The Perfect Story.
The perfect story is a seduction. That's not seduction as an attribute of the perfect story, but almost the opposite. Seduced by the notion of the perfect story. What is this that happens when something strikes in such a way as to seem perfect, particularly a work of art? A story, a painting, a movie. What is this at once maximizing and minimizing, this economy of the stroke or gesture that seems to encompass the most or hit the mark? And at once it works backwards and forwards, a teleological trick, like the aporia of discovery and invention. Often the very sense that something is perfect in that it hit on something already there, some archetypal, subterranean connecting, at the same time diminishes so much of the occurrence of the story, its operation, what it does.
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And what about the enormous and obvious problem, right there in front of the nose -- any nose, his nose, the nose of everything -- of this: god's nature. Right out of the gate, but what has thus been ignored like the paper all the rest is printed on, is the very point of god being subjected to a greater frame. What god -- even more precisely God, the very point of the capitalization (all statements of supremacey and exclusion always protesting too much, presupposing what they renounce or deny) -- amounts to is thus this bid of absolute, of the exceeding of all means of comparison, of a principle above all condition. But this is, even worse than tautology, at once the deprivation of any means even for superlative, certainly for any framework of principle. The problem with "intelligent design" is that intelligence itself is derivative.
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Organic whismy art. Alien art or future. Where does art or innovation come from? Do you pull it out of thin air?
"Star Trek" is pure imagination, a kind reservoir of the most basic imaginary stipulation, the playground of pure fiction, of unfettered imagination at least as far as the purest sort of wish fulfillment, what gives rise to magic, and at the same time the lack of imagination. It's Imagination 101. This is its generality and its specificity, and how those two flicker. The fact that it's abstracting -- and that Formica future of the orginal series is not entirely fortuitous, not only a function of TV theatrical limitations of the 60s, just as "The Next Generation" series reiterated the penchant ("pon-shan," as Picard would pronounce it) for this clean and sparse look -- makes it generic, what would be ennobled as archetype, but also requires leaving alone all sorts of refinements.
It's also the specificity of those involved, which is also a large swath, not just Gene Roddenberry, the creator, and then all the people who made the 60s series, then the 80s, and so on, but all the people it appeals to, the fandom, of course, but beyond that to what Trekkie there is in any of us. Describing this ethos, then, is not just to single out the type who is a Trekkie, though there is definitely a scale or degree of the extent to which anyone will accept less of the qualifications of this desire for the unqualified -- the cost of playing tennis without a net -- the equivalent in terms of tolerance in style and convention, for suspending disbelief. For "Star Trek," this may be the suspension of scoffing or mocking.
"Star Trek: The Next Generation" makes it more conspicuous that this is magic. Even the "science" part of science fiction is really about magic, simply imagining ability. This falls back to the obsession of power, of being able to.
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"It figures." Like "it rains," or Lacan's "it thinks." This gives a whole expression like that for figure, as figuration, makes impersonal and indefinite even the way something makes sense.
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Legacy disposition / disposition legacy. (Which way?) Looking out a high hotel window, I notice a building that is now a different restaurant than when I went to it years before. The thought of the distance, even emotional, that is nonetheless this marking. A parallax effect -- muteness or bluntness of the "present," a kind of dumb fact effect, considering also the way the past is ignored, unknown. This bears in as my preponderence, too. But I still have the memory, only reduced, held off in this state. I'm not just now, but this strange bridge, not just holding up the present as a separable moment to compare to another, not even as if this present could be just as much subsumed by the past as vice versa, but as the specter whose fate is not so much to be seen, as to see from this ghostly vantage outside existence. I hold up the present me as another now become as mute as the past, seeing also the oblivion of any of this, my sentiment, this marking for me, to all those passers by down there.
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Morality -- mixing. This is there for writing, for the ordering of things. A moral scheme to collect the world, and all its marks on us.
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Pave, paved. (Cf. etymology.) The idea of memory-forgetting, legacy and oblivion, being a road, a highway, where each person is mashed in, ground, mulched, takes place, is there in the river of posterity, but as matter. Perhaps the singular contribution will come up, perhaps not so, but there, unconscious. This is not the unity or fusion of a mystical kind, nor even necessarily a Walt Whitman kind. Also, trodden path, nature and nurture. Niche.
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Catch-22: the idea that there is some absolute sanity, some perfect clear-headedness, clear thinking, way to see or comprehend things without any affectation (what amounts to the notion, myth, of the mastery of consciousness), is neurosis. The dream of this utter rationality is the compliment of the neurosis (before we even get to how this works proportionately for psychosis, paranoid-schizo, mad logic). It's as if we could say it's already a little crazy to believe there is an absolutely not crazy. Conversely, then, one has to accept being always a little crazy in order to be effectively sane. And really, the one thing one doesn't want to be is absolutely sane. You just have to find the right measure of crazy, how to negotiate it with the others.
The other catch: this is really catch no. 1.
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For the time being. Time and disposition. The problem we have managing time is that it is both open and finite. As if the openness of quantity itself, pure or potential volume, were cut up, meted out. It's the limit itself that uses us, that makes us the instrument even of ourselves. We have eternity, but only for the moment.
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When is the time[ ] for us. I never get to you. I miss you. A past that lays claim to the future, because it's really the other way around. Refraction, deflecting. This time as if it could be gathered and stopped up, returned again as substance. The you that is my destination away from me. The project of you, the better unfinished, scattered, failed. Open to the aim the drive. Bunching all up, the pressure against a space, not empty, but what -- as if for -- always as if for, but this is how it works, by not being appropriate to anything -- the accretion, swelling, significant as this movement, then spending, wasting in its issue. Like these words.
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The problem of representation and it's other is not just determining hierarchy, subordination, but even to do that, distinction. There are terms which demonstrate the difficulty: for example, as if just one among others (and you can see all the levels of irony or humor, the registers, that right off can't be ruled out, say for the sake of rigor, or literalness or -- what? -- mathematics?) "everything." Does everything include "everything," or does "everything" include everything? Does the term include the reality or vice versa? As Levinas showed of "infinity," there are problems here in that the very concept itself includes the sense of its own excess. But this would actually resolve everything -- "everything"? -- to the same conundrum, by virtue of the very literality, whether material or ideal, which would want to discount this "problem." This is the matter.
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Let us honor that what is also unsettling about the incomprehensible breadth and number of the stars, what makes us also feel so infinitesimal, is the breadth and number of us, and how each one of us is also a cosmos, how each one of us holds the stars. This is also what exceeds grasp, comprehension.
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Beneath every foundation is a fault.
Foundation is over a fault.
The foundation is always this resumption of a fault, this management of it, this attempt to resolve it.
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The difference of time with depression and joy, or exuberance. With the latter, one burns time up. With depression, time suffocates, you're drowning in time. You want to get out of it. It's as if all time itself, thus existence, is a confinement, a jail. You are either the consumer or the consumed. Of course the way out of this: that there is always some "joy" in depression, some sense of play, at the least curiosity, in what you're going through.
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Exhilaration -- is there a better way to show the emphasis of the overlap, the inextricable tangle or non-distinction of representation and represented, than this? Is this the exemplar for how evocation is experience itself? Think of film or video (certainly in video games, all the drive simulators, "GTA"), the representation of moving down a highway. Does this not "induce" the same sense of the exhilaration? Is it not also this exhilaration? Think of Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" as another in this relay. (Which is why there's always driving music, the driving compilation, and then refinement of that, such as one for night driving.)
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Hark the herald angels sing, and on "king," a gimcrack cosmos. Errant christliness, out of season, always proportion, the insignificant and the grandiose, the token paradox. I cry for all of us I's left crying, left with our schemes, christs like each bird picking about for itself in the flock of imitations. Pecking for order. Click. As if we could hit save the world on the computer, and have it fixed, cliche'. Christ as Schopenhauer. Christ as Narcissus. The pathos cuts both ways, is made up of so many ways and cuts, an octopus of Escher hands catching each other up. We are the wretched and the overbearing saviors, in need of saving ourselves from this need to be saved. An earthworm crawling up a wall. But even the simple touch is the matter of reaching. On the waves of solitude when we come in close only to find how it goes through us, all the different currents of the same longing set us apart again, adrift. A vessel even in its solidity, its fullness empty, its emptiness only to be filled.
Nothing can stop us, nothing can stop this up, for we are appetites. Even writing this, I want to wipe it away.
But it's the property of thinking -- thinking of thinking as property. Keeping house. As if it were a matter of gatekeeping rather than the exchange itself.
The anti-christ: has it not been thought, is it not really that what is "antichrist" would be, not some equally grandiose or universal figure, but the oblivion that is the obverse of significance, even a condition of it, the infinitesimal that, dependent on this web of relation even to its overbearing extent, is also singular, liable to desertion, and that even, if not especially, this static eternity of good conscience leaves alone? Wouldn't this be the condition of Christ? (Would that make Christ the anti? An antidote.)
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The moment. The same moment. Another moment. But what does a moment name? What does it indicate? The same moment, another moment of the same? [See Derrida's "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am".] The assemblage of the word, the name. Another of those things, like death (with Blanchot) that does not have a referent strictly speaking, but shows how this operates for every "thing."
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There is no thing, not even nothing.
[Variation.]
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Truth and disposition.
[Cf. disposition and inclination. See also "position," for how disposition convolutes this. Latin poser, to put, place. Latin disponere, to arrange. To put apart. French disposer is alteration of disponere.]
A preacher says that you're not necessarily going to be liked for telling the gospel. All the directions this breaks.
× Does this mean that one will like him/herself? Does credit always accrue to the self for this, the value above all esteem?
× Thus also, is this always the good news? Is the gospel always this same story, or is this injunction for the truth not itself open to a similar division, to that which would come and displace, divide, supplment, overturn it? Does one resist all news that is not this good news? Not this good news, but this good news?
× The monotony of this message, this scheme: a universal progression forever transfixed. Another kind of eternal return. The disposition towards a father projected large for everything, a fixation of this state to never grow out of it.
× Truth and disposition: is it the truth of disposition, or the disposition of truth.
× Would there be an effectively affectless -- but what? -- what word doesn't immediately slip into the matter? -- stance? state? position? Would there be an utter objective "view"? A degree zero of inclination? Would the most effectively affectless disposition towards the truth not be -- ignorance? Not knowing what it means? Opacity, hearing a foreign language, seeing a formula without knowing what the symbols mean? Once again, can we not see how this sort of comprehension works, as soon as we see it is a claim of comprehension, and that this will always be the limit, the qualification of comprehension, of seeing?
En totalisant l'être, le discours comme Discours apporte ainsi un démenti à la prétention même de la totalisation.
[In totalizing being, speech as Speech thus gives the lie to the pretention itself of totalization.]
-- Levinas
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The litter of my heart.
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Addicted to gestures of grandeur that only inflate our banality.
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The aporia of the date. Its own condition is what renders it useless.
As the index of time, ostensibly the unique marker of an event, it becomes as abstract and ineffectual outside of the axes of relation it supposedly determines: the other information that marks it, the content, so to speak, of that date, and the dating order of numbers for days, months, years.
It's analogous to the matter of identifying a person in journalism, expressed by the conundrum, when there is a lack of other information about a person being reported for a particular event, but who is this John Doe this happened to? Well, he's the person this happened to.
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You're not conscious mastery born in a vacuum where it picked out the fabric it would be made of.
Not even your self-sufficiency is sufficient, or self-sufficient.
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The sensory flow -- the flow of sense. The pure being of now -- an abstraction, a subtraction, at once the addition of another sense. Eternity the form of desire. A tableau in the head that one has a bearing towards, that image, the arc of which is that feeling of allure from a perception removed. Like a heaven, a sublimely open -- barren? -- pregnant? -- still and receptive room, any moment of light -- twilight, noonday, night -- is fixed only in the sense of this bearing, inclination, coming from and leaning towards.
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Those who bully conversation don't trust what they have to say.
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