Street of Thought/Deep Thought/Speculation
The European Graduate School
Speculative philosophy and the interpretation
(construction?) of experience







Sign

 
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Leap & Last Ray
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán,
for Walter Benjamin,
who did not want to be a survivor,
and his angel of history

To redeem the hopes
of a demolished past, 
of a future soon obliterated?

PROGRESSIVE ART in general:

ELIN O'HARA SLAVICK

www.unc.edu/~eoslavic

"Hell has to do with justice,
not anger. Hell begins with
hope.
If we didn't have any hopes
we wouldn't suffer.
Hell begins with the idea that
things can be made better.
Paradise is rest, isn't it?
Repose. You go to paradise
after you've worked
three shifts running,
twenty-four hours without a
break.
You stop and there's the pure
pleasure of stopping, doing
nothing, lying down.
You don't know anything else
exists. No relations in
paradise.
Undistilled egotism,
Paradise! It's only in hell that
we find each other."
- John Berger

THE LUGGAGE STORE

I dreamt Brother Blue sang,
"Why did you ...?"
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán

In her ear Brother Blue's song began and ceased and began again with tremulous cadence slow, dragging out an eternal note of sadness, comingling with other verses of Sappho and Sophocles and whatever else came in on the riptide of a faithless sea churned up by one more lady from the sea,

Lady © 2003 by María DeGuzmán

one more of those huracanes (when did the eddy become a hurricane?) driven east to west and south to north, those whirling vortices que nos hacen saber que este mundo que aparenta ser tan varioso, tan bello, tan nuevo posee ni certidumbre, ni paz, ni bálsamo para el dolor.

Temptation comes in many forms—masquerading as the angel of light, the arc of promise, the art of persuasion, the manufacture of identities, the tympanic sympathy of voices vibrating in unison while their purpose is singular—to shoot a ghost with a gun, abolish the specter whose heart began to break long ago. Specter with a heart of glass and eyes wide open, an anti-type of Oedipa standing before the riddles of the Sphinx, blinding herself as long as she could but foreseeing into the distance how the dice would fall, the wheels of opportunity turn. Such turns of the wheel are predictably confused by sleepwalkers with lines of escape and the fantastic (or are they infernal?) desiring-machines of which the poet-philosophers speak. Oedipa's anti-type sighs sharply as she recognizes the wellworn pleasures of pre-programmed elopement, over hill and dale, mistaken for resistance and rebellion, mistaken for a radical politics of desire.

An accident. Desire is an accident.
It does not know itself.
A derailment, if this were a train wreck.
But it was a car accident.
Machinic limbs. Limbic machines.
Libido is a machine.
Watch what you set in motion,
riding in what drives you.

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Had a ticket to ride, or
too "unreal" for fiction
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán

("love is a Stranger 
in an open car
to tempt you in
and drive you far away"--Eurythmics)

Reading before a windowless train
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán

Twosome
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán

Camera-veiled face 
among the roses: flores valientes
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán

AUTO-BIO-PHOTO/EXPERIMENTS

Collected Visions

The Mirror Project

Duane Michals

Cindy Sherman










Time warp cube or 
serpent with video screen for a head 
or the record of a fall 
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán


("every time I think of you,
I feel shot right through 
with a bolt of blue" --  
Bizarre Love Triangle, New Order)





"The great virtue of magic, and of alchemy, 
her daughter, is to postulate the unity
of matter, with the result that certain
philosophers of the alembic and the crucible
have even conjectured that matter could
be of the same nature as light and thunderbolts.
That postulate carries us perilously far,
but no adept of the science worthy
of his name would fail to recognize the dangers."

--Marguerite Yourcenar, The Abyss (1968)



ALCHEMY & HERMETICISM
metafísica en acción, experimental
metaphysics, arte combinatoria,
hands-on "natural" philosophy


Cornelius Agrippa
Alchemy & Color Symbolism
Alquimia de hoy y ayer
Ars Magna
Francis Bacon
Roger Bacon
Beware of the homunculus
Jakob Böhme
Giordano Bruno
Cagliostro
Count Cagliostro the Overreacher
John Dee & Edward Kelly
Donum Dei
The Emerald Tablet
Ireneo Filateo
Abul Qasim Ibn Firnas
Nicolas Flamel
Robert Fludd
Flyers Before Da Vinci
Johann Faust
Manly Palmer Hall Manuscript Collection
The Golem of Prague
Hermeticism
History of Hermetic Philosophy
The Jewish Alchemists
Ramon Lull 
Albert Magnus
María the Jewess
H.M.E. de Jong's study of Atalanta Fugiens
Pico della Mirandola
Mujeres y alquimia
Music from Atalanta fugiens
Occult Sciences, 1500-1700
Occult Tendencies, 17th c
Paracelsus
Purple Red or Rubedo
Rudolph II
Transmutation or Projection Powder
Remedios Varo

What the night mares saw
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán

"Sweet dreams are made of this …
everybody is looking for something"
(but will Senta choose 
the Farm instead?)
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán
in collaboration with Martha Mockus
and Patricia Juliana Smith


 

"To the sea, back to the sea! To the sea
for all eternity! You have broken
faith, I cannot be saved!"
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán
in collaboration with 
Patricia Juliana Smith

Joy and Grief

"That grief should be willingly endured, though far from a simply pleasing sensation, is not so difficult to be understood. It is the nature of grief to keep its object perpetually in its eye, to present it in its most pleasurable views, to repeat all the circumstances that attend it, even to the last minuteness ... ."

--Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757)

Listening © 2003 by María DeGuzmán


She felt herself beginning to turn a corner.
She knew she could not live on the spiritual
anemia of melancholic nostalgia -- 
a la recherche du temps perdu. 
Nor would she die of it, though
it was wasting the flesh off her bones,
literally, as if giving so much
thought to feeling, feeling
to thought, were sucking out the very marrow.
She cupped her hand to rest her chin,
facing, with eyes open but inward-looking,
the vertiginous despair she had been fighting
through denial.
Despair. There it was. There it was.
And there it was again. Every instant.
She would not try to annihilate it. 
She sat listening, breathing.
The world was often raunchy and raucous,
full of cheap thrills and
short-lived betrayals and venganzas.
She considered it might be time
to laugh, just a little.
But she also knew it would be a laugh
tentatively edged with an aureole of terror,
rings of color around the moon.








Moon caught on a branch:
We're going there, haven't you heard?
© 2003 by Maria DeGuzmán

Samples from a 
A Hard Day's Nightwood, after
Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood (1936)

Done with the collaboration of Erin Carlston, Hadji, Carisa Showden, and Patricia Juliana Smith as well as Dominique Fisher, Frederica von Jagen, Candace Jean Kern, Annie Martin, Steven P. Preissler, Brian Toomey, Matthew and Susan Townsend, and with the cooperation of Acme Food and Beverage Co., Charron Andrews, and the Kern Residence

"'Doctor,  I have come to ask you to tell me everything
you know about the night.'" --Djuna Barnes

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Pat as Dr. Matthew O'Connor
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán

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Carisa as Nora searching for Robin
©2003 by María DeGuzmán

"... seeing  Robin go from table to table, 
from drink to drink,
from person to person ... ." --Djuna Barnes

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Robin and "the Other Woman" Exponential
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán

"... looking out into the garden ... 
she saw a double shadow
falling from the statue ... 
she saw emerge from the darkness
the light of Robin's eyes ... 
Robin's eyes met hers." -- Djuna Barnes

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Erin as Jenny Petherbridge
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán

Café de la Mairie du VI © 2004 by María DeGuzmán with the collaboration of Patricia Juliana Smith, Steven P. Preissler, Dominique Fisher, Carisa Showden, Erin Carlston, Candace Jean Kern, Annie Martin, Brian Toomey, and Acme

Signifying: Endgame
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán

Three Lives and A Whale of a Triangle:
Gertrude Stein meets Lotte Jacobi 
meets Herman Melville
from Prismatic Prismatricks
Copyright © 2004 by María DeGuzmán

Claude Cahun Ear
© 2004 by María DeGuzmán

Sorcerer's Lantern 
© 2004 by María DeGuzmán

Wouldn't a little intercession be nice?
© 2004 by María DeGuzmán
from Prismatic Prismatricks

A queer clairvoyance
(in memory of Michael Field)
© 2004 by María DeGuzmán
from Prismatic Prismatricks

Here s(he) comes, an angel of joy,
over the red purgatorial fields
towards the bluest depths of water
living

Minerva's Radar
© 2004 by María DeGuzmán

Lady of the Sea and Her Kingdom on the Rocks
© 2004 by María DeGuzmán

"A concert is being performed tonight. It is
the event. Vibrations of sound disperse,
periodic movements go through space with
their harmonics or submultiples. The sounds
have inner qualities of height, intensity,
and timbre."

From "What is an Event?" in Gilles Deleuze's
The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque



A concert, huh? One of those serendipitous
musical experiences? Vibrations that come to
you from the outside (or as if from outside)
and disturb your emotions, deliciously.
Ahha. The invasion of a welcomed body-
snatcher soul-catcher sending you out to
wander the streets with the strange 
exhiliration of walking on the edge of
a precipice. A sacred restlessness that 
will not be tranquillized with the merely
actual but instead yearns anxiously for
the possible in the stony face of 
impossibility. All induced by that music,
spur to a freed horse, ravisher of the
soul, queen of the senses, distracting
you from fear and sorrow under an
inconstant moon--in this, our sublunary,
existence.

¡Flaming O! 
© 2004 by María DeGuzmán

Stop mooning and moping and mucking about!
Something's hot in the night;
something wants to get out.
For too long now
you've been plagued by doubt,
your face the portrait
of a permanent pout.
And where does that get you
at the end of the night,
at the end of the night,
at the end of the night?
Bolt upright in bed,
wide-eyed and staring, and, I'm sorry to say,
looking a fright!

--Anonymous

Id and Ego
© 2004 by María DeGuzmán
in collaboration with Patricia Juliana Smith

In a jaded age surely you aren't going to ask
if the mind can have a separate existence
from the body, are you? Outmoded Cartesian.
And yet the collapse of mind into body has
resulted in "happiness pills" and recipes
for chemical and behavioral control. Spinoza
on a doza with the dust of a thousand ground
lenses infiltrating his lungs like gypsy moths
do the summer trees. These doses may help some.
Many claim they are helped and feel better.
Who will quibble? But, meanwhile the pages of
Brave New World and 1984 and other dystopian
literature flutter in the wind, ominously.
"Be of good cheer. Sadness is a sin." At the
very least, undesirable. Rational self-interest
or the utilitarian control of the psyche?
To what ends? You can do it with drugs. You
can do it with mantras. In the mirror. Every
day in every way I'm thinking positively. The
power of positive thinking or thinking about
power? Goodbye yesterday; hello tomorrow. Or
is it "Bye, Bye, love. Bye, Bye, happiness.
Hello loneliness. I think I'm a-gonna cry-y."
Still, we're future-bound and not a minute
to waste on the melancholy who refuse to take
medicine or "be happy, don't worry."

Hmmmm. A thunderhead rises with a rumble into
the evening sky, mushrooming second by second.
Perhaps an image of remote immanence. Sublime.
Gorgeous. By a certain overdetermined 
connection of ideas, the One of a Twosome in
the aftermath of a Division (call it a Fall,
tragic or happy, the beginning of strange
knowledge, or whatever else you'd like) is led
to recall moments of shared vision on a 
terrace--mornings, evenings. Now some
philosophers postulate the continuity of
memory is essential to the continued existence
of "you." (Who? Who? Who? That's an owl in the
trees. Sorry. Shhhhhh.) But, memory changes,
shapeshifs, even evaporates like this 
magnificent suspended expanding cloud. It 
passes into other states, invisible, unknowable.
And then? The One who remembers, the Other one,
becomes a jet-propelled movement of flaming
sorrow--all motivation, volition, desire--
passing through an unreasonable universe
(so much for Natural Law) looking for sparks
of illumination. I know. I know. Even that
sounds, well ... too grand.

"Every language game is based on words 'and 
objects' being recognized again." 

"Certain events would put me into a position
in which I could not go on with the old
language-game any further. In which I was
torn away from the sureness of the game."

"... it is not a kind of seeing on our part;
it is our acting, which lies at the bottom
of the language-game."

--Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

Wrong Way © 2003 by María DeGuzmán

And when we are torn away from the sureness
of the game, time stops though events continue
unfolding, borne away, bearing us away to 
other spaces, times, cells dividing, 
multiplying, atoms splitting, fusing, infinitely.
And yet time stops, the Mirror inverse of
something like, "I promise you a timeless
constancy. I do. Remember? Remember?" You
left me standing here a long, long time ago,
and other lines of that sort. Lines of a 
language game that when felt and believed
is no longer a game but a situation of living
and dying and living on even so, in the wake
of promises.

Gnosis of the bridge © 2004 by María DeGuzmán

And so living on, undead, she vows to 
bridge the wake, the chasm, the abyss because 
she cannot do otherwise, because she carries a 
visceral memory of murmuring joy 
along with a visceral pain of absence 
radiating chills up and down her spine. 
Castaway, she walks out onto the bridge 
of a hundred years with her own vow 
of constancy, a constancy without strings attached 
though made of cables of corded steel. 
A constancy the wind can blow through. 
She whispers, "Hart! Hart! Where are you?" 
Below her, black waters. All around her,
a world broken into a trillion splinterings
of light, sequined crucible, intimations 
of Atlantis gleaming. Above her, the stars 
of memory and a heaven obscure as
the rushing telepathy of wires. A gust of air
catches her coat, her collar, 
the fuzzy seashells of her ears. 
She hears, she thinks she hears, 
"Under your shadow by the piers I wait. 
Only in darkness is my shadow clear."

Synchromos, or Affinity
© 2005 by María DeGuzmán
with the collaboration of Ishtar

And then an old dream took on new life ... 
Once, a long time ago, she had a dream. 
She found herself floating at the top 
of columns as if in a Baroque-Classical 
painting, for example, Aurora by Guercino, 
where you see the bottoms of cherub feet, 
where things are inverted even though 
they're right side up ... you know what 
I mean. And someone, a Voice, 
was whispering in her ear and asking her 
if she wanted to go down ... descend into 
the world and ... well ... what did
that amount to? ... be born ... have 
a life, I guess. So, there she was, 
hovering between a YES and a NO, 
a NO and a YES ... for what seemed like 
all eternity in a moment, you never can 
tell with dreams. And now here we are ... 
at the base of some actual columns, 
strong, thick, temporal constancies 
in the wind and the rain and the heat 
of the sun, colored shadows cast there, 
spellbound in the night, by undulations 
of light from the giant floods, colossal 
candle lumens, making an altar out 
of evening fallen. Two shades more than 
shadows; green-hued auras, intermixtures 
of yellow light and a cobalt-black night. 

Formations
© 2005 by María DeGuzmán

Descent into the world ... . Someone predicted, 
"You'll be working on a structure for a time"--
a structure or more like a formation with--ha!--
a life, many lives, of its own beyond whatever
craft is worked upon it. She looks out at that
landscape. A strange one. No doubt about it. 
Unanticipated. Unintended. Or so it seemed. She's
landed on the moon or Mars or some moon-Mars
hoping to find a habitable Venus ... the earth
before the terminal effects of war and global
warming or something like that. Astronauts must
be farmers, haven't you heard? Farmers to turn
the Martian desert into the paradise we never
produced on the blue planet, dearly beloved and
forgotten again and again in the blink of an eye.
Well, no matter, here she is (on earth, in this
our world) whether she wills it or not. Oh, in 
fact, here we are, wondering who we are in this
ancient new landscape where things stand out
starkly and we may wish that angels would do our
work and elucidate our deepest motives like so
many tactile points of view ...

"My soul has lost possibility.Were I to wish for anything I would not wish for wealth and power, but for the passion of the possible, that eye which everywhere, ever young, ever burning, sees possibility. Pleasure disappoints, not possibility." --Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

Crossroads © 2003 by María DeGuzmán

"Fidelity gave a unity to lives that would otherwise
splinter into thousands of split-second impressions." --
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being





Face on Your Shoulder: Anamorphosis
© 2004 by María DeGuzmán

Pieces of the Puzzle © 2003 by María DeGuzmán

All the pieces are in place except for Hex and Why,
two characters out of an unfinished mystery novel
in which past-life narratives take over
the protagonists, narratives sensed obliquely
in the form of hunches, dreams, amd premonitions.
Or was it merely instrumental rationality
that unhitched Hex from Why?




Y © 2004 by María DeGuzmán

According to instrumental rationality,
everything has a value and, above all,
a use, a usefulness to the evaluating eye.
When faced with a dilemma, this is how you
choose between A and B or Y and Z, though no
reason to suppose those variables need
to be represented by contiguous letters.
Then again, is this a wall?
And what happens to all those walled off
memories, expectations, attachments?
Do these become dis-integrated pieces,
sharp-edged fragments?
Rubble, brittle and brash?

Reality fantasy, or
fake it to make it (gracias, EC)
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán 


WHAT DO WE WANT TO BUILD, ANYWAY?
JUBILEE ARTS is now THE PUBLIC, Birmingham, England
www.thepublic.com
promoting socially engaged public art exploring
homelessness, questions of internet access, etc.
"Dreamers, thinkers, doers, lookers"--

"Developing Forms of Democratic Evaluation"
article by Roz Hall, UK




Those beguiling eyes will 
always contain a question about 
a sense of an ending, 
like double question marks,
like hovering fish hooks luring one on...

Here's looking at you, kid, or
throw me a life (line) 
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán


ARIADNE

FUND FOR WOMEN ARTISTS

OUTRAGEOUS



N.PARADOXA


WOMEN'S STUDIO CENTER

"Romanticism. Idealism. 
Believing in ARGO [¿was that ARGUS?]...
or Alguien, Someone, 
written in big capital letters."

--From Puppet by Margarita Cota-Cárdenas

Persona: the I 
one chooses to remember
or this is not an eye
© 2003 by María DeGuzmán



I was at a party the other night and someone
said, "Hey, did you know there was this 
nineteenth-century tradition of wearing
the eye of your beloved on your lapel
in the form of a combination pin-and-locket?
Behind the eye, inside the locket, would be
a miniature portrait of your loved one."

And someone else replied, "The eye of love;
not the evil eye."

Now we all know the the future cannot be divorced from the past, nor the past from the future and that both are resistant to our deepest dreams and desires for wish-fulfillment. They cannot be divorced, but the time is nevertheless out of joint and suffused with the shock of being out of joint, verging on something other than where you are now. You wake up each day or night (depending on your shift) with the pressure of both the past and the future on your fluttering eyelids--usted sabe, ese peso, esa presión, sobre los párpados. And in that moment of coming up out of the dream-- and here I mean a dream of being in the remembered arms of someone who has left you (deliberately or accidentally) or being within reach of something you wanted and never got or lost--well, you know how it is, don't you, that sinking, sickening feeling because your geophysical and psychic time-spaces have broken apart, are dis-integrated, and you say to yourself, no you just feel these words: I don't get it. No entiendo. And you long for an understanding with a live person who is as good as dead. And you are, therefore, haunted by the past body, soul, and spirit of one who is still alive and yet to whom you are dead. And you are now yourself both living and dead, a revenant. But, revenant or not, you must rise from your bed anyway, if you can, and go out into the world, walk the face of this planet spinning in space. Spining, spinning, spinning faster and faster around the sun (new evidence shows), and labor in the world and also labor so that you can work with some satisfaction--increasingly difficult with growing poverty levels, oxygen restriction, and dwindling water tables or too much water but not a drop safe to drink (to name just a few challenges facing the majority of us now and in the future).

Credo:
In sickness and in health,
'til death do us part…
(and not even then)


Too much water, too little water, looking
for the living water, take me to the river
and drop me in the water. Orlando has sunk
far beneath the present moment. But when
Orlando sinks far beneath the present moment,
her eyes fill with fathomless tears, and these
are the measure of how far she has sunk
beneath the present moment and is haunted
by time past as she prospects 
for an absent presence.