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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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“The man whose eyes and mind are occupied with art [...] forgets about himself. Art makes for distance from the I.” • “The poem speaks only on its own behalf [...] But has always hoped to speak also on behalf of the other, perhaps of an altogether other.” • “The poem becomes conversation — often desperate conversation. Only the space of this conversation can establish what is addressed, can gather it into a "you" around the naming and speaking I. But this "you," comes about by dint of being named and addressed, brings its otherness into the present. Even in the here and now of the poem — and the poem has only this one, unique, momentary present — even in this immediacy and nearness, the otherness gives voice to what is most its own: its time.” • “And are these paths only detours, detours from you to you? But they are [...] the paths on which language becomes voice. They are encounters, paths from a voice to a listening You, natural paths, outlines for existence perhaps, for projecting ourselves into the search for ourselves ... A kind of homecoming.”
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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Triptych Thoughts: Celan • Weil • Eliot
I- Paul Celan, ‘Microliths’ [trans. P Jorris] II-  Simone Weil, ‘Gravity & Grace’ [trans. Crawford & Ruhr] III- TS Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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— Levinas, Is it Righteous to Be?
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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— Louis Zukofsy, “A”
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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— George Oppen
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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“I could hear my heart beating. I could hear everyone’s heart. I could hear the human noise we sat there making, not one of us moving, not even when the room went dark.”
— What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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More than just an impressive economy of language conveying a concrete image, Pound’s ‘Metro’ holds an ethical charge, becoming a love poem to humanity, an ode to the beauty of the unknowable Others’ ‘faces    in the crowd...’ abiding Levinas in the spirit of Leaves of Grass. Art attempts to tug at the veil of alterity: a reconstruction of the ethical encounter of the Other.
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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The sublime, the mystery, lies for me in the faces of these individuals alone. Once, in a museum, I watched these faces and all of a sudden I was struck by their extraordinary vivacity and elusiveness, so different from the works of art that suddenly seemed icy and cold to me. And I felt a kind of despair, because I thought no one has ever been able to completely comprehend the mystery of these faces and the life reflected in them.
Alberto Giacometti (via mystics-and-metaxy)
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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“Giacometti’s return to study from life was precipitated by a profound doubt about the most basic artistic transaction: that of representing what is seen...
 “The Levinasian account accepts the distance between Self and Other as unbridgeable and refuses to circumscribe alterity into a unity with the Self... likewise, Giacometti's effaced, never-ending portrait process was driven as much by the desire to create resemblance to something as it was by the need to refuse representation as an end goal.
“Giacometti’s late portraits thus open onto an important set of issues in modernism… Seen against the background of Levinasian ethics, the exploration of the properties of paint becomes the means of creating the possibility for a practice in which unpredictability allows both the pursuit and non-attainment of alterity... Levinas finds here the transcendent relationship to the Other, something akin to a religious experience. It is this ecstatic quality that most justifies the comparison of Giacometti’s view of the sitter’s face to Levinas’ abstract, invisible face of the Other.”
— Portraiture and the Ethics of Alterity: Giacometti vis-à-vis Levinas, Leo Costello (MIT Press)
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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“... I meditated and I started very cautious. I would pick up something from the street and take it home with me. I bought a goldfish and I concentrated on the goldfish and I loved it. I graduated from one thing to another... For six years now I have gone around by myself and built up my science. And now I am a master. Son. I can love anything. No longer do I have to think about it even. I see a street full of people and a beautiful light comes in me. I watch a bird in the sky. Or I meet a traveler on the road. Everything, Son. And anybody. All stranger and all loved! Do you realize what a science like mine can mean?” —Carson McCullers, A Tree. A Rock. A Cloud.
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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Now on Insta
You can follow me at mystics.and.metaxy
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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From Poor Folk to The Brothers K: Compassion is the underpinning theme that threads together all of Dostoevsky.
He tells us, “Compassion is the chief law of human existence.” (The Idiot) Compassion for the underclasses, the impoverished, mentally ill, the criminal, the marginal. As violent as they are kind and empathetic, each of his novels affirm the inalienable dignity of all life. He makes us look at what matters most; “There’s a whole life in knowing the sun exists…,” said with the experience of four years shackled in a labor camp.
Empathy is the impetus of social justice. Dostoyevsky warns a liberalism lacking it rings hollow, and prone to corruption. (Notes from Underground)
He reminds us how “We are all responsible [guilty] for all” (Karamazov), and, at his absolute darkest, shows us, like Virgil through The Inferno, what society (and ourselves) risk becoming when we shirk that responsibility.
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Image: Myshkin and Rogozhin Exchange Crosses by Frtiz Eichenberg, 1956
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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Renounce & enjoy
The Upanishads
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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S. Weil makes me afraid. I suppose one day I shall love and understand her because no other writer provokes in me so many reflections […]. The fear that S. Weil produces in me is a fear like when one waits indefinitely in an empty room (white). Maybe because she has abolished imagination or, to say it better, art, to restore in its place morals (justice, virtue, human love) […]. In me, S.W. is temptation to leap from the aesthetic to the ethic. Now […] I must say that neither justice nor virtue interest me dearly. In me, there is someone who accepts evil and pain in disorder if they are the previous condition for a beautiful poem […]. In the poem there is no place for justice because the poem is born out of the wound of injustice, that is, from the absence of justice. And whoever invokes the absent is not moderate nor fair given that the substance of his song or his voice cannot be measured because of the fact that it is not present […]. But I do not know why it hurts to read S.W.
Alejandra Pizarnik
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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Ilya Kaminsky, from “Musica Humana [an elegy for Osip Mandelstam],” in Dancing in Odessa
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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[…] He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,/ One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye./ He rolls the executions on his tongue like blueberries./ He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.
Osip Mandelstam, “The Stalin Epigram”; 1933, trans. by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin (via weil-weil)
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mystics-and-metaxy · 3 years
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“Imagste” is back, becomes “Mystics-and-Metaxy”
A long hiatus, hopefully over. Sorry I was gone (It’s been a rough year...). It’s been hard finding the motivation. But I’m trying to get back into things.
On the name change: “imagste” [imagisme] was too restrictive, and connoted the apolitics of modern literature. I want to step away from that. I plan for a more socially engaged and cross-disciplined blog. New wine for new wineskins.
Metaxy is greek for the ‘inbetween’, as a mediator. Plato calls eros the metaxy between man and God. Simone Weil says compassion as metaxy fills this gap. Going forward, I want to curate this blog with a stronger emphasis on art, literature and philosophy that focuses on ethics, empathy and compassion.
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