leaf

 

… the constant motion in the leaves rendering his landscapes confused and unmeaning… [T]he same objection necessarily applies to all moving objects, which can never be properly delineated without the aid of memory'. Only after it had fallen to the ground was a leaf available for impression, when it rejoined the world of inert things.

Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion p44 commenting on Daguerre's experiments.

regeneration sunsets

constellated

cyanometer / measuring the sky

MGS // tankerton castle

The Terminal Zone

He lay on the sand with the rusty bicycle wheel. Now and then he would cover some of the spokes with sand, neutralising the radial geometry. The rim interested him. Hidden behind a dune the hut no longer seemed a part of his world. The sky remained constant, the warm air touching the shreds of test papers sticking up from the sand. He continued to examine the wheel. Nothing happened.

“nonsensuous” similarity

“We must assume,” writes Walter

Benjamin, “that in the remote past

the processes considered imitable includ

ed those in the sky.” 

http://www.brianmassumi.com/textes/Archive%20of%20Experience.pdf

overspent// disasters of spring

the veiled image at Saïs

the veiled image at Saïs


turn at the statue of Champollion, says the guide

Lacan / ecrits/ 160

Apocalypse:
late 14c., "revelation, disclosure," from Church L. apocalypsis "revelation," from Gk. apokalyptein "uncover, disclose, reveal," from apo- "from" (see apo-) + kalyptein "to cover, conceal"

Calypso


Sheet of paper has gone missing must look for it at home. It contained:
1. The discussion of the concept of “system” and the doctrine of the extinguishing of intention in the truth, explained in terms of the veiled image of Sais.
2. Discussion of the concept of “essence” as the mark of truth.’

WB 1913-1926 /272

M. Champollion paid a visit, in his way, to the ruins of Sais, ... That part of the enclosure might well have contained great temple of Neith, the chief goddess of Sais, and we drove away, by our musket-shots, some owls, ...

The Asiatic journal and monthly register for British and foreign India, China and Australasia Vol 27







Novalis Die Lehrlinge zu Sais 1799

I. The Pupil. — Men travel in manifold paths: whoso traces and compares these, will find strange Figures come to light; Figures which seem as if they belonged to that great Cipher-writing which one meets with everywhere, on wings of birds, shells of eggs, in clouds, in the snow, in crystals, in forms of rocks, in freezing waters, in the interior and exterior of mountains, of plants, animals, men, in the lights of the sky, in plates of glass and pitch when touched and struck on, in the filings round the magnet, and the singular conjunctures of Chance. In such Figures one anticipates the key to that wondrous Writing, the grammar of it; but this Anticipation will not fix itself into shape, and appears as if, after all, it would not become such a key for us. An Alcahest seems poured out over the senses of men. Only for a moment will their wishes, their thoughts thicken into form. Thus do their Anticipations arise; but after short whiles, all is again swimming vaguely before them, even as it did.


TO ENVISION ✴ 39 Flusser / technical image
And so it looks as though our historical development in the West has reached a final stage that does not look significantly different from a Buddhist worldview: a veil of Maya surrounds the yawning nothingness of nirvana. From this standpoint, the powerful stream of Western history is about to empty into the ocean of the timeless Orient.
There is considerable evidence that such a suicidal view of Western society is justified. And yet this view largely overlooks what is significant in the current cultural revolution. That is, the visionary power that we are beginning to use and that we owe to technical images makes us capable of calculating and computing the whirring nothingness around us. Therefore our illusions are not things we should abandon to fall into nirvana but rather are quite the opposite, our answer to the yawing nothingness that threatens us. The veil of technical images that surrounds us, as similar as it may appear to an Oriental veil, challenges us to an engagement neatly opposed to the Oriental. Our veil is not to be torn but rather woven more and more closely. The following chapters are dedicated to looking at this increasingly dense mesh.

cellophane world

In our garden there was an abandoned, ramshackle summerhouse. I loved it for its stained glass windows. Whenever I wandered about inside it, passing from one coloured pane to the next, I was transformed: I took on the colours of the landscape that - now flaming and now dusty, now smouldering and now sumptuous - lay before me in the window. It was like what happened with my watercolours, when things would take me to their bosom as soon as I overcame them with a moist cloud. Something similar occured with soap bubbles… In those days one could buy chocolate in pretty little crisscrossed packets, in which every square was wrapped separately in colourful tinfoil… green and gold, blue and orange, red and silver… from out of this sparkling entanglement the colours one day broke upon me, and I am still sensible of the sweetness with which my eye imbibed them. It was the sweetness of chocolate.

Benjamin / Berlin Childhood/ Colours
























































…electricity through an over abundance of light produces multiple blindings

The Palace of Curtains III

YOU'RE DESTROYING THE UNIVERSE!

Kim shoots a hole in the sky. Blackness pours out and darkens the earth. In the last rays of a painted sun, a Johnson holds up a barbed-wire fence for others to slip through. The fence has snagged the skyline … a great black rent. Screaming crowds point to the torn sky.

burroughs / the place of dead roads

observations, weather changes or other events of daily importance

284. EXT. ARRAKEEN PALACE - DUSK

Paul opens his mouth and issues an ever increasing
wind. Lightning and thunder begin. Clouds begin to
form over the Palace. In the half-light of dusk,
thousands of Fremen watch the sky. Giant golden
lights are illuminated and their rays shoot far into
the sky illuminating the growing clouds. Five
tremendous bolts of lightning suddenly unleash a
downpour of RAIN ON ARRAKIS. The Fremen stand
awestruck as they are drenched with water falling
from the sky.

285. INT. GREAT HALL - ARRAKEEN PALACE - DAY

WE MOVE through Paul's glowing blue eyes into
beautiful blue luminescent light.

A gigantic WIND arises, and suddenly appearing in
the blue light is an ocean of light rolling like
gold glass off into infinite. The blue becomes
darker and a golden lotus flower blooms in the
night.

THE END

Locker Room

Realism = making the conditions of the present available.


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

Toby is reading The Time Machine by HG Wells.

I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next as I felt then …
I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling…
I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling.
They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that one has on a switchback - of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace, night followed day like the flapping of a black wing…
The twinkling sensation of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye… The sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band… Minute by minute the white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by the bright, brief green of spring…

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

heavy sky

studio

different kinds of sky

[In lieblicher Bläue . . .]

Carta Azzurra / Carta Turchina
Hebrew printing on blue paper

Early in the C16 under the influence of the Italian master printer Aldus Manutius, a new 'secondary deluxe' medium [after the preferred vellum] was introduced into Venetian Hebrew printing by the Xtian publisher of Jewish texts, Daniel Bomberg of Antwerp. The new material, blue paper, a product of Renaissance fascination with the indigo dye, became a convention of Hebrew deluxe printing in the C16.
It is possible that the special status of blue in Jewish religious tradition - according to the Talmud, blue is the colour of the divine throne - led to the affinity for this colour in the Hebrew book world.
…
Cheap blue tinted paper was widely used by indigent printers in towns such as Dubno, Jozefow. Kpys, Korec, Ostrog, Wilno, Zhitomir…

Over the centuries papers of other colours, such as green, rose, grey, yellow, orange, were occasionally used for printing special copies of Hebrew books, and sometimes on large, wide margined sheets. In most cases the paper was dyed in the pulp, but in some cases it was painted after manufacture. In a very few instances a variety of coloured papers was used to print a single book. In a few other instances the text was printed in red ink on coloured paper…

In Eastern Europe in this century, posters and other ephemera, in large part Yiddish, were often printed on coloured paper stock.

Brad Sabin Hill
Hebrew Section
Oriental & India Office Collections, BL 1995