LifeAfter

Someone who  had also a brain hemorrhage told me that to this day, twenty years later, one thing that remained with her was the exhaustion.
Sometimes it feels as if I want to sleep for weeks at a time, to hibernate…

The famous French/Belgian poet, Henri Michaux speaks here of exhaustion too.
I had always liked this poem but now I understand it more deeply.

Un homme paisible

Étendant les mains hors du lit, Plume fut étonné de ne pas rencontrer le mur. ” Tiens, pensa-t-il, les fourmis l’auront mangé… ” et il se rendormit.
Peu apres, sa femme l’attrapa et le secoua: “Regarde, dit-elle, fainéant! pendant que tu étais occupé à dormir on nous a volé notre maison.” En effet, un ciel intact s’étendait de tous côtés. “Bah, la chose est faite.” pensa-t-il.
Peu après, un bruit se fit entendre. C’était un train qui arrivait sur eux à toute allure. ” De l’air pressé qu’il a, pensa-t-il, il arrivera sûrement avant nous ” et il se rendormit.
Ensuite, le froid le réveilla. Il était tout trempé de sang. Quelques morceaux de sa femme gisaient près de lui. ” Avec le sang, pensa-t-il, surgissent toujours quantité de désagréments; si ce train pouvait n’être pas passé, j’en serais fort heureux. Mais puisqu’il est déjà passé… ” et il se rendormit.
– Voyons, disait le juge, comment expliquez-vous que votre femme se soit blessée au point qu’on l’ait trouvée partagée en huit morceaux, sans que vous, qui étiez à côté, ayez pu faire un geste pour l’en empêcher, sans même vous en être aperçu. Voilà le mystère. Toute l’affaire est là-dedans.
– Sur ce chemin, je ne peux pas l’aider, pensa Plume, et il se rendormit.
– L’exécution aura lieu demain. Accusé, avez-vous quelque chose à ajouter?
– Excusez-moi, dit-il, je n’ai pas suivi l’affaire. Et il se rendormit.

English Translation (by Marton)
A quiet man

Extending his hands out of bed, Plume was surprised not to meet the wall. “Well, he thought, the ants must have eaten it …” and he fell asleep again.
Shortly after, his wife grabbed him and shook him: “Look, she says, lazy you! while you were busy sleeping we were robbed of our house. “Indeed, an immaculate sky stretched on all sides. “Well, the thing is done.” He thought.
Soon after, a noise was heard. It was a train coming at them at full speed. “From its hurried look, he thought, it will surely arrive before we do” and again he fell asleep.
Then, the cold woke him up. He was soaked in blood. A few pieces of his wife were lying next to him. “With blood, he thought, there are always a great many problems; if this train could have not passed, I would be very happy. But since it has already passed … “and he went back to sleep.
– Well, said the judge, how do you explain that your wife injured herself to the point that she was found divided into eight pieces, without you, who were nearby, being able to make a gesture to prevent it, without you even having noticed it. That’s the mystery. Everything lies there.
– On that path, I cannot help him, thought Plume, and he fell back asleep.
– The execution will take place tomorrow. Accused, do you have something to add?
– Excuse me, he said, I have not followed the case. And he went back to sleep.

Référence. Henri Michaux, Un certain Plume, dans Plume précédé de Lointain intérieur, Paris, Gallimard, 1963, pp.139-140.


If you want more from Michaux, here are some of his night reports.

Just found this amongst my files… Something about labels, naming, and other games – I wrote this back in 2011.

Don’t Call it Art, Don’t Call It – (the artificiality of art , etc…)  © Marton 2011

I might have tried what others had succeeded in doing, swimming across the harbor and once on land start shouting:”Long live Dollar! Long live Dollar!” It’s a gimmick. A lot of people have landed that way and made a fortune. Céline.

There is the English expression “to lose one’s marbles.” This is exactly what happened to me. 
In the old days, reality and all decent art may have appeared at times like a beautiful arranged necklace composed of colorful pearls arranged in striking patterns. Now, poof, all gone!

A brain surgery and three weeks of intensive care later, the possibility of art had seems to have been excised as if the scalpel went a bit further than required. The necklace lost its connecting string and the pearls have gone whichever which way. There is now neither any necklace nor any pattern.

Those who profess to be artists appear now to me in great need of a Moses figure, someone to shatter their golden calf. Yes, the fetishization of one’s sensibilities seems like a frozen frame of life, something akin to my having to shout to them: “yes, you do like that sunset, but do keep walking!”

Looking at my desk after a month of not seeing it, I could understand how it would have looked to someone else, had I not made it back from the hospital. Yes, these were his tchotchkes, I could hear them. I was the one that used to give meaning to those items on my desk but without me, it was just “stuff…”

Most art, in order to be recognized as such, duplicates what has already seen. The formula “art” is conjugated in innumerable permutations… When one plays particular notes, one is able to enters the groove that says – this is art. 
Even anti-art, as radical as it may have been at the time (i.e., Gustav Metzger’s acid sprayed canvases) was only asking for recognition within the art world. Allan Kaprow’s Happenings as expansions towards life were still geared towards acceptance within the world of art.

Bresson’s masterpiece, Pickpocket, in its US DVD release has an extra, showing the consultant on the film demonstrating in front of a circus audience how “magically” – without anyone noticing it, he is able to rob wallets, ties, belts, etc… Much in the arts revolves around this kind of sleight of hands.

What if one would not need to go as far as Aden or Harar, as Rimbaud did, in order to create distance between the world of conventions, whether one calls it art or literature? Duchamp said that Art is an habit forming drug. I would add that life, as a whole, is addictive.

Could the arts not be so clever, pretty/disturbing, and too often decorative? Could they do something else besides “feed the soul?” Is it possible to ask for more? Maybe art should hide and hit us unaware, just like life does?

Keep going, don’t freeze it into “art.”

Images can be a way to create “representation” when blindness surrounds us and invisibility is preventing some of us and some of the issues from being heard, but as an end in itself, it just creates another gallery, another fancy shelf to rest our eyes.

Yes, it is great to stimulate the eyes, the mind and the heart but are we only on this earth to be massaged in these various ways?

In this world of addicts that we all seem to occupy, there has to be a place for what is not defined as art (nor defined, period).

Who says artists have to make money. Francis Ford Copolla
I would add: Who says artists have to make art? (if Copolla still means that)

[Addendum: les morts-vivants sur France-Culture]

There is a Jewish joke about someone prostrating himself on the floor during the holiday of Yom Kippur and being ridiculed by two observers muttering to themselves “Look who thinks he’s nobody!”

After “being nobody” by not being able to move, speak and communicate, there is no going back to the innocence – and the naivety – of a simple existence; the point of no return can turn most activity into just that, just an activity.

Most people imagine themselves in charge of their own lives and relegate questions about free-will to philosophers.

Rarely do we question what we take for granted, but here is
a brilliant article that does just that – in the New York Times.

It is by Ferris Jabr, a freelance writer and an associate editor at Scientific American.

Why Nothing Is Truly Alive

By FERRIS JABR
MARCH 12, 2014

On a windy day in Ypenburg, the Netherlands, you can sometimes see sculptures the size of buses scuttling across a sandy hill. Made mostly from intricately conjoined plastic tubes, wood and sails, the many-legged skeletons move so fluidly and autonomously that it’s tempting to think of them as alive. Their maker, the Dutch artist Theo Jansen, certainly does. “Since 1990, I have been occupied creating new forms of life,” he says on his website. He calls them Strandbeest. “Eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.”

Poetic, most would say, but Strandbeest are not alive. They are just machines — elaborate, beautiful ones, but inanimate contraptions nonetheless. A few months ago I would have agreed with this reasoning. But that was before I had a remarkable insight about the nature of life. Now, I would argue that Strandbeest are no more or less alive than animals, fungi and plants. In fact, nothing is truly alive.

What is life? Science cannot tell us. Since the time of Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have struggled and failed to produce a precise, universally accepted definition of life. To compensate, modern textbooks point to characteristics that supposedly distinguish the living from the inanimate, the most important of which are organization, growth, reproduction and evolution. But there are numerous exceptions: both living things that lack some of the ostensibly distinctive features of life and inanimate things that have properties of the living.

Crystals, for example, are highly organized; they grow; and they faithfully replicate their structures, but we do not think of them as alive. Similarly, certain computer programs known as “digital organisms” can reproduce, mate and evolve, but ushering such software through the gates to the kingdom of life makes many people uncomfortable. Conversely, some organisms — such as gummy bear-shaped microanimals called tardigrades and brine shrimp (whose eggs are sealed up in little packets like baker’s yeast under the brand name Sea Monkeys) — can enter a period of extreme dormancy during which they stop eating, growing and changing in any way for years at a time, yet are still regarded as living organisms.

In the 1990s, a group of scientists tasked with helping NASA find life on other planets devised a working definition of life: a self-sustaining system capable of Darwinian evolution. Even this phrase does not satisfactorily identify the fundamental difference between living things and nonliving things.

Consider a virus: a bit of DNA or RNA encased in protein that hijacks a cell to make copies of itself. Viruses are incredibly efficient reproducers and they certainly evolve — much faster than most creatures. Yet biologists have disagreed for centuries about whether viruses belong among the ranks of the living, the inanimate or in some kind of purgatory. Gerald Joyce, one of the scientists who helped devise NASA’s working definition of life, says that viruses do not satisfy the definition because they are not “self-sustaining” — that is, they can only evolve in the context of the cells they infect.

The same is true, though, of many larger parasites that everyone agrees are alive. Bloodthirsty intestinal worms, vines that suck the sap from other plants, fungi that extrude filamentous antlers of flame orange through the shells of spiders they have killed — all are just as dependent on their hosts to reproduce and evolve as is a virus.

About 10 years after serving on the NASA panel, Mr. Joyce embarked on experiments that further deflated the agency’s working definition of life. In the lab, he and his colleagues coaxed into existence two rather unique molecules of RNA that can indefinitely make copies of one another by stitching together sequences of nucleotides, their building blocks. Four billion years ago, in Earth’s primordial soup, similar self-replicating RNAs may have spontaneously formed from linkages of free-floating nucleotides. As naked pieces of RNA, they are even simpler than viruses and, because they can reproduce and evolve, Mr. Joyce admits that they, too, meet the working definition of life. Yet he hesitates to say they are alive.

Why so much ambivalence? Why is it so difficult for scientists to cleanly separate the living and nonliving and make a final decision about ambiguously animate viruses? Because they have been trying to define something that never existed in the first place. Here is my conclusion: Life is a concept, not a reality.

To better understand this argument, it’s helpful to distinguish between mental models and pure concepts. Sometimes the brain creates a representation of a thing: light bounces off a pine tree and into our eyes; molecules waft from its needles and ping neurons in our nose; the brain instantly weaves together these sensations with our memories to create a mental model of that tree. Other times the brain develops a pure concept based on observations — a useful way of thinking about the world. Our idealized notion of “a tree” is a pure concept. There is no such thing as “a tree” in the world outside the mind. Rather, there are billions of individual plants we have collectively named trees. You might think botanists have a precise unfailing definition of a tree — they don’t. Sometimes it’s really difficult to say whether a plant is a tree or shrub because “tree” and “shrub” are not properties intrinsic to plants — they are ideas we impinged on them.

Likewise, “life” is an idea. We find it useful to think of some things as alive and others as inanimate, but this division exists only in our heads.

Not only is defining life futile, but it is also unnecessary to understanding how living things work. All observable matter is, at its most fundamental level, an arrangement of atoms and their constituent particles. These associations range in complexity from something as simple as, say, a single molecule of water to something as astonishingly intricate as an ant colony. All the proposed features of life — metabolism, reproduction, evolution — are in fact processes that appear at many different regions of this great spectrum of matter. There is no precise threshold.

Some things we regard as inanimate are capable of some of the processes we want to make exclusive to life. And some things we say are alive get along just fine without some of those processes. Yet we have insisted that all matter naturally segregates into two categories — life and nonlife — and have searched in vain for the dividing line.

It’s not there. We must accept that the concept of life sometimes has its pragmatic value for our particular human purposes, but it does not reflect the reality of the universe outside the mind.

Theo Jansen and his Strandbeests/BeachBeasts
(Music by Khachaturian’s Spartacus)


Video by Theo Jansen

Recognizing life as a concept is, in many ways, liberating. We no longer need to recoil from our impulse to endow Mr. Jansen’s sculptures with “life” because they move on their own. The real reason Strandbeest enchant us is the same reason that any so-called “living thing” fascinates us: not because it is “alive,” but because it is so complex and, in its complexity, beautiful.

Watch a Strandbeest’s sail undulate in the wind, its gears begin to turn, its legs bend and extend in sync over and over — so dauntless, so determined. It does not matter whether this magnificent entity is alive or not. Just look at it go.
====
Strong parallels with Cymatics:

HospitCurt01When the “engine” was just starting to rev up again, when I could still feel the difference between the “nothing” of being a vegetable and what I was starting to experience, i.e., looking outside, at a tree, at the grass, feeling the breeze around me, hearing music… it was clear that all of that was amazingly addictive.
I wanted more of it, even if it was in small doses.
There was a pleasure principle (endorphins?) that was activated, and I was hooked.

What a relief from the hospital where. starving for stimulation, my eyes and brain would relentlessly work off the curtains’ patterns and imagine various creatures and scenes.HospitCurt

It is well known that one of the tenets of U.S. culture posits that people pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Within that system, victims are blamed for their problems and, by implication, the sick and the poor are thought to have brought disease and poverty unto themselves.
To be limping or unhealthy is shameful, to be hidden from public view  – worse, to speak directly of one’s problems is unconscionable.
Most of us are thus invited to struggle in silence and in complete invisibility: no one is interested.
The wounded state is perceived as a threat.

Nothing is more real than nothing. Beckett Malone Meurt/Malone Dies – 1951

We Are Nobody by Pier Marton

Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be. – Samuel Beckett, Molloy, 1951

The clamor is everywhere: BE SOMEBODY!… but those efforts are illusory. Beyond our names and our affiliations lies the same eternal nobody that we were when we were born – and that we will be when we die. What surrounds us – all the stuff, the concepts… – blinds us and entraps us into a fortress, a coffin. These facts, though, do not constitute any reason to become pessimistic, merely realistic. And freer.

A false sense of self, or is it that any sense of self is false?
Not unlike the Buddhist warning about everything being “maya“- a form of illusion, it is clear that much of what surrounds us (the concepts, the busyness… ) stands on wobbly foundations.
The silence – not the physical type [machines were beeping, announcements and similar activities abounded around me] – a form of beyond-activity spelled out clearly, within a form of silence – that everything was nil.

O vanity of vanities, behind all the “stuff” that surrounds us lies…

… nothing.
And no need to expand much on this.

Either you understand this or you don’t.
More words will not help.

It seems most people have no interest in this type of “information” – it just does not seem to fit anywhere.


About “being nobody” per se, paralleling Kafka’s “I have hardly anything in common with myself ” & “My People! My People! If only I had one,” I would refer you to many others who have expanded on that topic: Guy Debord, Alejandro Jodorowski, U.G. Krishnamurti. Or you can view the recent brilliant film “The Other Son.
Without saying, saving lives is not part of this concern.

CabbageSMLMarton

My cabbage by Pier Marton

Say No To Say Yes

I may have written about this earlier: this was a key moment in my “survival.”
I had tubes in my head, my nose, my throat, my stomach, where else I am not sure anymore… I had been more dead than alive. I could not speak… I could not write… my eyes seemed my only way to connect to the visitors. After being in the I.C.U. for what seemed like an eternity [beware of the myth of that neutral taste of eternity on the Jewish Shabbat -nobody had considered what eternity in hell could be like?!], as another tube was being inserted into me, this time into my throat, I came back to life by shouting a loud and clear: “NO!” –  As if this were a form of re-incarnation (re-entering my body), I came back to a certain sense of self by refusing that tube.
The nurse was shocked, I had been absolutely compliant before… I had surprised myself too.
Was this the same life force that Marceline Loridan-Ivens – who survived the concentrations camps – often speaks of?
Biology of the cells uniting?  Life must be?

My refusal corresponded to some re-investment of my body, and my need to control its boundaries.

Turn your weakness into a strength.
I used to tell my students that whatever made their work imperfect had to be turned around to become part of their message, i.e., video was only the poor parent of film until… its raw quality could be perceived as the 60’s rallying slogans, ¡Si se puede!/Yes we can! – Do it your way!
This is not unrelated to Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theater or the techniques used by Third World Cinema as they thumb(ed) their nose to Hollywood’s status quo.
Here though the principle is applied in a completely private way, and is imperceptible.

Everything depends on you.
I have mentioned this earlier, but without realizing this “within your bones,” there is no way to proceed. We may or many not be surrounded by loving individuals but anything that counts, anything that will ever take place and make a huge difference comes from you.
It should not be tainted by sadness or joy but should be seen as a fact.
Life is much simpler once we deal with facts, not that complexity ever leaves us.

A corollary:
Everything that counts has to be discovered alone.
The more alone and the more shapeless and unfiltered the experience,
the more unable to catalog it…
the more it will have a chance to remain anchored inside you.

On mesure la richesse de l’homme à ce dont ‘il peut se passer. Proverbe Zen cité par Michel Vaujour
One measures the richness of a human being through what he/she can live without. Zen proverb mentioned by Michel Vaujour

Everything is always about everything… And in the deepest sense, everything is a reflection of nothing.
If this fact emerges as a reality, these words which seem to belong to the realm of thinking probably engage resistance, and thus defeat my purpose.
What I say here is unrelated to mysticism, philosophy, and nihilism.

The world of ideas is not my domain; these are not elements to be discussed or argued with.
Actual silence or your own death could help me, but you would misunderstand these suggestions.
Words seem only one way to reconcile what I know.