fictionisms's Xanga

Monday, August 30, 2010

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 23:44:58 GMT

the city of women, the city of mirth

       When Romulus looked down at his city, he discovered what every man after him will also come to recognize— namely, that cities are defined by women. Women walk their streets, women make rounds in their marketplaces, women stand on their rooftops and at open windows, their voices filling the air. From atop the Palatine Hill, this is how Rome must have appeared in the beginning, the kidnapped Sabine women traversing its alleys and passageways like luckless victims in a labyrinth. In fact, if we are to regress and break down the word city itself, we will find that even it is feminine. City, from the Latin civitas and ultimately, urbs, takes on the female gender grammatically in many languages: la ciudad in Spanish, die stadt in German, la ville in French, la città in Italian, and so on.
       So, women are cities, and cities are women. I want to imagine that a city such as this is a slow city. Once its avenues are drawn and laid and every square mile is populated, its citizens go about their lives in such an impeded state that to an outsider, it is immobile. Cars slide on the asphalt, birds never land, strangers lock eyes for years, rain is in suspension, earthquakes do not seem to affect it. Placed side by side, a normal city would appear to experience accelerated progress. I want to call this type of city a city of mirth. Mirth: jollity, gaiety, laughter. Its inhabitants are young and then are old, they habitually find the shortest ways to the end of a conversation, buses and trains arrive at their destinations instantaneously, buildings are built and then razed immediately, etc. The excited city left to its own accord would, like any other city of its kind, simply be founded, thrive, and die.
       To prevent this destruction, we must put these two entities together, the city of women and the city of mirth. It is only by doing so that we can explain the continued existence of the cities of old: Byblos, Damascus, Jericho, Beirut and so on. According to Calvino, cities such as these have struggled to finally arrive at their current shapes. So then it is only natural that I want to imagine a city without a permanent form at all. For example, its streets are arbitrarily placed, its residents speak in tongues not yet evolved, law and lawlessness coexist peacefully. This polymorphous city takes on the shapes of its daily whims: a carousel, a puddle, an animal, a desert plant, and so on, a veritable constellation indecisive in both anatomy and arrangement. From an outsider’s perspective, this is how this new city will always appear. From the inside however, one only has to imagine the first days of the Roman empire through the eyes of one of its denizens. If we were present in the moment, if we could place ourselves where we could never be, we would see Romulus above on his hill and the city of women below him, a city of aqueducts, bridges, outdoor theaters, markets with sundries and myrrh, baths, libraries, and roads repeating themselves in intricate gossamer patterns. La mujer, die frau, la femme, la donna, and so on. This would be the city of memory.

- Chicago (Dan Schultz)

Saturday, August 07, 2010

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 23:20:15 GMT

"I should seek to make young people vividly aware of the past, vividly realizing that the future of man will in all likelihood be immeasurably longer than his past, profoundly conscious of the minuteness of the planet upon which we live and of the fact that life on this planet is only a temporary incident; and at the same time with these facts which tend to emphasize the insignificance of the individual, I should present quite another set of facts designed to impress upon the mind of the young the greatness of which the individual is capable, and the knowledge that throughout all the depths of stellar space nothing of equal value is known to us.

And he will see that the man whose mind mirrors the world becomes in a sense as great as the world. In emancipation from the fears that beset the salve of circumstance he will experience a profound joy, and through all the vicissitudes of his outward life he will remain in the depths of his being a happy man."

From wiki:

"Project Excelsior was a series of high-altitude parachute jumps made by Colonel (then Captain) Joseph Kittinger of the United States Air Force in 1959 and 1960 to test the Beaupre multi-stage parachute system. In one of these jumps Kittinger set world records for the highest parachute jump, the longest parachute drogue fall, and the fastest speed by a human through the atmosphere, all of which still stand."

- The Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell; Philippe Petit;

Untitled [Falling Buffalo], 1988-89, David Wojnarowicz; Eadward Muybridge; Project Excelsior

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 05:53:26 GMT

memoranda neue

       In third person: A woman sits recollecting her lovers. Hours after beginning, she finds that there have been more than she remembers. She begins writing down their names on sheets of paper, on her hands and arms, in the margins of old magazines. Soon, she resorts to the blank walls of her room, filling them each to their corners. The ones remaining she begins reciting their names aloud, recalling their middle names and surnames whenever possible. She consults the pages of The Decameron for those she has long forgotten; she consults telephone directories for those yet to come. A lover is not determined only by past and current coital interactions, as is defined by normal usage. Instead, to her, a lover is also every man with whom she will eventually come into contact throughout the rest of her life, physically, verbally, mentally, situationally, every man that she has not yet met, but has already assigned idiosyncrasies to and to whom she has committed names. Engaged in this process of selective remembrance, she arrives at a new discovery: that she is living in the time of new memories.
       In second person: You meet a man who says he is able to will things and events solely by the use of repetition. Under these rules, he explains to you, things happen as they should and things happen as they should not. Macduff kills Macbeth, the smile of Persephone brings about the changes in the seasons, weight is a function of gravity, elephants fly, turkeys swim, fish crawl, and so on. As an exercise, he tells you to think about mythical creatures, repeating them in your mind until they populate your every thought: sphinxes, sphinxes, sphinxes, hippogriffs, hippogriffs, satyrs, satyrs, centaurs, centaurs. If you repeat an argument enough times, it becomes true. For instance, Borges’ dreamtiger. Dreamtigers exist along the Paraná River, inhabiting the dense foliage along the banks. Their stripes are inverted, those dreamtigers.
       And finally, in first person: I am always forced to recall things as they were. Remember the tigers: if you repeat an argument enough times, it becomes true. In other words, hypotheses of the present will eventually turn into laws of the past. In the time of new memories, a promiscuous woman dreams up future lovers in her bedroom, repeating their names with her inner voice, ingraining each into her mind. Effectively, she has already spoken to each of them. Effectively, she has already led each of them by the hand to her bed. If I apply the same rules to logic, similarities appear. Logic exposed under the fallacy of repetition begins to break down because logic does not exist if it is under duress. What I mean to say is if an argument, action, or thought perseverates enough, we can begin to ascribe to it certain truths, or in the case of a mythical creature, even go so far as to analyze its behavioral patterns and circadian rhythm.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Thu, 20 May 2010 16:00:56 GMT

Americana

      Kundera says that homo sentimentalis is not only a man with feelings, but one who has elevated feeling to something with tangible, even clerical value. Therefore, as another person of society who prides himself on his values, man must feel. However, he also states that as soon as man is cognizant of this ability and decision to feel, that this man is no longer feeling, but in hysteria. He calls this second group homo hystericus.
      I would like to propose a third species, homo melancholis. Members of homo melancholis feel sentimentally and hysterically, but also melancholically. Therefore, the world passes this man by. People walk by sadly, buses drive themselves sadly, scaffolds are raised sadly, buildings are built sadly. But the mistake should not be made: this man is not dispirited. Hardly, because in fact, of the three, homo melancholis retains the most accurate value judgments. To this man, things have always existed within preset guidelines and limits. In other words, things appear premeditated. Cartographically speaking, the nameless city in which he lives is entirely calculated. Streets only run perpendicular and parallel, people walk along predetermined routes, buses run according to schedule, and so forth. Following this extremely rational framework, homo melancholis will find himself repeating his actions because they are sensible, because they are logical. He awakens every morning at the same time, he visits the same coffee shop, orders the same item, thinks about the same woman, over and over again.
      Within these parameters, homo melancholis finds that things are backwardly attracted. He befriends futurists who tend to theorize about the past, he finds that Hamlet must turn his sword on the king to attain peace, he watches men and women make eyes only to repel each other upon speaking. He finds these reverse affinities everywhere. In fact, he is not dissimilar from homo sentimentalis or hystericus. What I mean: Sentimentalis looks at a cathedral. To him, even a single brick of the façade has emotional value. Looking at this one brick, he can feel it play its role as a part of a grand whole. He becomes paralyzed by sentiment. Hystericus looks at the brick. He notices that it is loose. He watches it shift position in the high winds above, but does nothing. He is paralyzed with hysteria of its eventual fall. Day after day, he stands across the street and watches as it loosens slowly. Melancholis sees the brick falling, but he is unconcerned with the vector of its descent or the speed at which it plummets. Instead, he is preoccupied with visions of the city as it once was. He sees the falling brick as a premeditation of a continuous narrative. He is then able to draw only one of two conclusions, that the falling brick was meant to either purposely rob someone of immortality or purposely make a depression in the sidewalk.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 04:06:18 GMT

It was that memorable evening in March out at the end of the jetty. She was lying there in a white cotton dress and I mistook her for a rowboat.

- David Ives, Jim Dine

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 04:06:04 GMT

A few times in my life I've had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds, the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I've lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.

- A Single Man (2009), Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi

Monday, March 22, 2010

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 01:49:09 GMT

the rhinoceros

There is a rhinoceros charging the café. Hearing the sounds at first, we didn’t think it was a rhinoceros. We thought a bus had crashed into a lamppost or a building on the corner. But no, it was a real, live African rhinoceros charging at us from down the street. Cars overturning in the air, fire hydrants bursting, people screaming, horn on its head. We had done a double-take. You and me, we both put our coffees down. I stirred mine in its saucer. It spilled a little. Your mouth was agape. The walls were shaking. Here we were, sitting together in a café at a table across from each other in front of a large glass window in the path of an angry, three-ton ungulate. What were we to do? Up and run like everyone else? Everyone does that. But us, we never were ones to take premeditated courses of action. Instead, we sat there in silence while the rhinoceros charged straight at us. Closer and closer, but we didn’t move. We had last thoughts running quickly through our heads. You, you thought about how you had left the burner on again, about how to tell your boyfriend if you survived, and about how you forgot to water your geraniums. Me, I thought about variations of this theme. I thought about the mailman making his neighborhood rounds year after year, like a monk in circumambulation around a temple. I thought about how you were like Galatea in this café full of multiple copies of imperfect women. I thought about how all of this was a temporary arrangement. You were a temporary arrangement, I was, the rhinoceros was, the café was, our coffees were. The chairs were arranged temporarily, the people were screaming temporarily, the rhinoceros outside was charging temporarily. What else were we to do during an event such as this? If you release an object, it will drop. If you apply horizontal force to a free-standing wheel, it will roll. If you put a man and a woman in a room, they will fall in love. Like Caracalla damning Geta’s memory from history, the very act of a rhinoceros charging down the street at us on an early Sunday afternoon became, at the very least, untransmutable.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:34:22 GMT

four hundred thousand years

If I could condense the whole of human history, I could reduce it to the fact that it has existed for four hundred thousand years. The premise is this: an observer of the universe watches the progression of our existence from beginning to end. In this state of extended observation, he watches them evolve from single-celled organisms, populate islands and landforms, create civilizations, and lay siege to one another's city walls. He watches as generations of fabulists and revisionist historians tell and retell sequences of events. Over millennia, he notices that this sequence is nothing but select single events in recursion. What I mean is: each incident, each action is a single occurrence in an iterative series. Therefore, we take single episodes and we repeat them four hundred thousand times. An old man pays a shopkeeper for his goods four hundred thousand times. The Greek army marches up to the walls of Troy four hundred thousand times. Medea kills her own children four hundred thousand times. A child drops his ice cream four hundred thousand times. If we apply this extraordinary logic, we can no longer say the universe is a chaotic, meaningless sequence of events. Instead, it is the very opposite. A boy trips over a crack in the sidewalk four hundred thousand times. A man meets a woman four hundred thousand times. He makes love to her four hundred thousand times and she says she loves him four hundred thousand times.
In fact, if you take anything and repeat it four hundred thousand times, a precursor to change begins to appear. On our six hundred and first conversation, the details of the sentence I have been repeating to you will alter. It will have been a brown cat that I saw, not a grey one. On our two hundred thousandth meeting, it will be in park instead of a waiting room. If the collision of two contingent forces allows, we could continue this. There will never be the dilemma of what to talk about, if anything at all. In fact, I can all but employ a synonym for a word in our recursive dialogue and you would never notice. On our three hundred thousand and fiftieth meeting, I could discuss the way your slender fingers curl or I could even lose you completely to someone else. Hypothetically, we could be like the observer, watching our meetings from light-years away, at times remarking on their parity, at times commenting on their alterity. Like the germ of an idea, we could do this, one, two, three, four times, over and over and over again.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:18:10 GMT

Valaquencia

What is Valaquencia? For some, it is a place, a town, a city, or an empire that once flourished. For others, it is a thing, a description, or an action. You can drive one thousand miles west from Boston, Massachusetts and arrive at a hamlet called Valaquencia; you can travel in the opposite direction and find its acropolis on an unknown island in the northern Atlantic. You can walk into a gallery and find it as the title of every single painting on its walls and sculpture on its floors. It could be a scientific phenomenon that dictates the pull of gravity or the push of barometric pressure. A child stands by the ocean picking his nose. He smears it on a large rock when no one is looking. The beach on which he is standing is one off the Andalusian coast and its name is Valaquencia. It could have once been the name of a warring faction, like the Montagues, the Capulets, the Guelphs, the Ghibellines. Or it is an old man tending to his herbarium reciting his favorite dramaturgical verses to himself. The fact that it can be all this at the same time-- a noun, an adjective, and a verb-- leads us to believe that Valaquencia is in fact the very term for things that do not have one. So I can say Valaquencia is an undiscovered star cluster, or that it was once a contending name for ancient Mycenae, or simply it is the name of a beautiful woman, or a lonely woman, or the woman you never met. Yes, in fact that is the best explanation. It is the name of the woman you never met. You can meet a woman who you think you know as Valaquencia just to discover that she is actually the same woman you met thirty years ago, whose name is actually Veranda. In fact, you can take a woman, any woman, and you subtract her arms, her legs, her shoulders blades, every single facial feature, and just as the act of trying to recall a place you have forgotten, you find in naming this woman without a face or digits or distinguishable characteristics that her name will always unwaveringly be, Valaquencia.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 04:19:22 GMT

Ockham's razor

       Ockham's razor is a principle that favors simplicity, parsimony, and succinctness. It follows: if we are to accept that the simplest explanations are always more favorable than the complex, yet equally-reasonable ones, we could logically concede (1) the shortest distance between two points is indeed a straight line, (2) our cosmic model is indeed heliocentric, (3) lovers do eventually find each other.
       We think about a man and his wife in their bedroom. The man is in his chair, the woman standing. He tells her: take off all your clothes. Don't be ridiculous, she says. Take off all your clothes, he repeats, more deliberate this time, pointing his finger also. She feels helpless; she does not know what to do. So she takes off all her clothes for him. She takes them off one by one, throws each one at him with hatred while he sits in his chair. Turn around and look at me, he says. Why is he making her do this? Why does the woman listen?
       We could produce familiar explanations. We could say that he did not like the look she gave that lone man in the supermarket earlier this morning, or the way her face looked staring out the window during the flight back from Connecticut as if searching on the ground for someone she once knew. And why does she? Perhaps she is afraid of him as equally as he is afraid of her-- she finds uncomfortable the way he blows his nose every so often, or the way he plays with his fingers, the way he sits in his chair directing her in his own film.
       Or perhaps all of these are incorrect. They are incorrect because they are complex. So logically, we invoke Ockham's razor. The shortest distance between two points is not a line that travels from origin to destination and doubles back, heliocentrism is a model that does not extend beyond our observable solar system. We say that the man tells the woman to take off all her clothes simply because he loves her. We say she agrees to do so simply because she reciprocates. And we agree to this not because of its validity, but because of its immediacy, its clarity.