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Monday, November 26, 2007
B.I.B.L.E. (BASIC INSTRUCTIONS BEFORE LEAVING EARTH
The GZA
Liquid Swords
Geffen : 1995
[Buy It]
MOISTWORKS STORYTIME CORNER PRESENTS:
An excerpt from The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge
by Carlos Castaneda
Simon & Schuster : 1968
[Buy It]
Sunday, 15 April 1962
As I was getting ready to leave, I decided to ask him once more about the enemies of a man of knowledge. I argued that I could not return for some time, and it would be a good idea to write down what he had to say and then think about it while I was away.
He hesitated for a while, but then began to talk.
'When a man starts to learn, he is never clear about his objectives. His purpose is faulty; his intent is vague. He hopes for rewards that will never materialize, for he knows nothing of the hardship of learning.
'He slowly begins to learn - bit by bit at first, then in big chunks. And his thoughts soon clash. What he learns is never what he pictured, or imagined, and so he begins to be afraid. Learning is never what one expects. Every step of learning is a new task, and the fear the man is experiencing begins to mount mercilessly, unyieldingly. His purpose becomes a battlefield.
FEAR
Clint Mansell & Kronos Quartet
Requiem for a Dream OST
Nonesuch : 2000
[Buy It]
'And thus he has tumbled upon the first of his natural enemies: Fear! A terrible enemey - treacherous, and difficult to overcome. It remains concealed at every turn of the way, prowling, waiting. And if the man, terrified in its presence, runs away, his enemy will have put an end to his quest.'
'What will happen to the man if he runs away in fear?'
'Nothing happens to him except that he will never learn. He will never become a man of knowledge. He will perhaps be a bully or a harmless, scared man; at any rate, he will be a defeated man. His first enemy will have put an end to his cravings.'
'And what can he do to overcome his fear?'
'The answer is very simple. He must not run away. He must defy his fear, and in spite of it he must take the next step in learning, and the next, and the next. He must be fully afraid, and yet he must not stop. That is the rule! And a moment will come when his first enemy retreats. The man begins to feel sure of himself. His intent becomes stronger. Learning is no longer a terrifying task. When this joyful moment comes, the man can say without hesitation that he has defeated his first natural enemy.'
'Does it happen at once, don Juan, or little by little?'
'It happens little by little, and yet the fear is vanquished suddenly and fast.'
'But won't the man be afraid again if something new happens to him?'
'No. Once a man has vanquished fear, he is free from it for the rest of his life because, instead of fear, he has acquired clarity - a clarity of mind which erases fear. By then a man knows his desires; he knows how to satisfy those desires. He can anticipate the new steps of learning, and a sharp clarity surrounds everything. The man feels that nothing is concealed.
A MOMENT OF CLARITY
Jay-Z
The Black Album
Def Jam : 2003
[Buy It]
'And thus he has encountered his second enemy: Clarity! That clarity of mind, which is so hard to obtain, dispels fear, but also blinds.
'It forces the man never to doubt himself. It gives him the assurance he can do anything he pleases, for he sees clearly into everything. And he is courageous because he is clear, and he stops at nothing because he is clear. But all that is a mistake; it is like something incomplete. If the man yields to this make-believe power, he has succumbed to his second enemy and will fumble with learning. He will rush when he should be patient, or he will be patient when he should rush. And he will fumble with learning until he winds up incapable of learning anything more.'
'What becomes of a man who is defeated in that way, don Juan? Does he die as a result?'
'No, he doesn't die. His second enemy has just stopped him cold from trying to become a man of knowledge; instead, the man may turn into a buoyant warrior, or a clown. Yet the clarity for which he has paid so dearly will never change to darkness and fear again. He will be clear as long as he lives, but he will no longer learn, or yearn for, anything.'
'But what does he have to do to avoid being defeated?'
'He must do what he did with fear: he must defy his clarity and use it only to see, and wait patiently and measure carefully before takng new steps; he must think, above all, that his clarity is almost a mistake. And a moment will come when he will understand that his clarity was only a point before his eyes. And thus he will have overcome his second enemy, and will arrive at a position where nothing can harm him any more. This will not be a mistake. It will not be only a point before his eyes. It will be true power.
SUPERPOWERS
Dismemberment Plan
Change
De Soto : 2001
[Buy It]
He will know at this point that the power he has been pursuing for so long is finally his. He can do with it whatever he pleases. His ally is at his command. His wish is the rule. He sees all that is around him. But he has also come across his third enemy: Power!
'Power is the strongest of all enemies. And naturally the easiest thing to do is to give in; after all, the man is truly invincible. He commands; he begins by taking calculated risks, and ends in making rules, because he is a master.
'A man at this stage hardly notices his third enemy closing in on him. And suddenly, without knowing, he will certainly have lost the battle. His enemy will have turned him into a cruel, capricious man.'
'Will he lose his power?'
'No, he will never lose his clarity or his power.'
'What then will distinguish him from a man of knowledge?'
'A man who is defeated by power dies without really knowing how to handle it. Power is only a burden upon his fate. Such a man has no command over himself, and cannot tell when or how to use his power.'
'Is the defeat by any of these enemies a final defeat?'
'Of course it is final. Once one of these enemies overpowers a man there is nothing he can do.'
'Is it possible, for instance, that the ma who is defeated by power may see his error and mend his ways?'
'No. Once a man gives in he is through.'
'But what if he is temporarily blinded by power, and then refuses it?'
'That means the battle is still on. That means he is still trying to become a man of knowledge. A man is defeated only when he no longer tries, and abandons himself'
'But then, don Juan, it is possible that a man may abandon himself to fear for years, but finally conquer it.'
'No, that is not true. If he gives in to fear he will never conquer it, because he will shy away from learning and never try again. But if he tries to learn for years in the midst of his fear, he will eventually conquer it because he will never have really abandoned himself to it.'
'How can he defeat his third enemy, don Juan?'
'He has to defy it, deliberately. He has to come to realize the power he has seemingly conquered is in reality never his. He must keep himself in line at all times, handling carefully and faithfully all that he has learned. If he can see that clarity and power, without his control over himself, are worse than mistakes, he will reach a point where everything is held in check. He will know then when and how to use his power. And thus he will have defeated his third enemy.
FINAL SLEEP
Svarte Greiner
Knive
Type : 2006
[Buy It]
'The man will be, by then, at the end of his journey of learning, and almost without warning he will come upon the last of his enemies: Old age! This enemy is the cruellest of all, the one he won't be able to defeat completely, but only fight away.
'This is the time when a man has no more fears, no more impatient clarity of mind - a time when all his power is in check, but also the time when he has an unyielding desire to rest. If he gives in totally to his desire to lie down and forget, if he soothes himself in tiredness, he will have lost his last round, and his enemy will cut him down into a feeble old creature. His desire to retreat will overrule all his clarity, his power, and his knowledge.
'But if the man sloughs off his tiredness, and lives his fate through, he can then be called a man of knowledge, if only for the brief moment when he succeeds in fighting off his last, invincible enemy. That moment of clarity, power, and knowledge is enough.Labels: books, brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, November 19, 2007
SCATTERED SHAVINGS
Drawing Voices
Drawing Voices
Hydrahead : 2007
[Buy It]
REVEALING THE COMMAS
Michael Harrison
Revelation
Cantaloupe : 2007
[Buy It]
MERGANSER (HOODED)
Feltbattery
It Had Wings
Migration Media : 2007
[Buy It]
Sometimes I like to get really high and try to read books. I say "try" because I'm seldom able to do so - more often, a sentence or two will comprise a feedback loop in my head, a current guided by the relentless, interior annularity of pot-thought that becomes rich with the mineral silt of whatever else happens to be rattling around in my mind. I don't get much reading done this way, but find the activity profoundly relaxing, and conducive to the formulation of new ideas. In this state, instead of passively absorbing a text, I'm actively engaging with it, mingling with it, which is a profoundly different experience than *reading* a book, one to be employed strategically.
Other times, I just wind up tripping out on the utter weirdness of language itself. A book or a magazine does strange things to my sense of conceptual space - they're compact objects that feel much larger as you approach them, their conceptual depth like a vertical column of light inscribed through them. You can feel yourself diffuse along this column as you read, and that sense of feeling larger than you are - that awareness of your essence being extended through someone else's thought - can be exhilirating. When I look at my car, its conceptual dimensions fit within its physical dimensions, but when I look at at a book (or an iPod, for that matter), I see a small physical object with a great glowing quantity of web-like data around it. The conceptual exceeds the physical.
Despite the ubiquity of language, when I really think about it, it never ceases to amaze me that it's possible to condense something as anarchic as thought into these orderly, compact symbols, which, on the receiving end, are reverted to thought, albeit thought inevitably transformed from its original dimensions by the shape of the medium. The process is very similar to sending someone a zip file over the Internet: content is compressed for transmission, then extracted. This is miraculous, and perilous, because our actual language still represents only a minute sliver of total language, which is why we're always fumbling over our words and having to explain ourselves. Total language is total knowledge. The minute sliver of language to which we've access is insufficient for expressing the total knowledge we have within us. What I can think is not the same as what I can say. When these two quantities align, the essence of humanity as we understand it will be irrevocably changed.
It's often been said that a million monkeys with a million typewriters would, given world enough and time, eventually produce Shakespeare. This chestnut is meant to illustrate something about probability, but its undermining of the assumptions we make about our relationship to language is more compelling. Since Shakespeare has already produced Shakespeare, I'm more interested in the texts these millions of monkeys would produce that *have yet to be written*. And why wouldn't they? Let's take "monkeys with typewriters" out of the equation, subbing in simply "computers." In my mere 28 years on Earth I have seen the rise of technologies that would have seemed unthinkable within my lifetime. Being generous and assuming I'll live for fifty more years, I place very few limits on the wonders that might emerge within my lifetime - at this point, nothing seems too far-out (this is why the best science fiction writers of the nineties and aughties have given up on the future to write about the present - flying bubble cars seem absolutely quaint compared to the Internet). Our technological reality already exceeds our imagination.
So let's imagine our modern monkeys with typewriters, an array of supercomputers, endlessly configuring and reconfiguring the whole of language available today into every possible combination. Let's imagine some software filters that disregard the pure gibberish while weeding out any randomly generated text that scans as remotely coherent in a syntactical sense. Let's imagine a team of humans who pore over these results, and what, with persistence, they would eventually discover: Shakespeare, perhaps, but also scientific breakthroughs, philosophical insights, great poems and novels, plans for weapons of incredible destruction or cures for currently incurable diseases, et cetera...
All of these secrets are locked within our language, if only we could find the key. Traditionally, human thought has been that key - the idea precedes the langauge. Ideation is fundamental to our self-image as humans, to our sense of personal agency. But in this new paradigm, the process would be inverted: language would precede thought. What would a Shakespeare text mean to us if it had been generated via computer algorithms, if ideation was a game not of intent but of chance? Is the beauty of Shakespeare's writing inherent in the symbolically condensed thought it contains, or in the fact that a human produced it? What if we truly learned to produce knowledge without thinking? We currently regard conceptual problems as tests of the human intellect, but in this new paradigm, their solution wouldn't be a matter of intellection, it would be a game with trillion-sided dice, a matter of combining words in the correct order, aided by tireless machines, using only the language that is already available to us. On the upside, we already have a cure for AIDS, we just haven't gotten the right words in the right order yet. On the downside, we already have a recipe for a bomb that could detonate the whole world, we just haven't gotten the right words in the right order yet. The secrets lie not in our minds, but in knocking down the walls in the labyrinth of our language.
I have read and loved many writers in my life, but there are a few I can isolate that changed my worldview forever. One of those is Jorge Luis Borges, who first put this idea of total language into my head. Borges intuited this linguistic supercomputer in stories like "The Library of Babel" and "The Book of Sand." In the former, he writes about a great library in which every possible permutation of extant language is rendered in its own tome; in the latter, he maps the same concept onto a single book, which you can never quite open to the first or last page, and never find the same page twice. He was circumscribing the infinite, which he embodied in language, where the infinite is partitioned off into discrete, digestible units. These are not fantasy stories - in the conceptual realm, the Library of Babel *exists* - we just haven't become able enough as librarians to catalog more than a fraction of its stacks. And in fact, it probably isn't within the realm of human pontential to be those librarians. But to build them is.
Once Borges taught me that total language embodied total knowledge, my conceptual filter was irrevocably changed. I had previously thought of my words as something I generated to contain my thought, but now I regard my words as little splinters plucked haphazardly off of the total mass of language, which create my thoughts. And once I perceived language as a total mass, it was impossible for me not to view art the same way: a mass of generative potential from which we steal little bits, mostly at random. I then understood myself, when I created something, as a conduit for a force that had nothing to do with me beyond being shaped, ever so minutely, by the contours of the vessel (i.e., little me.)
The randomness bothered me, and suddenly, process-based art was the only kind I was interested in creating (all the songs on today's post are in some way constained and guided by a process or technical imperative). I've since come to terms with that randomness. A common critique of poets, especially modern free-form minimalists, is that you can just put any combination of words on the page. This is true - any combination of words on a page will create a radically specific vector of thought, coherent or otherwise, and if this approach seems infertile, it's only because too many poets are using the same combinations of words in the same way. So that random element of accessing the great art mass can be fertile, if we're careful about choosing the words that call out to us and not the words that worked well for other poets. But it's still process-based art that has the greatest foothold in my imagination. (Not that process-based and intuitive art are mutually exclusive - most of my processes have aleatory agents and vast fields of unfettered play built into them. (Yeah, I know - we'll talk John Cage and Jackson Mac Low some other time.) And I still love to improvise in paint and music and words, although I tend to feed these extemporaneous acts of creativity into constrained processes after the intial fact.)
Think about it like this, as I did on a recent camping trip. Making art without a process is like sitting in the forest. You occupy a radically specific location and have a circumscribed panorama (this represents a portion of the art-mass, which is far too large to be viewed as a whole) in your field of vision. It's then up to you to choose which parts you want to write or draw or sing about, and in what order. Making art with a process in place is like doing the same thing from within your tent. You still occupy a radically specific location, and the same circumscribed panorama surrounds you. But you can only see a tiny portion of it, through a small window you've unzipped in the tent. This window represents your process, whatever concept or algorithm or intuition your project is operating under, which will desposit you at a radically specific point of entry in the art mass, perhaps allowing you to travel a continuous path toward the art-mass's interior, should you pursue the logic of your process far enough, instead of slicing random slivers from different points on its surface.
Paradoxically, by cutting yourself off from the hell of infinite options and focusing your creativity into a thin beam, you can attain greater artistic freedom, since your will, left to its own devices, will always be threatened by the pull of the market, vanity, insecurity. Enslaving yourself to a process makes that process into a shield, creating a protected field of play on which one can be free. And in making process-based art, I've been able to create texts that I've learned from, rather than texts that embody my meager learning. If I have to choose a master, I'll take a process of my own devising over the market any day.
Wow, was that discursive? I swear I'm not high.Labels: books, brian, language
posted by Brian
LINK |
Monday, October 01, 2007
GET ME AWAY FROM HERE, I'M DYING
Belle & Sebastian
If You're Feeling Sinister: Live at the Barbican
iTunes : 2005
iTunes download only
LAZY LINE PAINTER JANE
Belle & Sebastian
Available on: Push Barman to Open Old Wounds
Matador : 2005
[Buy It]
MORNINGTON CRESCENT
Belle & Sebastian
The Life Pursuit
Matador : 2006
[Buy It]
Continuum's 33 1/3 series of books pairs writers and musicians with albums of import, and honestly, the results have been mixed. Some of them have been great, some have been a little heavy on fawning and light on insight (steer clear of the Aeroplane Over the Sea one unless you're a big fan of the color purple), and some have seemed like they were written over the course of a weekend (I happen to know what writers are paid for these books and that hypothesis might not be far off in some cases). But the idea of pairing writers with albums they've thought about for a long time for a tight focus in a pocket-sized book is still a great one, and while I haven't read many of the recent 33 1/3 releases, one just came out that I'm quite excited about. It's about Belle & Sebastian's 1996 classic If You're Feeling Sinister, and it's written by Scott Plagenhoef, an editor I've worked with at Pitchforkmedia for several years. I'm excited about it for several reasons - one is that, as much as I love Belle & Sebastian, they have attained such an ossified stature in my music fandom that I actually forget to listen to them amid the onslaught of new releases. A copy of Scott's book showed up in my mailbox yesterday, and it reminded to me to go back through my Belle & Sebastian albums and revisist some of my favorite songs, a few of which I'm sharing with you today. "Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying" is not one of B&S's more subtle efforts, but I fell in love with it in my late-teens, which is not among life's subtlest times, and the onrush of emotion I felt listening to it then is still coded in my spine, like long-ago dropped LSD. For contrast, I've posted "Lazy Line Painter Jane" and "Mornington Crescent," the former of which is as ecstatic as the latter is retiring. But besides the chance to revisit an old favorite, I'm excited because Scott wrote it - having reads lots of his writing on Belle & Sebastian, I know he's deeply invested in the source material, and he's too smart of a writer to lapse into shallow mythmaking (and I don't think he reads Moistworks, so I'm not just sucking up). If you're unfamiliar with 33 1/3, this might be a great place to start. (If you happen to be too apocalyptically minded to get into a book about Belle & Sebastian, then Chris Ott's 33 1/3 book on Joy Division, while occasionally fawning, is well-researched and sharply observed.) You can find Scott's If You're Feeling Sinister book here on Amazon, as well as the rest of the 33 1/3 catalog.Labels: books, brian
posted by Brian
LINK |
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