Great Interview with Margaret Chardiet AKA “Pharmakon” in Santiago, Chile, September 02, 2015, for her South American Tour “Sacred Bones”.
Tag Archives: transcendence
eno on medium-specific materiality (1995)
leonard cohen – joan of arc (1971)
“Myself I long for love and light
But must it come so cruel, and oh so bright?”
From Songs of Love and Hate (Columbia,1971).
maya deren – the very eye of night (1958)
“The laws of macro- and microcosm are alike. Travel in the interior is as a voyage in outer space: we must in each case burst past the circumference of our surface – our here-space and now-time – and, cut loose from the anchorage of an absolute, fixed center, enter worlds where the relationship of parts is the sole gravity. When the sun sets, the stars become apparent; when our eyes close out the light to sleep, there rises in the night-eye the constellation by which sleep-walkers plot their incalculable accuracies. By day we move according to desire and decision; by night Noctambulo advances without moving, led by the twins Gemini (as the eyes are twins or as the I of night is twin to that of day). It is by the dark geometry of such celestial navigation that the day‘s erratic negotiations are corrected and reconciled into the total orbits of our lives.
The film is in the negative. The blackness of night erases all horizon and, released from the leveling pressure of this plane, the movements both of the dancers and of the camera become as four-dimensional and directional as those of birds in air or fish in water.”
– Maya Deren: Chamber Films, program notes for a presentation, 1960
#Title: The Very Eye of Night
#Director: Maya Deren
#Year of Production: 1958
#Duration: 00:15:00
#Choregraphy: Antony Tudor, Metropolitan Opera Ballet School
#Dancers / Actors: Philp Salem, Rosemary Williams, Richard Englund, Richard Sandifer, Don Freisinger, Patricia Ferrier, Barbara Levin, Bud Bready, Genaro Gomez
#Camera: Maya Deren
#Editing: Maya Deren
#Foley Assistance: Harrison Starr
#Sound: Louis and Bebe Barron
#Music: Teiji Ito
sviatoslav richter plays liszt’s transcendental études
A selection of my favourites from Liszt’s Transcendental series, recorded in Prague on June 10, 1956 and broadcast on Czech Radio.
Tracklisting with times:
00:00 – Étude No. 1 (Preludio)
00:58 – Étude No. 2 (untitled – Molto vivace)
02:52 – Étude No. 3 (Paysage)
08:29 – Étude No. 5 (Feux Follets)
12:03 – Étude No. 11 (Harmonies du Soir)
Heartbreaker Franz Liszt circa 1860 (Franz Hanfstaengl/Wikimedia)
“On a snowy day in Berlin, two days after Christmas 1841, Franz Liszt strode out onto the stage at the Berliner Singakademie concert hall. He sat at his grand piano in profile, beads of sweat forming on his forehead. He was 30 years old, at the height of his ability, and he was about to unleash a mania—a mania not in the sense of “Beatlemania”, or any of the other relatively mild musical obsessions, but a mania viewed as a truly contagious, dangerous medical condition that would affect women in Germany, Italy, France, Austria, and elsewhere.
“Using his whole body—his undulating eyebrows, his wild arms, even his swaying hips—Liszt dove into Händel’s “Fugue in E minor” with vigor and unfettered confidence, keeping perfect tempo and playing entirely from memory. It was the start of the phenomenon later called “Lisztomania,” and the women in the audience went mad.”
Read THIS ARTICLE on the romantic power of music like Liszt’s…
two simones on banality and evil
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.”
— Simone Weil
“In particular those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest. This notion we reject, for our perspective is that of existentialist ethics. Every subject plays his part as such specifically through exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves liberty only through a continual reaching out towards other liberties. There is no justification for present existence other than its expansion into an indefinitely open future. Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-sois’ – the brutish life of subjection to given conditions – and of liberty into constraint and contingence. This downfall represents a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if it is inflicted upon him, it spells frustration and oppression. In both cases it is an absolute evil. Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his existence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.”
— Simone de Beauvoir
(not chicken)
happy birthday, simone de beauvoir
When she does not find love, she may find poetry. Because she does not act, she observes, she feels, she records; a colour, a smile awakens profound echoes within her; her destiny is outside her, scattered in cities already built, on the faces of men already marked by life, she makes contact, she relishes with passion and yet in a manner more detached, more free, than that of a young man.
Jenny Agutter in “Walkabout” (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)
Being poorly integrated in the universe of humanity and hardly able to adapt herself therein, she, like the child, is able to see it objectively; instead of being interested solely in her grasp on things, she looks for their significance; she catches their special outlines, their unexpected metamorphoses. She rarely feels a bold creativeness, and usually she lacks the technique of self-expression; but in her conversation, her letters, her literary essays, her sketches, she manifests an original sensitivity.
The young girl throws herself into things with ardour, because she is not yet deprived of her transcendence; and the fact that she accomplishes nothing, that she is nothing, will make her impulses only the more passionate. Empty and unlimited, she seeks from within her nothingness to attain All.
― Simone de Beauvoir, from The Second Sex (first published in French as Le Deuxième Sexe in 1949)
If you’re interested in reading this hugely influential text, you can find it online HERE.
mouchette
Final scene from Robert Bresson’s 1967 film.
“The small town is plagued with alcoholism, marital infidelity, unbridled masculinity, violence, and moral ambivalence. Mouchette’s father and brother, we have already seen, operate by selling liquor on the black market, with complicit police that turn an indifferent eye to a crate left behind. They, like other townsfolk, are paid in shots of alcohol, consumed without speech. Following Sunday mass, the village parishioners leave church and hastily head to the bar before the bells cease to toll. Mouchette’s dying mother has to hide gin from her abusive spouse. Even the town’s interdependent poacher/warden pair, Arsène and Mathieu, bring an end to their cat-and-mouse charade in the woods by sharing a drink from Arsène’s canteen full of gin. The motif of alcohol and its abuse stands as a distinctive mark of the moral decay of Mouchette’s society; however, the corruption of this town is not limited to alcoholism… Indeed, Mouchette’s society is one of extreme decadence and lawlessness, one that is ripe for a scapegoat upon whose back it can collectively discharge the burden of its vice and one from which the victim will gladly depart.”
Read more about the film HERE.
re: god and human freedom
a conversation between cherry bomb and aryan kaganof
—
On Nov 20, 2007 10:14 PM, Rosemary Lombard wrote:
http://www.religion-online.org/showchapter.asp?title=2285&C=2159
came across this while reading around transcendence/immanence
a fascinating philosophical article
on god and human freedom
comes at christian scripture, existentialism, marxism
from an ENTIRELY different angle to the traditional church
very unorthodox
yet still from a christ-focused perspective
thought you’d also find it interesting
esp how it might relate to your youniverse
“ama et fac quod vis”
(love, and do what you will)
– st augustine
[although the he-personification of god
and use of ‘man’ to mean generic ‘human’ irks me a bit,
i see the publication’s date was 1970, so it’s alright ;]
—
Nov 21, 2007
poem for rose, paradoxically
Filed under: kagapoems, poetry, paradoxism — ABRAXAS @ 10:24 am
i stumbled upon
myself stumbling upon
the difference between transcendence and immanence
my stumbling was the means by which i knew
there was an i to stumble
upon that which was there to be stumbled upon
immanence implied that i was everything that i stumbled upon
and everything i stumbled upon was me
transcendence granted me existence outside of what i stumbled upon
and that my being might exist outside of knowing
what was unknowable was how to unstumble
and thus in my unstumbling upon
myself unstumbling
i became unme
now immanence implied that everything unme
could be unstumbled upon and that everything that could be unstumbled upon is in unme
whereas transcendence seemed to be saying that unme is also outside of unstumbling
and therefore could not be unstumbled upon
here i found a contradiction
because if it is only possible to stumble upon something outside of me
then surely it is impossible to unstumble upon something inside of unme
unless of course my stumbling upon
myself stumbling upon
was in fact inside of me
meaning that there is no difference between transcendence and immanence
hence god’s indifference
to the problem
—
On Nov 21, 2007 11:59 PM, Rosemary Lombard wrote:
yes
this is our business
does the ground worry
if a seed is growing or withering away?
or how often a wayfarer stumbles?
the substrate whereby
we are
is god
within with without
us
our embrace of existence lies in union
love is the yes to life
love is the blossom of anti-entropy
Carly’s loving hands (2008). Photo by Rosemary Lombard
fleurmach 