communication of a potential to be communicated. In itself it has nothing to say, because what it shows is the being-in-langauge of human beings as a pure potential for mediation. But since being-in-language is not something that can be spoken of in propositions, in its essence gesture is always a gesture of a non-making of sense in language, it is always a gag in the strict meaning of the term, indicating in the first instance something that is put in the mouth to hinder speech, and subsequently the actor’s improvisation to make up for a memory lapse or some impossibility of speech. Hence there is not only a proximity between gesture and philosophy, but also one between philosophy and cinema. The essential ‘mutism’ of cinema (which has nothing to do with either the presence or absence of a soundtrack) is, like the mutism of philosophy, an exposition of human being’s being-in-language: pure gesturality. The Wittgensteinian definition of mysticism [,] as the showing of what cannot be spoken of, is a literal definition of the gag. And every great philosophical text is the gag that displays language itself, being-in-language itself, as a giant memory lapse, as an incurable speech defect.

V

Politics is the sphere of pure means, which is to say of the absolute and total gesturality of human beings.

Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Kojeve P.492

But if Freedom is ontologically Negativity, it is because Freedom can be and exist only as negation. Now in order to negate, there must be something to negate: an existing given... Freedom dos not consist in choice between two givens: it is negation of the given, both of the given which one is oneself (as animal or as 'incarnated tradition') and of the given which one is not (natural and social World) .... The freedom which is realised and manifested as dialectical or negating Action is thereby essentially a creation. For to negate the given without ending in nothingness is to produce something that did not yet exist; now this is precisely what is called 'creating'.

The Ticklish Subject - p. 59 Zizek (Verso: London, 1999)

The paradox thus lies in the fact that 'false' appearance is comprised within the 'thing itself'. And, incidentally, therein lies the dialectical 'unity of essence and appearance' completely missed by the textbook platitudes on how 'essence must appear', and so on: the approximate 'view from afar' which ignores all the details and limits itself to the 'mere appearance', is paradoxically constitutes itself through the very removal of the 'false' appearance from the Real in its immediacy. We thus have three elements, not only essence and its appearing: first, there is reality; within it, there is the 'interface'-screen of appearances; finally, on this screen, essence appears. The catch is thus that appearance is literally the appearing/emerging of the essence - that is, the only place for the essence to dwell. The standard Idealist reduction of reality as such, in its entirety, to the mere appearance of some hidden Essence falls short here: within the domain of 'reality' itself, a line must be drawn which separates 'raw' reality from the screen thorugh which the hidden Essence of reality appears, so that if we take away this medium of appearance, we lose the very 'essence' which appears in it...

illiterate

being illiterate for 16 years did not persuade him to say:
I like this poet because he is easy to read.

being illiterate for 19 years, he did not say:
I live with regret for missing out the classics one should have started reading as a kid

being illiterate for 22 years,
he would not step on anybody's inability to read or write, to stand taller

being illiterate for 29 years,
he despise their capacity to accumulate and use cliches and needless foreign slangs... even if that were to signify literacy

4 July 1934 - ALVARO DE CAMPOS P. 253

I got off the train
And said good-bye to the man I'd met.
We'd been together for eighteen hours
And has a pleasant conversation,
Fellowship in the journey,
And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave
This chance friend whose name I never learned.
I felt my eyes water with tears...
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death.
In the train we call life
We are all chance events in one another's lives,
And we all feel sorry when it's time to get off.

All that is human moves me, because I'm a man.
All that is human moves me not because I have an affinity
With human ideas or human doctrines
But because of my intimate fellowship with humanity itself.

The maid who hated to go,
Crying with nostalgia
For the house where she'd been mistreated ...

All of this, inside my heart, is death and the world's sadness.
All of this lives, because it dies, inside my heart.

And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe.

A Woman In Love - Paul Eluard

She is standing on my eyelids
And her hair mingles with mine,
She has the shape of my hands,
She has the colour of my eyes,
She dissolves into my shadow
Like a stone against the sky.

Her eyes are always open
And she doesn't let me sleep
Her dreams in daylight
Cause the suns to drift away
Make me laugh, weep and laugh,
Speak when I have nothing to say

there I nearly faint

It was a casual update of what happened to me over the weekend:
I nearly blackout in the shopping mall, amongst the crowd.
Too hungry, I guess,
and to the nearest restaurant I went
– for something to drink and anything to eat.

You asked, you mean you were alone?!
You made it sound as if it were a sin to be alone, to faint there.