"...Valery decia que la traducción es el arte de producir effectos analogos con medio diferencia...Es decir que traducción nunca es un transcripción sino una metáfora: el poema traducido es otro poema." - Octavio Paz from Grandes Personajes a Fondo telecast

Valery said that translation is the art of producing analogous effects with different means...That is to say, translation is never a transcription- Rather, it is a metaphor. The translated poem is another poem - translation mine

1 blade ghost on the platinum tier

Each of the posts of this blog is going to consist in a soundfile, an image, and a few words in a kind of inquiry:  an attempts to characterize the relationship between reality / everyday life and the impulse of expression...

First, some explanation of the soundfiles.


MP3: BLADE GHOST ON THE PLATINUM TIER



They were usually composed of peculiar sounds sampled and looped, played back over and over again as an eq or a delay or an envelope filter was gradually passed over the output. Some of the experiments evolved a little more complexity, but that is essentially how they begin to develop. The primary ideal was to create a background sound for reading or concentration. Roughly every other track posted here incorporates some kind of recurring melody (3,5,7,9,10).  A vantage point in the drone to counterpoint the plain sound.

The files will remain posted for as long as archive.org exists to host them.  I'm sure there are a handful of people on the globe who have an affinity for this sort of non music, but, given that there are so many recordings available nowadays,  I'd be surprised if they find their way to them.  I've got hours and hours of this stuff,   Nevertheless0, I wish that I had a second existence that could sit endlessly churning it out.  If it reminds you of anything similar that you think I'd like to know about, certainly say hello.

I have made videos for these kinds of audio tracks before, I've embedded one of them below...but my hardware speed and my software limitations have put me on a video hiatus. I really got a lot of pleasure making video field recordings of peculiar settings.  I was never one for traveling to take tourist monument photos, but appreciate the camera as a pretext for travel, a means to occupy and consume time.. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time to get them to get images with no narrative content whatsoever to appear interesting in and of themselves. You shoot two hours of video and you're clicking a mouse and staring into a screen for twenty hours. While I'm really enamored of hallucinogenic nightclub-style video wallpaper and new techniques of generating it, the tools are still too elite to access; for the present, my interest is in developing some observations along the sphere of the written word.

As I will expand upon later, none of this audio, imagery, or text was created and made public with any serious expectation of finding an audience other than my own.   While people are usually quick to say that each person possesses something to express that would be interesting to others,  I am rather skeptical about this.  The truly interesting is rather elusive.  Yet, for decades, there was this magical aura of power that surrounded the ability to make and distribute artistic creation.   And now, anyone can make and publish whatever they can imagine.   Given this new freedom, your curiosity obligates you to fashion something creative and put it into tje virtual public context.  In one sense, it's as if we woke up one day and all of the rocks in the world had turned into gold.   We suddenly have to ask, "Why was anyone ever so enamored of gold?" So much creativity... Of course, in the past, the scarcity of creativity, the difficulty of publicizing something was not the only reason why it was interesting, why it had value.  That is the subject of this blog.  What is the value of representation? Why bother?


2 THREE LIGHTS AGAINST STONE from motivesbeyondreason.net on Vimeo.

2 intoxicated in the heavy perfume

MP3: INTOXICATED IN THE HEAVY PERFUME

The images are from my own camera,  The text embedded in the images are excerpts from a two hundred page work that consists of long passages of automatic writing which have been continuously cut, pasted, and rewritten uncountably many times over the last ten years. While particular plots, characters, and settings, often autobiographical, served as the seed text, whenever any coherent meaning seemed to suggest itself, I broke apart the existing passage and redistributed the different sentences throughout the remainder of the work. A compulsive preoccupation for filling hours and hours of time.  Eventually I will use one of those do it yourself bookmaking sites and have a version of it, just the text, as a book on a shelf. 

I do not expect that there will be a direct relationship between the prose within the images and the text of this blog itself. Both of them arise from imagining that common sense ideas about how words acquire their meaning may be false.   Both of them arise from the vague intuition, almost certainly misleading, that the discovery of new techniques for using symbols and language could somehow directly transform the here and now of reality.

This present account is motivated by an attempt to interpolate the words of my own stream of consciousness through and about recently encountered text...The desire to manipulate words; the compulsion to temporarily engage in some sort of definite relationship with the world by arranging an account of words, I don't know that it really bears up very well to moral scrutiny. Especially when it involves the pretense of literature, a reference to literature.   And by "moral" here I might simply be referring to individual happiness.  Focusing on words may very well be antagonistic to happiness.  But that is the way I am going to proceed.

I have a mania for rewriting and consequently will never definitely publish anything. If you are reading this for the first time, let me explain to you that there will be no new posts. Rather, I am only going to attempt to develop the ideas that are presented here into something that will strive for increasing clarity with every revision. This is a linear essay. So the typical temporal format of standard blog markup is not being used here. As my conclusions are not yet soundly fixed; the entries towards the end become progressively more vague...Of all of the things that reality imposes upon me, engaging in this monologue is certainly the most significant in the sense a context for being blunt and direct.  That might make certain convictions or intuitions inaccessible, but, for this text at least, it is the style of the inquiry.

In my youth, I took a few years in university circles of philosophy.  Earned a minor degree it it... attracted, towards the end of that time, to inquiries about the truth and nature of arithmetic. This subject seemed to offer a degree of rigor and a narrowness of ambiguity that most other philosophical problems lack.  Since mathematical concepts can be defined with a lot more precision than those from ethics, or aesthetics, or religion, or metaphysics.  On my retirement, however,  the end result was that I left feeling there was something theatrical about the state of mind with which philosophical inquiry takes place.  What might seem depth was ultimately just another surface.  Just as someone could say: "He who hesitates is lost." He could just as well say: "Look before you leap." Perspectives are contained within the phrases, texts, or accounts, and the best system of thought would be merely to articulate various contradictory positions,  These perspectives can be used as roles or tools within which certain situations can be confronted. Ultimately, however, someone's attraction to one perspective rather than another is beyond justification or explanation.

3 an assault on the sun

MP3:AN ASSAULT ON THE SUN

Of the three tracks I've put up so far, this is the most musical. As opposed to merely focusing on sound. A real pensive thing composed merely on sine samples and coming together in less than a couple hours.

Given a desire to select and manipulate words, it generally seems preferable to avoid things written by other people and write about life itself. The significance of what you relate stands or falls regardless of the quality of the efforts of some other author. As well, there is a sort of imperative presence of mind that arises with you are addressing your own personal life and fate. This frequently disappears when we take on the pretense of appraising the lives and ideas of famous people. The opposing alternative seems to be: to attempt and portray moments of real life as I have personally experienced them; settings, characters, and situations that would have no representation save an account that I could provide...descriptions of successes and failures that have no discernible bearing upon anything else in the world other than my own humble fate and those of a few vague acquaintances. The difficulties that prevent this alternative are considerable. The immediate obstacle is "the routine": irrelevance, triviality, the complete lack of imagination that accompanies things already done before they are started: the majority of real life..."the routine" is almost the entire substance of every event that I am personally witness to. (While my own personal mediocrity is almost certainly what is to blame for this, when I consider all the people I've met, I'd have to say that I believe this to be the situation for the large percentage of them) Attempting to construct something from the tedious continuum of real life is not an insurmountable task; certain instrumental moments and encounters could be selected and portrayed. This strategy has been recommended before: "Novels will give way, by and by to diaries or autobiographies- captivating books, if only a man knew how to choose among his experiences that which is really his experience, and how to record truth truly."

For one thing, the narrative that resulted would be so artificial that it would border on falsehood. The bulk of real life is not the interesting moments. If I were to write an account which included them and rejected all else, the persona that emerged...someone who was engaged, conflicted, instrumental, involved...this would bear a very tenuous relationship to the real person whose concentration serves as a direction for these remarks.

For another, the character of the representation is far more interesting than the events themselves. Or any events for that matter. For what stories have not already been told? An analogy with photography makes the point easier to see. New ways of altering images are almost always far more interesting than the appearance of a subject or the event of a photograph. I take a picture of a street or a shopping mall or a crowd and they become, effectively, a picture of nothing...because people see them everyday and they fade into a background which is nothing. To make the picture interesting, I try to come up with novel ways of adjusting the hue...the saturation...the contrast...The picture only starts to become interesting when novelties in the form become the figure itself, the content, the nothingness of everyday life, disappears into the ground.

For another, (from Fitzgerald): "He tries to go to life. So does every author except the very worst, but after all most of them live on predigested food. The incident or character may be from life, but the writer usually interprets it in terms of the last book he read. For instance, suppose he meets a sea captain and thinks he's an original character. The truth is that he sees the resemblance between the sea captain and the last sea captain Mr. X created, or who-ever creates sea captains, and therefore he knows how to set this sea captain on paper."

4 the settings were reflections

MP3:THE SETTINGS WERE REFLECTIONS

Writing about what others have said is irrelevant and writing about one's own experiences is uninteresting. What, then, is the purpose of writing anything at all? Unfortunately, I do not have some ideology, some moral manifesto waiting in the wings, ready to seize this fortuitous moment in order to reveal itself.

There is, for me at least, a very simple pleasure that arises out the concentration writing requires. A sense of having one's back up against an Archimedian point that is the search for the right words. We may be able to concoct some psychological explanation, some analysis for how this comes about: why it is that writing, or talking for that matter, is something that people take pleasure in...But elaborating the concepts for some such theory of psychology is no small task. Defining notions such as "pleasure" and "communication" requires asking some quite paralyzing questions about a profoundly evasive labyrinth of presuppositions.

Yet, of all the things there are to be done in the world, how is writing something that merits one's time? Perhaps to begin with a more specific question: Which sorts of topics are preferable to write about? Almost certainly, we must look to write something that we ourselves would like to read. Something that presents our own curiosities and intuitions in the form of words, or perhaps, presents words that express thoughts that oppose and undermine our intuitions, the better to understand their failings.

Some subsequent points of departure will consist in excerpts from the critical works of Octavio Paz. In my ongoing attempt to become more familiar with Spanish, the clarity of his prose has been of incomparable assistance. My debt is such that I owe many of his essays much more detailed praise... perhaps that will be forthcoming. But for now:

....................Dadá fracasó porque creyó que la derrota del lengua seria el triunfo del poeta el surrealismo afirmó la supremacia de lenguaje sobre el poeta . Toca a los poetas jovenes borrar la distinción entre creador y lector: descubre el punto de encuentró entre el que habla y el que oye. Eso punto es el centro del lenguaje no es el diálogo: el yo y el tú, ni el yo reduplicao, sino el monológo plural- la incoherencia original- la otra coherencia. La profecia de Lautréamont: la poesia será hecho por todos.

...................."Dada was a failure because it believed that the destruction of language would be the triumph of the poet. Surrealism affirmed the supremacy of language over the poet. The young poets were moved to erase the distinction between writer and reader; to discover the point of encounter between the one who speaks and the one who is heard. This point is the center of language: it is not dialogue, the I and the you, neither is it the I multiplied, rather, it is a plural monologue- the original incoherence, the other coherence. The prophecy of Lautreamont: that poetry will be made by everyone." (octavio paz, corriente alterna, siglo veintuno, p. 73) translation mine

Some very broad gestures in such a short paragraph. Most of Paz' writing is more exacting. This was taken from a unrepresentative chapter: a foray into maxims and epigrams...Helpful however, as an introductory allusion to several ideas that demand more explicit scrutiny: an author, an audience, language, poetry, participation in language, points of encounter, the resolutions of the Surrealists and the ideals and difficulties which gave rise to them.

From asking: "what is the purpose of writing anything at all?" we have wandered away into quoting an appraisal of surrealism by Octavio Paz. What is the association between these this two ideas? Some clarity, perhaps, by reviewing the surrealists' own definition of their endeavors?

...................."Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life." (first manifesto)

"...Solving all the principal problems of life." Ambitious words indeed!

5 as if we ourselves belonged to others

MP3:AS IF WE OURSELVES BELONGED TO OTHERS

6 the city of autumn in glass

MP3:THE CITY OF AUTUMN IN GLASS