File spoon-archives/bataille.archive/bataille_1999/bataille.9908, message 44


Date: Sat, 07 Aug 1999 19:36:51 -0700
From: "J. Foster" <borealis-AT-mail.wellsgray.net>
Subject: Re: silence


Ariosto:
>>John, this relation without relation I  think would be akin to
>>Echkart's modeless mode. You remember where he writes about this?
John:
>I have superimposed the image of the rag doll in the reclined position here.
>We are most open when we are reclined and in the ambivalent position, or
>existential posture of the doll [Marco Vassi]. 

That is to say, we are most inclined when we are reclined, less ambivalent.
Prove me wrong.

Marco Vassi [In Lying Down: the horizontal worldvies] commenting on Strauss
states,  "[He] weds his physiological existentialism to a zen-like vision." 

'Distance is ambivalent. Sometimes we want to preserve it, sometimes we want
to eliminate it. The hand is instrumental in both cases. When our
equilibrium is out of balance or disturbed, the hand grasps for a hold. In
darkness, it functions as scout and sentry, warning against collision and
searching for contact....[It is] an organ of gnostic touching- the
epicritic, discriminative instrument par excellence. As such the hand ranks
with the eye and the ear." 

"[Man] is surrounded by a world panarama, by a space divided into world
regions joined together in the totality of the universe. Around him the
horizons retreat in an ever growing radius. Galaxy and diluvium, the
infinite and the eternal, enter into the orbit of human interests." 

Erwin Strauss, "The Upright Posture"

"Lying down as art. The vertical understanding of art is as creation: making
things. The horizontial understanding is one of appreciation: becoming more
sensitive to what is." [Marco Vassi]

"The beginning of art lay in its application to the body. Art arose, not in
any isolated and self-contained work, but by the moulding of the human body
to a formative plasticity, urged thereto by an idealized instinct of will to
style." E. van Syndow. 

"Art may have very well begun with tattooing, scarification, body painting,
the making of masks, and dance and song, all growing out of the awareness of
the body as body, distinct from other bodies or nature at large."

"We have had 'stand-up' comedians, why not lie-down comedians?" [Marco Vassi]

"Vertical architecture has proven disasterous, producing ugliness, crowding,
pollution, and dehumanization in the cities, which have then spawned
suburbs, with the entire system causing ecological imbalance on the rest of
the planet." 

"In the pure an shining sarcophagus, sweet water reposes, warm and perfect,
birde of the body's form. Light and free, the nude settles down and is
assuaged. Everthing is easy in the fluid..." [Somerset Maughman]

The existential posture of lying down is also one mode of the 'modeless'. 


   

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