Don’t underestimate this idea of mine, which calls to mind that it would not be too much of an effort to pause sometimes, to look into…stains on walls, the ashes from the fire, the clouds, the mud, or other similar places…[there] you will find fantastic inventions that awaken genius: new inventions, such as compositions of battles, animals, men as well as diverse compositions of landscapes and monstrous things as devils and the like. These will do you well because they will awaken genius with[in] this jumble of things.
Nietzsche once opined that “No artist tolerates reality.”
No one should! In both the ordinary and extraordinary moments of life, our thought does not manifest its freedom to its fullest extent. [Our minds are] unceasingly threatened [assualted by exploitative forces projecting unnecessary—unnatural!—anxieties, fears, wants etc.] on to us. It coincides with a thousand and one things which restrict it [;a thousand and one things that reduce our existence to be nothing more than that of a self-centered, hungry ghost]. This [learned pattern of seeing] is almost permanent.
But yet! But yet, a rand[umb] word, an errant, accidental line, a blur, a smudge are all it takes to open the flood gates, are all it takes for the ‘possibility to present itself, [which allows] the [imagination to] observe NOT external bodies, but itself.
Revelation is immediately bestowed upon those who wish to receive it as it is.
A chance [meeting] of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table’ will link ‘two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them.”
This beauty, this wonder of the juxtaposition is lost on those who find no higher meaning than the mundane, who see no marvel in anything that isn’t easily explained or categorized, those who see no value in anything that isn’t merchandise.
The Christ of the peasants has never been the Christ of the Papacy.
Simone Weil once said “creative attention, is analogous to genius.”
Let’s not to wax so haughty—though in a way, sort of agree while bearing in mind the following encouraging caveat: This could all lead to incoherence, the risk is considerable…[(enjoy the risk!)] Yet, [to the willing, the receptive] the work remains coherent. [This] cannot [be] explain[ed]…any more than…why a swarm of bees always has a kind of symmetry.”
This could all lead to incoherence…It may well just, and if it does so be it! If it doesn’t and that little spark of imagination, that side trip on a wave of spatial delirium ignites a blaze that consumes your thoughts for weeks even better! If the odd or the random catches our eye we should treat it like it is the greatest moment of our life (or at the very least the best part of our day). Do not dismiss the wandering thought, the fleeting reverie—everywhere there are surprises and sensations. Who cares if your boss is talking to you? Explore that absurdly random tangential thought to the very end. Who cares if you miss your bus? Figure out what that paint splatter on the wall is trying to tell you. What you thought you heard is oftentimes more important than what was actually said.
Some may hear a malaprop others hear a koan: The complete teaching instantaneous.
There are those who see signs and those who see symbols.
Lay open the occult by closing away the revealed.
to be continued…
the pinched: Leonardo Da Vinci, Mina Loy, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Daniel Higgs, John Berger, Simone Weil