Insomnia #1637
The sleepless nights are painful, though I need to catch up on my insomnia…
Insomnia: metonym for the clarity of perception which arrives when the brain gives up pursuits aetiologic and starts choking down unfiltered reality with willful abandon. Glutting on ideation which lacks the quality assurance of a well-rested perspective may result in paroxysms of epiphany, spewing logorrhea.
I imagine coughing up souvenirs, bits of postcards and letters long forgotten, slippery black worms, blood; objects which signify yet other objects and signs pointing to signs. Memories against the reality of the past. Inculcated memes against their substrate.
Language’s tautologies were immediately apparent to de Saussure; not content to know the enemy, he turned it on itself with playful words: A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas. If differences are boundaries and there exist no rational absolutes within language, e-Prime‘s honest attempt at clarity leaves its speaker and listener in a state of untenable un-knowledge. To speak of anything – linguistic law included – as if it may manifest or reify as more than words is like trying to pin down a ghost. (I told you, the man had a sense of humor)
Plans, as meanings, change at all times – gang aft agley, even. So it is with my plan.
Also, I should add, one should not contemplate the particulars of art. To do so is to invite new layers of difficulty:
Artwork’s truth content lies not in communicating something other than itself; rather it is a mediation, a “participation,” in history. The great works of art do not transcend the boundary of their own illusion, because their illusion represents their truth, an illusion of truth, i.e., their falsity. Aesthetic truth transcends illusion, but the artworks themselves are illusory. This is the paradox: they cannot lie, and yet they remain false.
- Amresh Sinha, Adorno on Mimesis in Aesthetic Theory
… and so, too, are we – a mediation of eternal cosmic machinations and subatomic combinations.
