sit on the grass it is autumn the sun is shining the stream is sheehwhooshsheehing _hououh_sheeh-ing along wear strong reading glasses _ let yourself get lost in observing the green blades _ the long shade the mosquito is projecting detached & still part of your hyperwhite writing pad _ you’re holding in your lap legs crossed it is easy to imagine _ your first impressions when as an infant                                 your eyes ran around in surprise                                 trying                                 enchanted                                 to follow                                 myriads of changing colors & shapes                                 with surreal sounds reaching out                                 and becoming your same body   What have your eyes seen? What have your eyes touched? What have your eyes smelled? What have your eyes heard? What have your eyes tasted? ___At 1.30pm on Sundays in winter - the life of the day has already gone___ Olympic records broken every four years give the parameters of a(n) (im)possible plasticity of the human body. Nietzsche - the least patriotic of all Germans, and the least German of the Germans /Bataille - has wiped out the notion of the many, or of the trine, or of the One God with his all-demanding Übermensch and the terrifying cognitive responsibility such concept entails. The industrial revolution has slowly forged an entire population of Supermen. The Über/Supermen, the refined and speculative category to which we belong, with the knowing maps of the memes of past and present if not future societies, are selecting what man needs to get to a broader consciousness that allows for wider if not unrestricted borders, and at the same time for a kind of focalization which should be more complex and involute: rational depths with the emotional quality of an ongoing disclosure, continuous ecstatic revelation. The Infant/Adult progresses towards the threshold of Immortality.     It has been stated that Man: is addicted to image and spectacle -  nobody ever said that Guy Debord was not right, is addicted to speed – it happened after Marinetti’s Futurism and while preparing for the two World Wars, to comfort, since ever but amplified through Caravaggio’s and Bernini’s impressive Baroque, to sleep and reverie, to spleen and ideal, and such tendency became acute after Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, to stressful events, violent and aggressive behavior, undoubtedly enhanced with 9/11 and religious fanaticism, to strong emotions made all pervasive with the best out of Hollywood, and ready to experiment Paul Virilio’s Tele-Presence, to the simultaneity of multi-tasking after having realized uncountable potentialities and the limit set by a 24h day – well focalized with McLuhan’s globalized village, to cyberblinking colors as soon as there was an Internet connection, to all what is cyber (same as before).

 

‘For wars we were … admirably prepared. Were they not foretold … as precursors to the coming of Christ, which might (my mother hoped) not be long delayed? We could get along nicely without gas, electricity, bathrooms, tap water, indoor lavatories, restaurants, luxuries, hot-water bottles - in a word, in an Arran cottage or a remote Perthshire farmhouse. Like my father I was naturally a good shot and I was skilled at climbing and ambuscades. I should, I believe, have made a good guerrilla fighter … It is the custom now to attribute to the Victorians a sort of bland and blind security. On the contrary, we were ready for everything…’ Catherine Carswell on Textualities by David Fergus [Available: October 30 2009] .

 

"To learn," said the Master, "and then to practise opportunely what one has learnt—does not this bring with it a sense of satisfaction? "Have no associates in study who are not advanced somewhat like yourself. "When you have erred, be not afraid to correct yourself." "The man of greater mind who, when he is eating, craves not to eat to the full; who has a home, but craves not for comforts in it; who is active and earnest in his work and careful in his words; who makes towards men of high principle, and so maintains his own rectitude—that man may be styled a devoted student." Confucius, from The Analects, Book I and Book II

With a little help from my friends

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