ex·tract n. (ěk’strākt’) Something extracted, especially: a. A passage from a literary work; an excerpt. [Middle English extracten, from Latin extrahere, extract- : ex-, ex- + trahere, to draw.]
From: Ode To Kirihito, by Osamu Tezuka, Vertical, 2006.
From: Camera Lucida, by Roland Barthes, Hill and Wang, 1981.
Barthes-has-been: hit by a laundry truck.
Flat Death
A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and a Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.–And no doubt, the astonishment of “that-has-been” will also disappear. It has already disappeared: I am, I don’t know why, one of its last witnesses (a witness of the Inactual), and this book is its archaic trace.
What is it that will be done away with, along with this photograph which yellows, fades, and will someday be thrown out, if not by me–too superstitious for that–at least when I die? Not only “life” (this was alive, this posed live in front of the lens), but also, sometimes–how to put it?–love. In front of the only photograph which I find of my father and mother together, this couple who I know loved each other, I realize: it is love-as-treasure which is going to disappear forever; for once I am gone, no one will any longer be able to testify to this: nothing will remain but an indifferent Nature. This is a laceration so intense, so intolerable, that alone against his century, Michelet conceived of History as love’s Protest: to perpetuate not only life but also what he called, in his vocabulary so outdated today, the Good, Justice, Unity, etc.
From: Empire of Signs, by Roland Barthes, Hill and Wang, 1982.
Mu, emptiness.
Center-City, Empty Center
Quadrangular, reticulated cities (Los Angeles, for instance) are said to produce a profound uneasiness: they offend our synthetic sentiment of the City, which requires that any urban space have a center to go to, to return from, a complete site to dream of and in relation to which to advance or retreat; in a word, to invent oneself. For many reasons (historical, economic, religious, military), the West has understood this law only too well: all its cities are concentric; but also, in accord with the very movement of western metaphysics, for which every center is the site of truth, the center of our cities is always full: a marked site, it is here that the values of civilization are gathered and condensed: spirituality (churches), power (offices), money (banks), merchandise (department stores), language (agoras: cafés and promenades): to go downtown or to the center-city is to encounter the social “truth,” to participate in the proud plentitude of “reality.”
The city I am talking about (Tokyo) offers this precious paradox: it does possess a cener, but this center is empty. The entire city turns around a site both forbidden and indifferent, a residence concealed beneath foliage, protected by moats, inhabited by an emperor who is never seen, which is to say, literally, by no one knows who. Daily, in their rapid, energetic, bullet-like trajectories, the taxis avoid this circle, whose low crest, the visible form of invisibility, hides the sacred “nothing.” One of the two most powerful cities of modernity is thereby built around an opaque ring of walls, streams, roofs, and trees whose own center is no more than an evaporated notion, subsisting here, not in order to irradiate power, but to give to the entire urban movement the support of its central emptiness, forcing the traffic to make a perpetual detour. In this manner, we are told, the system of the imaginary is spread circularly, by detours and returns the length of an empty subject.
Marginal Notes: The most accessible of Barthes’ oeuvre I have read so far (and I still have a long way to go!). Even Barthes enjoyed writing L’Empire des signes more than any other book (Barthes, Jonathan Culler, 1983). For Vince, Baudelairian flâneur of Old Manila: I enjoyed your Short Walks: Echague, R. Hidalgo, Anloague, Escolta, Quiapo, Bilibid Viejo, Recto, Estero Cegado, Hormiga, Ongpin, Dulumbayan, San Sebastian.
From: An African Elegy, by Ben Okri, Vintage Books, 1997.
An African Elegy
We are the miracles that God made
To taste the bitter fruit of Time.
We are precious.
And one day our suffering
Will turn into the wonders of the earth.
There are things that burn me now
Which turn golden when I am happy.
Do you see the mystery of our pain?
That we bear poverty
And are able to sing and dream sweet things.
And that we never curse the air when it is warm
Or the fruit when it tastes so good
Or the lights that bounce gently on the waters?
We bless things even in our pain.
We bless them in silence.
That is why our music is so sweet.
It makes the air remember.
There are secret miracles at work
That only Time will bring forth.
I too have heard the dead singing.
And they tell me that
This life is good
They tell me to live it gently
With fire, and always with hope.
There is wonder here
And there is surprise
In everything the unseen moves.
The ocean is full of songs.
The sky is not an enemy.
Destiny is our friend.
February 1990
Marginal Notes: A page saved from Ben Okri’s book of poetry–what is left of all my books. Lost, 20 May 2004.
From: Poems New and Collected, by Wisława Szymborska, Harvest Books, 2000.
Tarsier, Bohol, Philippines
TARSIER
I am a tarsier and a tarsier’s son,
the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers,
a tiny creature, made up of two pupils
and whatever simply could not be leff out;
miraculously saved from further alterations–
since I’m no one’s idea of a treat,
my coat’s too small for a fur collar,
my glands provide no bliss,
and concerts go on without my gut–
I, a tarsier,
sit living on a human fingertip.
Good morning, lord and master,
what will you give me
for not taking anything from me?
How will you reward me for your own magnanimity?
What price will you set on my priceless head
for the poses I strike to make you smile?
My good lord is gracious,
my good lord is kind.
Who else could bear such witness if there were
no creatures unworthy of death?
You yourselves, perhaps?
But what you’ve come to know about yourselves
will serve for a sleepless night from star to star.
And only we few who remain unstripped of fur,
untorn from bone, unplucked of soaring feathers,
esteemed in all our quills, scales, tusks, and horns,
and in whatever else that ingenious protein
has seen fit to clothe us with,
we, my lord, are your dream,
which finds you innocent for now.
I am a tarsier–the father and grandfather of tarsiers
a tiny creature, nearly half of something,
yet nonetheless a whole no less than others,
so light that twigs spring up beneath my weight
and might have lifted me to heaven long ago
if I hadn’t had to fall
time and again
like a stone lifted from hearts
grown oh so sentimental:
I, a tarsier,
know well how essential it is to be a tarsier.
Marginal Notes: One of my favorite Szymborska poems. This short poem, regarding a small creature (about the size of one’s palms) typifies what I like about her poetry: the sharpness of observation, the unassuming decorum (like the subject matter itself), and the underplayed sense of wonder. The last, not unexpected, coming from the poet who wrote: “The world–whatever we might think when we’re terrified by its vastness and our own impotence or when we’re embittered by its indifference to individual suffering… whatever else we might think of this world–it is astonishing.” Also check out: Vietnam, Written in a Hotel, and Returning Birds.
From: Alchemy and Mysticism: The Hermetic Museum, by Alexander Roob, Taschen, 2006.
The very earliest Greek text with an alchemical content, bearing the programmatic title Physika kai Mystika (of natural and hidden things), divides the Opus Magnum into four phases according to the colours that it produces: blackening (nigredo), whitening (albedo), yellowing (citrinitas) and reddening (rubedo). This division has survived the entire history of alchemy. Later, there appeared other highly divergent subdivisions of “lower astronomy”, as alchemy was also known. These were based on planets and metals, as well as on the signs of the zodiac. In his Dictionnaire Mytho-Hermétique (Paris, 1787), J. Pernety listed the following phases: 1. calcinatio: oxidation–Aries; 2. congelatio: crystallization–Taurus; 3. fixatio: fixation–Gemini; 4. solutio: dissolution, melting–Cancer; 5. digestio: dismemberment–Leo; 6. distillatio: separation of the solid from the liquid–Virgo; 7. sublimatio: refinement through sublimation–Libra; 8. separatio: separation, division–Scorpio; 9. ceratio: fixing in a waxy state–Sagittarius; 10. fermentatio: fermentation–Capricorn; 11. multiplicatio: multiplication–Aquarius; 12. projectio: scattering of the lapis on the base metals in the form of dust–Pisces.The aforementioned early alchemical text from the 1st-2nd century B.C. was published by a follower of Democritus, using the latter’s name. Democritus himself traced all phenomena capable of being experienced by the senses including colours, back to the movements and changing combinations of minute particles without quality, which he called atoms, “indivisible”. The atomic reality behind the illusory world of appearances was of an inconeivable depth and secrecy.A history of practical alchemy could begin with the mystical atomist and non-alchemist Democritus, and it could end with the non-alchemystical atomists of the 20th century, 200 years after the refutation of all scientific foundations of the hermetic art succeeded , by fusing atomic nuclei (admittedly using uneconomical amounts of energy) in transmuting the elements.
Marginal Notes: This passage is dedicated to my friends in organic synthesis, who toil long hours in the lab, whose labors are as sublime as the stars!
