Copernicus and Kepler

Nicolaus Copernicus, the aesthete, a kind of daydreaming astrological draughtsman, is a "mimesis" man. Johannes Kepler, who had proposed to write a book called Geometric Cabala, is a "semiosis" man, seeking to go deeper in search of concealed esoteric truths of a more or less gnostic nature. Both men as presented in these precise terms appear terrifically characteristic of their two opposed zeitgeists, Copernicus connected to the Renaissance, Kepler to Mannerism. For both Copernicus and Kepler, God must remain the loadstar. 

Copernicus is very much still in thrall to Plato, Pythagoras, and Euclid, though he aspires to make his own way. He writes in lyric fashion of his love for the sun. 

Kepler believed in Spinoza’s ‘principle of sufficient reason.’ Mechanics was changing because the world was busier and crazier. Kepler’s cosmology is one of perverse ellipses and all manner of confounding motion. He said of music that it constituted "a construction […] so rational and natural that God the Creator has impressed it upon the relations of the celestial movements." 

In 1608, Kepler writes a dizzying bit of speculative theory—framing it as a dream, a literary device intended to help safeguard Kepler against charges of heresy—in which he imagines astrology as practiced on the moon.  

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"Neither perception, nor voluntary memory, nor voluntary thought," insists Gilles Deleuze in Proust and Signs, "gives us profounds truth, but only possible truth."

Maoist Kayak

It would appear that most of the beautiful and brilliant young folks in Paris during the last half of the 60s, leading up to May ’68 and its depressive aftermath, were one sort of Maoist or another. Among the radical leftists there was much sectarian bickering and rancour such that many Maoists were official enemies with one another. The poster children for the beautiful and beatific Maoist Parisians are surely Anne Wiazemsky and Juliet Berto in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterpiece La chinoise (1967). Godard said of Maoist China that its greatest accomplishment was creating a nation where they only needed one book, a little if notorious red one. Personally, I’d go for the Analects of Confucius, but that’s hardly here nor there. No nation will ever actually be operating on a single book…no matter who’s the crook or how badly the populace be shook. “Mao thinks in an almost infinite way,” says brilliant but often vexing French philosopher Alain Badiou. Mao certainly didn’t know how to control or direct the widespread chaos and mass murder of the Cultural Revolution, whether or not he thought like I Ching. After the revolution the main purpose of the Communist Party was to make sure shit like that didn’t ever happen again.

The Persian empire was so wide

they did not believe the sun shined

beyond their borders.

“One could claim that the Paris Commune in 1871 was a complete ‘disaster,’” says Badiou. “20,000 workers shot to death in the streets of Paris—nevertheless, it was by reflecting on the Paris Commune that Lenin developed the means for a victorious revolution in 1917. Likewise, it is only by reflecting on the Cultural Revolution that we can prepare for the future of the communist political movement. Why? Because the Cultural Revolution was the sole example of a revolution under the conditions of state socialism. It is no coincidence that the most important creation of the Cultural Revolution took the name the Shanghai Commune.”

Imagine you are travelling 

over a great expanse of terrain

engulfed in flames

and not a single soul

has answer

for your inquiries.

Imagine you need

to pass through town

cloaked.

 

Three Drawings

I would prefer not to.

- Harman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener”

Let them have all of it, his measly joy, his scrapbook past, his hope, too.

- Stanley Elkin, “The Conventional Wisdom”

The Bartleby Zygote 

Sky-Smashed Face

Hillbilly Fuckery (At Very Least Their Yellow)

Burning Bush

 A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.

- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

The last act is the one with nobody in it.

- Hélène Cixous, Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time 

kayakBluE99

1.

I was the dashing rogue who tap-danced through your doorway in manta ray boots acting like he and Dick Nixon out of San Clemente was, like, tight in the buddy-buddy way, or worse, more lewd, who knew? 

LOL and WTF duffle-up along with us, am I right or 

United Arab Am-I-Rights?  

Have I got these Gucci shoes on too tight? 

Does Neolithic man still cry out in the night? 

It took me ten years to learn to kick a can with a spoon. Crawfish in your underpants? Then we shan’t be accepting you back into the tent, and you’re two months owing on rent. Blimey, blimey.

2.

I was a military experiment from the get-go but also unfortunately a stagecoach wino and scapegoat for those who refine oil, like my pa, riding side-saddle to God. My gimmick is ridic when I throw the lit match into the oil slick. Hindustani upgrade on the reg, overshooting the relaxed calendar of official relaxation, already brazenly in arrears in the preordination, is this here your surcharge, honey, under the Sony Playstation?

Riddle me this, co-worker, is that your piss in the thermos I dearly miss? 

Is this your idea of a functional ham sandwich? 

Next time you pass me by try not to scrape your undercarriage.

Stopping me in my tracks like I were anthrax is a cheshire cat checking facts. 

I throw down sawdust and encamp myself in the terminal building, counting to one hundred. Pill-popping, pip-pipping Penelope awaits her Odysseus…or does she? I’m a little bashful, all and all, even when I'm having a ball, so why did I hand my little pink puckered starfish to four unfeeling prep school assholes who should be more than sufficiently satisfied with beaver? Is it the holes like cigarette burns in the ozone layer? Something ado about my hair?!

3.

I went grocery shopping with the Marquis de Sade and he came out carrying a cabbage, slobbering. He’ll stick his quill whither he will. I have an appointment with celestial anointment, driving on the wrong side of the road like a Brahman bull ‘cause I feel impenetrable and enlightened and all my sensations and sensitivities feel like they's heightened. 

This isn’t a soap opera, it’s just plain old soap…if hardly for the likes of you. Come back when you’re dressed less like the pope and no longer committed to rocking the boat. My baby, she’s a trough full of offal, prognosis naturally isn’t fuckin’ hopeful. I’m not usually boastful but: 

I’m in some kind of torpor and I...

I’d like to offer up my aubergine with a side of leeks

then set up a sting and see who peeps. 

One day life will be a game where nobody any longer cheats; 

try to be a little more sly with your crib sheets and little 

bookie notebook, 

my sweets. 

Try not to cook the cook—

4.

In pulchritude and lassitude I was nevertheless the lad who could 

not be fooled even as he was forever overruled by roaming bands 

of cock-blocking fools—what is the hour of your appointment 

with His Highness? Sorry, I was smoking a blunt and 

now here we suddenly find us:

SocksCrates and Owlcibiades!!

The State of Texas

 

Straight Crushin'

If the other suffers from hallucinations, if he fears going mad, I should myself hallucinate, myself go mad. Now, whatever the power of love, this does not occur: I am moved, anguished, for it is horrible to see those one loves suffering, but at the same time I remain dry, watertight.
- Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse

It is not uncommon in love to experience [a] heightened sense of one’s own personality (‘I am more myself than ever before!’ the lover feels) and to rejoice in it as Nietzsche does. The Greek lyric poets do not so rejoice.
- Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet