Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
In the throat, burning and turning. All night afloat
On the silent sea we have heard the sound
That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled listening
To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound
And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing
The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,
Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat
For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,
We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell,
Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,
Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.

- Dylan Thomas

of that which is sovereign.

Eros is the helplessness of that which is sovereign: it is the strength abandoning itself to something elusive, something that stings.


Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

horns and bells

Eros!
Now I am lost, he thought, and from that moment on he was.

Strindberg, The Cloister

Sometimes I feel very old, like my whole life's over, like I'm not around anymore.

The devil just sittin' there laughing. He's glad when people does bad. Then he sends them to the snakehouse. He just sits there and laughs and watch while you're sitting there all tied up and snakes are eating your eyes up. The snakes go down your throat and eat all your systems up.
I think the devil was on the farm.


The sun looks ghostly when there's a mist on the river and everything's quiet. I never knowed it before. And you could see people on the shore but it was far off and you couldn't see what they were doing . They were probably calling for help or something or they were trying to bury somebody or something. We seen the trees that the leaves are shaking and it looks like shadows of guys that are coming at you and stuff. We heard owls squawking away hooting away. We didn't know where we were going and what we were going to do. I'd never been on a boat before. That was the first time.
Some sights that I saw was really spooky that it gave me goosebumps. I felt like cold hands touching the back of my neck and, and it could be the dead coming for me or something. I remember this guy his name was Blackjack, he died. He only had one leg and he died. And I think that was Blackjack making those noises.


This girl she didn't know where she was goin' or what she was gonna do. She didn't have no money or nothin'. Maybe she'd meet up with a character. I was hoping things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine.


Linda Manz in 'Days of Heaven'

impetuous and illimitable

I hold against all modern religions that they have provided their believers with consolations and embellishments of death, instead of giving them means, in their heart, of living with it and coming to an understanding with it. With it, with its entire unmasked harshness: this harshness is so tremendous that precisely with it the circle is closed: it leads back to the extreme of a gentleness that is great, as pure, and as perfectly clear (all comfort is murky!) as we have never suspected gentleness to be, not even on the sweetest spring day. But toward the experiencing of this deepest gentleness which, if only some of us felt it with conviction, could perhaps gradually penetrate and make transparent all the circumstances of life; toward the experiencing of this richest and most wholesome gentleness humanity has never taken even the first steps - unless it be in its oldest and most unsuspicious times - the secret of which has been almost lost to us. Nothing else, I am sure, was ever the content of the 'initiations' but precisely the communication of a "key" that made it possible to read the word "death" without negation. Like the moon, so surely life has a side that is continually turned away from us, which is not its opposite, but rather its completion to perfection, to fullness, to the whole and full sphere and globe of being.
One should not fear that our strength would not be sufficient to endure any experience of death, even though it would be the nearest and most terrible; death is not beyond our strength, it is the measuring mark of the brim of the vessel: we are full whenever we reach it - and being full means being heavy...that is all. I do not wish to say that one should love death; but one should love life so magnanimously, so without calculating and selecting, that love of death (the turned-away side of life) is continually and involuntarily included - which actually happens invariably in the great motions of love, which are impetuous and illimitable....It would be conceivable that death stands infinitely closer to us than life itself....What do we know about it?


And love too, which mixes up the numbers between people for a game of nearness and distances, in which we enroll only insofar as the universe seems so full and there is space nowhere but in us. Love too takes no account of our categories, but snatches us, trembling as we are, into an infinite consciousness of the whole. Lovers do not live by the segregated Here; but as if a separation had never been undertaken, they lay hands on the tremendous possession of their hearts. Of them one can say that God becomes truthful to them and death does not harm them: for they are full of death in being full of life.

- Rilke, Letter to Lotte Hepner (1915)

the place where death went

Roland Barthes, whose philosophy of photography sprang from the loss of his adored mother, treasured photographs of the dead woman for their almost shamanistic value, as a kind of literal transcription of the light that emanated, directly and physically, from her living hair, her skin, her dress. Through these feelings he aimed at an unsurpassable definition of photography - as the place where death went when religion let go.

- Claudia Roth Pierpont

handed down mysteries

Where everything is bad
it must be good to know the worst.

- F.H.Bradley

a paradise that comes and goes.

Debauchery is perhaps an act of despair
in the face of infinity.

- the brothers Goncourt / Jean-Léon Gérôme

incursions

'We are given the shadow for the thing, and in the end we live among shadows, and not only believe that things are made for the sake of their shadows, but find that this is actually the case.'

Edgar Wind - Art and Anarchy

The Trembling and Unbroken Circle...

The greatest masterpieces created by man are now bound to a freedom from death as they are contained in records, and a child of three may hold weighty spiritual secrets in small hands.

~ Maurice Maeterlinck

Guest entry by the wonderful Woolgathersome.
http://woolgathersome.blogspot.com/

unreal in the eyes of the dead

I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead...

Sebald - Austerlitz

a closing of remedies.

Get drunk saying good-bye.

With C&W weepers from the golden age as backdrop.

And featuring a performance by PERFVGIVM.


http://www.perfvgivm.com/

At Observatory: 543 Union Street (at Nevins), Brooklyn, NY 11215

The formation of attention.

In : Roberto Calasso, The Forty-nine Steps
University of Minnesota Press. 2001

ALL SORTS OF REMEDIES TALK

a candid conversation about the twin stars of art & death.

wine will be sold; you may bring your whiskey.

herbert pfostl | all sorts of remedies
november 21, 2009 - january 8, 2010

Observatory | 543 Union Street | Brooklyn
thurs/fri 3-6pm | sat/sun 12-6pm
observatoryroom.org

ALL SORTS OF REMEDIES

at Observatory

543 Union Street- at Nevins
Brooklyn, New York 11215

Hours:
Thur & Fri 3-6pm
Sat & Sun 12-6pm

Opening: Saturday, November 21st at 7:00pm

Exhibition: November 21, 2009 - January 8, 2010

Further events coinciding with:
ALL SORTS OF REMEDIES:

ART AS MAGIC & THE COLD HARD FACTS OF LIFE

DECEMBER 18 - 7:30

as well as:

Palinurian splinters

There are also solitary bees, and it is not claimed that they are biologically inferior.


When we see someone living alone, like a beech-tree in a clearing, with no other signs of life around him yet proclaiming his freedom, displaying his possessions and maintaining his devotion to his friends, we can be sure that such a person is an ogre and that human bone-meal lies buried under his roots.


Why do ants alone have parasites whose intoxicating moistures they drink and for whom they will sacrifice even their young? Because as they are the most highly socialized of insects, so their lives are the most intolerable.


Streets of Paris, pray for me; beaches in the sun, pray for me; ghosts of the lemurs, intercede for me; plane-tree and laurel-rose, shade me; summer rain on quays of Toulon, wash me away.


For a dark play-girl in the night-club I have pined away, for a dead school boy, for a bright angel-vixen I have wept in vain, If this thoughtless woman were to die there would be nothing to live for, if this faithless girl forgot me there would be no one for whom to write. These two unseen and otherwise occupied figures compose the fragile arch of my being and constitute a Tribunal which they have long ceased to attend.


A child, left to play alone, says of quite an easy thing, 'Now I am going to to do something very difficult'. Soon, out of vanity, fear and emptiness, he builds up a world of custom, convention and myth in which everything must be just so; certain doors are one-way streets, certain trees sacred, certain paths taboo. Then along comes a grown-up or a more robust child; they kick over the imaginary wall, climb the forbidden tree, regard the difficult as easy and the private world is destroyed. The instinct to create myth, to colonize reality with the emotions, remains. The myths become tyrannies until they are swept away, when we invent new tyrannies to hide our suddenly perceived nakedness. Like caddis-worms or like those crabs which dress themselves with seaweed, we wear belief and custom.

We pay for vice by the knowledge that we are wicked: we pay for pleasure when we find out, too late, that we are disappearing.


- The Unquiet Grave
A Word Cycle by Palinurus (Cyril Connolly)

remedies

The wonderful, of which the miraculous is a subcategory,
was never boring.

- Jacobus de Voraigne

"We are a part which has to imitate the whole."

- Simone Weil/Brancusi

to be absolved...

Throughout the first centuries of our era, the Gnostics disputed with the Christians. They were annihilated, but we can imagine their possible victory. Had Alexandria triumphed and not Rome, the extravagant and muddled stories that I have summarized here would be coherent, majestic, and perfectly ordinary. Pronouncements such as Novalis' "Life is a sickness of the spirit", or the despairing one of Rimbaud, "True life is absent; we are not in the world", would know the conditional assent of the pious laboratories. In any case, what better gift can we hope for, than to be insignificant? What greater glory for a God, than to be absolved of the world?

Borges - Other inquisitions

pieces

There is no paradise on earth, but there are pieces of it.
What there is on earth is a broken paradise.

- Piero della Francesca / Jules Renard