Interlude XXX. Foucault - part 10

The joy of torture + GreenFestival

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XXIX. Foucault - part 9

From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

Chapter 3 - The Heart Laid Bare - Cont...

Foucault, like Bataille, had more than a theoretical interest in transgression. In these years, he evidently began to explore for himself a “shattering of the philosophical subject,” not just through intoxication and dreaming -- but also through an erotic kind of “suffering” that “breaks apart.” In his 1962 essay on transgression, he quoted one of Bataille’s most lyrical descriptions of the experience, which evokes a moment of “divine agony” when “I instantly reenter the night of a lost child, and enter the anguish, in order to prolong a rapture with no end other than exhaustion and no exit other than fainting. It is the joy of torture.”

This most excruciating (and mysterious) of pleasures was not an end in itself for either Bataille or Foucault. For Bataille, it was one basis for a kind of philosophical critique, laying bare the “nonsense of the will to know” -- and the purely negative freedom of the human being. By illuminating the enigma of transcendence, sado-masochistic eroticism offered an esoteric but potentially fruitful means of self-analysis, a way to pursue a “psychological quest.” And at the ultimate limit, where torture turned into ecstasy, a voluptuously painful eroticism made possible as well a “negative theology founded on mystical experience,” permitting a person (in Batailles words) “to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity.

p88

Foucault agreed. “Nothing is negative in transgression,” he declared in his 1962 essay on Bataille, explaining (and implicitly defending) a form of extreme erotic experience that is simultaneously “pure” and “confused...” “Transgression,” Foucault writes, thus “affirms the limited being” -- namely, the human being -- “and it affirms this limitlessness into which it leaps,” opening a space of possible transfiguration and offering us moderns our “sole manner of discovering the sacred in its unmediated content.” Because this was the occult prospect conjured up by Bataille’s books, Foucault was only exaggerating slightly when he described them as a kind of “consecration undone: a transubstantiation ritualized in reverse” -- an unholy communication with uncanny daimonic forces, “where real presence becomes again a recumbent body.”

That Bataille's claim to originality rests, in part, on his approach to eroticism seems clear enough. Nietzsche, for all of his talk about bodies and power, was a man mortified by his own sexuality; it is in this area that Bataille most dramatically extends his master's thought. That the uninhibited pursuit of eroticism might enable a person to “say yes” to life, even “up to the point of death.” also seems plausible. Through the imaginative dramas that give to erotic rituals a pattern and unity, human beings can act out freely, and so gain a sense of mastery over, impulses and memories otherwise experienced as involuntary and perhaps intolerable...

p89

...as one of Bataille's besotted erotic heroes describes the experience in Story of the Eye, the greatest of his novels; “It struck me that death was the sole outcome of my erection” and that “the goal of my sexual licentiousness” was “a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating."

I would love to quip that they just don't write porn like that anymore, but, alas, I really have no idea.

These preoccupations can be found, beautifully sublimated, in Jean Barraqué's most important composition from this period, Séquence, a concerto for soprano, percussion and "diverse instruments," which he completed in 1955. Barraqué had begun work on Séquence before meeting Foucault, planning at first to use poems by Rimbaud and the surrealist Paul Eluard as texts. Foucault, however, persuaded his lover to drop these texts and to use, instead, four poems by Nietzsche. The work is carefully shaped to climax with the most important of the poems, "Ariadne's Lament."

...At the heart of "Ariadne's Lament" is one of the key intuitions that Nietzsche in fact shares with Sade: that pleasure and pain are permeable, and that experiencing the transmutation of pain into pleasure, of hate into love, in Dionysian ecstasy, is the beginning of wisdom. As Gilles Deleuze would later gloss the philosophical subtext of the poem, "what we in fact know of the will to power is suffering and torture, but the will to power is still the unknown joy, the unknown happiness, the unknown God."

Ariadne (/æriˈædniː/; Latin: Ariadne; "most holy", Cretan Greek αρι [ari] "most" and αδνος [adnos] "holy"), in Greek mythology, was the daughter of Minos, King ofCrete, and his queen Pasiphaë, daughter of Helios. She is mostly associated with mazes and labyrinths, due to her involvement in the myths of the Minotaur and Theseus. Her father put her in charge of the labyrinth where sacrifices were made as part of reparations (either to Poseidon or to Athena, depending on the version of the myth); however, she would later help Theseus in overcoming the Minotaur and saving the would-be sacrificial victims. In other stories, she became the bride of the god Dionysus, with the question of her background as being either a mortal or a goddess varying in those accounts...

-Wiki

I was originally going to skip this bit about Ariadne, but labyrinths are going to be a thing later and this is kind of important to that.

p93

Nietzsche once put it this way: “The path to one's own heaven always leads through the voluptuousness of one's own hell."

Green Festival.

I've been attending the GreenFestival here since it began in 2001. The first year or two I even paid the entrance fee. Back then the show didn't fill all of the space in the Concourse Exhibition Center, so there were blocked off sections. One year there was even room for a large geodesic dome to be erected in an otherwise empty area.

Soon, I started volunteering, both to get in free and to help the cause. The event really does run on volunteer power. But wielding that power requires good volunteer coordinators. The event has sometimes had this, and sometimes, not so much. In the early days I would volunteer for the setup crew. We would go in early and help everyone setup their booths and do all the hauling and misc. work required when putting on, what had by this point grown to be an event that completely packed the hall. One year a comfortable seating area was created by bringing in donated furniture and plants. And by furniture I mean large pieces like upholstered chairs and even sofas. We had to drive all over the city collecting these pieces, picking them up in people's living rooms and carrying them down stairs to the truck.

During these years I also worked on the breakdown crew. This was even more exhausting. As soon as the event ended on Sunday (5pm I think) all the vendors would start tearing down their booths and we would help them. Then we would clean up everything left behind. We would be riding around this huge empty hall in carts late into the night cleaning up the last of the trash.

There was always a demand for people to work on the GreenTeam... their efforts trying to make "The GreenTeam" sound like something elite and special only warned you that it was probably going to be nasty. Finally, one year (probably when I had burned out on working setup and breakdown) I gave it a shot. The GreenFestival really does go out of its way to divert as much waste and to recover as many resources as possible.

By this time the event was straining the space-limitations of the Concourse facility, so huge tents were typically erected outside the hall or else neighboring buildings were rented for special purposes like lectures. We scattered three-can recycling stations all over the place and provided monitors so that everyone knew what went where. Even with all that, there was still some physical sorting at the back-end, especially at the end of the show. At first I would work at least one shift on each of the three days of the event and then also join the sorting team at the end. I Introduced the idea of using these huge rubber bands to hold up the can-liner bags (people have a hard time buying liners that actually fit the cans -- I don't know why). I also sold the idea of placing large buckets at each station to collect liquids from drinks people are throwing out (otherwise the liquid weighs down the bags which leads to leaks or breaks -- not good in an indoor festival. The first year I was so keen to make sure it went smoothly I maintained the buckets myself. That means I went around dumping nearly full buckets into an even larger container which I carried around from station to station -- the mix of liquids can get pretty vile looking and also very heavy. The next step was to use wheeled dollies to hold the big containers. The final solution was to use more volunteers to bring empty buckets to stations and take away the full ones.

In recent years, I've only worked one shift per event, and then taken a quick walk through the show to see what's new. Yesterday I didn't take home a single flyer or business card or anything. There's still a good deal of interesting stuff to see, though not as much as previously, but nothing I hadn't seen before. Mostly GreenFestival is a marketplace for food, clothes, cosmetics, and whatnot that appeal to people interested in Green issues. I did have a very good (all raw, veggie salad assortment) lunch.

I signed up late to volunteer this year and could only get the 9am early shift. Once I got everything in order in my area (the food court, of course), there was nothing much to do as no one was ready for lunch yet. So I started thinking about this past Greening season and the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. What I recall most vividly now (over a month later) are the smoothies (slushies) I had on each of those, too hot, days. I would start with a largish cup of ice and juice and, as I consumed it, would add water from the bottle I keep in my cargo pants pocket. By the end of my break I would have downed both all the water and all the juice and would be well on the way to being hydrated again. But just sitting in the shade sucking up that sweet coldness was pure bliss.

This year is also GreenFestival's first at Fort Mason rather than at the Concourse (which is due to be torn down for re-development). My ties to Fort Mason go back even further than my ties to GreenFestival. I first visited the enclosed piers (once used by the Army to send cargo and troops -- including my dad -- to Pacific destinations, and now used as exhibition space) in 1976 when I was an exhibitor representing a very small East Coast literary magazine (I don't even recall how that happened.) What I do recall is how great it was to be in those shed-like spaces with the side doors rolled-up and the bay just outside. (I do remember that, in this large group of poets and writers and literary wonder-kinder -- at least in their own minds -- I was the one who figured out how to turn on the industrial lights so we could set up our booths and get to work).

They've tarted up one of the buildings to be more appropriate to it's new life, but the setting is just as wonderful as it was almost 38 years ago. The same sea gulls everywhere. The same seals or sea lions popping up now and then in the water between the piers and Alcatraz. The same blue sky and Mephistophelian serpentine (or Serpentinite) rock oozing out of the bay to form the foundation of the city (and wouldn't that literary connection explain so much about the city and even about Michel Foucault? The infernal origin of the material and that the official name even includes the word "serpent" is almost too good to be true.)

Next: Interlude XXXI. Foucault - part 11.

Interlude XXIX. Foucault - part 9 - Transgression

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XXVIII. Foucault - part 8

From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

Chapter 3 - The Heart Laid Bare - Cont...

Maurice Blanchot.

p83

According to Blanchot, every truly powerful work of art is a singular compound of form and chaos: “The work is the pure circle where, even as he writes the work, the author dangerously exposes himself to, but also protects himself against, the pressure that demands that he write.” Like Andre Breton and the surrealists, Blanchot regarded works wrested from delirium, dreaming, and the terrible beauty of uncontrollable passion as communicating a special kind of wisdom. The dream, he once declared, amounts to a “dangerous call,” a “premonition of the other,” a “double that is still somebody.” Exploring the unconscious and the unthought, what an author discovers is “a part of himself, and, more than that, his truth, his solitary truth,” swirling in “a cold immobility from which he cannot turn away, but near which he cannot linger” -- for the repetitions and recurrences are (just as Freud had divined in his analysis of thanatos, Blanchot noted) the siren song “of death itself.”

The writer in Blanchot’s view thus becomes a figure strangely like Ellen West: someone who cannot help being fascinated by death, “attracted by an ordeal in which everything is risked, by an essential risk where being is at stake, where nothingness slips away, where, that is, the right, the power to die is wagered.”

Yet if the work that grows out of such an ordeal is successful, the author will not only survive, he will (Just as Heidegger promised) experience a miraculous kind of ascent into grace: “Through an inexplicable maneuver, through some distraction or through the sheer excessiveness of his patience,” the author will find himself “suddenly inside the circle,” folded back upon himself, the void now contained by the work, which “forms a part of himself from which he feels he is free and from which the work has contributed to freeing him.”

p84

The forms in which a work could accomplish this magical feat of transforming (and so “saving”) its author were as protean and varied as the creative genius of each truly creative individual. As a matter of taste, Blanchot was a connoisseur of modernism: in the late 1940s and 1950s, he devoted incisive essays to the poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Rilke, and René Char; and to the novelists and short-story writers Kafka, Beckett, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet. He was the only prominent French critic of the time to take the Marquis de Sade as seriously as Foucault did. And he was a dedicated reader of modern philosophy: besides Heidegger, he admired Nietzsche, and also the pioneering French Nietzschean, George Bataille.

I am going to skip Hermann Broch and The Death of Virgil on p84-85.

Georges Bataille.

p86

Like Nietzsche, Bataille throughout his life sang the praises of Dionysian moments of communal effervescence, of reverie and madness, of intoxication and ecstasy -- all “moments of excess that stir us to the roots of our being and give us strength enough to allow free reign to our elemental nature.” And like the Marquis de Sade, his other great intellectual hero, he thought that impulses commonly called cruel were central to our elemental nature; the pursuit of uninhibited eroticism laid bare a deep seated drive “to destroy,” “to annihilate,” to spoil even the simplest things, and (at the limit) to embrace death in a “torment of orgies,” in a sensuous lust for blood so sanguinary that it welcomed even ‘the agony of war.”

On one level, this was sheer bluster: like the mousy protagonist in one of his favorite books, Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, Bataille took malicious delight in being “impossible.” in making outrageous statements and stubbornly standing by them. But on another level, Bataille was a deeply serious man. An habitué of the demimonde, he acted out a great many of the erotic fantasies he described...

p87

As Bataille would later concede, some of his writing in this period [1930s] brought him uncomfortably close to fascism. But Bataille also embraced a bizarre kind of Marxism, believing (with apparent fervor in the 1930s) that the only way to unleash the alienated elemental nature of the human being was through “a fiery and bloody revolution” that would smash the suffocating values Bataille associated not just with bourgeois legality and capitalism, but also with nationalism and organized militarism.

Bataille is looking more and more like the model for Naphtha.

For Foucault in these years, however, the heart of Bataille’s achievement was not his theory of revolution, but rather his understanding of erotic transgression. “Perhaps one day,” Foucault speculated in an essay written shortly after Bataille’s death in 1962, the idea of transgression “will seem as decisive for our culture, as much a part of its soil, as the experience of contradiction was at an earlier time for dialectical thought.”

“Transgression,” as Foucault defines Bataille’s idea, “is an act which involves the limit,” violently breaching the customary restraints on sexual behavior and putting into play the sort of “‘denaturalized ‘” eroticism so vividly imagined by the Marquis de Sade. The very violence of Sade’s erotic fantasies testifies to the force of those elemental impulses that most modern societies have tried to brand as abnormal. Yet even most civilized creatures of modern cultures, as Foucault had remarked in 1954, “can and must make of man a negative experience, lived in the form of hate and aggression.” It was Bataille’s peculiar genius to suggest that eroticism, taken to its most extreme limits in sado-masochistic practices, was a uniquely creative way to grapple with otherwise unconscious and unthinkable aspects of this “negative experience,” turning it into something positive, enabling a person to “say yes” in the spirit of Nietzsche -- even to a recurrent fantasy of death.

One of the things I like about Hinduism is how they seem to be more aware of the dark side of human nature. Kali may be a dark and scary goddess, but she is still an important figure in the Hindu pantheon of gods and goddesses. You deny Kali at your own risk. The other day when the Giants won their third championship in five years, there was the usual rioting in the Mission District -- people burned things (anything they could find) in the street and threw bottles at the police. Last time they burned a transit bus. Everyone attributed it to “a few troublemakers.” More or less the same thing happens whenever the usual restraints of civilized life are weakened by some political or criminal or natural event. The “few troublemakers” are like opportunistic bacteria, always latent, always waiting for an opportunity to do their thing. If you want to think of them as “demonic” then the “demonic” is always with us, like poverty.

In a story I read once (I thought it was Chrome Yellow by Aldus Huxley but I was mistaken, and now I don't know what it was), a secondary character instigates or carries out an anarchistic or terrorist act -- not for any political reason but -- because he imagines that by doing something truly demonic he will get to see the "Face" of the Devil, which will logically prove the existence of God. If you have a less Manichean view of things, confirming the demonic, or the dark, side of your daemon, really just tells us something about the nature of god/nature/reality.

Currently, the dangerous Tenderloin neighborhood here is undergoing unprecedented change, with Tech businesses and Tech money coming in to re-develop and revitalize buildings and eventually, some hope, entire streets. Others hate this “gentrification” as it drives out the people who have lived here for so long. Some of those unhappy about the changes argue that the unfortunates living there should he assisted to improve their lives rather than being forced out to make way for rich techies. The problem with this notion is that the people who have been living in the Tenderloin, for the most part, like it the way it is -- a jungle-land outside of civilization where the strong can prey on the weak and people can do as they please. The area isn’t rundown because of failures in infrastructure and social support networks, it's rundown because that suits, and reflects the character of, many (but not all of) the residents.

I’m largely in favor of the changes being made and less than impressed by the complaints of the residents being forced out. But, at the same time, I worry about denying so completely that aspect of human behavior. Kali is not a reasonable goddess. Like eliminating every natural predator of man (except man), completely civilizing the urban environment involves ecological risks. And who am I to say that behaviors and lifestyles I don’t care for don’t deserve to exist? Though it is amusing to see petty human predators (jackals) whining when bigger (economic) predators (lions) push them around.

Next: Interlude XXX. Foucault - part 10.

Interlude VIII. Foucault - part 3

Limit-experience + California

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude VII. The God Delusion

From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

Continued from page 30...

As a connoisseur of literature and art, by contrast, Foucault, in the spirit of Nietzsche and the French philosophe maudit [cursed philosopher] Georges Bataille, was also interested in exploring experience in what he sometimes called its "negativity," probing into aspects of human existence that seemed to defy rational understanding. In Madness and Civilization, for example, he took away from his encounter with the tormented vision of Goya, the cruel erotic fantasies of Sade, and the insane glossolalia of Artaud, "something that can and must be thought," something that startles and disconcerts -- a mystical kind of experience that "you come out of changed."

Heartened by the possibility of changing himself, Foucault sought out potentially transformative "limit-experiences" on his own, deliberately pushing his mind and body to the breaking point, hazarding "a sacrifice, an actual sacrifice of life," as he put it in 1969, "a voluntary obliteration that does not have to be represented in books because it takes place in the very existence of the writer." [seeking a liminal state and experience. Also seeking out the abject]

In an unusually revealing 1981 interview, he described in some detail the appeal to him of certain extreme forms of Passion, implicitly linking a shattering type of "suffering-pleasure," the lifelong preparation for suicide -- and the ability, thanks to potentially self-destructive yet mysteriously revealing states of intense dissociation, to see the world "completely differently." Through intoxication, reverie, the Dionysian abandon of the artist, the most punishing ascetic practices, and an uninhibited exploration of sado-masochistic eroticism, it seemed possible to breach, however briefly, the boundaries separating the conscious and unconscious, reason and unreason, pleasure and pain -- and, at the ultimate limit, life and death -- thus starkly revealing how distinctions central to the play of true and false are pliable, uncertain, contingent.

At this breaking point, "experience" becomes a zone full of turbulence, unformed energy, chaos -- "l'espace d'une exteriorite savage," he called it in L'ordre du discourse (The Order of Discourse, 1971), "the space of an untamed exteriority." Like few thinkers before him, Foucault was at home in this no-man's-land. Sometimes he seems to have considered himself an exemplary seeker of "clandestine knowledge," a hero of truly Nietzschean stature, precariously balanced on a high wire, heralding "the dim light of dawn, fearlessly pointing the way to "a future thought."

p 31

But perhaps, as Foucault himself at other times implies, he was simply a figure of quixotic folly -- a philosophical Felix the Cat, forced to learn the laws of gravity the hard way. [He’s referring here to Felix’s propensity for running out into thin air only to belatedly realize that there was nothing to hold him up.]

"The individual driven, in spite of himself, by the somber madness of sex" would then, as he wrote in 1976, be "something like a nature gone awry." His own death, though revealing, might then be seen merely as "the supernatural return of the insult, a retribution thwarting the flight into counter-nature."

Three of my favorite people died in the AIDS epidemic that struck San Francisco at this time. They were all larger than life characters, like Foucault they were drawn like moths to a flame by the gay scene here and, arguably, died while striving to maximize their human potential. Foucault seems to have gotten off easily (which is ironic given his fondness for the abject). For others there were slow, agonizing deaths that whittled away not just their pleasure seeking bodies but also their characters and minds. Few died the same men they had been, that I had known.

I found the whole drama depressing and avoided it as much as I could. In part this was because I was not attracted to the abject and was very nervous around death, but I also didn’t want my memory of these exceptional people spoiled by the ravages of disease. I felt guilty, then, about keeping my distance, and now that I’m more comfortable with death, wish I had been a little more helpful. But I doubt I could have been that helpful back then, and I’m still a little pissed off that they died such stupid deaths. Safe Sex didn’t start with AIDS and it didn’t take a genius to know that they were all playing with fire. These deaths were a different kind of “limit-experience” for the survivors, one with not much of an up-side.

p 34

Foucault’s work was drawing to an end; and his life... was ending in an ambiguous gesture, as if he had finally grasped the full significance, too late, of the fatal temptation he had first identified nearly ten years earlier, long before AIDS had become a tangible threat: “The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for.”

p 35-36

From the Preface to the last two volumes of Foucault’s History of Sexuality as recited by Gilles Deleuze at Foucault’s “levee du corps” following his death:

As for the motive that compelled me, it was very simple. In the eyes of some, I hope that it will suffice by itself. It was curiosity -- the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that merits the pain of being practiced with a little obstinacy: not the kind that searches out in order to digest whatever is agreeable to know, but rather the kind that permits one to get free of oneself. What would be the value of the stubborn determination to know if it merely insured the acquisition of understanding, rather than the aberration, in a certain fashion and to the extent possible, of he who understands?

There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks and perceive differently than one sees is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.

People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself need only go on behind the scenes; that they are, at best, part of those labors of preparation that efface themselves when they have had their effects. But what then, is philosophy today -- philosophical activity, I mean -- if not the critical labor of thought upon itself? And if it does not consist, in place of legitimizing what one already knows, in undertaking to know how, and up to what limit, it would be possible to think differently?

California.

I suppose it was just a coincidence Foucault found his promised land in California and San Francisco rather than in NYC. I’m not alluding to my having been here at the same time, but to the symbolism and imagery of California. That crucial dream in the “Snow” section of The Magic Mountain is set in the Mediterranean -- Greece, actually -- but the California coast has a similar climate, similar light, and seems to evoke similar impressions of both light and dark in people. Think the movie Chinatown. Think the popular songs “Hotel California” and “San Andreas Fault” (both with lyrics). This is a setting of sun-kissed beaches and tar pits. Fruit orchards and oil fields -- even Beverly Hills sits atop an oil field that is still being pumped (the discrete wells hidden away in malls and even on the high school campus. There is also an artificial island at Long Beach where oil rigs are screened behind decorative palm trees and fake buildings. You can’t get much more Mephistophelian than that). On the TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, SoCal was the location of a Hellmouth that was periodically opened by earthquakes or demonic activities.

As in Hans Castorp’s dream, California is both blessed and cursed.

Next: Interlude IX. Standing in the sun + Cynicism.

Interlude V. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude IV. The Passion of Michel Foucault - part 1

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

I tend to confuse the stories of Sallie Tisdale (The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies -- links here) and Annie Dillard. When I recall a ghastly tale about insects it’s hard to remember which of the two infected me with it. Dillard’s parable of the Polyphemus moth is unforgettable (there’s a version in Pilgrim... and a slightly different version in An American Childhood which is perhaps more effective for standing more alone) and I can thank Dillard for the statistic that 10% of all insects are parasitic, but otherwise they tell a similar tale of natural abjection.

Some quotes from Pilgrim...

I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and it keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live, there’s a lot to think about... Theirs [the creeks] is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection...

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusion on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes, but everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

And speaking of fire, we do love a good blaze. We can’t take our eyes off a wreck or disaster. I’ve joked we “choose” to dump the crazy and defective on the streets where we can see them struggle -- but what if that’s true? What if “Care In the Community” is like bear baiting and dog fights? The Saw movie franchise and the Human Centipede suggests that we crave this and BDSM suggests that just watching isn’t enough -- hello Foucault.

If we build a particularly big “Man” on the Playa it’s because we want to see it burn. Is it the same for cities? Did the Japanese build the magnificent Yamato battleship and then sail it on a pointless mission of doom at least in part for the spectacle?

An infant who has just learned to hold his head up has a frank and forthright way of gazing about him in bewilderment.

I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting.

When the leaves fall the striptease is over; things stand mute and revealed... All that summer conceals, winter reveals.

I’m getting used to this planet and to the curious human culture which is as cheerfully enthusiastic as it is cheerfully cruel.

The “worlds” created by art also take you away from the “actual” moment. To the extent you are captivated by music, a painting, a book, a film, you are oblivious to the world that is actually around you. The “moment” is like a cat trying to get your attention while you are busy doing something else.

I do it [study pond water] as a moral exercise... a constant reminder of the facts of creation that I would just as soon forget... These are real creatures with real organs, leading real lives, one by one. I can’t pretend they’re not there.

...it occurs to me more and more that everything I have seen is wholly gratuitous.

...the universe was beginning to look more like a great thought than a great machine... But the question of who is thinking the thought is more fruitful than the question of who made the machine...

Just think: in all the clean beautiful reaches of the solar system, our planet alone is a blot; our planet alone has death. I have to acknowledge that the sea is a cup of death and the land a stained altar stone.

Are we dealing in life, or in death?

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me.

Either this world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak... We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet... We are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die -- does not care if it grinds itself to a halt.

I’ve already used the quote above (in Autumn XIII. Stoics part 2) but I need to review it with Sartre and Foucault in mind. The task of being a moral creature in an amoral world was Sartre’s life work. While Sartre and Foucault often marched together at political rallies, I think Foucault was rather more comfortable with an amoral world. In fact I have the feeling he was at home there.

...if you want to live you have to die...

Creation itself was the fall, a burst into the thorny beauty of the real...

The creator is no puritan. A creature need not work for a living; creatures may simply steal and suck and be blessed for all that with a share -- an enormous share -- of the sunlight and air.

Another year has twined away, unrolled and dropped across nowhere like a flung banner painted in gibberish.

And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life... The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest... There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see.

Next: Interlude VI. Foucault - part 2 - S/M & liminal space.