Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts

Saturday, January 22, 2022

For a friend: "that work is being done on"

(you perhaps):

"...all things change in time; some are made of change itself, and the poem is of these. It is not an object; the poem is a process... it is available, heard once, or... always at hand... that climate of excitement... announcing with the poem that we are about to change, that work is being done on the self."
— Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry [1949] (Paris Press, 1996) p174-175.

Friday, April 24, 2020

Space for those who never go there

"A man with a book goes to the light.
A library begins that way...
This one starts with a man who wants to read a book...

Inspired by a great teacher the fortunate young man
winks to the chapel as he passes...
He was there though he never opened its door...

Not daring to enter the Piazza, I
diverted to other streets
toward it but never allowing myself
to arrive...

Space for those who never go there,
those who must be near and don't enter
and those who go in."

— excerpts from "The Continual Renewal of Architecture Comes from Changing Concepts of Space", Louis Kahn (Perspecta, v.4, 1957).



Saturday, July 9, 2016

The Situation Would if it Could


“the situation”

“the situation”

“the situation”

“the situation is only what it is”

“the situation holds on to itself”

“the situation paints itself as inevitable”

“the situation is forever”

“the situation is only interested in its own well-being”

“the situation does not think twice”

“the situation cannot do it”

“the situation does not want to”

“the situation would if it could”

“the situation isn’t half as bad as they say”

“the situation tosses everything into the garbage that doesn’t belong to it”

“the situation incarcerates everybody in its realm”

“the situation does not sing”

“the situation does not argue its case”

“the situation will go away”

“the situation must go away”

“the situation lets nobody off the hook”

“the situation sits on itself”

“the situation continues to invade territories”

“the situation falls victim to the same collateral damage that it inflicts”

“the situation does not invite self examination”

“the situation is an accumulation of its own past”

“the situation can’t stand itself”

“the situation necessitates longing”

“the situation routinely shoots itself in the foot”

“if the situation could understand itself it would not continue”

“the situation is hungry for more”

“the situation’s future can only be other than itself”

“the situation forever boasts questionable accomplishments”

“the situation… no!”

“the situation overwhelms or underwhelms”

“the situation the situation”

“situation”

“the situation”

“the situation”

“yes”

“the situation”

“the situation”

“situation?”

“which situation?”

“the”

“what? no”

“the situation”

“the situation has no other goal than itself”

“the results of the situation result from the characteristics of the situation”

“the situation requires all lives to be in it”

“to be alive is to be in the situation”

“all together are the situation”

“the hidden obvious is the situation”
“the situation is the end effect of history”

“the situation is what has us and surrounds us”

“the obvious cannot be admitted therefore it is the obvious”

“the situation is not something but everything”

“words transplanted like onions from their original sprouts
     cannot say the situation”

“the situation says itself in everything”

“the situation is life acquiring death”

“the situation is blind to itself”

“the blind situation acquires blind death”

“the situation is characterized by its blindness”

“its death is characterized by its blindness”

“the situation is everything and all”

“all together are the situation [again]”

“all together are blind”

“all together’s death is blind”

“the blind death of the all together is the obvious”

“the situation implies the possibility of revolt against it”

“the situation is what it is only as long as we allow it to be so”

“the muscles that make the situation function
     are the same muscles that must take it down”



—Peter Schumann, from Bread & Sentences (Burlington: Fomite, 2015).

Lines cited here as a found "archi-poem" are from a series of charcoal sketches for a 2014 performance called "The Situation", included as illustrations in an amazing book of aphorisms (“neither fiction, nor poetry, nor philosophy”) gathered from the working notebooks of the founder and director of the Bread & Puppet Theater.

Please obtain this book, and read it now!
The situation demands it!


http://sales.breadandpuppet.org/books/books/bread-and-sentences