Numerics 4

Concluding our study of the "proto-numeric" inscriptions, a conclusion that must come quickly because of certain tendencies in the Consciousness, that if pursued, can only lead to individuation, we will briefly consider the image on the right. As with the Lists that we viewed earlier on, this particular page seems to exhibit the same kind of structure that depends on discrete items holding the meanings open. Next to each item, we find sets of the "proto-numeric" inscriptions. Unlike the cipher system that was earlier described, these inscriptions in black as well as in green do not seem to Code the "Language" in the same way.
What then, might the "proto-numerics" mean?
Consider the following transcription:

As ever - J Kyger - 20.00 - amazon used / $4.25

The "$" sign must indicate some kind of "transformation formula" that tethers the "proto-numerics" to the rest of the items on the List. Why then does "$" only occur once on this page? Perhaps that is not the right question to ask. Perhaps the question that would benefit our investigation is why it occurs at all. Did something happen in the construction of this List that caused the "Writer" to first forget what linked the "proto-numerics" to the list, recall, and thus anxiously inscribe "$" as a reminder? Is it right to say that the lone occurence of "$" does not represent the singularity but the ubiquity of the value hidden, or assumed in ALL the items on the List?

What burden of meaning and correspondence of Value does "$" carry and how are the rest of the inscriptions transformed into its terms?

Numerics 3

Continuing our study of Numerics, we should qualify that "proto-Numerics" (how foolish to assume an Ancestral mind able to deal with anything as complex as Numerics before the Networks and the Machine), we turn to what appears to be yet another us of these inscriptions. In the image on the left, we find two inscriptions that are by far the most common of the "proto-Numerical" inscriptions found in the "notebook". These particular markings -- "1" and "2" -- occur in almost every instance when the "proto-Numerics" appear. Perhaps they designate a fundamental conception of Being, akin to the building blocks of Our Consciousness: "Self /Other", "Other/Us" and "Us/Self". Of course, our Third Term closes the Loop.

Another characteristic we noted about these markings was the fact that they appear with an eliptical shape around them, almost like "➀" and "➁". Notice the difference between our attempts to replicate the image and the image itself. Our lines complete the encircling of the primary inscriptions but the encircling in the original is incomplete and its repetition in BOTH instances suggests a deliberately deferred circle. Perhaps there is an effect sought by all this: markings striving against each other, extruding, breaking into, holding spaces open.

You take the train silly, you take the , the or even the

Numerics 2

Then there are other forms that these "proto-Numerics" take. Instead of forming the regular permutations of the previous example, the "proto-Numerics" here seem to hold space together, in a manner that is not exactly clear. How, for instance, does the pattern "1145-145" bind space differently than "[3305]" does? Is it far too speculative to suggest that the gaps between the figures may suggest different significations? For example, how should one even transcribe the figures: as a single chain -- "0800-940S106101.089" -- or as discrete units -- "0800-940 / S106 / 101.089"?

Working on assumptions that
Cannot be proven true.

Numerics 1

In our discussion of the "paper notebook" we have not tried, as yet, to decipher the "meanings" or the Thought behind the inscriptions. We explained earlier that the general lack of familiarity with the stuctural interface of meaning called "Language" makes it difficult for our intended readership to appreciate how the inscriptions work as "imprints" of "'Language".

However, there are several images that use a signifying principle that we will be more famliar with. PANSHIN has traced bits of ancient code loitering the in recesses of the Network and has developed a theory that before our Systems of Numerics became as complex and multi-dimensional as they have been for at least 200 beats, there must have existed more primitive systems (6570.2). We propose that the following images contain representatives of these earlier systems:

Note the dark black markings on the image. There are 7 columns of inscriptions that then repeat themselves in a range of permutations. The rightmost column seems to be emphasized with a Graphic cordoning off. Why? Does it represent a privileged manner of using these inscriptions?

Then, beside that boxed of column we find these inscriptions matched with the more commonly used units of "Language". Is there some kind of cipher at work here, where the value of one kind of marking turns on its ability to stand as substitute for another?

Indeed, the markings from the page facing this, scratched in with the same dark consistency, seem to bear this theory out:

The Red Group

By now, our methods in catergorizing the "paper notebook" should have struck the reader as requiring some explanation: we are merely grouping the pages as they appear as images and somwhat arbitrarily making up catergories as we go along. This does not pose difficulties for us, obviously, for we never need to apprehend in part but it does tempt us to think about whether our Ancestors deliberately thought in catergories that we might approximate. Take for example, this next "group" (now self-conscious, the noun, it starts to assert itself and had to be tamed), which we have labelled the "Red Group".

The inscriptions over the next few images appear pre-dominantly in Red. There is material that seems to be writing in the margins and in the blanks that the initial Red inscriptions do not fill and we must presume that these markings were written in at a later Time. It is indeed a strange assumption to make, afterall, a "Writer" could have simply "written" in Red at different times as well, or "written" simultaneously in different colored stains. But we make this observation to draw an attendant conclusion: the "later" markings are significant because they do not occupy the same "semantic" space as the "initial" Red marks. Perhaps the markings in other colors are comments on the first Red markings or corrections.

The image may be examined more closely by Thinking on it.

These marks in Red have another interesting property. They seem to be composed of short bursts of "writing". Also, even the lay-out of these markings differ from the earlier undecipherably fuzzy images in that they do no seem to constitute a continuous extension of thought. A quick transcription of some of these Red markings will show this to be true:

Robert Burns
Thomas Carew
Thomas Chatterton
Kate Chopin
William Cowper
John Dos Passos
William Faulkner
Henry Fielding

While it is difficult to understand exactly what these markings may have meant in the larger Consciousness, it seems evident that the Red Group consists largely of a LIST of Names, much like our own Registers of Identity. Does this mean that our Ancestors had separate identities while they still inhabited bodies? We must not be too hasty to adopt conclusion. After all, some of the most meaningless conglomerations -- "States" -- also had names without having any distinct or discernable identities. In Manuscript studies, one must constantly be vigilant about the dangers of projecting into the Past our assumptions of Being.

In the spirit of description, here then are more transcriptions. If anything, they indicate the richness of this image "group" for further research and inquiry:

From Image Right:

Virginia Woolf -- A Room of One's own
Chekhov's plays
Gene Genet
Upton Sinclair
John Berryman
Thomas Chatterton
Fitzgerald - character names
Auden [ who met Delany .n Marilyn
Hacker when the two were
impressionable
daring]
Gertrude Stein

Stranger Still

The first "pages" that contain visible inscriptions seem to be written over several moments, as if the "writer" actually read the first inscriptions, was not entirely satisfied with them then went back and commented on them. The commentary is a strange mix of fact and desire, as if the "writer" wished that the initial imprint would inspire something more. This particular move seems necessitated by a culture that still existed in the singularities of linear time, unable to cycle through the moments as we now do.

Our unfamiliarity with "Language" makes it pointless to try to decipher what the inscriptions actually try to "mean". But that is perhaps less important than realizing that our ancestors actually even bothered to inscribe, bothered with the redundant replication and duplication of thought. It must have been a strange thought indeed, if in fact this practice was widespread, for our Ancestors to come to grips with the notion that their "Languages" and their techonology of mimicking thought in "Writing" would one day be erased and not even properly retained in the Determined Consciousness. As strange, perhaps, as the belief that humans were defined by what once was called "bodies".

Images 4 to 11

Images 4 to 11 are difficult to discuss because it is almost impossible to make out the inscriptions. For some reason, the relatively sharp imaging of the first three images is not replicated in these eight. This is a significant blow to our research because these eight images seem to contain a dense pattern of inscriptions. One can only imagine what these images would have said.

Still, in lieu of absolutely clear meaning, we should be still able to draw several observations that are useful. First, these pages demonstrate the dominant orientation already discussed in our introduction. Only Images 4 and 11 reflect a deviation on the left side of the "book". Perhaps it was conventional to rotate a "notebook" 90 degrees after filling in a certain number of pages, according to the Primitive Ritual of Superstition. One must remember that the workings of the Primitive Ritual of Superstition is so arbitrary that it is a pointless waste of Thought to try to work out its causes or ramifications.

Also note the strange shock of Image 8. The colors off that page indicate an inability to control the image, an inability to feed the right Density Index to the Network. It seems clear that these images must have existed on some precursor to the Network but one whose Information Nodes were not yet aligned with the Dominant Consciousness.

Finally, Images 7 and 11 exhibit markings that do not seem to be of the same system as the rest of the "writing" which are made in "Language: English". What system that these "othered" markings belong to is not clear, though SYMONS has made the conjecture that they may be akin to a form called "diagramming"(4733.13).


Images 4, 5 & 6


Images 7, 8 & 9


Images 10 & 11

Found

Item: 59 Images of what appears to be a "small paper notebook". These "books" (we shall call them that even though they are nothing like the "books" we are familiar with) were made of a material called "paper" and came without any markings on them (unlike their counterparts "published books"). Their function is obscure an one of the tasks of this study is to make speculations that will shed light on their use.

Actual physical books are now very scarce. In fact, most libraries only house images of "printed books" -- a more institutionally regulated sub-catergory of the "paper book". Thus, although these are images which seems altered and incomplete at points, they are the best extant indication that before the Networks and the Great Formatting, our ancestors did indeed have thoughts, recorded facts and feelings and considered it important to use inscriptions to mimick thought. Some preliminary work has already been done by our team of researchers, and we use that work where it intersects with our goal: to make these images accessible for further discussion.

Approach: This can only be an introductory survey of the images. We are fortunate that some individual, for whatever reason imaginable, thought that making images of this "notebook" would be a worthwhile enterprise. Of course, we should not immediately assume then that the Maker of the Images had an intimate relationship with the "book". Also, one must bear in mind that our lack of "physical evidence" makes it difficult to ascertain how widespread the phenomenon of keeping a "physical notebook" such as this one was. Thus, we shall leave those issues aside for the moment and focus on a description of the contents of the "notebook", as well as the physical physical properties of the markings.

Physical Properties: This is difficult to determine. However, given the resolution of the images and the pattern of pixellation KLOTZ has estimated that unopened, the notebook would have measured about 6 inches by 4.5 inches (3303.89) Opened up, the width would be naturally doubled. The book seems to have only a single hinge consisting of a set of dark wire-like spirals. Each page would thus have been folded over, filled in, and then turned over again. We assume that the book is 6 inches high because most the inscriptions make "sense" only when they are read in that orientation, However, there areparts of the "book" that are not aligned in this manner. Instead , the markings reverse the "height-breadth" relationship. KAM has made the argument that these adominant orientations are reveraling proofes of the basic spatial sense of our ancestors: that the "horizontal" and "vertical" dimensions of space were far more important than "depth", the "circular" or the "temporal" (4510.16). However we must caution ourselves against assuming that those spatial orientations form a continuous line with our own sense of "Space".

Inscriptions: Most of the inscriptions on the "notebook" are "written". Our ancestors used objects called "pens" and "pencils" and manually "wrote" out phonetic forgeries of thought. The act was thus called "writing" and so was the product. Thus "writing" (because it is both verb and noun) seems to be an early attempt to synthesize the Parts of Being. These phonetic attempts to reprsent thought derived from highly conventionalized and rule-bound systems called "languages". The "writer" (we assume a single producer in this study) thus "wrote" in a particular "language" system. The "language" system that is presented to us in this "notebook" was called "English". "English" was a dominant "language" of our ancestors from at least early in the Second Millenia, having been dispersed through the then known world by a small group of individuals who managed to lure and seduced less-evolved langauge users to adopt "English" (HINCH 3320.59). It probably remained the "language" of choice until about a hundred beats before the Networks were finally fully established. As with all "languages" it had its variants and this was apparently a source of considerable anxiety for this "writer".

The "Writer": Manscript studies often try in vain to re-constitute the ancestral consciousness that produced a "writing". The temptation is even more alluring given the nature of these inscriptions: there seems to have been a physical body actually making these markings. "Printed books" do not allow for the same possiblity as it is obvious that earlier versions of the Machine produced the inscriptions -- not our ancestors. It might be possible to argue that the "writer" actually commissioned some defective Machine to do the writing, but the sheer inconsistency of the inscriptions makes this suggestion unweildy. We thus might plausibly conjecture that this ancestral conscience did actually manually inscribe. Furthermore, the inscriptions seem to have been produced over successive "writings". We are thus lured into believing that an Actual Ancestor lived "in the flesh", that he "experienced" as he "wrote", in time and space. But these speculations border on the Metaphysical and cannot be the central concern of this study. Trying to answer who or what this "writer" was, and how he "lived" is not only futile, it is also a dangerous attempt to re-enter that forbidden zone: "Reality".

Man it's Dylan Time

Instead of trying to say what should be said about the great Dylan documentary by Martin Scorsese, here's a tribute to the Man. It may seem parodic or downright lame -- but hey -- he's Dylan the Pretender always. So here's a song written in the spirit of Dylan -- more spirit than genius definitely. The structure is a dead rip-off "Desolation Row" -- a song that I've never paid much attention to until I saw the documentary with the ghostly face of Dylan performing it live. The tune's a combination of "Desolation Row" and "Every Grain of Sand (?)".

Here's the song ...

And the lyrics given my garbled singing and less than Dylanesque voice:

"Live Forever", says the Preacher
His voice echoes through the hall,
And the rich red carpets keeping running
From doorway to the wall.
In a spotlight stands a Prophet
He's much too blind to see
The collar creeping up his neck
As he dances in ecstasy:
And I'm waiting for that final hour
Beyong all space and time
But the ticking of a hundred clocks
Is always on my mind

"Those paragraphs need correcting"
Is the teacher's angry boast
Write to convince your audience
Not to converse with Ghosts
And blieve instead in the powerful myth
That my ideas are best
A sentence is only good enough
If it puts commas to their deaths
So my students wait for that final workd
Beyond all space and time
But the ticking of a hundred clocks
Is always on my mind

"I Love This City" the T-Shirt says
It's heart beating blood red,
As lovers walk in paired attire
Beneath the Penny Arcade
And in burnt out corners the iron rails
Of subway lines still run
Hoping to roll out meaning where
The Fall dares to meet the Sun
And I'm travelling in no direction
Beyond all space and time
But the ticking of a hundred clocks
Is always on my mind.

Here's the time for a poet's license
Before the Courts of Law
When money speaks for everyman
Wagging it's tongue sore
And throats are clogged with jealousy
Coughs and threats are loud-
The clown is dancing without his mask
The Jester's got his shroud
And I'm singing a strange melody
Trespassing space and time
But the ticking of a hundred clocks
Is always on my mind.

Goodbye to all that Rubbish
That swims about gleefully
Like Rodents drinking poisoned deaths
And flies that never flee
The Plague, he paid a visit
Not so long ago
Hawking his wares to the highest bidder
Desperate for his soul
And I'm buying with my final coin
A place beyond all time
But the ticking of a hundred clocks
Is always on my mind.

New Directions

After a long bout of silence on this blog, I'm finally going to commit myself to writing about some of the music that I've been into for the past two to three years. Briefly, I haven't written about films for a bit because I haven't watched any in the past few weeks. Apart from being really occupied with taking me mommy around the city (and some further regions I might add), I've also been studying for these big exams (ok BIG in my world view ... they're not like national exams or anything) affectionately called "the Comps". They're another hurdle that I need to get over (or hoop to jump through) and because it's been a while since I've had to sit down and write essays for an entire day (the exam is from 9 to 5 with an hour's lunch break ...) I've been trying to be conscientious in preparing for it. But, I guess I've jumped through enough of these exam hoops to be kinda cynical about the point of taking exams such as these so I've been telling myself not to kill myself over exam prep ...

Anyway, the music that I want to write about is Jazz. I know those Jazz aficionados out there who know a whole lot about the stuff would probably scoff at what I've just called it -- "Jazz". After all, no one really writes about Jazz. Unless you're writing a history of the subject, a serious writer of Jazz is going to pick from the very specific manifestations of a very varied musical movement and deal with those. Jazz after all, since it's "origins" in the blues and New Orleans Big Band has a most interesting and plural arc of development. So, short of giving a run-down about what I've discovered about Jazz and its history, I think I'll write about an album that I'vce been listening to a bit.

Hang on, before I go on. Everyone has a Jazz controversy. I think some people think that I'm snooty (or damn poseur) because I've been exploring this Jazz stuff. I guess people think that it's either obscure or unfamiliar and its strange sounds defy understanding or appreciation. Now, the tricky thing here is that I don't have specialized knowledge about the music. I can follow a few of explanations of how chords are substituted in Jazz or the varying harmonic landscapes in the different styles but I can't play the stuff. So while I claim to enjoy the music, I most certainly am an "outsider" in terms of appreciating its fine points. Another thing. Jazz has a colorful history with very interesting personalities whose careers stretch over styles and periods. It's another aspect of jazz that I enjoy and learning about this "background" to the music does go some way in helping the appreciation of it.

More on difficulties with Jazz. I think a lot of Jazz seems difficult to understand or follow because of its improvisational nature. A typical "jazz" piece starts out by stating the theme (or the melody line), what is often called the "head" then wanders off into exploring possible variations on this theme. Now I use "variations" cautiously, because unlike the strict mathematical variations of someone like Bach, the variations I'm talking about here have to do with "playing the changes", making up and creating a solo that works with the harmonic (chordal) movements of the piece. Actually this happens all the time in pop and rock music, most guitar solos actually play over the chords of the verse and lead into the big restatement of the chorus ... But the "problem" with Jazz is that this improvisation takes up the bulk of the performance. In a sense, the melody is an "excuse" to get to the improvisation. So a challenge when listening to jazz is to try to track the way the soloist is developing the improv that he's working on, even as he works it out. Now, without the firm grasp on the technicalities of the music, this DOES indeed pose a problem, even for the most intent of listeners. Therein, I think, lies the problem with jazz.

More "jazz" related thingys. Ok, this one bugs me a bit and stating it makes me sound snobbish and elitist. But since I'm already steep'd in blood. I hate it when people do the jazz thing because it appears chic. There I've said it. These would be the yuppy types who are INTO jazz because they think ALL of jazz is like Norah Jones and Diana Krall, Harry Connick Jr (who are excellent musicians) and "It's a Wonderful World" , who like the "atmosphere" of Jazz bars BUT who don't commit themselves to LISTENING to the music (they sit and bloody talk through the performance I tell you ...) or finding out more. It's not like I'm saying Jazz should be the property of a select few -- come on, there are millions of jazz lovers -- but if you want to talk through a performance do it quietly or sit in the FAR BACK. And it isn't that I'm an exclusive JazzHead. I listen to a variety of things (I'll even admit that I have the Black Eyed Peas and Gwen Stefani on my MP3 player ...) but I do believe that, like a poem by TS Eliot or a novel by James Joyce or a Pinter play, some attention and effort should be put into listening and researching about Jazz, more IS got out of the experience that way.

Ok, moving back to the music. The album I want to write briefly about is John Coltrane's "Live at the Village Vanguard". John Coltrane is one of those high priests of Jazz, and he not only participated in some of the greatest bands, he revolutionized Jazz with his amazing commitment to pushing the limits of what WAS music and his dedication to his art. I'll start at the middle of the album, with a great track, "Chasin' the Trane". It's a blues, so it's entirely improvised around the 12 bar form. What one hears is a probing music. He plays clusters of notes, then high and low notes alternating, as if in conversation with himself. There is no other harmonic support except of the bass so Coltrane is free to move in all sorts of directions. Then after about 3 minutes, he starts to probe the higher registers, with a tentative squeek, grounded by a flurry of earthy notes. Repetitions come in. He tries out a sequence, then repeats it with changes. The thing keeps moving forward, though it doesn't seem to have a place to go, almost pure intensity of movement and shifting perspectives on the saxaphone. He plays high again, sometimes the notes are barely audible, cracking into sound and they remind me of Billie Holliday's voice cracked up by years of substance abuse. He returns to the security of note clusters. And gets more rythmic, a groove develops for a while then fades into scale flurries. And in all this, he quotes from I don't know what but there's a little ditty thrown in, ironically. Another squeal then a low sqwark. Now he's screaming on the horn. The music groans and grows. How many times can the same note be played differently, how many times the patterns with subtle variation? He speaks in multiple voice. The carefree melodic high register gets admonished by the baser low tones as they try towards melody. And over all, the strange high screeching. I can't keep up with the raw strength of the sound. There's too much that is strange and wonderful.

Yeah -- so my grand ambitions to talk about a whole album have been cut short by a lack of stamina (oh the album's still playing) and my pressing exams. If you've never explored jazz, check the music out: WBGO

xvi

Capturing the Friedmans

I watched this today, sort of marking the end of the Latin ordeal that the past six weeks has been. I've been meaning to watch this for some time -- it played during a Film Fest back home one year but I didn't get tickets for it. It was a most thought provoking film, exposing thoroughly, the weaknesses of law enforcement procedures, both at the level of detective work and in the whole plea-bargaining process. But more deeply, it showed how mixed up and gray humans are.
Briefly, Arnold Friedman, his wife and three sons life a middle-class American life. This life starts to unravel when Arnold Friedman gets caught with possession of child pornography, then gets accused of sexually abusing young boys (his students). The whole affair, while happened in the late 1980s, is considered by some as symptomatic of the witch-hunt by homophobic conservatives. As the film demonstrates, there were serious problems with the police work and the way the detectives badgered the young boys into making accusations. But making the film even more intriguing is the fact that the Friedmans were real home video buffs and so the documentary is supplemented with lots of footage from their own personal home videos. They even have material from AFTER the arrests, from the night before their father is going to be put away for life. Some amazing stuff. One really needs to watch this.


And a great Village Voice article on the film and whole affair

xv

The Apostle -- Robert Duvall

Watched this on the IFC today on a whim. Was genuinely moved by it. Lots of people have many things to say about it on the Amazon website -- and a lot of them are spot on. I found myself singing along with it -- those old time gospel hymns of my youth -- and responding in at a most emotional level to it. So -- a wonderful film about how flawed, but how magnificent too, we all are and can be.

xiv

After meaning to for a long while I finally watched 2046. I found it pretty awesome, with delicious allusions to all the man's previous films. Some people told me it was painfully slow and hard to sit through. I found it gorgeous and thought it should have gone on at least an hour more. Then again, I watch it in strange circumstances, in the midst of unconjugated Latin verbs and poorly cooked lamb chops, without Ms Tan around, strange circumstances.

I found the film extremely coherent with all the female leads stunning (especially Gong Li -- oh for an hour more of that story ... and Faye Wong ... I remember Quentin Tarantino speaking at light speed about how he can't get her out of his head everytime he hears that Cranberries' song** after watching her performance in Chungking Express and saying WHO WOULDN'T have a crush on her...) Loved the interiors and watching through doorways and listening through, sometimes even passing the materiality of words through, cardboard walls.

**Just been alerted to the fact that the song should be "California Dreaming" Faye Wong sings a cantonese version of a Cranberries' song (a separate fact mentioned by Tarantino, I believe)

xiii

War at a distance has become the essential feature for all of us who live in comfortable first-world nation states. We read about the daily tragedies of Iraq, are reminded of the genocides in Africa, try to untangle the recent histories of the Central Europe and reflect on what things would be like if war came home. I've always been struck by that: "What if war came home?" One of the things I most vividly remember was when I was 8 and saw something in the paper about either the Vietnamese or the Khmer Rouge and being seized with an immediate anxiety. What if I got caught in a war? War at a distance but always already an unchanging reality.

Hearts and Minds is a war film. A war documentary shot in the 1975 just when the Vietnam War was winding down. It features a relatively small number of persons and key-players who are interviewed and in comparison to Stanley Karnow's epic documentary, Vietnam: A Television History (side note -- THIS is available in its entirety in the Singapore NLB system --apparently it runs slightly over 11 hours long but it certainly doesn't seem that long when one gets immersed in the tapes), its scope is definitely limited. Also, its format seems rather straight forward, edit talking heads with shots of the war and you have a take on Vietnam. However, Hearts and Minds certainly is a lot more personal in its approach. Interviewing Vietnamese farmers who have just gotten their homes blown apart, who have lost children; an American deserter who has decided to return because he can't go on living "underground"; Daniel Ellsberg who breaks down as he recounts the shooting of RFK; the American GI who is with a Vietnamese girl, who says into the camera, "If my girl back home could see me now ...": the war geographically, distant, is brought home.

And the war distant in time is brought into the present as well. One of the ex-soldiers being interviewed, a funny jive talking, quick-witted, filthy-mouthed Afro-American with a 'Fro, who talks about his experiences. Who can joke about using a dead comrade as a shield when American planes napalm HIS position. Who can joke about running through his napalmed position without his pants on because they get burned up, "How do you fight a war without your drawers!" Who lives with the war everyday, because as the camera pulls away from the stream of his commentary, we realize he doesn't have an arm anymore, doesn't have a leg. The destruction of war, lingers, is always with us.

xii - 2 and 3

Two truths are told ...

Finished watching the first Ingmar Bergman trilogy which starts with Through a Glass Darkly today. The next two installments are Winter Light and The Silence. It's not a trilogy in the same way that we think of Star Wars as a trilogy or the Terminator movies being related to each other sequentially. It doesn't even make the loose connections that Kevin Smith's "New Jersey" films make, with their strange "interconnectedness" and with, of course, Jay and Silent Bob ... But it's a trilogy at that deep level of existential questioning, on the level of "where is God in all this"? And perhaps that is where ALL connections, if we believe in connections, find some basis, in some kind of movement toward or away Presence and Being.

The second film in the trilogy, Winter Light, is the most overtly "christian" or religious of the three. It centers on a pastor of a small village being himself unable to work out any firm belief in his God. He has a strained relationship with his mistress (or maybe we should call her his girlfriend since his wife IS dead ... but do pastors have mistresses or girlfriends ?) and is unable to provide counsel to a parishoner in distress. All this in the bleak northern Swedish winter. All this in the cramped confines of a tiny parish church with it's oppressive low ceilings and uncomfortable wooden pews.

But the open landscape provides no relief either. In one of the most powerful scenes of the film, when the pastor has to attend to a death, the setting is without respite. The roaring river muffling out any sounds of human interaction and activity; relations are reduced to a mimed sequence of polite gesturing. But it isn't because these characters have nothing to say. No, instead, WE are just never positioned to hear it. Like a distant God, who sees moving mumbling lips in prayer, trembling tired knees, strained necks and bowed heads, but never hearing humanity.

The Silence was, in my opinion, the most artistically complex of the three. A consistent choice in staging these films -- the pared down cast with only about four characters interacting with each other. The Slience takes this further by putting a young boy, his mother and his aunt in hotel, surrounded by complete strangers, who don't speak the same language as they do. In fact, Bergman was playing a strange game with this one. I don't think it's even a REAL language that the rest of the people in the film speak -- even the shots of the newspaper isn't in any recognizable European language. So a little boy wandering about the ornate interiors, playing make believe games to entertain himself, while his mother has affairs and his aunt wastes away. A strained silence, engulfs the film because there is so little dialogue.

The Silence was beautifully shot, with amazing lighting effects and camera angles. With mirrors playing off each other, smoke filled sillouettes, lone figures starkly placed against thick rich interiors, impossible closeups, partial objects -- fingers, glass, table top, water -- mingling. Atmosphere, creating a terrible nauseating implosion. Very much like Last Year at Marienbad but looser.




All this was heavy stuff. Maybe I'll take a break from Bergman tommorrow and watch something else.

xii What's past's Prelude

I'll admit that the viewing I've been doing the past couple of days has been leading up to my proposed project-- to get acquainted with Ingmar Bergman's films.

Till today, the only Bergman film that I've watched (and owned, this being my second DVD purchase, Farewell to my Concubine being the first) was The Seventh Seal. I've always liked it. It's harsh cinematography -- stylized symbolic moments -- against other relatively naturalistic episodes. A true mingling of high and low in the dance of death.

So I began today, to explore Bergman, to know him better. And I thought I'd look at something from around the same time as The Seventh Seal.

What strikes a dweller of the tropics is the strange eternal daylight of Through a Glass Darkly. It's supposed to be night but these are the Northernmost lattitudes, where it is almost always sun in the summer. The austere setting -- a scenic rocky coast where a lone rural holiday retreat -- evokes that realm of the outside. Outside what? An exteriority, sky and sea reflecting clouds, that cannot be placed within. In this "outside" of surfaces, Bergman delves into the heart of existential angst -- Where is God?

It might seem silly for a film to so overtly deal with an agnostic nightmare. Afterall, it was/is post-45 and God is Dead. But IS God Dead? The question must be asked both ways. We often think of the consequences of a Dead God. But what if God is not Dead, what if he is alive and well, and waiting to judge, waiting, like a spider (and this is the protagonist's conclusion) to enter one's body but then to not enter. To see the Face of God and then to realize one's God is not the God you grew up struggling with. A summer retreat. A writer, his two children, his son-in-law. One of his children, afflicted with a mental illness. The hypocrisy that emerges from the best of intentions. Yet all drawn together wondering Where IS God? A writer who WILL use the degeneration of his daughter's mind as fodder for his next novel. A husband unable to penetrate the decaying mind of his wife.

A younger brother -- and this isn't clear but I think it happens -- who finds himself incestuously involved with his sister, in the moment of her mania. Where is God in this?

To the cannibalized daughter, the impenetrable wife, the desiring sister, God is in the slit behind the wallpaper in the mildewed room on the top floor of the house. The voices draw her there and there she sees the face of God. God is a spider.

And this is a beginning. It's part of a trilogy that Bergman put out in which he thinks about God. And it's supposed to be the affirmative beginning ...

xi

Friday: Another double feature day
I should actually state, for the record that the place I've been renting these videos from is called "Kim's". They've got a store right outside Columbia, at about 114th Street, next to the NYPL. They've also got a stores down in the East Village and West Village. Anyway, I really like the store cause it has everything strange and avant garde, as well as commercial box office successes. I could spend an entire year borrowing stuff that I want to watch everyday and there would still be more. Anyway, I also like the fact that it's relatively cheap - a buck twenty five if you borrow and return on the same day, and only a buck if what you want to watch happens to be a "pick". This of course, can't compare to one of the best things that ever happened to Singapore -- the Library at the Esplanade-- where lots of great stuff can be got for a low low annual fee.

Which brings me to Friday's selections. The first thing I watched was The Dark Crystal. It was a "staff pick" so I decided to get it. Some background: I've got fond memories of this film because 1. It was the only thing I'd watch over and over whenever I went to my Dad's place, while growing up, 2. The new Agey thing about Evil-Good being part of the same plane of existence always intrigued me as a powerful narrative trick. And of course 3. I've always like the Muppets and Jim Henson and Frank Oz go all out in this one.

Watching it after what must be about 15 years (?), I realized how much one's tastes and opinions are shaped by the specific mode of consumption. Not that I have particularly fond memories of hanging out at my Dad's place. There was nothing to do except to take in the extremely neat living room and lounge on the fresh Ikea furniture. Nothing to do except bemoan the fact that he didn't own books, had only one other silly video -- Victor/Victoria -- and a bunch of Witney Houston CDs. Nothing to do by play Donkey Kong Jr. on an old Nitendo handheld -- the only game that I've managed to run the scores right round the hundreds and back to zero. So The Dark Crystal was something to watch. Watching it yesterday was painful. It's really slow: it doesn't help that it's life-sized puppets or men in suits playing to roles (making them clumsy and awkward), it's also about a dying planent, making things deliberately slow. I guess I've been spoilt by jump cut editing and a brisk storyline.

The other thing I borrowed in my trip "down amnesia lane", was Amadeus. I've had fond memories of the film ever since I watched it as a kid. It was made in 1984 so I must have seen it around the same time as I was stuck with The Dark Crystal. I even had a pirated copy of the soundtrack on tape. Must have watched its irreverance on the cusp of telling my psychotic piano teacher that enough was enough and not touching the piano for the next 5 years. Anyway, this trip was much more rewarding. Tom Hulce and F Murray Abraham were just brilliant in counterpoint and it's so brilliantly campy I started to wonder what I saw in it as an eleven year old. There IS a tremendous amount of dialogue that I find wickedly funny now that I couldn't possibly have appreciated then. I guess the fact of the genius that never gets his due because he can't play the politics of court and the tremendously insecurity of Salieri in the face of Mozart's raw musical genius was what drew me in. So -- 1 out of 2 is not bad when one reaches back to a strange time.

Don't you just love those old movie posters that used to be hand painted ...

x

Another Movie Day but the review is a hang over from what I didn't get to yesterday.
Along with Rashomon, I watched the first three parts of Krzysztof Kieslowski's 10-part "Decalogue". What first attracted me to checking him out was a strange faint memory of watching "Blue", part of the "Three Colors" trilogy made for France's Bi-centennial celebrations -- a polish man making French films ... -- and the fact that each story in the "Decalogue" revolves around each of the Ten-Commandments.
But only obliquely. The story that I enjoyed most yesterday, though enjoyment should perhaps be replaced with appreciated, because of emotional resonance, was the second one, "Thou shalt not take the Lord's name in vain". A old old doctor and his relationship with his patient's wife. A complicated affair but he swears, and lies and his patient's condition, tangling up the lady's motives and plans, and heartaches. Everything austere, as I like my films, everything concrete in Polish HDBs. Every film with a scene where the stove must be lit, with matches, without which there would be no hot water, for a bath, for a tea, for coffee.
Today, two more films. I first watched "The Last Temptation of Christ". I must admit I watched it because i) Scorsese can do no wrong ii) it's a been banned from my viewing most of my life and I vividly remember having a conversation about this -- why it was banned -- on a school bus just as we passed by the Bishop's house ... Anyway -- Scorsese is better with the grit of streets than the dusty deserts of Palestine and having not yet watched Mel Gibson's ultra-catholic "The Passion", I guess I can't say anything about "realism". But the dream sequences and the strange way that the camera stays on faces much too long, in a disconcerting manner, made it worth watching. I did think it portrayed Christ's humanity very powerfully. William Dafoe made an unlikely Christ but Harvey Kietel's Judas was excellent. And the nice thing about DVD is that the extras confirm certain intuitions -- the shots of Golgatha and the march up the Via Dolorosa, were modelled on Italian / Flemish paintings.

The other film, was Edna's pick. The Grave of the Fireflies [?], a Studio Ghibli Anime. Pretty moving for a cartoon, I guess. Yikes, what lack of commitment in responding to a film!

ix

If part of the goal of this life were to life memory and allow the ramifications of meandering, half-remembered flashbacks to dictate the moral centeredness or valuation of belief, how then does the fact that we always remember inaccurately affect moral identity?

Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon examines, like Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, dives deep into the subject of memory. But unlike the playful teasing non-event that "Rosebud" is (or is it a transcendent signifier, for if I remember correctly the NAME on the first sled that the young Kane holds is NOT "Rosebud" -- if I remember correctly ...), Rashomon works out morality against memory, a difficult pairing indeed. For one is fickle, interior and composed of image and the other is spoken, acted upon, enacted.

Rashomon is essentially a story told over and over. A rogue Samurai/Bandit, played by that Kurosawa stalwart Toshiro Mifune, played strangely with gasping inexplicable gestures and hysterical laughing, meets a Samurai and his wife along a deserted path in the forest. He wants her. He wants her without having to kill him. So he tricks, tempts and ties the Samurai up, has his way with the Lady and then ... And then is where the film begins. The Samurai is found dead -- that much we know. Everything else in-between, in those moments that films never dwell upon, between the "rape" and the death of the "victim" (not the Lady in this case but the Samurai who has to witness the rape of his wife) is thrown up for grabs. And memory sets to work.

What happens in-between is told first by the Bandit, then by the Lady, then (and this, except in the hands of Kurosawa, would otherwise be cheesy) by the dead Samurai, through a Medium and finally, by a peasant who just so happened to be in the woods. Each telling remembers differently, has the scene replayed in a reconfiguration of details. Was it an epic battle between the Bandit and Samurai? Was it the Lady who wanted her husband dead? Was it all a silly accident? Memory slips according to the position of each subject, according to the unearthed desires that shape the Memory's course.

The Colonization of Cyber Space

Mainstreaming -- themes

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/148949/1/.html

1. control control control
2. compete compete compete
3. Market Market Market

Next time Disappear ...

M's'k Lstnd o'r n o'r to

Here are my current 20 -- I'm stuck in the past, past before my own being somehow--
I play them over and over and over and over and over and over.
Obsessions.

1. Bob Dylan -- Tambourine Man. This being the man's best song almost absolutely. This being that strange morning dawn moment. Blurring into a hazy morning. You need to memorize it and let the strings of these things called words ripple and tingle off your tongue with the Dylan man.

2. The Beatles -- Revolution #1. Ok. There's a cute line about Chairman Mao.

3. U2 -- Pride in the Name of Love. I've put on the version from the Unforgettable Fire and that's the one I listen to. Partly because most of my U2 life I've listened to the Rattle and Hum version. Anyway, there's supposed to be a strange underlying narrative in the play-list -- so read on.

4. Oasis -- Wonderwall. Only because it's such a strange lyric ... a mantra ... like "I would prefer not to."

5. Cat Stevens -- The Wind. A teeeeneeee weeeeeneeeee track. Just over 1.40 min. But the guitar work is great. "But never never never never" Never a more economic use of the word.

6. Sufjan Stevens -- The Dress looks Nice on You. Another one with great guitar work. And the banjo is just so creepy. Almost like a strange acoustic version of an Edge riff ... ringing ringing. I'd put like more Sufjan Stevens tracks but it wouldn't be fair to my more deeply rooted loyalties -- I mean some of these guys have seen me through many a long night.

7. Elton John -- Tiny Dancer. Ok -- I'm not a soundtrack kind of guy. But you need to check out the Almost Famous Soundtrack. Neither do I much like Elton John (only liked him in the Muppet Show doing the whole Crocodile Rock thing). But there's this scene in the bus where Stillwater and their entourage (those divine groupies) are like squabbling and arguing and then everyone's really pissed and sits sullenly. Then they start singing this and there's a strange out of tuneness that brings everyone together. It's a great moment and I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff.

8. Pete Yorn -- Just Another. I really liked his first album. I don't like his other album.

9. The Beatles -- I Will. Another great small track. I've got a theory about the song. They probably worked out a fabulous melody (it's great) and had a nice idea about the IDEAL woman who was a smile in the crowd or passed on the train (the one you'll "wait a lonely lifetime for"). Whatever. Anyway -- they get to the point in the song where they need to write a bridge. And so they throw it away in absolute cliche. Go listen to it. It's an amazing contrast. But reading more pseudo psycho analytically, the song's really about two desires. The beautiful bits are directed to this woman that Paul McCarthny isn't with -- ok -- the ideal woman. Then the bad bridge is the pledge / vow of constancy to one's girlfriend / wife / partner. OOOoooo all that repression going on in 1.44 mins. Read that way, it's great.

10. Janis Joplin -- Me and Bobby McGee. And you thought I wouln't have any women on this list. The narrative of the road trip. The hetero-social transforming into the hetero-sexual. I only came around to listening to Janis Joplin a couple of years ago when I decided the taboos that were placed upon her in my youth were no longer working their spell (she featured prominently in book about satanic music I read and was haunted by when I was a kid). Anyway, her voice just drives you into the raspy keys of energy, like BLUES singing that's good enough for everything else.

11. Ella Fitzgerald -- Cheek to Cheek. Another soundtrack song that I'm a sucker for. The film: The English Patient. And the scene: they're carrying Ralph Fiennes and dancing with the stretcher out in the rain. I might have remembered it wrongly but that whole tension between the paralysed / almost dead corpse and the swing that Ella brings to it. The intimacy of skin against skin against the scorched destruction that has become the non-face of the English Patient. "A plum plum" indeed. I had a version with Ella and Louis Armstrong taking the whole song one after another. That was great. But it was in a hard disk that died.

12. Nina Simone -- I Loves You Porgy. The spare piano and the smokey vocals. Nothing can beat this version.

13. Ella and Louis -- I wants to stay here. Ok I know it's the same song as the Nina Simone track. But the stark contrast in treatments has never ceased to amaze me. Now if only Billie Holiday had a version.

14. Kings of Convenience. I Don't Know What I Can Save You From. Every late night conversation remembered.

15. Lauryn Hill -- To Zion. This is like the most I can go with the whole hip hop thing. It's probably the most touching thing I've heard. From a Mother to a Child.

16. The Fugees -- No Woman No Cry. Must have an example of even more non-standard englishes being the basis of a great song. This is a "remix" thing with Steve Marley. I kinda like it cause it has applications about their new life in NY ("project yard in Brooklyn") coming from Haiti. "Redemption Song" would have made it to the list but I don't have a ready MP3 in my iBook of it.

17. Oasis -- Stand By Me. Best opening line in a song.

18. U2 -- Ultraviolet. Out of all the U2 tracks I could pick why this one? I guess right now it isn't one of those that I'm tired of. The funky guit is great. That's how inane lyrics ("baby baby baby light my way???) are transformed into great anthemic statements. I always think of a dark earthscape (or is it the moon? ultraviolet radiation having wiped out mankind) then riding waves of sound on the layers of distortion and reverb, memories of the past, in "whispers and moans".

19. Oasis -- Champagne Supernova. It's a COSMIC song. Which helps draw the list to a fitting close.

20. U2 -- MLK. Never a better ending.

Maybe I should do another.

Letters to Myself

Against an Analytical Tradition

To analyse it, would seem impossible. Can we, then, by the citation of some of those instances wherein this thing of whiteness -- though for the time either wholly or in great part stripped of all direct associations calculated to impart to it aught fearful, but, nevertheless, is found to exert over us the same sorcery, however modified; -- can we thus hope to light upon some chance clue to conduct us to the hidden cause we seek?
Let us try. But in a matter like this, subtlety appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow another into these halls.

Melville, Moby Dick, 162.

Letters to Myself

Read it -- in BIG GULPS -- read and move on keep on reading not stopping to read to think but let reading be the lapping thinking thought is reading on

Lines, lapping:

          It is enough Glocester,
to say where it is,
had you also the will to be fine as

          as fine as fins are

                              as firm as

          as firm as a mackerel is
          (fresh out of water)

                              as sure

          as sure as no owner is
          (or he'd be to sea)

                              as vulnerable

          (as vulnerable as I am
          brought home to Main St
          in such negligible company) (MP 24)

The LINE is enlongated by its redoubling turning in on itself. Or is it dense -- repeating its similes as textures? OR is it a schizoid LINE entangled (as a net fishing mackeral fin) pulling in jerks and spasms?

"(W)hat I want to emphasize here, by this emphasis on the typewriter as the personal and instantaneous recorder to the poet's work, is the already projective nature of verse as the sons of Pound and Williams are practicing it. Already they are composing as though verse was to have the reading its writing involved, as though not the eye but the ear was to be its measurer, as though the intervals of its composition could be so carefully put down as to be precisely the intervals of its registration." (Olson, Projective Verse)

Letters to Myself

Letter 3 --

Tansy buttons, tansy
for my city
Tansy for their noses

Tansy for them
tansy for Gloucester to take the smell
of all owners

Tansy
for all of us (MP,13)

He keeps it going, repeating an attractively SOUNDING word. Tansy = aromatic herb, buttonlike yellow flowerheads -- bitter tasting leaves -- sometimes used medicinally --
So the image is UNCONVENTIONAL -- not a rose or daffodail -- but "Tansy". Shakespeare knew his flowers and plants and herbs -- so to Olson. And I thought it was a STUPID made up word.
The Smells must be present in the space. Never a vacuum.

Tansy -- so dense -- that it must resist exploitation:

The word does intimidate. The pay-check does.
But to use either, as cheap men

o tansy city, root city
let them not make you
as the nation is (MP 15)

The "tansy city" resists commercial exploitation, resists becoming a global product. It remains aromatic in its own way, obscure in its use, not chopped and trimmed and fit land exported like ROSES or TULIPS or (one might add) ORCHIDS.

Concluding Letter 3 Olson writes:

Isolated person in Gloucester, Massachusetts, I Maximus, address you
you islands
of men and girls (MP 16)

How apt.

Letters to Myself

What must be kept is the experience of encountering these things. The how we got to reading this stuff -- even if it were merely following the cue or off-hand remark or a footnote smuggled into a commentary on something else.

The Book: THE MAXIMUS POEMS / Charles Olson --

I remember HIM -- not Olson of course -- but little impy HIM -- batik shirts and open toe sandels, hair curling and glasses immense. Twiddling tabacco. smoking out the window. Always talking about Projective Verse and de-territorializing machines. Turned onto a huge BIG BOOK by the throwaway remarks of a mad Irish man.

The Book: THE MAXIMUS POEMS / Charles Olson --

Dominating the cover -- a giant of a man. Hand reaching to his lips. Cigarette poised for a BREATH of the noxious weed. Old man now. But still a big man -- powerfully built.

Other Books -- Call Me Ishmael -- a condensed study a real densely packed study of Melville, his material world and what made the WHALE.

The Book: THE MAXIMUS POEMS / Charles Olson --

Sprawls. Is too large to carry or read unobstrusively. Perhaps that's what THIS reading is supposed to be. Utterly large, utterly performed.

Letter One -- I Maximus to You

I can only make out the LOCAL -- the Birds build with straw -- as a poem is built with syllables. One tiny bit at a time. But the Local is smeared in the excesses of a consumerist age. Advertisements are the noise. The Local is the National is the Cultural:

(o Gloucester-man,
weave
your birds and fingers
new, your roof-tops,
clean shit upon racks
sunned on American
braid
with others like you, such
extricable surface
as faun and oral,
satyr lesbos vase

o kill kill kill kill kill
those
who advertise you
out)
( MP 8)

To braid -- is not to weave. A braid retains the complexity of each strand, doesn't dissociate the MATTER into particular atoms. A ROUGH putting together, holding together -- a putting together where the mismatch or the texture is the pattern. So with the world / the universe(!), he writes -- the local.

Letters to Myself

Ammiel's class on Thursday brought me back. He brought the whole class back. He wanted everyone to talk about "How you ended up here?", wanted us to talk about how we came to poetry and perhaps why we wanted to read the stuff that he's so thick into. I didn't say much except for turning to the Beats as a 17 year old Singaporean, an experience that many in the class shared despite the vast cultural differences. A fuller memory of poetry --

Sy -- self-designated poet of the class, in both languages. I remember him writing a tortured Sonnet about angels and tombstones while I flippantly copied a Wordsworth rhyme. Got me to thinking about the lengths individuals would go in forming an identity in poetry.

Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey and the Beats. In the strange corners of the National Library, sudden discoveries. Along with the metaphysical poets -- strange companions. But liberating. Perhaps I was attracted to the psychadelic hardcover design of the Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.

I remember how poetry and the Beats almost saved somebody's life. 17 and with no place to go, trying to start out again after being on Probation, he turned to the books without the grammar. He starting writing without the rules. I would sit with him, hours late into the Teck Hin night, listening to him, listening to myself. We read Kerouac together, Marvell too, Herman Hesse and of course, Shakespeare. The only person whose ever asked me to read out loud cause he liked the sound of my pseudo TS Eliot voice.

And I remain intimidated by the notion of the poetic. I remain desiring to read BIG BOOKS whose meanings need to be teased, pried open, hunted out. I still sit -- reading LINES out aloud. LINES that don't make sense but play with my sense of how words should sound, put together in a line. And I remain awkward, hesitant, shy, afraid, diffident around the company of poets -- self-proclaimed or not. In a strange way, perennially outside.