Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. -Carl Sagan I’ve got my hands on a copy of Palestinian poet Hisham Bustani’s book of…
What this brings us to, more or less, is a poetic, ironic analysis of events. Against the simulation of a linear history “in progress”, we have to accord a privileged status to these backfires, these malign deviations, these lightweight catastrophes which cripple an empire much more effectively than any great upheavals. We have to…
If,in Chaos Theory, for sensitivity to initial conditions, we substitutesensitivity to final conditions,we are in the form of predestination,which is the form of fate. Poetic language also lives with predestination,with the imminence of its own endingand of reversibility between the ending and the beginning.it is predestined in this sense -it is an unconditional event,without…
…we have to get used to the idea there will no longer be any end, that history itself has become interminable. Thus, when we speak of the ‘end of history’, the ‘end of the political’, the ‘end of the social’, the ‘end of ideologies’, none of this is true The worst of it all…
We shall never experience the original chaos, the Big Bang; the file is closed on that; we weren’t there. But, where the final moment is concerned –the Big Crumb -we might have some hope of seeing that. Some hope of enjoying the end, to make up for not being able to enjoy the origin….
We are, self evidently,entering upon a retroactive form of history,and all our ideas, philosophies and mental techniquesare progressively adapting to that model. We may even see this as an adventure,since the disappearance of the end is in itselfan original situation. It seems to be characteristic of our culture and our history,which cannot even manage…
Words are a lifeline: The connecting link between my inner awareness, the layered consciousness, and memories which we loosely call “self” to other selves, and to “the world. ” The connectors are a matter of words, grammar and syntax. Therefore a deft touch with words is key to becoming more real, the process of…
Cause and effect reversibility… I get into reading Jean Baudrillard because this philosopher bends language reminiscent of poets. Change and times passage are interchangeable, the given of our experience on this planet. We tip our hats to Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic thinker who famously said that ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’. Another…
An inauspicious day from the get-go by Hisham Bustani translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie Some damn thing made her mom start talking to her about her fiancé yet again. “He’s just not cast from the same clay we are,” she said, “and I don’t think he’s really got it in…
No really! This is the final of my comments about The Dawn of Day. The writer, Nietzsche, bids that we never forget this one principle of flight. A majority of our fellows cannot fly. That I must accept. A limited few will be able to join the adventures on the horizon of thought. Best…
