proximoception | (no subject)

Youth and middle age are squabbling over me lately. I liken them to the two visual layers of Bugs Bunny cartoons, the painted background and moving objects. You'd always know which things were going to be picked up or otherwise involved in the action because they had a black outline and solid color; they lived in the same world as the characters, bright and simple shapes though infinitely malleable. You could feel how their cellophane sheets must have shone from neighboring angles. The backgrounds, in comparison, were quite detailed, with colors fading into one another to indicate dimensionality. They were lavish and complex but utterly static and slightly washed-out, an ancient world where everything was clear and still and hopeless.

Much more offensive than the Mary Poppins-level gnosticizings of "What Dreams May Come" was its attempt at animating paintings. It was heartbreaking, really: there was just enough success, here and there among the scrambled-eggs-with-mango-jelly visuals, to wake your yearning. And then maim it by showing computer cartoons may take us little further. To know the world in its complexity without freezing it or being frozen oneself, the old dream of art, is still a discipline only certain books teach, and those imperfectly, uncertainly.

Also I have the flu.

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I was bemused at myself for the quietitude through which I read the posting...but didn't you notice that: you start to build a viril and fertile metaphorical comparison than without any apparent reason you forget (at all) why you have started to write and continue to show some meticulous, entertainig and involving insight for how you now perceive your memories on the cartoons but still irrelevant to what you have prepeared(at least me) us(?)to be absorbed in...I mean the completion of the painting..the second part is just...i believe you know now. It loves me from "youth" till at "malleable"....and of course the last sentence..but I would not comment on it..till I see it again...By the way I'm the weird AlBombayan...see you

I think the extended metaphor works throughout; as you age you rely more and more on (the more and more readily available) precedents, which are detailed in relation to one another but not vivid, not spontaneous. I do take a thought-leap in the middle, where the big blank space is, which I'd fill in this way:

How do you keep the thoroughgoingness and accuracy of adult perspective while keeping the dance of novelty alive? Id est, how can you know fully and want deeply at the same time? I take it for granted that this is possible, it's something we've all experienced and long to recapture. I also take this recapture to be the goal and justification of art. Clearly no method has yet been perfected. Some rely on film to speak the truth about their own potential. Tears came to my eyes when I saw the opening minutes of Toy Story: imagine what could be done with such a new art! Disenchantment set in with familiarity. The human imagination still limits visual representation, and technology so complex that no single human consciousness controls it leads to, at best, a few hundred good little ideas. Like Simpsons gags. What's needed is a language, a consciousness. A moving painting.

I'm sorry but I agree throughout..probably from a different prespective
but yes you are right, except(in my opinion) for the "The human imagination still limits visual representation" and that because I think the multitude is a ilusion and your tears are true.

The elegies of the stone (excerpt?)

Measured is the space given to men
And the same space is given to the birds
but immense
Immense the garden where hardly
Separated from dead
(before it does not touch me again disguised),
I played and all arrived to me easily
at the hand's height.

This small sea horse! And the bubble that shun
the bursting!
The red boat of wild blackberries in
deep currents of
Foliages! And the foremast filled with flags!

All this reaches at me now! But it was yesterday where
I existed
And then the long way of the strangers
it will be unknown to me
Nothing but speaking prettily exhaust us.

Like the river which from one heart to another
weave the distances.
And you find me ambulanting from one Galaxy to another
Whereas under your feet the chasms thunder.
And you arrive there or not.....

author-Odysseus Elytis.....
unfortunately or not I can't remember more than this...and probably it is badly remembered...if you can find it somewhere may be you will understand why I posted...tell me if you wouldn't like me post...

You had all that committed to memory?

It's beautiful. And I'd dismissed Elytis as just a manic surrealist!

The first two thirds are pure Holderlin. I don't quite follow the thought of the last stanza; I'll keep an eye out for translations at the library.

Thank you for the poem. Post all you like.

I didn't committed that to memory willingly, this is just what I can remember from my reading of it in french. I hope there are not grave mistakes, I believe the essence is more or less there, the poem
however is longer, the title of the work in english(if it is translated) is " oximopetra's elegies" or the inverse.Elytis have been influenced by Eluard(and by lectures he was stuffed with in Sorbone) for a short period of time but he have never been considered(classified)a surrealist. As for Holderlin, I don't know if you speak german but anything translated in english seem to have been written by the language itself and not people, despite this prejudice, Holderlin strived most of his (mentally acceptable)life to apply, naturalize, technically and ideologically to induce
(the common belief is that he succeeded)to the german language the forms(and beliefs) of classical(ancient) greek lyrics and litterature in a more or less stretched sense(and muddle them up with christian attitude and beliefs)..so here we are again at the word Greek
...No I do not speak german!

I don't speak German either. What was being said in the Elytis poem reminded me of Holderlin translations (which are entirely unlike any Greek lyrics I've been exposed to, though rather like some early poems by Goethe--all, again, in translation), especially this one:

When I was a boy
A god often rescued me
From the shouts and the rods of men
And I played among trees and flowers
Secure in their kindness
And the breezes of heaven
Were playing there too.

And as you delight
The hearts of plants
When they stretch towards you
With little strength

So you delighted the heart in me
Father Helios, and like Endymion
I was your favourite,
Moon. 0 all

You friendly
And faithful gods
I wish you could know
How my soul has loved you.

Even though when I called to you then
It was not yet with names, and you
Never named me as people do
As though they knew one another

I knew you better
Than I have ever known them.
I understood the stillness above the sky
But never the words of men.

Trees were my teachers
Melodious trees
And I learned to love
Among flowers.

I grew up in the arms of the gods.

(tr. David Constantine)