Showing posts tagged love
Corteo d’amore [Love procession], a tempera fragment that Everett Fahy attributes to Marco del Buono and Apollonio di Giovanni, c. 1440s. The piece is thought to be the front from a wooden cassone, or bridal chest. The figures are depicted with their hands in shackles for reasons unknown. Giorgio Agamben writes (in “The Idea of the Enigma”): One always and only fears one thing: the truth. Or more precisely, the representation we make of it. Fear is not, in fact, simply a lack of courage in the face of a truth that we more or less knowingly represent to ourselves: even prior to this is the fear already implicit in the fact that we have made to ourselves an image of the truth, that in any case we have had a name and a presentiment of it. It is this archaic fear, contained in every representation, that finds in the enigma both its expression and its antidote. View high resolution

Corteo d’amore [Love procession], a tempera fragment that Everett Fahy attributes to Marco del Buono and Apollonio di Giovanni, c. 1440s. The piece is thought to be the front from a wooden cassone, or bridal chest. The figures are depicted with their hands in shackles for reasons unknown.

Giorgio Agamben writes (in “The Idea of the Enigma”):

One always and only fears one thing: the truth. Or more precisely, the representation we make of it. Fear is not, in fact, simply a lack of courage in the face of a truth that we more or less knowingly represent to ourselves: even prior to this is the fear already implicit in the fact that we have made to ourselves an image of the truth, that in any case we have had a name and a presentiment of it. It is this archaic fear, contained in every representation, that finds in the enigma both its expression and its antidote.

Image from El Lissitzky’s Suprematist story — of two squares [Suprematicheskii Skaz], 1922. Alain Badiou writes: Even though Molloy, Malone and the Unnamable seek out and encounter other supposed subjects, they move towards their own solitude. The tone of The Unnamable could even be described as starkly solipsistic. Without doubt it is in Beckett’s theatre, with the couples of Vladimir and Estragon (Waiting for Godot) or Hamm and Clov (Endgame), that something which will not cease to be at the heart of Beckett’s fictions comes to the fore: the couple, the Two, the voice of the other, and lastly, love. Both to defer and to beckon death through distance, Malone recounts all the elements that this love contains: “…what flutterings, alarms and bashful fumblings, of which only this, that they gave Macmann some insight into the meaning of the expression, Two is company…” View high resolution

Image from El Lissitzky’s Suprematist story — of two squares [Suprematicheskii Skaz], 1922.

Alain Badiou writes:

Even though Molloy, Malone and the Unnamable seek out and encounter other supposed subjects, they move towards their own solitude. The tone of The Unnamable could even be described as starkly solipsistic. Without doubt it is in Beckett’s theatre, with the couples of Vladimir and Estragon (Waiting for Godot) or Hamm and Clov (Endgame), that something which will not cease to be at the heart of Beckett’s fictions comes to the fore: the couple, the Two, the voice of the other, and lastly, love. Both to defer and to beckon death through distance, Malone recounts all the elements that this love contains: “…what flutterings, alarms and bashful fumblings, of which only this, that they gave Macmann some insight into the meaning of the expression, Two is company…”

Abbas Kiarostami’s Where is My Romeo?, a short film produced for To Each His Own Cinema (2007).

Giorgio Agamben writes (in his essay “The Passion of Facticity”):

Just as in Ereignis, the appropriation of the improper signifies the end both of the history of Being and of the history of epochal sendings, so in love the dialectic of the proper and the improper reaches its end. This, finally, is why there is no sense in distinguishing between authentic love and inauthentic love, heavenly love and pandemios love, the love of God and self-love. Lovers bear the impropriety of love to the end so that the proper can emerge as the appropriation of the free incapacity that passion brings to its end. Lovers go to the limit of the improper in a mad and demonic promiscuity; they dwell in carnality and amorous discourse, in forever new regions of impropriety and facticity, to the point of revealing their essential abyss. Human beings do not originally dwell in the proper; yet they do not (according to the facile suggestion of contemporary nihilism) inhabit the improper and the ungrounded. Rather, human beings are those who fall properly in love with the improper, who — unique among living beings — are capable of their own incapacity.

Clip from Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2007).

Giorgio Agamben writes (in his essay “The Face”):

My face is my outside: a point of indifference with respect to all of my properties, with respect to what is properly one’s own and what is common, to what is internal and what is external. In the face, I exist with all of my properties (my being brown, tall, pale, proud, emotional …) ; but this happens without any of these properties essentially identifying me or belonging to me. The face is the threshold of de-propriation and of de-identification of all manners and of all qualities — a threshold in which only the latter become purely communicable. And only where I find a face do I encounter an exteriority and does an outside happen to me.

Be only your face. Go to the threshold. Do not remain the subjects of your properties or faculties, do not stay beneath them: rather, go with them, in them, beyond them.

Anatomical Man. Image from Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a Book of Hours commissioned by John, Duke of Berry, around 1410. Jeremy Prynne writes: The curvature of the universe is love. I mean, you can know that; I mean, you can feel it; I mean, it’s just unmistakable. Some people can get it just like that from the night sky; for other people, I suppose, it takes a little longer. There are great moments in Blake’s poems where he knows that too. There is that extraordinary poem where he decides to re-work Milton and to arrange for the demonic possession of himself by Milton. And there are extraordinary congestions of personality which result from that unlikely genetic interchange. But there are moments in that poem of Blake’s, Milton, which are the absolute presence of love. Because, well, I mean, you take an orthodox Puritan theology, and you ride that out until it burns away, and then you ride beyond that on the visionary presence of the ancient prophets, and you reach it. It is a two-stage rocket. And you get there. And where you get is the curvature of the universe. And that’s what Blake in that early poem, not being able to reach in one thrust, had two shots at, and comes right out to it, and oh the flowers, and oh the astral bodies. There is a most fantastic spread across the rim of the horizon. And the condition of affection, oh it’s unmistakable. If I had all my books around me, I would read it to you. And if I had all my books round me, I wouldn’t be here. So isn’t that great. Finally, what this takes us right round to is that it is simple. Simple in a technical sense: that’s to say, the universe is simple. Any part of the universe is complex. In fact, there are only two things in the universe which are simple, and one of them is the universe taken as a whole; and the other is its language, because its language is its capacity for love. And the capacity of the universe for love is that for which man was born. Oh yes, I am an absolute predestinarian in that sense. I believe utterly in that it is man’s destiny to bring love to the universe, I mean, to fulfill the universe’s potential for love. It’s great, you know; in France — they keep things alive longer there — the word for magnet is “aimant” (lover). I just flipped when I heard that. Always, I mean, in all the ancient cosmologies, the planets were moved by love, or carried round. The First Mover was certainly love. It’s a very curious thing that all our notions of how the sequences and linkages of one to one, and part to whole, are determined, derive from the celestial mechanics for a particular era — that’s to say, not from the early celestial mechanics, and not from all sorts of alternatives, but from that particular Newtonian mathematics. It would be very interesting to think what kind of a system we would have if we derived our sense of what constituted a cause and what constituted a direction from patterns other than the mechanics of celestial motion considered in the eighteenth century sense. Like, for example, the passage of animals. There’s something very close to the condition of the celestial universe up to about 1590 in the movement of animals. That’s what you have to try and see. If we get ourselves to that condition of the universe, any animal will do, like birds, any of the omen animals, of course, we have some literary sense of, but like fish in the pond, those planetary movements. I mean, think of the extraordinary unlikelihood of what such a thing like Stonehenge or Avebury were built to predict. They never thought they would work. Oh, never. I mean, they were chance shots. Like, sooner or later it must come round again, and it must come round again because it was wanted: and if it was wanted, it would come. There is this immense controversy now about how they knew over those immense periods of time that there were cyclic repetitions in the movement of heavenly bodies. They didn’t know. They just wanted it. That’s how it happened (J.H. Prynne, extract from the lectures on Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, given at Simon Fraser University, July 27, 1971; available here: http://charlesolson.ca/Files/Prynnelecture1.htm). View high resolution

Anatomical Man. Image from Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, a Book of Hours commissioned by John, Duke of Berry, around 1410.

Jeremy Prynne writes:

The curvature of the universe is love. I mean, you can know that; I mean, you can feel it; I mean, it’s just unmistakable. Some people can get it just like that from the night sky; for other people, I suppose, it takes a little longer. There are great moments in Blake’s poems where he knows that too. There is that extraordinary poem where he decides to re-work Milton and to arrange for the demonic possession of himself by Milton. And there are extraordinary congestions of personality which result from that unlikely genetic interchange. But there are moments in that poem of Blake’s, Milton, which are the absolute presence of love. Because, well, I mean, you take an orthodox Puritan theology, and you ride that out until it burns away, and then you ride beyond that on the visionary presence of the ancient prophets, and you reach it. It is a two-stage rocket. And you get there. And where you get is the curvature of the universe. And that’s what Blake in that early poem, not being able to reach in one thrust, had two shots at, and comes right out to it, and oh the flowers, and oh the astral bodies. There is a most fantastic spread across the rim of the horizon. And the condition of affection, oh it’s unmistakable. If I had all my books around me, I would read it to you. And if I had all my books round me, I wouldn’t be here. So isn’t that great.

Finally, what this takes us right round to is that it is simple. Simple in a technical sense: that’s to say, the universe is simple. Any part of the universe is complex. In fact, there are only two things in the universe which are simple, and one of them is the universe taken as a whole; and the other is its language, because its language is its capacity for love. And the capacity of the universe for love is that for which man was born. Oh yes, I am an absolute predestinarian in that sense. I believe utterly in that it is man’s destiny to bring love to the universe, I mean, to fulfill the universe’s potential for love. It’s great, you know; in France — they keep things alive longer there — the word for magnet is “aimant” (lover). I just flipped when I heard that. Always, I mean, in all the ancient cosmologies, the planets were moved by love, or carried round. The First Mover was certainly love. It’s a very curious thing that all our notions of how the sequences and linkages of one to one, and part to whole, are determined, derive from the celestial mechanics for a particular era — that’s to say, not from the early celestial mechanics, and not from all sorts of alternatives, but from that particular Newtonian mathematics. It would be very interesting to think what kind of a system we would have if we derived our sense of what constituted a cause and what constituted a direction from patterns other than the mechanics of celestial motion considered in the eighteenth century sense. Like, for example, the passage of animals. There’s something very close to the condition of the celestial universe up to about 1590 in the movement of animals. That’s what you have to try and see. If we get ourselves to that condition of the universe, any animal will do, like birds, any of the omen animals, of course, we have some literary sense of, but like fish in the pond, those planetary movements. I mean, think of the extraordinary unlikelihood of what such a thing like Stonehenge or Avebury were built to predict. They never thought they would work. Oh, never. I mean, they were chance shots. Like, sooner or later it must come round again, and it must come round again because it was wanted: and if it was wanted, it would come. There is this immense controversy now about how they knew over those immense periods of time that there were cyclic repetitions in the movement of heavenly bodies. They didn’t know. They just wanted it. That’s how it happened (J.H. Prynne, extract from the lectures on Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, given at Simon Fraser University, July 27, 1971; available here: http://charlesolson.ca/Files/Prynnelecture1.htm).

1902 French postcard series depicting Pierrot and Colombine.

A selection of a letter from Wallace Stevens to Elsie Moll:

And so when summer came, they went in a boat to [a] quiet island, and on the way, Pierrot pulled out a newspaper and read to Columbine a little news of the stupid world from which he was taking her. But Columbine didn’t think it stupid. So Pierrot turned the boat around, and they drifted back to town. Yet even while they were drifting, Columbine thought of the quiet island and she knew that Pierrot was thinking of it too (Wallace Stevens, letter to Elsie Moll (excerpted from letters written 1907-08), in Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p 106))

Daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson, c. early 1847. This is the only authenticated portrait of the poet. Poem 1765: That Love is all there is Is all we know of Love; It is enough, the freight should be Proportioned to the groove.

Daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson, c. early 1847. This is the only authenticated portrait of the poet.

Poem 1765:

That Love is all there is
Is all we know of Love;
It is enough, the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.