mad toy

etceteraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

what the water gave me

I hated

The Aleph.

I hated how pretentious it sounded talking about time and space.
I don't worship language. i barely respect it.

I am glad it was destroyed.
I hate trying to think about everything at once. I hated the paragraph where he tried to do it.

I absolutely hate the woman. I hate the man's fawning and what he remembers about her. the pictures of what she did. because i am scared of how i will live when i die.

Beatriz what a bitch.
though of course he rendered her subtly and beautifully, another dead woman. a naked dead woman in art. a naked dead woman sole obsession of a man who ages without her. i have a picture in my head. she is the aleph. she was once everything kaleidoscope telescope dream goddess. then she is a photograph. so she was never actually anything but a photograph. and when he stops going to look at the photograph, she was never even a photograph.

I hate to think about how cruel it is that memories morph and distort and disappear.
I also hate to think how wonderful it is.

There was never paradise.
the memories i have of you i can count on one hand. is that the extent to which you live?


masolino (aleph=tree of the knowledge of good and evil)


rothko (and i think he was closer to representing ALL)

The People

death & the compass continued

on the myth of sisyphus (note: camus also wrote about kafka)

1.
The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

what is meaning if (one can be both right & wrong)?
how can people be free?
i was wondering if lönrott committed suicide?


2.
To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets.

symbolism - a group of poets who did not care about the rights of the reader.
the detective's, the reader's, the criminal's, the writer's identities becoming mixed up.
the cultural weight of borges' choice to portray judaism and jewish subject matter, how lönrott thinks everyone is searching for the name of g-d.


3.
a. If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?
b. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory.

lönrott thinks everyone is searching for the name of g-d. he believes he is being super-rational, and that may be but he is also operating upon an absurd hypothesis, and his hope of success upholds him.
i was wondering if lönrott committed suicide? but he does not seem to become conscious of his role until scharlach tells him he will die.


4.
a. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.

b. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Oedipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same time, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Oedipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory.

how can people be free? spinoza asks this question in The Ethics. there he also explains that emotions are based on a scale of acting freely (affirmatively) v. reactively. joy is the ability to act more freely. we can arrange our affairs to produce joy rather than sadness.
lönrott's "absurd victory": he forgot his original desire>he only thinks of himself as Rational, as Reason>forgot world reality and body>he wants the name of G-D>reads himself wrong>wants to faithfully reproduce the text of the crime>scharlach's hyper-controlled rage produces/controls lönrott's joy at solving mystery>all is well because even after death, they will continue to play in and with their roles as criminal and detective> his skill will be his downfall> winning is losing>
but what is this absurd hope?


5.
a. There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.

b. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

wants to faithfully reproduce the text of the crime>scharlach's hyper-controlled rage produces/controls lönrott's joy at solving mystery>all is well because even after death, they will continue to play in and with their roles as criminal and detective.
but what is this absurd hope?
scharlach's revenge is the marriage of desire and reason, allows him to make something new with the text he is given. his impulse is toward mastery.

6.
a. All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing.

b. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

what is meaning if (one can be both right & wrong)?
the embrace of the absurd, embrace at all, action of self.


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The State