Limit
Instrumental music: all surface. A play of surface.
Image: All surface. Give it metaphor; give it meaning; imagine its other.
Image the limit, image the surface. What else is there?
Little concrete gestures, orienting towards things, towards ideas...
If there is the limitless, I cannot figure it.
The universe, they say, expands at 160,000 miles per hour,
(which is apparently just slightly faster than my internet speed!)
and I have a hard time being convinced (I think it shows).
I was reading Jean-Luc Nancy, and telling my professor his attempt to critique the idea of myth, without creating a new mythology. She told me to “ground these ideas,” and I thought that that was the difficulty: to avoid this form of fiction, and to avoid some sort of “autofiguration” of “nature” or “humanity” or “myth itself,” or these stories that attempt to “inaugurate meaning.” How, really, can you critique our propensity for mythologies without creating, in some abstracted sense, a myth of our propensities? What a silly question. I told her I wanted to take pictures of asphalt. How’s that for grounding?
I thought of Annie Dillard’s use of the word “bathetic” when she visited “Jesus’ birthplace,” where Christianity might be inaugurated. The word means something like anticlimatic or disillusioning. And I think of claims of ideologies and mythologies and limitless worlds and these cheap-shot vocabularies attempting to rip our attention away ourselves, placing our own subjectivities in some larger drama of sin or samsara or divine orders or some cause for T-r-u-t-h. “Have you ever looked at your hand?!” Why not, instead, stare at the asphalt beneath our feet, at this world so boring and so removed from the drama of attention? Give me that drama-free religion of a world so apathetic to our gaze for the limitless. My eye stops on the ground, with no articulation of ideas; only a gesture removed from understanding.
(I’m getting back into it, ordering my stories from the past couple of months. Stay tuned.)