a Rambing of sorts

I am an arrogant bastard who has "translation" as his native tongue. If we, the ubiquitous we, were to attribute my prose models to any event/s, it would be due mainly to the fact that I have been readings translations of French, German, Spanish and Russian since maybe 6th grade, with very few native english speaking prose models in between. That is why. Toss in some joyce and beckett with that and you have stream of consciousness, abrupt with lots of prepositional phrases and oddly/miss placed modifiers and phrases. That is me.

I am listening to Portishead's Glorybox...the one in NCY with a live orchestra. Over and over again I listen to it. I know not why. I just like it. All around it is a great song. Her sensuous voice, the beat mixing with the orchestra. It is droning, yet mysterious, purple would be the colour of this song, the prevalent colour actually. That is why it is so intoxicating, it is dark, yet sensuous, beth gibbon's voice, the gravitas of it. It strikes me. The visual information is awesome too, she enters with her vibrant red hair, unkempt, unruly, smoking a cigarette, it burning down in between her figures as she wails into the microphone, the crowd quiet, hanging on to each note..she puffs away in between these amazing vocalizations of emotions and ideas which you can paint yet cannot see. My favourite moment, she finishes the song, turns and takes a final drag of her cigarette, perfect for the lyrics of the song.

This is the purpose of the blog. Is there ever a purpose. Yes, maybe not. Everything exists. That is the essence of this blog actually. I think that the deep thoughts are often tautologies and the obvious, but they are the obvious which we have difficulty seeing/ knowing/ understanding. I have been reading Heidegger, Being and Time, and his first argument is that daesin, being there is the essence of being and that a question presupposes an answer. Perhaps the being of being is an unanswerable question because the definition is constantly in flux. But by asking the question we ask it in a way that we can understand the answer that was presupposed the moment of the asking. Daesin, being there, is so difficult to uncover because it is so near, it is everywhere, it structures our being and understanding and this is precisely why we cannot understand it. Okay. I agree.

I was listening to my Amnesiac album. I love it, probably in my top five favourite albums, all time. The cover is a book. Reminds me of of Fahrenheit 451. I never noticed that it was a book until today. I never paid attention to the visual rhetoric. That is the brilliant thing about radiohead, they actually pay attention to everything, and are well read. Amnesiac eh? Here comes the state the obvious. Amnesiacs are labeled as such because they forget part of their life. They forget what they experienced, learned etc and can only remember the present, in some cases at least. The interesting thing is the usage. Amnesiacs are labeled by society. How can those that lose memories know that they lost them. Lost memory in society is the issue. They ask you your name, your home, etc, it is the society that creates amnesia. Think about that.

But this reminds me of altheia. The re-remembering. Perhaps we are all re-remembering something, which of course presupposes that we all have something to forget, which is the problem because we are forgetting all the time. Despite all our efforts, they in turn allow us this forgetting, the internet, google, books, they all allow us to lose our memory....but maybe it is in the re-remembering you get the meaning, or learn something lasting. Is that not it? We all are looking for something meaningful, and perhaps the things that are, are so because we re-remember them, we lose them while maintaining some sort of trace, and upon reopening, upon becoming an amnesiac and re-remembering we find it meaningful, we understand it. This is where I would talk about the problem of our existence and the reason why we have meaning, because we have death. You only stand to gain something by having a life, a life requires a beginning as well as an end, no play in an infinite field says morrissey paraphrasing derrida.

In short, we are all amnesiacs because we forget and re-remember, and we are all products of some social construction that allows us to know that we are in fact amnesiacs. If we can wake up, or when we wake up, I don't know. Perhaps we are all living in a glasshouse that we can never escape because we don't know where the walls are. we lead our lives with the illusion that allows us freedom, but in reality there are walls, there are always walls. That is another issue, by saying that there is a wall you presuppose that there is something outside on the other side of the wall, this is the issue, what if we reach a point where we can't fathom our own being, which we have, we can't fathom our own universe because of this issue. You can't define the system that structures and binds/bounds your world because you don't have the capacity to say what is outside of the system. You can't draw that box simply because all you see and know is the paper.