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Fragile Related reading: "Embracing and Refuting the Golden Onslaught: Belligerence as Male Entity and (More) Related reading: "Embracing and Refuting the Golden Onslaught: Belligerence as Male Entity and The Art of Pure Antagonism" (excerpt) [...] Many of today's contemporary artists and thinkers understand that destruction is nature's purest creative process, in a sense that destruction, being active negation, does not truly opposite creation because of that lack in passivity. However, the detail in this argument lies in what drives the destructive urge, why the potency of desire to destroy supersedes the creative desire and whether this makes it a more creative process than active creation itself. The greater question is whether such natural urges, instinctively, can themselves be considered active or passive in their occurrence. When a child pulls the wings off of an insect in an early act of aggressive dominance, is that destructive aggression learnt, is it manifested in a practical method of expression that is acquired? Or is the child, in feeding her curiosity over testing the livelihood and mortality of the insect, instead refusing to suppress a subconscious desire present from birth? If the latter case were true, especially when the child is accumulating a set of morals based upon the retention of undesirable (but not undesired) 'real' emotion, the suppressor would be considered the obedient 'good' child for resisting the urge to remove the insect's wings despite her supposed need to establish superiority over the insect in mutilating its body. However, when in the throes of a destructive act themselves, the artist, author or thinker is praised for her refusal to suppress this urge and, while an evaluation of the result as good or bad usually positions itself at a level of the reader's individual subjective moral views, it is generally accepted that the act of creativity is one to be encouraged, regardless of whether the act celebrates 'creation' or not. However, it would not be unreasonable to claim that all creative processes, in all media, contain in them an equal level of diametrically opposed creation and destruction, with product of the process occurring where the two forces are bisected (fig. 1). At face value this may seem absurd, considering that much of today's artwork characterises itself by the undermining of previously revered and respected beliefs or the gesture of appropriation, methodically destroying either physically or methodically the creation of another. Yet effectively this is simply making the destructive side of the act more openly and unashamedly obvious, whereas in other artistic devices the destructive nature is simply obscured or masked by the artist herself, in some cases through active denial. Naturally any such statement would prove futile; any process that has any effect will demand some destruction to aid its occurrence, whether it be the physical destruction of naturally occurring raw materials, the appropriated destruction of intellectual property, the symbolic destruction of the blankness before the process begins &c. This hypothesis of equally distributed creation and destruction is called Finite Productive Diametric Theory, which differs from another widely accepted concept, Finite Productive Trimetric Theory, which states that the process is easier to trisect (fig. 2). This is due to the theorem's statement that destructive acts are the most creative, because using destruction as creation would mean that destruction and creation would be separately occurring, which would be cumulatively doubling the productive value of the process -- the Auto-Direplicative Effect. Yet the Finite Trimetric Theory assumes, like its Diametric counterpart, that the levels of creation and destruction in any process can be equally divided, but assumes that, because destruction and creation are both inherent in each other, the judgement of whether an action is creative or destructive would rely on whether, in a thirded system, there is two parts creation to one part destruction or vice versa. Both these theorems however, in particular the Trimetric system, fail to acknowledge the popular view that creation and destruction are in a constant state of flux, and that both can be treated like energy, constantly transmogrifying and shifting into one another (or some interpreted hinterland in between). If destruction is viewed as creation at an equal level then, presuming the universe continues in linear equilibrium, then such systems, arguing the existence of pure creation and pure destruction to be extracted from any process, would intrinsically be flawed and could not apply appropriately to a social context. For instance, a considerable bulk of writing by twentieth century gender theorists concerns itself with the traditional notion that creation and creativity can be considered a 'female' act, not only due to biological connotations of childbearing but also due to the creative advantages of sympathy, patience and abundant emotional fibre. The male by contrast, regularly thought of as the destructive gender, would be less scrupulous regarding the consequences of destructive acts and, as hunter, would be drawn to the immediacy and violent primitivism the afford. More contemporary theorists however make evident that such a division of creation and destruction cannot be as objectively clear-cut as the gender divide. In particular masculinity's synonymy with destruction and nihilism is said to be the result of the acknowledgement that the male is the gender obsolete, and such forceful and aggressive tactics tend to be the result of a need to create not so much a purpose for the existence of the male but to achieve a feeling of dominance that he never had -- or in the majority of cases, deserved -- in the first place, by the most rapid and impacting means necessary. [...] Augustus Sterling (Less)
may 22, 1905 based on a chapter in einstein's dreams by alan lightman. a man has a vision of a woman, and he (More) based on a chapter in einstein's dreams by alan lightman. a man has a vision of a woman, and he must find her. in this place time moves differently. will he find her in time? why was he looking for her?
in the beginning he wakes up as time, life passes him by. a man at the crossroads of his life, pondering his existence. he has a sudden and vivid image of a woman and a farmiliar place. she is waiting for him, taunting him, antagonizing him. he flies to find her at the bridge to another world, but when he gets there, she has just vanished, time has flown by with the woman. he stands, solemnly, angrily. what was he going to do to her? fall in love? murder her? we will never know, because the man was too slow.
"Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
For the most part, people do not know they will live their lives over. Traders do not know that they will make the same bargain again and again. Politicians do not know that they will shout from the same lectern an infinite number of times in the cycles of time. Parents treasure the first laugh from their child as if they will not hear it again. Lovers making love the first time undress shyly, show surprise at the supple thigh, the fragile nipple. How would they know that each secret glimpse, each touch, will be repeated again and again and again, exactly as before?
On Marktgasse, it is the same. How could the shopkeepers know that each handmade sweater, each embroidered handkerchief, each chocolate candy, each intricate compass and watch will return to their stalls? At dusk, the shopkeepers go home to their families or drink beer in the taverns, calling happily to friends down the vaulted alleys, caressing each moment as an emerald on temporary consignment. How could they know that nothing is temporary, that all will happen again? No more than an ant crawling round the rim of a crystal chandelier knows that it will return to where it began.
In the hospital on Gerberngasse, a woman says goodbye to her husband. He lies in bed and stares at her emptily. In the last two months, his cancer has spread from his throat to his liver, his pancreas, his brain. His two young children sit on one chair in the corner of the room, frightened to look at their father, his sunken cheeks, the withered skin of an old man. The wife comes to the bed and kisses her husband softly on the forehead, whispers goodbye, and quickly leaves with the children. She is certain that this was the last kiss. How could she know that time will begin again, that she will be born again, will study at the gymnasium again, will show her paintings at the gallery in Zürich, will again meet her husband in the small library in Fribourg, will again go sailing with him in Thun Lake on a warm day in July, will give birth again, that her husband will again work for eight years at the pharmaceutical and come home one evening with a lump in his throat, will again throw up and get weak and end up in this hospital, this room, this bed, this moment. How could she know?
In the world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely. So too every moment that two friends stop becoming friends, every time that a family is broken because of money, every vicious remark in an argument between spouses, every opportunity denied because of a superior's jealousy, every promise not kept.
And just as all things will be repeated in the future, all things now happening happened a million times before. Some few people in every town, in their dreams, are vaguely aware that all has occurred in the past. These are the people with unhappy lives, and they sense that their misjudgments and wrong deeds and bad luck have all taken place in the previous loop of time. In the dead of night these cursed citizens wrestle with their bedsheets, unable to rest, stricken with the knowledge that they cannot change a single action, a single gesture. Their mistakes will be repeated precisely in this life as in the life before. And it is these double unfortunates who give the only sign that time is a circle. For in each town, late at night, the vacant streets and balconies fill up with their moans.
16 April 1905
In this world, time is like a flow of water, occasionally displaced by a bit of debris, a passing breeze. Now and then, some cosmic disturbance will cause a rivulet of time to turn away from the mainstream, to make connection backstream. When this happens, birds, soil, people caught in the branching tributary find themselves suddenly carried to the past."
-einstein's dreams (Less)
Control Denied - The Fragile Art of Existence (1999) 
2009-05-04 - extension: rar - size: 19 MB
Control Denied - The Fragile Art of Existence (1999)
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