Yellow movement

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Repetition IV

"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."

"I Am Sitting in a Room", Alvin Lucier - Listen

"In order to play this motif 840 times consecutively to oneself, it will be useful to prepare oneself beforehand, and in utter silence, by grave immobilities."

Erik Satie - Vexations listen to pianoless vexations

"If the traveler reaches the station hall before me, Pierre Garin will obviously walk toward him to greet him, with all the more assurance since he does not yet know that the new Henri Robin is wearing a moustache. . . . Two hypotheses are to be entertained: either the usurper is merely someone who resembles me like a twin brother, and Pierre Garin runs the risk of betraying himself, of betraying us, before the misunderstanding is revealed; or else the traveler is actually me, that is, my veritable duplication, and, in that case . . . Come off it! Such a supposition is hardly realistic. That I, in my Breton childhood, in a country of witches, ghosts and all kinds of apparitions, had suffered from identity problems regarded as serious by certain doctors is one thing. It would be quite another to imagine myself, thirty years later, the victim of an evil spell."

Repetition - Alain Robbe-Grillet, who died recently ((obituary)

Repetition - San Joaquins

Just north of Bakersfield on the Amtrak train to San Francisco.

Flatness. In SF people were perplexed not only to why I spent time in Bakersfield, but why I didn't take the coastal train. The coast is lovely, but the interior was entrancing. There was a lulling monotony; a repetitiveness - of right angle crossings by roads and rails; telegraph poles, fences, barriers; fields, furrows, tracks; bells, doppler effects. Space etched by rail.

"He is telling all of this while he keeps fixed to his map, and
as he speaks, he draws in the ties of his tracks, a couple hundred little hash marks. At first I see them as tallies of wrongs, but when he keeps marking them even after the topic changes, keeps laying down those little sleepers, I think: of course, the most important elements in a trackman’s work is the crosstie—that piece holding the railroad together, the predicate between subject and object, the linking between soil and rail. A trackman’s days go to battling ties; as feet are to a walker, so ties are to a train"

Prairyerth: A Deep Map - William Least Heat Moon

Nostalgia

In The Future of Nostalgia, cultural historian Svetlana Boym proposes to differentiate between two kinds of nostalgia: restorative and reflective. Restorative nostalgia evokes national past and future and is focused on the recovery and preservation of what is perceived to be an absolute truth. Reflective nostalgia is focused on the individualized meditation on history and suggests flexibility, an individual narrative, and cherishing shattered fragments of memory. While restorative nostalgia takes itself "dead seriously," reflective nostalgia "can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection."

A Little Nostalgia: The Detective Novels of Alexandra Marinina - Elena Baraban

Restorative nostalgia ... attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in ... the longing itself, and delays the homecoming.... Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contractictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt. Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals; it knows two main plots - the return to origins and conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones: it loves details, not symbols.

The Future of Nostalgia - Svetlana Boym

The etymology "nostalgia": constructed from the Greek words nóstos, meaning "return home", and álgos, meaning “pain”. The word was coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in the 17th Century to describe the pathological condition of severe homesickness observed in Swiss mercenaries who spent long periods away from their homeland.

It was during the 20th century that it's meaning evolved - a shift in emphasis from the spatial to temporal. A yearning for past ages, and then further into fantasy: a yearning for what never existed. And then, perhaps, even nostalgia for the future.

photographs

• Painting + armoured crab + fan + Sheran
• Stoat + cod backbone + virgin mary + navy torpedo bomber + 19th C pottery shards

Repetition - Music and Mathematics

Insomniac meanderings... I found these during the night

Chopin, Mazurka in F# Minor at The Shape of Song

Diebenkorn [Repetition]

"My freedom thus consists in moving within the narrow frame I have defined myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action, and the more I surround myself with obstacles"

Stravinsky - Poetics of Music


Richard Diebenkorn: Notes to myself on beginning a painting:

1. Attempt what is not certain, certainty may or may not come later. It may be then a valuable delusion.


2. The pretty, initial position which falls short of completeness is not to be valued – except as stimulus for further moves.


3. DO search. But in order to find other that what is searched for.


4. Use and respond to the initial fresh qualities but consider them absolutely expendable.


5. Don’t discover a subject – of any kind.


6. Somehow don’t be bored – but if you must, use it in action. Use its destructive potential.


7. Mistakes can’t be erased but they move you from your present position.


8. Keep thinking about Polyanna [his wife].


9. Tolerate chaos.


10. Be careful only in a perverse way.

Near Tower Bridge

Repetition and echoes, old against new.

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Walked along from tower bridge towards Rotherhithe. I'm obsessed with: stacked objects - spines. Support: will it topple? Collapse. Balanced upright - vulnerable to tipping over.

Repetition

"Repetition and recollection are the same movement except in opposite directions; for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forward. Repetition, therefore, if it is possible, makes a person happy, whereas recollection makes him unhappy - assuming, of course, that he gives himself time to live and does not promptly, at birth, find an excuse to sneak out of life again, for example, under the pretext that he has forgotten something."

Kierkegaard