All space is already occupied by the enemy

Gustave Courbet is one of the leaders of the Commune. He instigates the demolition of Napoleon's statue in the Place de Vendome because it is a symbol of militarism and imperialism. He writes I get up, I eat breakfast, I sit down and preside for 12 hours a day, my head begins to feel like a baked apple. But despite all this unaccustomed turmoil of the head and brain, I’m in a state of enchantment. Paris est un vrai paradis. The poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud are also involved. In the last days of the Commune, Edward Manet draws heartbreaking pictures of the Communards slaughtered at the barricades by the French Army


http://marxists.org/history/france/paris-commune/index.htm

May 16th 1871 /// to demolish the Vendôme Column

Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

http://www.ccwgraduateschool.org/a-conversation-between-michael-asbury-and-sean-lynch/

Democracy /// Arthur Rimbaud

'The flag goes with the foul landscape,
and our jargon muffles the drum.'
In the great centers we'll nurture
the most cynical prostitution.
We'll massacre logical revolts.

In spicy and drenched lands!--
at the service of the most monstrous
exploitations, industrial or military.
'Farewell here, no matter where.

Conscripts of good will,
ours will be a ferocious philosophy;
ignorant as to science, rabid for comfort;
and let the rest of the world croak.
This is the real advance. Marching orders, let's go!'

on the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers

Can the point at issue be more definitively and incisively presented than by Rimbaud himself in his personal copy of [ Une saison en enfer ]? In the margin, beside the passage "on the silk of the seas and the arctic flowers," he later wrote, "There's no such thing." (Benjamin, "Surrealism" 208)

Correspondances

La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

II est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l'expansion des choses infinies,
Comme l'ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l'encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l'esprit et des sens.

— Charles Baudelaire

drawing / rimbaud's hall

The floor of the hallway of Rimbaud's home in Charleville












…see your whole life spread out in a spatial panorama, a vast maze of rooms, streets, landscapes, not sequential but arranged in shifting associational patterns. Your attic room in St. Louis opens into a New York loft, from which you step into a Tangier street.

This place feels like a funeral, the locals sit at the bar in black, in silence. I order a beer and lay out the beermats in front of me in hexagons, looking blankly through the rain to the Zonnecenter: El Sol opposite, across the street with its black and white chequerboard crossing. The white zone is for loading and unloading only.

The past and the future make an encounter like black and white. The real and the virtual coalesce at the border like a wound healing over.

Two forlorn chandeliers moving gently in the wind to the tune of fly me to the moon.