pearl diving

POWER
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power

AR

tongue

out of our skins

cranach melancholia

ironing rembrandt

holbein ambassadors

monument to the vanquished peasants

Thanks F - proliferation

Explaining pictures to a dead hare / hair

 Dead Original // Five Years // 2012

Image: Lanis Levy
(thanks Lanis!)

melencolia's block

melencolia ii

melencolia 1

melencolia

Ensisheim meteorite / donnerstein

Title: The meteorite of Ensisheim - 1492 to 1992
Authors: Marvin, U. B.
Journal: Meteoritics (ISSN 0026-1114), vol. 27, March 1992, p. 28-72.
Bibliographic Code: 1992Metic..27...28M

reverse of Jerome in the Wilderness/ Durer / NG London

A short guide on how to recover a meteorite

sweet meteor of death 2016

‘Verwisch die Spuren!’

But as well as supporting Surrealism’s analyses of kitsch and clutter and all their utopian and dystopian investments, Benjamin and friends are compelled to propagandize for the opposite, more conventionally Modernist strategy of wipe-out, emancipation from clutter. In 1931 Benjamin invents the persona of the ‘destructive character’ - enemy of the comfort-seeking ‘etui-person’:

The etui-person seeks comfort, and the case is its epitome. The inside of the case is a velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world.

The destructive character is a type opposed to repression in its political and psychic senses, who - causing havoc by cutting ways through - removes the traces which sentimentally bind us to the status quo.

The destructive character knows only one slogan: make space; only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air and open space is stronger than any hatred. The destructive character is young and cheerful, for destroying rejuvenates by clearing away traces of our own age... .

The destructive character wants to make possible the formulation of experience according to revised and appropriate tenets.

 

...

‘Verwisch die Spuren!’, ‘Efface the traces!’, Brecht insisted in one poem in his 1926 lyric cycle ‘Handbook for City-dwellers’. For those traces, the monograms, screens, knickknacks on mantlepieces secreted like sprays of dog-piss, are also tied up with possession; and so signal class society. Brecht’s poetic sentiment details the issue of autonomy at stake: Efface the traces, rather than have someone else efface them. ‘Efface the traces’ - screeched Benjamin in February 1933 in ‘Live Without Traces’, a tiny fragment which presented a horror-vision of the cluttered bourgeois parlour, and detailed the new, potential, lives to be led within shiny, translucent steel and glass. In his 1939 commentary on Brecht’s poem, Benjamin noted that the phrase ‘efface the traces’ now seems to have been a secret indication of the strategy of crypto-emigration by communist activists. By 1939 it had long been obvious to Benjamin and others that it was ‘Jewish trash’, plus other bits of social refuse, which power decreed must be swept out. 

esther leslie

August 2013 // a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes

'[e]ach single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it' (

In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself'

In melancholia, accordingly, countless separate struggles are carried on over the object, in which hate and love contend with each other; the one seeks to detach the libido from the object, the other to maintain this position of the libido against the assault'

'So by taking flight into the ego love escapes extinction'

Just as mourning impels the ego to give up the object by declaring the object to be dead and offering the ego the inducement of continuing to live, so does each single struggle of ambivalance loosen the fixation of the libido to the object by disparaging it, denigrating it and even as it were killing it' (257). 

melencolia / durer's solid

When thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches an historical subject only when he encounters it as a monad.

WB/ TPH/XVII