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"One night I was, as usual, observing the sky with my telescope. I noticed that a sign was hanging from a galaxy a hundred million light-years away. On it was written: I SAW YOU. I made a quick calculation: the galaxy's light had taken a hundred million years to reach me, and since they saw up there what was taking place here a hundred million years later, the moment when they had seen me must date back two hundred million years."
- Italo Calvino; Flickr: Baucis, Matt Connors; la ciudad y el nombre, 路易斯; Thekla, janicejs
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"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody."
From Wiki:
Tsar Bomba— the largest, most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated, and currently the most powerful explosive ever created by humanity.
Developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb was originally designed to have a yield of about 100 megatons of TNT (420 PJ); however, the bomb yield was reduced by half in order to limit the amount of nuclear fallout that would result. Only one bomb of this type was built and tested on October 30, 1961, in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago.
- J.D. Salinger, Tsar Bomba -
"It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously."
- C.M. Street, Vincent Van Gogh, Georgia O'Keeffe -
no one ever walks here anymore
An archivist spends a lifetime cataloging a museum's collection. Towards the end of his task, he finds that behind the old shelves were new ones filled, one for each of the years he spent working on the past. Chronometrically speaking, he finds that his work is indistinguishable from that of his successors and that of his predecessors. An instrumentalist has housed in his cellar all the instruments of the world. He sits alone in his house playing tunes that remind him of his youth, his adolescence, his adulthood, his seniority, the number of days he has left. He plays these in reverse order hoping to achieve immortality. A woman keeps a journal. She keeps records of things that have happened to her, things that are happening at the moment, things to buy, the exact number of times she has thought about her lover while with her husband, the remaining tally of times she will ever get a haircut.
When we make lists, we make orderly systems, taxonomies, and hierarchies-- in our pockets, therefore, are notebooks of personal indices, at times temporal, at times perpetual. For example: I am sitting at a desk writing stories of alternate histories. Each of the sentences is alternately true and alternately false: The doings of Eris resulted in the Trojan War; Caesar stood above the dead body of Brutus. Achaemenes was an unattested ruler of the Old Persian Empire; Persepolis was destroyed by the great floods of 330 BC. We had a total of thirteen hundred and forty-five conversations; we were never together at all.
Following this, I could say that the archivist is a man indifferent to the natural circadian cycles. Looking at his registries, he finds that he could have been born in either 1954, 1958, 1967, or 1974. At night, when the instrumentalist is asleep, the instruments play by themselves. From his bed upstairs, the cacophony of sounds from the basement reminds him of one of Rameau's cantatas or a forgotten concerto by Pergolesi. Eventually, the polyamorous journal-keeper produces a complete biometric inventory of her private thoughts. Putting them together as a whole, she finds that this chronological enumeration of things forms a new unit of time. Essentially, I make modifications of things just to negate them. For instance, I list out each of the thirteen hundred and forty-five conversations we did or did not have. From the geometric progression, I pick one out randomly. In it, we are talking about a street we walked down once. It was busy; it was empty. Remember: there were people, markets, shops, fruit stalls, musicians, blind men, palm readers, horologists, compass makers. Or just as easily: there was nothing but us and undisturbed gravel and traces of precipitation.
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the paintings
An artist makes a conceptual painting. Unintelligible from both close and afar, its brush strokes and lines mimic the inverse of movement-- they appear thicker from a distance and disappear upon proximity. If we were to closely read the painting's abstract composition, to translate its visual semiotics into a form more textual, lexical, and literal, we could tell any one of the following stories:
(1) A woman aims her camera at the skyscrapers of the city she is visiting. A man reading a magazine inadvertently runs in front of her as she is releasing the shutter. After her vacation, in the darkroom, she notices half a man's head in the corner of one of her photographs. Panicking, she begins reconstructing the image of the passing man from two weeks ago. She remembers the color of his waistcoat, the way the waves of his hair moved in the wind. She thinks about falling in love with him. In time, she fills her walls with sketches of his body with half his head missing. She begins to be accustomed to his deformity, this malformed section of human anatomy, this man with half his head missing.
(2) An architect builds a house. He fills its rooms and corridors with molten plastic. After construction, the walls are broken down to reveal the resulting transposed mold. He begins to live around this structure, in the space bordering the perimeter created by this inverted house. He enters through the unseen hallway projected by the sidewalk; he inhabits the backyard from where the bedroom extrudes outward. The furniture is nailed to the outside walls. The chimney bellows smoke downward and inward. The neighbors marvel at the architect living outside, cooking, cleaning, bathing, sleeping, his footsteps tracing a predetermined route around his property.
(3) A man loves a woman. Every night, he arrives at her bedroom with new sets of tools to break down the doors she has been in the habit of constructing. She builds one right after the other in succession: wood, brick, mortar, concrete, reinforced steel. Breaking down the first, he arrives at the second, to arrive at the third, and so on and so forth. Her life begins to follow the line that this sequence of doors creates into the distance. Defeated, the man begins to dig a hole. Surfacing on the other side, he is met with panes of windows through which he sees a girl opening one door after another in quick progression: the first, the second, a third, a fourth, and so on.
Before his death, I meet with the artist seeking an explanation. He quotes writers, other dead and dying artists, rotarians, archivists, numismatists, vexillologists, philatelists, and cartographers. He theorizes about mountain roads, coastal evacuation routes, air traffic patterns, and Reuleux polygons found on maps of cities overlaid on each other. Confused, I ask about the woman in love with a half-head, the disoriented, peripatetic homeowner, the relationship of the lovers afflicted by recursive doors and windows. He mentions how each of his paintings are reversals of the last, that seen together, they form a variegated diagram of opposing colors: blacks and whites, greens and reds, blues and oranges, yellows and purples. He describes how each one can mean either of the ones before or after, how each one could take on two forms, like the onset of spring (the coalescence of an extinct bird species or a sudden rainstorm of berries, for instance), or either a sunny or grey day again in Mattituck.
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Prometheus
by Franz Kafka
There are four legends concerning Prometheus:
According to the first he was clamped to a rock in the Caucasus for betraying the secrets of the gods to men, and the gods sent eagles to feed on his liver, which was perpetually renewed.
According to the second Prometheus, goaded by the pain of the tearing beaks, pressed himself deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it.
According to the third his treachery was forgotten in the course of thousands of years, forgotten by the gods, the eagles, forgotten by himself.
According to the fourth everyone grew weary of the meaningless affair. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.
There remained the inexplicable mass of rock. The legend tried to explain the inexplicable. As it came out of a substratum of truth it had in turn to end in the inexplicable.
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Dreamtigers
by Jorge Luis Borges
In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger: not the jaguar, the spotted "tiger" of the Amazonian tangles and the isles of vegetation that float down the Paraná, but that striped, Asiatic, royal tiger, that can be faced only by a man of war, on a castle atop an elephant. I used to linger endlessly before one of the cages of the zoo; I judged vast encyclopedias and books of natural history by the splendor of their tigers. (I still remember those illustrations: I who cannot rightly recall the brow or the smile of a woman.) Childhood passed away, and the tigers and my passion for them grew old, but still they are in my dreams. At that submerged or chaotic level they keep prevailing. And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger.
Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird. -
Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that is has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo's white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the boughs. You would think the plumbers had finished their job and gone away before the bricklayers arrived; or else their hydraulic systems, indestructible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of termites.
Abandoned before or after it was inhabited, Armilla cannot be called deserted. At any hour, raising your eyes among the pipes, you are likely to glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stature, luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at the mirror. In the sun, the threads of water fanning from the showers glisten, the jets of the taps, the spurts, the splashes, the sponges' suds.
I have come to this explanation: the streams of water channeled in the pipes of Armilla have remain in the possession of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed to traveling along underground veins, they found it easy to enter into the new aquatic realm, to burst from multiple fountains, to find new mirrors, new games, new ways of enjoying the water. Their invasion may have driven out the human beings, or Armilla may have been built by humans as a votive offering to win the favor of the nymphs, offended at the misuse of the waters. In any case, now they seem content, these maidens: in the morning you hear them singing.- Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino -
It is possible that every need is basically spatial, that somewhere the image, the touch, and the voice of those who are no longer alive must still exist (“nothing is lost--”).
This has given me new hope; this is why I am going down to the basement of the museum to look at the machines.
I thought of people who are no longer alive. Someday the men who channel vibrations will assemble them in the world again. I had illusions of doing something like that myself, of inventing a way to put the presences of the dead together again, perhaps. I might be able to use Morel's machine with an attachment that would keep it from receiving the waves from living transmitters (they would no doubt be stronger).
It will be possible for all souls, both those that are intact, and the ones whose elements have been dispersed, to have immortality. But unfortunately the people who have died most recently will be obstructed by the same mass of residue as those who died long ago. To make a single man (who is now disembodied) with all his elements, and without letting an extraneous part enter, one must have the patient desire of Isis when she reconstructed Osiris.- The Invention of Morel, Adolfo Bioy Casares
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What is Litost?
Litost is an untranslatable Czech word. Its first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog. As for the meaning of this word, I have looked in vain in other languages for an equivalent, though I find it difficult to imagine how anyone can understand the human soul without it.
Let me give an example: The student went swimming in the river one day with his girlfriend, a fellow student. She was athletic, but he was a very poor swimmer. He could not time his breathing properly and swam slowly, his head held tensely high above the surface. She was madly in love with him and tactfully swam as slowly as he did. But when their swim was coming to an end, she wanted to give her athletic instincts a few moments' free rein and headed for the opposite bank at a rapid crawl. The student made an effort to swim faster too and swallowed water. Feeling humbled, his physical inferiority laid bare, he felt litost. He recalled his sickly childhood, lacking in physical exercise and friends and spent under the constant gaze of his mother's overfond eye, and fell into despair about himself and his life. They walked back to the city together in silence on a country lane. Wounded and humiliated, he felt an irresistible desire to hit her. "What's the matter with you?" she asked him, and he started to reproach her: she knew about the current near the other bank, and that he had forbidden her to swim there because of the risk of drowning-- and then he slapped her face. The girl began to cry, and when he saw the tears on her cheeks, he took pity on her and put his arms around her and his litost melted away.
Or take an instance from the student’s childhood. His parents made him take violin lessons. He was not very gifted and his teacher would interrupt him to criticize his mistakes in an old, unbearable voice. He felt humiliated, and he wanted to cry. But instead of trying to play in tune and not make mistakes, he would deliberately play wrong notes, the teacher’s voice would become still more unbearable and harsh, and he himself would sink deeper and deeper into his litost.
What then is litost?
Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.
One of the customary remedies for misery is love. Because someone loved absolutely cannot be miserable. All his faults are redeemed by love’s magical gaze, under which even inept swimming, with the head held high above the surface, can become charming.
Love’s absolute is actually a desire for absolute identity: the woman we love ought to swim as slowly as we do, she ought to have no past of her own to look back on happily. But when the illusion of absolute identity vanishes (the girl looks back happily on her past or swims faster), love becomes a permanent source of the great torment we call litost.
Anyone with wide experience of the common imperfection of mankind is relatively sheltered from the shocks of litost. For him, the sight of his own misery is ordinary and uninteresting. Litost, therefore, is characteristic of the age of inexperience. It is one of the ornaments of youth.
Litost works like a two-stroke engine. Torment is followed by the desire for revenge. The goal of revenge is to make one’s partner look as miserable as oneself. The man cannot swim, but the slapped woman cries. It makes them feel equal and keeps their love going.
Since revenge can never equal its true motive (the student cannot confess to the girl that he slapped her because she swam faster than he did), it must put forward false reasons. Litost is, therefore, always accompanied by a pathetic hypocrisy: the young man proclaims he is terrified his girlfriend will drown, and the child incessantly playing off key feigns an irremediable lack of talent.- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
