dependencies

builder's language

Calm block fallen here from some dark disaster

Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur

……………………………………………………………………………………………

--> The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words "block", "pillar" "slab", "beam". A calls them out; — B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such a call. Conceive this as a complete primitive language. (PI 2.)

-->

Later "this" and "there" are added (with functions analogous to the function these words have in natural language), and "a, b, c, d" as numerals. An example of its use: builder A says "d — slab — there" and points, and builder B counts four slabs, "a, b, c, d..." and moves them to the place pointed to by A. The builder's language is an activity into which is woven something we would recognize as language, but in a simpler form. This language-game resembles the simple forms of language taught to children, and Wittgenstein asks that we conceive of it as "a complete primitive language" for a tribe of builders.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

{5}Here, above all, is the basis of the profound affinity between the adventurer and the artist, and also, perhaps, of the artist's attraction by adventure. For the essence of a work of art is, after all, that it cuts out a piece of the endlessly continuous sequences of perceived experience, detaching it from all connections with one side or the other, giving it a self-sufficient form as though defined and held together by an inner core. A part of existence, interwoven with uninterruptedness of that existence, yet nevertheless felt as a whole, as an integrated unit - this is the form common to both the work of art and the adventure. Indeed, it is an attribute of this form to make us feel that in both the work of art and the adventure the whole of life is somehow comprehended and consummated - and this irrespective of the particular theme either of them may have. Moreover we feel this, not although, but because, the work of art exists entirely beyond life as a reality; the adventure, entirely beyond life as an uninterrupted course which intelligibly connects every element with its neighbors. It is because the work of art and the adventure stand over against life (even though in very different senses of the phrase) that both are analogous to the totality of life itself, even as this totality presents itself in the brief summary and crowdedness of a dream experience.

Georg Simmel The Adventure

 

The Phenomenon of the Future

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Gibson / Neuromancer

Over the world as it ends in decrepitude is a pale sky that may perhaps dissipate with the clouds - streaks of used sunsets that bleed into the dormant waters of a river, submerged beneath rays and drops. The trees are bored, and beneath their whitened foliage [whitened by the dust of time, not by the dust of roads], rises the tent of the Revealer of Things Past…
Mallarme / Divagations / 11

The sky is thin as paper here.
Burroughs / Cities of the Red Night


The narrow staircase pushes me into the attic where the wall paper is loose. There are no images because the room is itself an image.
The yellow-orange cloth wrapping the skylight seems to hold a fallen sun; a softly illuminating sun of about one meter diameter, flat like a coin. I sweat and dream, washed up on a cold beach at midday.

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.

Pynchon / Gravity's RAINBOW


‘The sea had receded and the ground was grey and brownish like the sky. Abstraction grey. Calmly, intensely, hopelessly, the ultimate abstraction took hold of me.’ It seems to me that the ‘abstraction grey’, which recalls Hegel’s ‘grey on grey’ of theory, is the place to begin not so much thinking the ‘future’ as thinking the present.

noys/ beradi 

"When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk." Philosophy of Right ( (1821), translated by T. M. Knox, (1952)) p. 13 

1

The sky had lifted at least thirty feet.

I sat there, not moving. The shock must have cracked the

pavement, my right hand fumbled in the rubble. As I breathed,

the silence stilled the explosion of stars whose sparks still

crackled in my head. The white lines in the pavement showed

dimly in the darkness: my hand left the ground, felt up my left

arm, up to my shoulder, back down my ribs to my hips: noth-

ing, I was intact, I could go on.

I stood up. Falling flat on my face, sprawled out like a cross, I

remembered that I had forgotten to check over my legs as well.

ASTRAGAL /sarrazin