Leave words

[blissblogger]

Don't think me unkind
Words are hard to find
They're only cheques I've left unsigned
From the banks of chaos in my mind

And when their eloquence escapes me
Their logic ties me up and rapes me

De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
Their innocence will pull me through
De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
They're meaningless and all that's true

Poets, priests, and politicians
Have words to thank for their positions
Words that scream for your submission
And no one's jamming their transmission

'Cause when their eloquence escapes you
Their logic ties you up and rapes you

De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
Their innocence will pull me through
De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
They're meaningless and all that's true

 

[Murphy]

My sister just dumped her man of 15 years, absolute nightmare

I quite like the bloke but he’s pining way too much. People don’t understand maybe someone just needs time to think, uncrowded, to work out where their heart really is. He’s phoned 20 times today, crying, blubbing about holidays I couldnt quite remember, “wasn’t all bad was it?“. I dunno mate, you passed out once too often by the sounds of it

Tried Alton Ellis. “Oh man she loves that one”. No she doesn’t, you’re drunk again. Some people don’t see it coming, the Dear John, yet many do with time’s hindsight. Calling in reinforcements, got all the kids here watching Star Wars at 11pm because of the furore. Had to be a Monday ….

 

[mixed_biscuits]

Don't think me unkind
Words are hard to find
They're only cheques I've left unsigned
From the banks of chaos in my mind

And when their eloquence escapes me
Their logic ties me up and rapes me

De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
Their innocence will pull me through
De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
They're meaningless and all that's true

Poets, priests, and politicians
Have words to thank for their positions
Words that scream for your submission
And no one's jamming their transmission

'Cause when their eloquence escapes you
Their logic ties you up and rapes you

De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
Their innocence will pull me through
De do do do, de da da da
Is all I want to say to you
De do do do, de da da da
They're meaningless and all that's true

 

[sus]

“Henri Bergson, the French Philosopher, lived and wrote in a tradition of thought in which it was and is considered that language is a human technology that has impaired and diminished the values of the collective unconscious. It is the extension of man in speech that enables the intellect to detach itself from the vastly wider reality. Without language, Bergson suggests, human intelligence would have remained totally involved in the objects of its attention. Language does for intelligence what the wheel does for the feet and body. It enables them to move from thing to thing with greater ease and speed and ever less involvement. Language extends and amplifies man but it also divides his faculties. His collective consciousness or intuitive awareness is diminished by this technical extension of consciousness that is speech” (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 83).

 

[sus]

More Semiotic Wound stuff

 

[sus]

It is very striking to me that this board has, in recent memory, produced three threads against verbal consciousness:
- Thought is the enemy of flow (@blissblogger)
- Leave words (@catalog)
- The semiotic wound (@vershy versh)

There are probably others I'm not thinking of atm

 

[sus]

And that this goes alongside a kind of luddite/anti-technology strain of thought.

Language being a form of technology. "The fall is in language," as O'Brown writes in the passages Blissblogger quoted

A distinctly countercultural view! The social mainstream lies in continuing to build and refine structure toward a techno-utopia, and the counterculture gestures a la Rousseau toward the archaic and wonders: Maybe we're going the wrong direction. Maybe we're not getting closer, maybe we're getting further away.

Rousseau is alive and well. We are all Romantics. Romantics inherited the BBC. We are Romantics haunted by the dreams of the Romantics before us.

 

[sus]

I think I saw this attitude first in Maggie Nelson's Argonauts, when I encountered this view, back in college. That language (and 'structure' more broadly) was poisoning or corrosive. Not just a limited power, as all powers are limited. Not a capacity that enables us to do lots of stuff but is maybe sometimes inappropriately overused. But as something actively corrosive. "The fall is in language." The way we (and many others) seem to talk about e.g. smartphones here.

It seems related too to the anti-boundary, cosmic consciousness aspect of counterculture. Dissolve the borders, which are only ever oppressive. Language being in some ways "discrete" technologies, versus body language which is "continuous" and therefore does not provoke countercultural ire.

In many ways, I think this pro/anti attitude toward boundaries is the best synopsis what separates mainstream from counterculture

 

[sus]

(It's a sidebar, but if you look at complex systems, they're all heavily modularized. In other words, in the real living world, there's no contradiction between the use of boundaries/borders, and between increasing interconnection. They are inextricable. If you want interconnection you also need boundaries, because boundaries are interfaces between connected parts. Every wall has a gate, and every window or door partakes in a wall.)

 

[Murphy]

every culture is porous

 

[vershy versh]

It's fun being around couples/colleagues that are really good at unspoken communication they're so seamless and coordinated, a glancing look and suddenly they're doing somersaults in sync


8:40

Was it George Steiner who said that after the Holocaust, we could no longer have art? Slightly different thing I know but same sentiment ie that for certain tasks, as you say, or let's say, certain modes of creation are no longer suitable

Adorno's the famous one,

"The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today."​

 

[catalog]

I think my perspective is around the idea of "be like a tree" which is informing a lot of what I'm doing rn. In sense of be still, silent, slow, if and when possible.

We all talk a bit too much, me included.

Obviously most notable around social media.

 

[sus]

"Indigenous men are presented with the brooding and reserved facsimile of an Indian who may have been typical decades in the past. The first example for many of us may have been Chief Bromden in Ken Kesey’s classic 1962 novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (or its 1975 film adaption). Although a complex and emotionally nuanced character, the Chief is a perfect example of the surface standards used to define even modern Indigenous men: angular, strong, serene, and thoughtfully silent"

 

[sus]

Which ties into the American sixties counter culture which was so much about becoming indigenous: small communities, living off the land, ecology. And wore the fringed leather, the feathers in the hair

Also ties into trees. "Wooden Indian" is one term for this picture of indigenous masculinity

 

[sus]

Not all stereotype, a kernel of the real

I know the Wampanoag prized restraint and stoicism among their men, looked down on gossip and garrulousness. That was the culture the first Pilgrims lived beside.

The cowboys too have this reputation for silence. You can say it's about the desert but it's more than that I think.

Talk is about court societies and decadence. Idle leisure or social gaming or "extrinsic" gaming: playing to the audience of other human beings. Ornament and frill and musical manipulation.

Cultures that need to play games with nature, that's a different story. You can't bullshit or gossip or brave rhetoric a tree or farm, a weather system does what it will and You respond.

This is why the Parisian French think the world is all social reality, and American backwoodsmen are pragmatists

 

[mixed_biscuits]

And that this goes alongside a kind of luddite/anti-technology strain of thought.

Language being a form of technology. "The fall is in language," as O'Brown writes in the passages Blissblogger quoted

A distinctly countercultural view! The social mainstream lies in continuing to build and refine structure toward a techno-utopia, and the counterculture gestures a la Rousseau toward the archaic and wonders: Maybe we're going the wrong direction. Maybe we're not getting closer, maybe we're getting further away.

I think our trend is in line with the tech trend: social media is mainly short form and very visual...when neuralink comes in we'll be able to plug into each other's thoughts directly. We're nothing special 🙁

 

[blissblogger]

The cowboys too have this reputation for silence. You can say it's about the desert but it's more than that I think.

Talk is about court societies and decadence. Idle leisure or social gaming or "extrinsic" gaming: playing to the audience of other human beings. Ornament and frill and musical manipulation.

Cultures that need to play games with nature, that's a different story. You can't bullshit or gossip or brave rhetoric a tree or farm, a weather system does what it will and You respond.

This is why the Parisian French think the world is all social reality, and American backwoodsmen are pragmatists

There's a whole book about this in connection with Westerns (and other movie genres based around men of few words whose few words are generally of the tough-talking type)




Carducci (otherwise renowned for working at SST, with Black Flag etc whose aesthetic he characterized as "new redneck") celebrates an inexpressive style of unstyled acting - very much conceived against theatricality. Clint Eastwood is an archetype but he has many other heroes, often quite obscure and forgotten figures in B-movies, action movies, etc

He says the best Westerns are those with hardly any dialogue, that approach silent movies (albeit without the facial histrionics that a lot of silent movies went in for). And that some of the best actors in the traditions he's all about weren't actually trained actors originally but slipped into motion pictures through being stunt men or horse handlers - physical rather than verbal types. People with a sense of life as struggle and jeopardy. Often they were veterans of a world war.

His antipathy for theatre is part of a general slant of culture versus civilization, urban life as urbane as effete as decadent

 

[vershy versh]

There's a whole book about this in connection with Westerns (and other movie genres based around men of few words whose few words are generally of the tough-talking type)

Carducci (otherwise renowned for working at SST, with Black Flag etc whose aesthetic he characterized as "new redneck") celebrates an inexpressive style of unstyled acting - very much conceived against theatricality. Clint Eastwood is an archetype but he has many other heroes, often quite obscure and forgotten figures in B-movies, action movies, etc

He says the best Westerns are those with hardly any dialogue, that approach silent movies (albeit without the facial histrionics that a lot of silent movies went in for). And that some of the best actors in the traditions he's all about weren't actually trained actors originally but slipped into motion pictures through being stunt men or horse handlers - physical rather than verbal types. People with a sense of life as struggle and jeopardy. Often they were veterans of a world war.

His antipathy for theatre is part of a general slant of culture versus civilization, urban life as urbane as effete as decadent

Sonatine was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival. French publisher and notorious movie-goer, Jean-Pierre Dionnet (Canal+ / Studio Canal), reported in an interview, that someone convinced Alain Delon to watch Sonatine arguing that Kitano was a fan of Le Samouraï. Delon was taken aback, and talking about Kitano's acting, said: "What's THAT? [...], this is not an actor [...], he only has three facial expressions and he almost doesn't talk on top of this."​

 

[catalog]

Paris, texas where Harry Dean doesn't speak for a lot of the film.

The first and second mad max films have very few lines of dialogue, like 50 in whole script I think.

"show don't tell" is a maxim within filmmaking generally.

 

[vershy versh]

“I have lost silence, and the regret I feel over that is immeasurable. I cannot describe the pain that invades a man once he has begun to speak. It is a motionless pain that is itself pledged to muteness; because of it, the unbreathable is the element I breathe. I have shut myself up in a room, alone, there is no one in the house, almost no one outside, but this solitude has itself begun to speak, and I must in turn speak about this speaking solitude, not in derision, but because a greater solitude hovers above it, and above that solitude, another still greater, and each, taking the spoken word in order to smother it and silence it, instead echoes it to infinity, and infinity becomes its echo.”​

Maurice Blanchot, Death Sentence

“Always the pain, the chaos of composition. He could not find order in the field of little symbols. They were in the hazy distance. He could not clearly see the picture that is called a word. A word is also a picture of a word. He saw spaces, incomplete features, and tried to guess at the rest. He made wild tries at phonetic spelling. But the language tricked him with its inconsistencies. He watched sentences deteriorate, powerless to make them right. The nature of things was to be elusive. Things slipped through his perceptions. He could not get a grip on the runaway world.”​

Don DeLillo, Libra