What I Do Is Me

Each single thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being each one indoors dwells;
Selves, goes itself, crying What I do is me, for that I came.

— Gerald Manley Hopkins

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The Great Escape

“City Of Tiny Lites”

City of tiny lites
Don’t you wanna go
Hear the tiny auto horns
When they tiny blow
Tiny lightin’
In the storm
Tiny blankets
Keep you warm
Tiny pillows
Tiny sheets
Talkin’ bout those tiny cookies
That the peoples eats
City of tiny lites
Maybe you should know
That it’s over there
In the tiny dirt somewhere

You can see it any time
When you get the squints
From your downers and your wine
You’re so big
It’s so tiny
Every cloud is silver line-y
The great escape for all ot you
Tiny is as tiny do
Tiny is as tiny do
Tiny is as tiny do
Tiny is as tiny do

City of tiny lites
Don’t you wanna go
Hear the tiny auto horns
When they tiny blow
Tiny lightin’
In the storm
Tiny blankets
Keep you warm
Tiny pillows
Tiny tiny sheets
Talkin’ bout them tiny cookies
That the peoples eats
That the peoples eats
That the peoples eats
That the peoples eats
And it’s over there
It’s over there
It’s over there
It’s over there

— Frank Zappa, City of Tiny Lites
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What Is Enough?

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom…You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.

― William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

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Join with the Ecstatic

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
Just because the body is rotten—
That is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
You will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.

—Kabir

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Support

Can you ask more from the literature of the picture than you actually can support?

— Robert Adams in an Interview with John Gossage

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Beseitigen, Verwischen, Vermalen, Zerstören

[…] eine negativen Theologie des Bildes […], die davon ausgeht, dass ein Bild im stärksten und wahrsten Sinne des Wortes nicht intentional erreicht werden kann, sondern nur in einem komplexen, vielschichtigen und immer wieder negativen (Beseitigung, Verwischung, Vermalung, Zerstörung von Sichtbarkeiten und Ordnungen im Gemälde) Prozess des Malens – vielleicht – glücken kann.

— über Gerhard Richter

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Tools Not Broken

The basic insight of this analysis is found in Heidegger’s remark that, for the most part, the things of the world are not represented by our minds at any given moment. Mostly we fail to notice that the ground beneath our feet is stable, that our heartbeats continue without interruption, that atmospheric oxygen enables the continuation of our lives, and that the absence of political uproar in the streets makes possible our calm contemplation of phenomenological ontology. Usually, the life of things is notaccessible to us, but hidden, concealed, or withdrawn.

And here we encounter the seldom-noted ambiguity of Heidegger’s concept of the “ontological difference”: the difference, so important for his philosophy, between being and beings. On the one hand, the ontological difference means the difference between present and absent, veiled and unveiled, concealed and unconcealed, tool and broken tool, and so forth.

— Graham Harman, The Revenge of the Surface: Heidegger, McLuhan, Greenberg

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