Trace(s) of love - seeing with ears, hearing with eyes

" Kids."
"They are kids. Exactly. What pain do they feel that they need to take pill? Music, okay, too loud, so what. It is beautiful how they dance. But what pain do they feel too young to buy beer?"
"There's pain enough for everybody now," Eric told him.

 ****

 Music devoured the air around them, issuing from enormous speakers set among the ruined murals on facing walls. He began to feel an otherwordliness, a strange arythmia in the scene.

There was something infectuous in the air. It wasn't the music and lights alone that drew you in, the spectacle of massed dance in a theater stripped of seats and apint and history. Eric thought it might be the drug as well, the novo, spreading its effect from those who took it to those who did not. You caught what they had. First you were apart and watching and then you were in, and with, and of the crowd, and then you were the crowd, densely assembled and dancing as one.

****

But he felt old, watching them dance. An era had come and gone without him. They melted into eachother so they wouldn't shrivel up as individuals. The noise was nearly unbearable, taking root in his hair and teeth. He was seeing and hearing too much. But this was his only defense against the spreading mental state. Never having touched or tasted the drug, not even having seen it, he felt a little less himself, a little more the others, down there, raving. - Cosmopolis, pg. 125, 126,127

 

The Island of a Book - Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Don De Lillo's Cosmopolis

In 1818, Joseph Jacotot, a professor of French literature, was begining his lecturing days in the University of Louivain, expecting those to be a calm, uneventful period in his eventful life and career which begun when he was 19 and teaching rhetoric at the University of Dijon.

The students loved him and there were Flemish students who wanted him to teach them, but he knew no Flemish and they spoke no French. So Jacotot decided to give it a try, a bilingual edition of the French classic, Fénelon's Télémaque, being published at the time.

The students were given a book and asked to learn the French text using the translation. Jacotot entered the experiment with low hopes but having the bilingual edition (what Jacques Rancière in his work The Ignorant Schoolmaster refers to as the minimal link of a thing in common), he thought it worth a try.

" He expected horrendous barbarisms, or maybe a complete inability to perform. How could these young people, deprived of explanation, understand and resolve the difficulties of a language entirely new to them? No matter! He had to find out where the route opened by chance had taken them, what had been the results of that desperate empiricism. And how surprised he was to discover that the students, left to themselves, managed this difficult step as well as many French could have done! Was wanting all that was necessary for doing? Were all men virtually capable of understanding what others had done and understood?*

*Fénelon’s didactic and utopian 24~volume novel, Télémaque (1699), recounts the peregrinations of Telemachus, accompanied by his spiritual guide, Mentor, as he attempts to find his father, Odysseus. In it, Fénelon proposes an “Art of Reigning” and invents an ideal city, Salente, whose peace-loving citizens show exemplary civic virtue. The book was extremely displeasing to Louis XIV, who saw himself in the portrait of Idomeneus. But it was much admired by Enlightenment philosophers, who proclaimed Fénelon one of their most important precursors. In terms of Jacotot’s adventure, the book could have been Télémaque or any other.
— TRANS."

(The Ignorant Schoolmaster, pg.2)

The Ignorant Schoolmaster is a book about Jacotot's curious educational adventure. It is about teaching as a process not between the teacher as the master of knowledge and understanding and the student as the ignorant one, not between the intelligences of the teacher and the student locked in hierarchical opposition of higher and lower, better and worse, more and less. 

"The pedagogical myth, we said, divides the world into two. More precisely, it divides intelligence into two. It says that there is an inferior intelligence and a superior one. The former registers perceptions by chance, retains them, interprets and repeats them empirically, within the closed circle of habit and need. This is the intelligence of the young child and the common man. The superior intelligence knows things by reason, proceeds by method, from the simple to the complex, from the part to the whole. It is this intelligence
that allows the master to transmit his knowledge by adapting it to the intellectual capacities of the student and allows him to verify that the student has satisfactorily understood what he learned. Such is the principle of explication. From this point on, for Jacotot, such will be the principle of enforced stultification."

(The Ignorant Schoolmaster, pg.7)

" It is this word that brings a halt to the movement of reason, that destroys its confidence in itself, that distracts it by breaking the world of intelligence into two, by installing the division between the groping animal and the learned little man, between common sense and science. From the moment this slogan of duality is pronounced, all the perfecting of the ways of making understood, that great preoccupation of men of methods and progressives, is progress toward stultification. The child who recites under the threat of the rod obeys the rod and that’s all: he will apply his intelligence to something else. But the child who is explained to will devote his intelligence to the work of grieving: to understanding, that is to say, to understanding that he doesn’t understand unless he is explained to. He is no longer submitting to the rod, but rather to a hierarchical world of intelligence. For the rest, like the other child, he doesn’t have to worry: if the solution to the problem is too difficult to pursue, he will have enough intelligence to open his eyes wide. The master is vigilant and patient. He will see that the child isn’t following him; he will put him back on track by explaining
things again. And thus the child acquires a new intelligence, that of the master’s explications. Later he can be an explicator in turn. He possesses the equipment. But he will perfect it: he will be a man of progress."

(The Ignorant Schoolmaster, pg.8)

It is about teaching as a process of emancipation and as a process in which one teaches what one doesn't know.

" Jacotot decided to devote himself to this. He proclaimed that one could teach what one didn’t know, and that a poor and ignorant father could, if he was emancipated, conduct the education of his children, without the aid of any master explicator. And he indicated the way of that “universal teaching”— to learn something and to relate to it all the rest by this principle: all men have equal intelligence." (The Ignorant Schoolmaster, pg.18)

Like Télémaque, Cosmopolis is just another book. 

" The book. Télémaque or another one. Chance placed Télémaque at Jacotot’s disposal; convenience told him to keep it. Télémaque has been translated into many languages and is easily available in bookstores. It isn’t the greatest masterpiece of the French language; but the style is pure, the vocabulary varied, and the
moral severe. In it one learns mythology and geography. And behind the French “ translation,” one can hear the echo of Vergil’s Latin and Homer’s Greek. In short, it’s a classic, one of those books in which a language presents the essential of its forms and its powers. A book that is a totality: a center to which one can attach everything new one learns; a circle in which one can understand each of these new things, find the ways to say what one sees in it, what one thinks about it, what one makes of it." (The Ignorant Schoolmaster, pg. 21)

To learn something and relate to it all the rest.

Everything is in everything. 

There is no outside.

How many readings of Cosmopolis on this blog, how many things in the thing, the book, itself? 

No man is an island, 
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.  - John Donne

Immortal Poem - Eric Packer (un) dying- a Cosmopolis

Immortal Poem by Miroslav Mika Antić
I-
If they tell you: I died,
and you liked me,
something in you as well
may suddenly turn grey.
On your lashes a mist,
An ashen trace on your lips.
Have you ever thought
of what it really means to live?
                                      It was a matter of silences, 
                                      not words.- Cosmopolis, p.5
As snow on a warm palm
the childhood fades within you.
Worries...
Are there any worries?
Sorrows...
Are there any sorrows?
Up the ladder of imagination
Climb bravely into the youth.
That pretty but devious rainbow
there awaits for you.
And live!
Live completely!
Do not nibble on days as mice.
Chew on air
Race with the wind and the birds.    
                                     He stood a while longer, watching a single gull lift
                                    and ripple in a furl of air, admiring the bird, thinking into it,
                                     trying to know the bird, feeling the sturdy earnest beat
                                     of its scavenger's ravenous heart. - Cosmopolis, p.7
For every eternity is brief.               
Suddenly: those laughing faces         
in some mirror                                 
turn to wrinkled.
Suddenly: a tear lurks
around some corner.
Troubles arrive at fingertips.
Years become more grey.
Suddenly the world, while walking
becomes more narrow
and the laughter more quiet
and quiet
and askew somehow.
So live, but completely!
That is how I did.
Ages only I have travelled
for half a century.
I admit it: silly at times.
At times, the wrong way.
But I never stood still.
I went always.
And went...
Spin a golden thread
out of your aorta
and sew the cracked places
through which the wonders shudder.
And never imagine life
as a scared goodbye
but as a permanent welcome
and constant begining of awakening.
II-
And then, for once seriously
think what it means to die
and where is it that man goes away.
What is it that calls for him forever.
Do not go to cemeteries.
You will understand nothing.
Cemeteries are the darkest fair
and a sad theatre.
Whilst playing with restlessness
and with the unformed,
don't you feel the need
to secretly enter new
layers of mind?
neighboring futures?
I will explain it sometimes
if you find me there.
You know what I'll do:
I'll break your toy called pain,
if you dare.
I am not lying.
I am inventing
that which needs to exist,
only you haven't unraveled it yet,
because you haven't looked for it.
Remember: reality is more real
is you add more of the unreal.
You will recognize me through silence.
The eternal don't speak.
To wise out the wisdom,
cherish the listening skill.
After infinite births
and some petty deaths
once you understand
that all you breathed in
is not life,
really, come by,
so I can touch you with light
and turn you into a thought.
The farthest of futures has its future too,
which hears the call of its future inside.
And no worlds are empty.

That, which we are unaware of,

is not inexistance,

but the existance without us.
                        Nothing existed around him. There was only the noise in his
                        head, the mind in time. When he died he would not end. The
                        world would end. - Cosmopolis, pg.6

III -                                           
If they tell you: I died                        
this is what will happen.
Thousands of colorful fishes
will flutter through my eye.
And the earth will hide me.
And the weeds will hide me.
While I'll be flying high.
Remember: there are no limits,
only temporary limts.
I will sail above you at dusk
in wind slick as silk.
I will unravel horizons,
contoures of ages unborn
and images of future
through the beating of invisible wings.
And as a silent pendulum
swinging in the immense,
I will hang upon myself
as upon a golden belt.
Do you really think my arm,
my knee
or head
can turn into clay,
beech root or grass?
That some tiny secret
or fear
can tomorrow become
silence
darkness
and dust?
I am really from stars, you know.
All made of light.
Nothing in me will shorten or stifle
I'll just return
at some accidental dawn
to some distant sun   
my eyes golden. (...)           
                          He wanted to be buried in his nuclear bomber, his Blackjack
                          A. Not buried, but cremated, but buried as well. He wanted 
                          to be solarized.He wanted the plane flown by remote control
                          with his embalmed body aboard, suit tie and turban, and the
                          bodies ofhis dead dogs, his tall silky Russian woolfhounds
                          reaching maximum altitude and leveling at supersonic dash
                           speed and then sent plunging into the sand, fireballed one
                          and all, leaving a work of land art, scorched earth art that
                          would interact with the desert.... - Cosmopolis, pg 209.


Never bother to ask:                
how is one to live but:              
how is one not to die
after all these deaths.           What did he want that was not posthumous? 
                                                                                    - Cosmopolis, pg 209.           
If they tell you: I died,              
worry not. In every century      
someone mistakes me              
for tired and old.                       
Never as many people
in one single man.
Never as many different
in the same.(...)
To be humanly multiple      
is not to be dehumanized.   
I am divisible with everything,   
and yet indestructible.            
                           But his pain interfered with his immortality. It was crucial to his
                            distinctiveness, too vital to be bypassed and not susceptible,
                           he didn't think, to computer emulation. The things that
                          made him who he was could hardly be indentified much less
                           converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his
                          body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the
                          neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veneer
                        of his  libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who 
                        he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his
                        mother's breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes,  
                       this  is  him and how a person becomes the reflection 
                       he sees in  a   dusty window when he walks by.  
                                                                                                     - Cosmopolis, pg 207.
And all these wondrous stages    
and the renewal of me          
are nothing but a whirl          
unified,                                 
persistent,                            
long. (...)                              
Why then say farewell?         
What is it that we regret?       
If they tell you: I died,
you know - it is not what I can do.   
                             His hand contains the pain of his life, all of it, emotional
                           and other, and he closes his eyes one more time. This is
                           not the end. He is dead inside the crystal of his watch
                            but still alive in original space, waiting for the shot to
                            sound.- Cosmopolis, pg 209.
Love is the only air                            
I inhaled.                                            
And laughter only language                  
I understand in the world.                    
I dropped by this place
to wink at you a bit.
To leave behind something
as a  fluttery trace.
Do not be sad. (...)

Reading the Grid in Cosmopolis Through Foucault and Agnes Martin

Agnes Martin Print

On a Clear Day 1, 1973.

Agnes Martin

On a Clear Day 1, 1973.

Agnes Martin

   Go to the links here for a number of prints including the upper one. Didi Fancher has a grid print on the wall. It may be an Agnes Martin drawing, or a derivative of her work, or one her assistants did it a la Andy Warhol. He pressed her against the wall drawing, a minimalist grid executed over several weeks by two of the artist's adjutants working with measuring instruments and graphite pencils. 


On the right is an Agnes Martin painting. They are usually large, 5 to 6 ft across and almost as long. They are pale and lovely. But they are not dangerous. Or are they?

Eric Packer's Grid

Foucault's Power/Knowledge grid is what Eric Packer is caught in on this last day of his life. H begins it in linear time, historical time, within a dialectical frame. It charts implies time that is linear. Only it doesn't chart because Eric is within a simulated reality. He is trying to go in a straight line from East to West. But he is in global Virtual Reality. Numbers (yen), information, sex all circulate in an orbit.   So are the "rats".


In an interesting article on Richard Serra's minimalist Tilted Arc 1981  and its removal by the courts from its site-specific selected and commissioned place by the GSA at 26 Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan,  the author says

Richard Serra: Tilted Arc from minimalissimo.com

Minimalist sculpture is a critique of commodification, with its outwardly simplified visual schemas which seem to diminish the uniqueness of these objects.  Their artistic value can be difficult to extract.  In this sense, Minimalism reflects many of the social and political issues addressed by the American counterculture.

The critique continues and of course all this folds in with DeLillo's Cosmopolis in a seamless fashion. An Agnes Martin grid resonates with a Foucauldian grid of power/knowledge/capital and this grid was exactly what got Tilted Arc removed from its site after  an almost 10 year court battle. NOt to mention the GRID of traffic Eric Packer is moving in quarter inches all day.