Outpost 180624
The cell of myself fills with wonder.
The white-washed wall of my secret.
Pierre Jean Jouve, Les Noces.
Bachelard comments, once we have been touched by the grace of super-imagination, we feel in the presence of the simpler images through which the exterior world deposits virtual elements of highly-coloured space in the heart of our being. The image with which Pierre Jean Jouve constitutes his secret being is one of these. He places it in his most intimate cell.
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An abode of intimate space, it is Blanchot's inner room.
Here everything is simpler, more radically simple.
The room in which the poet pursues such a dream as this is probably not 'white-washed.' But this room in which he is writing is so quiet, that it really deserves its name, which is, the 'solitary room! It is inhabited thanks to the image, just as one inhabits an image which is 'in the imagination.'
Here the poet inhabits the cellular image. This image does not transpose a reality. It would be ridiculous, in fact, to ask the dreamer its dimensions. It does not lend itself to geometrical intuition, but is a solid framework for secret being. And secret being feels that it is guarded more by the whiteness of the lime-wash than by the strong walls.
The cell of the secret is white. A single value suffices to coordinate any number of dreams. And it is always like that, the poetic image is under the domination of a heightened quality. The whiteness of the walls, alone, protects the dreamer's cell. It is stronger than all geometry. It is a part of the cell of intimacy.
The Dialectics of Outside and Inside.
Gaston Bachelard.
The Poetics of Space demonstrates Gaston Bachelard's ability to bridge scientific logic with poetic analysis. As a phenomenological reading of the poetic image, it probes the geometrical divide between inside and outside through an analysis of the imagination of matter. It resists simplification, engaging with both physical and psychological body-space relations, and describes an exchange between interior and exterior in which the latter might be 'an old intimacy'. The dialectical condition of 'interior immensity' and the 'immeasurable outside', attests to the spatiality of being as a reflexive inquiry on interiority, what Bachelard calls intimate geometry grounded in imagination.
INTIMUS
Interior Design Reader.
Unlearning Conceptual Frameworks/The Inconceivable.
Dante, like any traveller who knows that the first step, that of abandoning the familiar paths is the most difficult.
White Holes
Inside The Horizon
Carlo Rovell. 2023
Every place in the universe has its own time, different places can send each other signals, like the 'hiss' sent to us from the black hole at the centre of our galaxy. But time passes at unequal rates in different places, and no single one of these times is 'truer' than any other.
There is no universal time, rather there is 'temporality' which is the network formed by many local times and the possibility of exchanging signals.
The Distortion of Time.
Bringing into doubt something that seemed self-evident to us.
Einstein, General Relativity.
Rovelli asks, how did an idea as bizarre as the relativity of time come to be devised and accepted?
In order to digest new ideas there lies a difficulty, not so much with the new concept, as it does with becoming liberated from old ones that seem so obviously to be true. To bring them into doubt seems inconceivable. We are always convinced that our natural intuitions are self-evidently right, and it is this that prevents us from learning more. The difficulty lies not in learning, but in unlearning.
Conceptualizing the impalpable fabric of reality.
Practices that are all about the continual reorganization of our conceptual space, of what we call meaning.
Art/Science/Philosophy, all have within them the capacity to change the organization of our thoughts , that allows us to leap forward. To produce singularities by re-conceptualizing reality. Our conceptual structures are neither the definitive ones, nor the only one possible, rather they are the ones that evolution has led us to cobble together in order to negotiate our daily needs, and often they do not work beyond that.
Making clay+ceramics, taking liberties, playing with and through a creative analogical reasoning.
Situated Practices/Theoretical Objects that develop a conceptual structure through analogy and recombination.
The Memory Police.
Yoko Ogawa. 1994
English translation, Steven Snyder. 2019
I sometimes wonder what was disappeared first, among all the things that have vanished from the island.
In those days, everyone could smell perfume. Everyone knew how wonderful it was. But no more. It's not sold anywhere, and no one wants it. It was disappeared the autumn of the year that your father and I were married. We gathered on the banks of the river with our perfume. Then we opened the bottles and poured out their contents, watching the perfume dissolve in the water like some worthless liquid. Some girls held the bottles up to their noses one last time-but the ability to smell the perfume had already faded, along with all memory of what it had meant. The river reeked for two or three days afterward, and some fish died. But no one seemed to notice. You see, the very idea of 'perfume' had disappeared from their heads.
It doesn't matter, she said. To you, this is no more than a few drops of water. But it can't be helped. It's all but impossible to recall the things we've lost on the island once they're gone.
It seems strange that you can still create something totally new like this-just from words-on an island where everything else is disappearing, he said, brushing a bit of dirt from one of the pages as though he were caressing something precious. I realized then that we were thinking the same thing. And what will happen if words disappear? I whispered to myself, afraid that if I said it too loudly, it might come true.
