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Come il giorno e la notte
La regola e il caso sono due contrari
come la luce e il buio
come il rosso e il verde
come il caldo e il freddo
come l’umido e il secco
come il maschile e il femminile.
La regola dà sicurezza,
la geometria ci aiuta a conoscere le strutture
o a costruire un mondo nel quale
ci possiamo muovere senza paure.
Il caso è l’imprevisto
a volte terribile
a volte piacevole
l’incontro con una persona
con la quale si stabilisce subito
un contatto di simpatia o di amore,
l’esplosione di una idea risolutrice
la scoperta di un fenomeno.
La regola nasce dalla mente
si costruisce con la logica
tutto è previsto
con la regola si può pianificare un programma.
Il caso nasce dal clima
dalle condizioni ambientali, sociali,
geografiche, dai recettori sensoriali.
Un odore di eucalyptus
la forma di un sasso
il ritmo delle onde del mare…
La regola, da sola è monotona
il caso da solo rende inquieti.
Gli orientali dicono:
la perfezione è bella ma è stupida
bisogna conoscerla ma romperla.
La combinazione tra regola e caso
è la vita, è l’arte
è la fantasia, è l’equilibrio.

tratto da: Bruno Munari “Verbale scritto”

Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki

“I think brains might be machines that turn information into feelings and feelings back into decisions and I’ve discovered that my machine has been put together in a strange way and it translates life in a strange way but I have no way to fix this—I’m not a brain-machine fixer, I’m just a haver of a brain, like anyone, and none of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough”
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Missing Ever

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“…with the end of my breath, which is the beginning of yours.”
— André Breton, Nadja
(A.U. MY LOVE)

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“If we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is a rather menacing power–something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm. We see an omnipotence equal to that of the Cartesian God, and capable of anything, even the inconceivable; but an omnipotence that has become autonomous, without norms, blind, devoid of the other divine perfections, a power with neither goodness nor wisdom, ill-disposed to reassure thought about the veracity of its distinct ideas. We see something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even God. This is not a Heraclitean time, since it is not the eternal law of becoming, but rather the eternal and lawless possible becoming of every law. It is a Time capable of destroying even becoming itself by bringing forth, perhaps forever, fixity, stasis, and death.”
― Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency

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have often thought about the man who first came up with the idea of recording the vibrations of the voice: he put little sound-sensitive plates, carbon and copper wires all together into a machine and then actually did hear the unmistakable sound of the human voice. In the same way the first surrealists forced themselves into states of utter exhaustion with the excesses they viewed as mere games, and saw the marvellous arise before them, the overwhelming hallucinations more usually produced by ecstatic religious states or narcotic drugs. At that time we used to meet in the evenings like hunters, comparing what we’d bagged that day, the tally of beasts we’d invented, the fantastic plants, the images we’d shot down. In the grip of a tremendous momentum, we spent more and more time on the practices which led us into our strange inner lands. We delighted in observing the curve of our own exhaustion, and the derangement which followed. For then the marvellous would appear. At first each one of us thought himself subject to some peculiar mental disorder and struggled against it. Then it revealed its true nature. It was as if the mind, having reached a turning point in the subconscious, lost all control over where it was drifting. Images which existed in the mind took physical forms, became tangible reality. Once we were in touch with them they expressed themselves in a perceptible form, taking on the characteristics of visual, auditory and tactile hallucinations. We experienced the full force of these images. We could no longer control them. We had become their domain, a setting for them. In bed, at the moment of falling asleep, in the street with eyes wide open, with the full apparatus of dread, we held out our hands to phantoms. Rest, abstention from surrealism made these phenomena disappear, gave us space to comprehend how close they were to the phenomena induced by chemical preparations, and at first we suspended our experiments through fear, but they gradually reclaimed their rights over our curiosity. The nature of the troubled mental states brought on by surrealism, by physical fatigue, by narcotics, and the way these resembled dreams and mystical visions together with the semiology of mental illness led us to evolve this proposition which, alone, can explain and link all these factors: the existence of a mental substance. The similarity between hallucinations and sensations compelled us to think of this mental substance as being different to thought, with thought itself, in all its perceptible manifestations, being only one particular example of it. The way we experienced it was through its concrete power, through its power to become concrete. We saw that it could pass from one state into another, and that these transmutations evidenced its existence as well as its nature. We would see a written image, for example, which had initially emerged arbitrarily, as if by chance, reach out to our senses, divest itself of its verbal element and take on the substance of phenomena we had only previously experienced in our imaginations, never knowing it was possible to induce them outside, in a tangible form. We now felt that every mental and physical experience we had was a direct result of our participation in this paradoxical exercise. Then, imagining the opposite of what we were experiencing, we reduced each sensation, each thought we wished to analyse, to a single word. Absolute nominalism was dazzlingly exemplified in surrealism and it gradually dawned on us that the mental substance described above was, in fact, vocabulary itself. There is no thought outside words: the whole surrealist experience evidences this proposition, nothing new in itself yet greeted, nowadays, with more scepticism than all the vague opinions (constantly contradicted by facts) of realists who are swept along to the Pantheon one lovely rainy evening.” — Louis Aragon, from A Wave of Dreams (1924), translated by Susan de Muth (2003)

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“Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, nails, hard transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelids, set with lashes – but open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter, longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon, then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit; as though your dress-maker’s scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of trousers, go on, expose the small intestines’ alleged interior, the jejunum, the ileum, the duodenum, or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its corners, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats’ wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous humours and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins. Work as the sun does when you’re sunbathing or taking grass. And this is not all, far from it: connected onto these lips, a second mouth is necessary, a third, a great number of other mouths, vulvas, nipples. And adjoining the skin of the fingertips, scraped by the nails, perhaps there should be huge silken beaches of skin, taken from the inside of the thighs, the base of the neck, or from the strings of a guitar. And against the palm, all latticed with nerves, and creased like a yellowed leaf, set potter’s clays, or even hard wooden handles encrusted with jewels, or a steering wheel, or a drifter`s sail are perhaps required. Don’t forget to add to the tongue and all the pieces of the vocal apparatus, all the sounds of which they are capable, and moreover, the whole selective network of sounds, that is, the phonological system, for this too belongs to the libidinal ‘body’, like colours that must be added to retinas, like certain particles to the epidermis, like some particularly favoured smells to the nasal cavities, like preferred words and syntaxes to the mouths which utter them and to the hands which write them…. There is no need to begin with transgression, we must go immediately to the very limits of cruelty, perform the dissection of polymorphous perversion, spread out the immense membrane of the libidinal ‘body’ which is quite different to a frame. It is made from the most heterogeneous textures, bone, epithelium, sheets to write on, charged atmospheres, swords, glass cases, peoples, grasses, canvases to paint. All these zones are joined end to end in a band which has no back to it, a Moebius band which interests us not because it is closed, but because it is one-sided, a Moebian skin which, rather than being smooth, is on the contrary (is this topologically possible?) covered with roughness, corners, creases, cavities which when it passes on the ‘first’ turn will be cavities, but perhaps on the ‘second’, lumps. But as for what tum the band is on, no-one knows nor will know, in the eternal turn. The interminable band with variable geometry (for nothing requires that an excavation remain concave, besides, it is inevitably convex on the ‘second’ turn, provided it lasts) has not got two sides, but only one, and therefore neither exterior nor interior.”
— Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy

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“Usually people read the lesson of Freudian psychoanalysis as if the secret meaning of everything is sexuality. But this is not what Freud wants to say. I think Freud wants to say the exact opposite. It is not that everything is a metaphor for sexuality. That whatever we are doing we are always thinking about that [sex]. The Freudian question is: what are we thinking when we are doing that? If I am a little bit impertinent by relating to something which most of us experience [….] It happens while one is engaged in sexual activity. All of a sudden one feels stupid. One looses contact with it, as if “My god what am I doing here? Doing this stupid repetitive movement?” [….] Nothing changes in reality in these strange movements when it is, as it were, disconnect. It is just that I loose the phantasmatic [fantasy] support. In sexuality it is never me and my partner(s) [….] There always has to be some phantasmatic element. There has to be a third element that enables me to engage in sexuality. There has to be an irresistible power or fascination. [….] The question is [….] why does our libido, pleasure, need the virtual universe of fantasy? Why can’t we simply enjoy it directly?” —
Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema — Part 2 (0:00)

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“I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason. I have found levels in the realm of the nerve. I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves…”
— Antonin Artaud

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❝ Serenity is when you get above all this, when it doesn’t matter what they think, say or want, but when you do as you are, and see God and Devil as one. ❞
Henry Miller

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“I need not to be afraid of the void. The void is part of my person. I need to enter consciously into it. To try to escape from it is to try to live a lie. It is also to cease to be. My acceptance of despair and emptiness constitutes my being; to have the courage to accept despair is to be.”
— Michael Novak, Experience of Nothingness