Conatus

We three When all these things are done And the stream of blood Has veiled the murky air With paws of crimson Which the sun sucks upwards Then we shall dance All thy blood Around thy tomb And over the piled corpses I will lift my limbs High with each step And all the folk who’ll see me there Yea, all who from afar only my shadow see will say For a great king All his flesh and blood Hold high festival and solemn revel And blessed is he That hath children Who will dance around his holy tomb Such royal dances of victory

St Michael's Mount, Cornwall, England

Theodore Meets in the Wood the Spectre of His Ancestor Guido Cavalcanti by Henry Fuseli, c. 1783.

“A certain emperor always bore the fleeting nature of all things in his mind, in order not to value them too seriously, and to be able to live quietly in their midst. Conversely, everything seems to me much too important for it to be so fleeting; I seek an eternity for everything: ought one to pour the most precious salves and wines into the sea? My consolation is that everything that is true is eternal: the sea will wash it up again.”

"Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs." — Charles Baudelaire.

"Analysis again. But where? How? Well, everywhere possible. Where unskirtable contradictions come to the surface. Where disturbing breaches of meaning trip us up amidst daily banalities, impossible yet perfectly viable loves, all kinds of constructivist passions that mine the edifices of morbid rationality... It can be individual, for those who tend to lead their lives as if it were a work of art; dual in all possible ways, including, why not, a psychoanalytic couch, as long as it has been dusted off; multiple, trough group, network, institutional, and collective practices; and finally, micropolitical by virtue of other social practices, other forms of auto valorizations and militant actions, leading, through a systematic decentering of social desire, to soft subversions and imperceptible revolutions that will eventually change the face of the world, making it happier. Let's face it: it is long overdue." (Guattari, "Entering the Post Media Era," p.306)

“The crimes of extreme civilization are certainly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarity because of their refinement, the corruption they presuppose, and their superior degree of intellectuality.” — Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Les Diaboliques (1874), translated from the original french text.

Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) directed by Paul Morrissey.

Djävulens öga (The Devil’s Eye) - Ingmar Bergman - 1960.

Berufung. The Appeal. 1941. Arno Breker.

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Ring Verse, “The Lord of the Rings”, 1954.

كتبتُ أيضًا؛ في عام ٢٠٢٠، من ضمن تأملات ما زالت مستمرة عن الفن: تكمن أهمية الفن في أنه العزاء الذي لن يقدمه لك أحد، تجربة لمس شعور الفنان تشبه الوقوع، صدفةً، في صدرٍ واسع يرحِّب بالنحيب الذي كنت تخفيه عن العالم، لكنك ترعاه وتحميه كطفلٍ أنجبتَه عن طريق الخطأ.

ما الفنّ إن لم يكن تَرنيمةً وأغنيةً مُدوِّية، تُعلي من شأن الحواس وتُمجّدها؟ ينبغي للفنون أن تُصنَّف وفق الحواس: فثمّة فنٌّ للعَيْن، كالرسم والعمارة والتصوير الفوتوغرافي والسينما؛ وثمّة فنٌّ لّلَمس، كالنحت؛ وثمّة فنٌّ للأذن، كالموسيقى والغناء؛ وثمّة فنٌّ للسان، كفنون الطهي وثمّة فنٌّ للأنف، كصناعة العطور. وهناك فنونٌ تجمع أكثر من حاسّة، كالشعر والخطابة وكذلك النحت، وأخرى تُشرك الجسد كلَّه، كالرَقص. حتى أبسط أشكال الفن، التي حلت محلها الفنون الراقية، نشأت من الرغبة في التلذذ بالعالم الّذي تُقدمه الحواس. للعالم الحسّي فنونه، كما للعالم العقلي علومه، وهذان القطبان هما ما تتراقص حوله كينونة الإنسان في سموها.

some works by august rodin

عادة وضع الموسيقى المؤثّرة في خلفيّة الڤيديوهات هدفها التأثير العاطفي وعرقلة قدرة المشاهد على التفكير القويم الخالي من العواطف والتأثيرات الخارجيّة؛ النسخة القديمة من هذه الممارسة نجدها في نصوص الكتب المقدّسة والطلاسم السحريّة، حيث نجد السجع الشعري بارز بهدف التأثير على المستمع وبث الرهبة في جوفه وإثارة مشاعره، وبجملة واحدة : منعه من التفكير بصورة عقلانيّة. والسبب وراء تأثير الموسيقى هذا قد يعود لحقيقة أنّ النَغَمة قد سبقت الكلمة، أي أنّ الإنسان ألِفَ الموسيقى وأصوات الطيور والحيوانات عامّةً قبل إبتكار اللغة، وهي الحُقبة الأطول من تاريخ الإنسان، لذلك ترتبط الأصوات عامّةً والموسيقى خاصّةً بالقسم اللاعقلاني من الإنسان وبالحقبة الزمنيّة الّتي نشطت بها الحواس والعضلات أكثر من العقل الّذي خطا خطوة كبيرة نحو إجلاء ماهيّته عندما إبتكرَ اللغة.

The delight of attaining a comprehensive sentimental and intellectual haven within the interior of another language, as though one were a native speaker, born into words and raised alongside them, amounts to acquiring a second home. It is the possibility of establishing a second inward conscious life, complete with its own depth and experiences, standing in contrast to the naively given world of our original tongue. One tears through the web and walls of a language circumscribed by the mother tongue and travels into another, whose intellectual and experiential possibilities are unfathomable. This journey is akin to traveling to another country: one comes to inhabit two parallel worlds, each capable of greatly enriching the other. The history of a language, the enigmatic life of its words, words that grow and possess layers as deep as those of the earth, yet never reach stasis, continuing instead to grow like children beside the human being who imparts to them ever new meanings, the lived experience and history of a people, the geographical landscape reflected within it as if upon the surface of the sea, its strata of semantics, and consequently the Weltanschauung of its speakers: all of these are, as it were, telepathically transmitted to the learner. His horizon is expanded, and only thus does one become capable of truly absorbing the fruits of another culture, a language must be interiorized: not merely learned, but lived from within, mere memorizing is insufficient from the point of view of linguistic sensibility.