Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition III

Splitting Hares

Broomstick Bunny, released February 25th 1956 (Warner Brothers) - d. Chuck Jones, w. Tedd Pierce, a. Richard Thompson, Ken Harris, Ben Washam, Abe Letivow, v. Mel Blanc, June Foray (uncredited), m. Milt Franlyn, p. Eddie Selzer

The Week in Review

Films:

Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, 2005 - d. Lian Lunson
Perfume, 2006 - d. Tom Tykwer
Pan's Labyrinth, 2006 - d. Guillermo del Toro
A Scanner Darkly, 2006 - d. Richard Linklater
Little Miss Sunshine, 2006 - d. Johnathan Dayton and Valerie Faris
Marie Antoinette, 2006 - d. Sofia Coppola

Books:

Journals of Jean Cocteau - Jean Cocteau
Confessions of an English Opium Eater - Thomas de Quincey
Noa Noa: The Tahitian Journal - Paul Gauguin
The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out Of The Earth - Edvard Munch
Inferno: From the Occult Diaries - August Strindberg
Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh - Vincent van Gogh

Music:

Symphonies, 1-10 - Gustav Mahler
Daphnis et Cloé - Maurice Ravel
Four Last Songs - Richard Strauss

Exhibitions:

Before the Body: Matter - Monash University Museum of Art
Sigmar Polke: Music from an Unknown Source - RMIT Gallery

Bunny Bonus

Lady Bugs






















From Hare Conditioned, 1945 - d. Chuck Jones

Dreams Of The Marionettes

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) - Medusa, c. 1597

"Mythology is an expression of the collective unconscious."

"The human psyche is essentially the same all over the world. The psyche is the inward experience of the human body, which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears. Out of this common ground have come what Jung has called the archetypes, which are the common ideas of myths."

"The elementary ideas: what could be called the ground ideas. These ideas Jung spoke of as archetypes of the unconscious. "Archetype" is a better term because "elementary idea" suggests head work. Archetypes of the unconscious means it comes from below. The archetypes of the unconscious are manifestations of the organs of the body and their powers. Archetypes are biologically grounded: the biographical is secondary to that. All over the world and at different times in human history, these archetypes have appeared in different costumes. The differences in costume are the result of environment and historical conditions."

"It's surprising how much memory there is down in the unconscious. There's a whole system . . . which, when we see it in animals, we call instinct. That is the biological ground. But then certain things happen that make it repulsive or difficult or frightening or sinful to do some of the things one is impelled to do, and that is when we begin to have our most troublesome psychological problems. Myths are primarily for fundamental instruction in these matters."

"A metaphor points to two ends: one is psychological, the other metaphysical. The dream is metaphoric of the structures of the psyche, and your dreams will correspond to the level of psychological realisation you are operating on. The metaphysical, on the other hand, points past all conceptualisations, all things, to the ultimate depth. And when the two come together, when the psyche and metaphysics meet, then you have a real myth."

"Myths are the world's dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with the great human problems."

"Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realisations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form."

"Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods. All the worlds are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body on conflict with each other."

"Dreamtime is the time you get into when you do to sleep and have a dream that talks about the permanent conditions within your own psyche as they relate to the temporal conditions of your life right now."

"Everyone has to pass a threshold of some kind. This is an archetypal thing. So there is a basic mythological theme there even though it is a personal dream. These two levels . . . are found in all cultures. For example, everyone has the problem of facing death. This is a standard mystery."

"A dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society's dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of society, you are in accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you."

"Dreams come up from the imagination which is grounded in the energy of the organs of the body, and these are all the same in human beings. Since imagination comes out of one biological ground, it is bound to produce certain themes . . . There are certain characteristics of dreams that can be enumerated, no matter who is dreaming."

"On some levels a private dream runs into runs into truly mythic themes that can't be interpreted except by an analogy with myth. Jung speaks of two orders of dream, the personal dream and the archetypal dream, or the dream of the mythic dimension. You can interpret a personal dream by association, figuring out what it is talking about in your own life, or in relation to your personal problem. But every now and then a dream comes up that is pure myth, and carries a mythic theme, or that is said to come from the archetypal person within us. "

"I think the psychology of Freud tends more to relate to what Jung calls the personal unconscious. When you break past that into the realms that cannot be interpreted in terms of personal experience, you're in the field of mythic forms. And if you're acquainted with the mythic forms, you understand where you are in a way that's impossible if you have no previous acquaintanceship."

Joseph Campbell

Wide Blue Wonder

Joan Miró (1893-1983) - Blue I, 1962


'The blue of the sky, if we were to examine its many image values, would require a long study in which we would see all the types of material imagination being determined according to the basic elements of water, fire, earth, and air. In other words, we could divide poets into four classifications by their response to the single theme of celestial blue:

Those who see in an immobile sky a flowing liquid that comes to life with the smallest cloud.

Those who experience the blue sky as though it were and enormous flame - "searing" blue, as the Comtesse de Noailles describes it.

Those who contemplate the sky as if it were a solidified blue, a painted vault - "compact and hard azure", as the Comtesse de Noailles again says.

Finally those who can truly participate in the aerial nature of celestial blue.

Of course, besides the great poets who instinctively follow these basic inspirations, it would be easy to discover, with such a common image, all the rhymers for whom "blue sky" is always a concept, never a primary image. Poetry about the blue sky suffers an enormous loss on this account. We can almost appreciate Musset's scorn when he called "blue" the stupid colour. In the works of artificial poets, at least, it is the colour of pretentious innocence from which come sapphires or flax blossoms. Such images are not, of course, banned: poetry is just as much the participation of the large in the small as it is the small in the large. But no one experiences this participation by juxtaposing a terrestrial and an aerial name. Only a great poet can discover naturally, without copying a literary example, blue sky in a wildflower.

But, leaving aside the facile polemics against false or worn-out images, I would like to reflect on a fact that has often struck me. As I have read many different kinds of poets, what has surprised me was how rare were the images in which the blue sky was truly aerial. This rarity is due, first of all, to the fact that aerial imagination is much rarer than the imagination of fire, earth, or water. But even more important is the fact that, even when the immense, distant blue infinity is felt by an aerial soul, it needs to be materialised in order to be incorporated into a literary image. The word blue designates, but it does not render. The problem of the image of the blue sky is completely different for the painter than for the poet. For a writer, if the blue sky is not merely a background, if it is a poetic object, only a metaphor can bring it to life. The poet's task is not to translate a colour, but to make us dream the colour. The blue sky is so simple that no one thinks he can oneirise it without materialising it. But this process of materialisation goes too far. The blue sky is made too hard, too glaring, too searing, too compact, too burning, and too brilliant. Often the sky looks at us too fixedly. We attribute too much substance and constancy to it because the soul does not become a part of the life of primary substance. We tonalise the sky's blue by making it "vibrate" like a sonorous crystal, whereas, for truly aerial souls, there is only the sound of a breath. Thus, with excessive intensity, the Comtesse de Noailles writes: "Today the blue is so strong that it blinds you if you look at it too long; it crackles, it whirls, it becomes filled with golden tendrils, with hot frost, with sharp and radiant diamonds, with arrows, with silver flies . . . "

The hallmark of what is truly aerial is to be found, in my opinion, in another direction. It is, in fact, based on the dynamics of dematerialisation. the substantial imagination of air is truly active only on a dynamics of dematerialisation. The blue of the sky is aerial when it is dreamed as a colour that pales a bit, like a pallor that seeks finesse, a finesse that we imagine as yielding beneath our fingers like a delicate fabric as we caress, in Paul Valéry's words:

The mysterious texture of the utmost height.

That is when the blue sky counsels us to be as calm and as light as it is itself:

The sky above the roof, is
So blue, so calm!

sighs Verlaine from the depths of his prison where he is still under the weight of unforgiven memories. This calm can be filled with melancholy. The dreamer feels that the blue sky will never be a possessed good. "What good are the symbols of a basic and comforting mountaineering since I shall not, this evening, reach the blue, that blue which is so aptly called sky blue?"

But it is by following the scale of dematerialisation of celestial blue that we can see aerial reverie at work. Then we will understand that it is an aerial Einfühlung: the fusion of a dreamer with as undifferentiated a universe as possible, on that is blue and gentle, infinite and formless, with a minimum of substance.'

From The Blue Sky by Gaston Bachelard

Death By Philosophy: Part Three

The Burning Question

Thich Quang Duc (June 11th, 1963)


'What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. All healthy men having thought of his own suicide, it can be seen, without further explanation, that there is a direct connection between this feeling and the longing for death.

The subject of this essay is precisely this relationship between the absurd and suicide, the exact degree to which suicide is a solution to the absurd. The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat, what he believes to be true must determine his action. Belief in the absurdity of existence must then dictate his conduct. It is legitimate to wonder, clearly and without false pathos, whether a conclusion of this importance requires forsaking as rapidly as possible an incomprehensible condition. I am speaking, of course, of men inclined to be in harmony with themselves.

Stated clearly, this problem may seem both simple and insoluble. But it is wrongly assumed that simple questions involve answers that are no less simple and that the evidence implies evidence. A priori and and reversing the terms of the problem, just as one does or does not kill oneself, it seems that there are but two philosophical solutions, either yes or no. This would be too easy. But allowance must be made for those who, without concluding, continue questioning. Here I am only slightly indulging in irony: this is the majority. I notice also that those who answer "no" act as if they thought "yes". As a matter of fact, if I accept the Nietzschean criterion, they think "yes" in one way or another. On the other hand, it often happens that those who commit suicide were assured of the meaning of life. These contradictions are constant. It may even be said that they have never been as on this point where, on the contrary, logic seems so desirable. It is a commonplace to compare philosophical theories and the behaviour of those who profess them . . . Schopenhauer is often cited, as a fit subject for laughter, because he praised suicide while seated at a well-set table. This is no subject for joking. That way of not taking the tragic seriously is not grievous, but it helps to judge a man.

In the face of such contradictions and obscurities must we conclude that there is no relationship between the opinion one has about life and the act one commits to leave it? Let us not exaggerate in this direction. In a man's attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world the body's judgement is as good as the mind's, and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body retains its irreparable lead. In short, the essence of that contradiction lies in what I shall call the act of eluding because it is both less and more than diversion in the Pascalian sense. Eluding is the invariable game. The typical act of eluding, the fatal evasion that constitutes the third theme of this essay, is hope. Hope for another life one must "deserve" or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it a meaning, and betray it . . . '

From Absurdity and Suicide by Albert Camus

Death By Philosophy: Part Two

The Fatal Game

Édouard Manet (1832-1883) - Suicide, 1877


'Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the contrary, we are concerned here . . . with the relationship between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps. Of an apartment building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and that the experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from the light . . .

But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in a melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. Let's not go too far in such analogies, however, but rather return to everyday words. It is merely confessing that that "is not worth the trouble". Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognised, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognised, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.'

From Absurdity and Suicide by Albert Camus

Death By Philosophy: Part One

A Deadly Thirst

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) - The Death of Socrates (1787)


'There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest - whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.

If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of great importance, abjured it with the greatest of ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right. That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. On the other hand, I see many people die because the judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it? On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living) there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In a subject at once so humble and so heavy with emotion, the learned and classical dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind deriving at one and the same time from common sense and understanding.'

From Absurdity and Suicide by Albert Camus

Six Images In Search Of An Exhibition II

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau (1844-1910): The Armchair Jungle

Surpris!, 1891




La Charmeuse de serpents, 1907




Combat de tigre et de buffle, 1908




Nègre attaqué par un jaguar, c. 1910




Forêt tropicale avec singes, 1910




Cheval attaqué par un jaguar, 1910

The Week in Review

Films:

Éloge d'lamour (In Praise of Love), 2001 - d. Jean-Luc Godard
Notre musique, 2004 - d. Jean-Luc Godard

La Jetée (The Pier), 1962 - d. Chris Marker
Sans soleil (Sunless), 1983 - d. Chris Marker

Double Indemnity, 1944 - d. Billy Wilder
The Lost Weekend, 1945 - d. Billy Wilder
Sunset Boulevard, 1950 - d. Billy Wilder
Some Like it Hot, 1959 - d. Billy Wilder

Television:

Smallville: Fourth Season

Books:

Meetings with Remarkable Trees - Thomas Pakenham
Mythic Woods: The World's Most Remarkable Forests - Thomas Pakenham
Remarkable Baobab - Thomas Pakenham
Remarkable Trees of the World - Thomas Pakenham

Music:

String Quartets - Ludwig van Beethoven
String Quartets - Belá Bartók
String Quartets - Elliot Carter
String Quartets - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
String Quartets - Arnold Schoenberg
String Quartets - Dmitri Shostakovich

Power Without Story

Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) - The End, c. 1990s


'I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.'

Joseph Campbell

Two Backs (February Special)

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) - The Bather of Valpiçon, 1808 (left) and Lucian Freud (b. 1922) - Naked Man, Back View, 1991-92 (right)

With talent, you do what you like. With genius, you do what you can.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

With me it's what Yeats called the fascination with what's difficult. I'm only trying to do what I can't do.

Lucian Freud

Unmapping The Heavens

Plates from Harmonica Macrocosmica, 1660 - Andreas Cellarius (c. 1595-1665)

"Ah what Bull, what Dog, what Bear,
What trophies of victory immense,
Once embarked on resourceless time
The soul imposes on formless space!

Charms, "Secret Ode", Paul Valery

Mathematical reverie has drawn diagrams of this immense tableau of a Cerulean night. These constellations are all false! They have grouped totally foreign stars in a dingle figure. Between real points, that is between stars that are isolated like diamond solitaires, the dream of constellations has drawn imaginary lines. Dream, that great master of abstract painting, sees all the animals of the zodiac done in a pointillism reduced to the minimum. Homo faber - a lazy maker of wheels - puts a chariot without wheels in the sky; the ploughman, dreaming of his harvests, erects a simple golden sheaf. Seeing such luxuriance produced by the powers of projective imagination, how odd this logical dictionary definition seems!

Constellations: the assembly of a certain number of fixed stars on which has been superimposed a figure, either man or animal or plant, in order to remember them better and to which has been given a name to distinguish them from other groupings of the same kind.

Naming stars to "help remember them", what a lack of appreciation for the speaking powers of dream! What ignorance of the principles of reverie's imaginary project! The zodiac is the Rorschach test for the child Humanity. Why have learned grimoires been written; why has the sky of night been replaced by the sky of books?

There are so many dreams in the sky which poetry, encumbered by old words, has not been able to name. To how many writers of the night would we like to say: "Come back to the principle of reverie; the starry sky has been given to us, not to think about, but to dream"? It is an invitation to constellating dreams, to dream about the easy and ephemeral construction of the thousand forms that our desires take. The mission of "fixed" stars is to fix some dreams, to communicate some, and to rediscover some. They prove to a dreamer the universality of oneirism. This ram, young shepherd, that your hand caresses as you dream - there he is up there, turning gently in the immense night! Then there will be two of you to sketch him, to recognise him, and to talk to him as a friend. You will find that the two of you have the same vision, the same desire, and that even in the night, in the nocturnal solitude, you will see the same ghosts pass by. How much greater life becomes when dreams are bound together!

We will understand to what an extent the imagination of the sky is falsified and impeded by book knowledge if we reread some passages in which writers have blithely lost track of dreams in exchange for "knowledge" that is as poor as it is lifeless. At that stage we will perhaps be justified in suggesting a kind of counter-psychoanalysis that might destroy the conscious mind in favour of an established oneirism, which would be the only way to restore a refreshing continuity to reverie. "Knowing" the constellations, naming them as in books, projecting a classroom map of the sky on the sky itself, is brutalising our imaginary powers and depriving us of the benefits of the stars' oneirism. If we were not burdened with the words that "help our memory"- the memory of words, the great sloth that refuses to dream - every new night would be a new reverie for us, a renewed cosmogony. An ill-formed consciousness or one that is too formal is as harmful for the dreaming soul as an amorphous or warped unconscious. The psyche must find a balance between the imagined and the known. This equilibrium cannot be satisfied by vain substitutions in which, suddenly, the imagining powers find themselves bound up with arbitrary schemata. The imagination is a primary power. It must be born in the solitude of the imagining being. As always, to understand contemplation, we must begin with the Schopenhauerean formula: the starry night is my constellation. It makes me aware of my power to form constellations. It puts in my hands, as the poet says, these weightless chalices and these flowers that grow in space."

From The Constellations by Gaston Bachelard

The Bleeding

André Kertész (1894-1965) - Distortions, c. 1933


'Can it be that in the West, in our time, the female body has been constructed not only as a lack or absence but with more complexity, as a leaking, uncontrollable, seeping liquid; as formless flow; as viscosity, entrapping, secreting; as lacking not so much or simply the phallus but self-containment - not a cracked or porous vessel, like a leaking ship, but a formlessness that engulfs all form, a disorder that threatens all order? I am not suggesting that this is how women are, that this is their ontological status. Instead, my hypothesis is that women's corporeality is inscribed as a mode of seepage. My claim is not that women have been somehow desolidified but the more limited one which sees that women, insofar as they are human, have the same degree of solidity, occupy the same genus, as men, yet insofar as they are women, they are represented and live themselves as seepage, liquidity. The metaphorics of uncontrollability, the ambivalence between desperate, fatal attraction and strong revulsion, deep-seated fear of absorption, the association of femininity with contagion and disorder, and the undecidability of the limits of the female body (particularly, but not only, with the onset of puberty and in the case of pregnancy), its powers of cynical seduction and allure are all common themes in literary and cultural representations of women. But these may well be a function of the projection outward of their corporealities, the liquidities that men seem to want to cast out of their own representations.'

From Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism by Elizabeth Grosz.

Illuminating Manuscripts

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) - Carnet de notes (Notebooks), 1908-18



"Our passions shape our books; repose writes them in the intervals."

Marcel Proust

"I try to leave out the parts that people skip."

Elmore Leonard

"Easy reading is damn hard writing."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."

Mark Twain

"True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance."

Alexander Pope

"The two most engaging powers of an author are to be able to make new things familiar and familiar things new."

Samuel Johnson

"The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes."

André Gide

"Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted."

Jules Renard

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Thomas Mann

"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite."

C. S. Lewis

Render Unto Ceasar

Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) - I shop therefore I am, 1990

"I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position."

Mark Twain

"There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either."

Robert Graves

"I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money."

Pablo Picasso

"There are people who have money and people who are rich."

Coco Chanel

"Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons."

Woody Allen

"It's a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money."

Albert Camus

"When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion."

Voltaire

"When I was young I thought money was the most important thing in life: now that I'm old I know it is."

Oscar Wilde

"I'm living so far beyond my income that we may be said to be living apart."

e. e. cummings

"If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to."

Dorothy Parker