Category Archives: commonplace

the value of black coffee

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“The Viennese logicians worked out a system wherein everything is, as far as I understood it, a tautology, that is, a repetition of premises. In mathematics, it goes from a very simple theorem to a complicated one, but it’s all in the first theorem. So, metaphysics: tautology: religion: tautology; everything is tautology, except black coffee because the senses are in control! The eyes see the black coffee, the senses are in control, it’s a truth; but the rest is always tautology.”

(Marcel Duchamp, interview with Pierre Cabanne, trans. Ron Padgett)

janouch on kafka on work

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“On my next visit to Kafka I inquired:

‘Do you still go to the carpenter in Karolinenthal?’

‘You know about that?’

‘My father told me.’

‘No, I have not been for a long time. My health does not permit it any more. His Majesty the Body.’

‘I can quite understand. Working in a dusty workshop is not very pleasant.’

‘There you are wrong. I love to work in workshops. The smell of wood shavings, the humming of saws, the hammer-blows, all enchanted me. The afternoon went so quickly I was always astonished when the evening came.’

‘You must certainly have been tired.’

‘Tired by happy. There is nothing more beautiful than some straightforward, concrete, generally useful trade. Apart from carpentry, I have also worked at farming and gardening. It was all much better and worth more than forced labour in the office. There one appears to be something superior, better; but it is only appearance. In reality one is lonelier and therefore unhappier. That is all. Intellectual labour tears a man out of human society. A craft, on the other hand, leads him towards men. What a pity I can no longer work in the workshop or in the garden.’

‘But you would not wish to give up your post?’

‘Why not? I have dreamed of going as a farm labourer or an artisan to Palestine.’

‘You would leave everything behind?’

‘Everything, if I could make a life that had meaning, stability, and beauty. Do you know the writer Paul Adler?’

‘I only know his book The Magic Flute.’

‘He is in Prague. With his wife and the children.’

‘What is his profession?’

‘He has none. He has no profession, only a vocation. He travels with his wife and the children from one friend to another. A free man, and a poet. In his presence I always have pangs of conscience, because I allow my life to be frittered away in an office.’

(Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees, pp. 15–16)

gass on elkin on work

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“Vocation: that is no trade-school word for him. What is your name? Where are you from? What do you do? Among those who survey the habits of Americans, there are many who find these questions, which are likely to be among the first beckoning blanks we fill in on forms, and the first we put to strangers, indicative of our indifference to the essential self. Should men and women, after all, be defined in any important way by their work? The answer is, of course, yes; otherwise, the activities that largely support our lives and consume our time would be unfriendly, foreign, and irrelevant to us. Our occupation should not be something we visit like the seashore in summer or a prisoner in prison, despite the fact that the work may be unpleasant and dangerous and hard, like that in a mill or a foundry or a mine. Even if it is like speaking a foreign language we haven’t mastered, that incapacity itself is totally defining.”

(William Gass, “Open on the Sabbath”, in A Temple of Texts: essays, pp. 246–247)

the trance of travel

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“And the unity of all the views of a train journey is not established on the basis of the circle itself (whose parts remain sealed), nor on the basis of the thing contemplated, but on a transversal that we never cease to follow, moving ‘from one window to the next.’ For travel does not connect places, but affirms only their difference.”

(Gilles Deleuze, Proust & Signs, trans. Richard Howard, pp. 126–127)

(on finishing proust)

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“Disappointment is a fundamental moment of the search or of apprenticeship: in each realm of signs, we are disappointed when the object does not give us the secret we were expecting. And disappointment itself is pluralist, variable according to each line. There are few things that are not disappointing the first time they are seen. For the first time is the time of inexperience; we are not yet capable of distinguishing the sign from the object, and the object interposes and confuses the signs. Disappointment on first hearing Vinteuil, on first meeting Bergotte, on first seeing the Balbec church. And it is not enough to return to things a second time, for voluntary memory and this very return offer disadvantages analogous to those that kept us the first time from freely enjoying the signs (the second stay at Balbec is no less disappointing than the first, from other aspects).

(Gilles Deleuze, Proust & Signs, trans. Richard Howard, p. 34)

how to proceed in the arts

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“13. Youth wants to burn the museums. We are in them – now what? Better destroy the odors of the zoo. How can we paint the elephants and hippopotamuses? Embrace the Bourgeoisie. One hundred years of grinding out teeth have made us tired. How are we to fill the large empty canvas and the end of the large empty loft? You do have a loft, don’t you, man?”

(Frank O’Hara & Larry Rivers, “How to Proceed in the Arts” (formatted dreadfully, that link), written 1952, published 1961)

mnemotechne

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“And sometimes an hour of sleep is a paralytic stroke after which we must regain the use of our limbs, learn to speak again. Will is not enough. We have slept too long, we have ceased to exist. Waking is barely experienced, without consciousness, as a pipe might experience the turning-off of a tap. This is followed by a life more inanimate than that of a jelly-fish; one might think one had been dredged up from the depths of the sea, or released from prison, if one could think anything at all. But then the goddess Mnemotechne leans out from heaven and offers us, in the form of ‘habit of calling for coffee’, the hope of resurrection. But the sudden gift of memory is not always so simple. One often has at hand, in those first minutes when one is letting oneself slip towards awakening, a range of different realities from which one thinks one can choose, like taking a card from a pack. It is Friday morning and one is coming back from a walk, or else it is tea-time at the seaside. The idea of sleep and that one is in bed in one’s nightshirt is often the last to occur. Resurrection does not come immediately, you think you have rung, you haven’t, you turn over insane ideas in your mind. Movement alone restores thought, and when you have actually pressed the electric bell-push, you can say, slowly but clearly, ‘It must be ten o’clock. Bring me my coffee please, Françoise.’ ”

(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 109)

taste

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“But ugly, expensive things can be useful: they can impress people who do not understand us, do not share our taste, but with whom we might be in love, more than a difficult object which does not yield up its beauty at once. Now it is precisely and only those people who do not understand us whom it may be useful to impress with possessions, since our intelligence will be enough to win the regard of superior beings.”

(Proust, The Prisoner, trans. Carol Clark, p. 159)

working, two theories

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I’ve never worked for a living. I consider working for a living slightly imbecilic from an economic point of view. I hope that some day we’ll be able to live without being obliged to work.

(Marcel Duchamp, interview with Pierre Cabanne, 1966)

In answer to your question – Fluxus way of life is 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. doing socially constructive and useful work – earning your own living, 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. spending time on propagandizing your way of life among other idle artists & art collectors and fighting them, 12 p.m. to 8 a.m. sleeping (8 hours is enough).

(George Maciunas, letter to Tomas Schmit, January 1964)

nero/frogs

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“From which I later concluded that if there is one thing as noisy as suffering it is pleasure, especially when there is added to it – failing the fear of having children, which could not be the case here, in spite of the far-from-convincing example in the Golden Legend – an immediate concern with cleanliness.”

(Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, trans. John Sturrock, p.11)

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“Then said he, ‘Make me with child, and after to be delivered, that I may know what pain my mother suffered.’ Which by craft they gave to him a young frog to drink, and grew in his belly, and then he said, ‘But unless ye make me to be delivered I shall slay you all.’ And so they gave him such a drink that he had a vomit and cast out the frog, and bare him on hand that because that he abode not his time it was misshapen, which yet he made to be kept.

Then for his pleasure he set Rome afire, which burned seven days and seven nights, and was in a high tower and enjoyed him to see so great a flame of fire, and sang merrily.

He slew the senators of Rome to see what sorrow and lamentation their wives would make.

He wedded a man for his wife. He fished with nets of gold thread, and the garment that he had worn one day he would never wear it nor see it after.

Then the Romans seeing his woodness, assailed him and pursued him unto without the city, and when he saw he might not escape them, he took a stake and sharped it with his teeth, and therewith stuck himself through the body and so slew himself. In another place it is read that he was devoured of wolves. Then the Romans returned and found the frog, and threw it out of the city and there burnt it.”

(The Golden Legend, the life of Saint Peter)

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“Many writers allude to it in Naaman’s case; that Constantine the head of the whole earth had leprosy no one mentioned; at least none of his fellow citizens, but perhaps some foreigner or other, to be given no more credence than that other fellow who wrote about wasps building their nest in Vespasian’s nostrils, and about the frog taken from Nero at birth, whence they say the place was called the Lateran, for the frog (rana) is concealed (latere) there in its grave. Such stuff neither the wasps themselves, nor frogs, if they could speak, would have uttered! [I pass over the statement that boys’ blood is a remedy for leprosy, which medical science does not admit;] unless they attribute this to the Capitoline gods, as though they were wont to talk and had ordered this to be done!”

Lorenzo Valla, Discourse on the Forgery of the Alleged Donation of Constantine, trans. Christopher B. Coleman, pp.153–155)

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pianta di roma di g. b. falda

(G. B. Falda, Pianta di Roma (detail), 1676)

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google earth view of san giovanni in laterano

(Google Earth of the same)