Introduction
Words and works. “Work in progress” toward an architect-ture. The question is whether in these voices, in our experience of these writings, we can recognize a thought being born, opening sense, a discourse traced by its verb, rather than in empty philosophizing or appropriative thinking, merely nam-ing and sealing off senses. The delight of presence is the mysti-cal formula par excellence, yet it is no mere seduction. Presence is not dialectically opposed to absence, analogous to the Western tradition’s opposition between life and death. In being born, a poetic work, regardless of its genre, dissolves the apparent opposites in a single incandescent moment, its significance is being born. 1
Some time during the last century there lives two great men, a nihilist and an mystic. Their work became the model for many to come, and while sometimes they were truly understood, more often their thoughts were polarized and distorted (a characteristic of our still Cartesian culture). One, the first postmodern thinker, inaugurated a lineage of deconstructive despair, existential angst and adolescent hysteria. Having declared the death of God and demonstrated the fallacy of secularized Christian values, he became the hero of many who decided the only way to act was in view of the ultimate “reality” of death, leading to materialistic interests and a pragramatic ethics of power and control. The mystic, on the other hand, believed in angels. His lineage included romantic artists and reactionary politicians, championing “faith” over reason, and singing the praises of disembodied love and spiritual beauty.
The nihilist once wrote: “Only tragedy can save us from Buddhism.” He became ill and during eleven years, in Turin, suffered from progressive paralysis. Some say he went mad, because he designated himself as God the Creator and started to address his friends as “immortals.” In January 4, 1889, he wrote “Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured and all the heavens are full of joy,” and signed “The Crucified.” 2
The mystic, author of several phallic poems, knew well that the kingdom of God was everywhere and nowhere, a personal experience, here and now, rather than in a thousand years or after death. Yet he wrote: “Transiency hurls itself everywhere into a deep state of being […] Nature, the things of our daily contact and use, all these are preliminaries and transiencies. […] All forms of this our world [however] are not only to be used in a time-bound sense […] we should introduce what we have seen and touched here into the widest circumference […], not in the Christian sense [of a ´ beyond´ whose shadow darkens the earth] but in the purely [and] joyfully earthly consciousness […], into the whole, into the universe. Therefore we should not only refain from vilifying and depreciating all that belongs to this our world, but on the contrary […] these phenomena and things should be understood and transformed by us in the innermost sense. […] because it is our task to impress upon ourselves this preliminary, transient earth in so deep, so painful, so passionate a manner, that its essential nature is “invisibily” resurrected within us. Within us alone can this intimate and constant transformation of the visible into the invisible take place […]” 3
The nihilist embraced art as a supreme form of the will to power, capable of reconciling it with amor fati, our love – or abandonment – to destiny. Artistic making, as intoxication and excess, could thus brandish its destructuring power against technological enframing, archaic values and intellectual weakness. He thought artists must be passionate lovers, for the lover is worth more, rather than one-half, as the Greeks thought, the lover is more complete.
The mystic wrote abundantly about love. He believed that to love was to respect the other’s solitude, to release rather than control. He also believed love and sex were difficult. “O that man might take this secret, of which the world is full even to its littlest things, more humbly to himself and bear it, endure it more seriously and feel how terribly difficult it is, instead of taking it lightly. That he might be more reverent toward his fruitfulness, which is but one, whether it seems mental or physical; for intellectual creation too springs from the physical […] In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive […] Do not be bewildered by the surfaces; in the depths all becomes law. And those who live the secret wrong and badly (and there are very many), lose it only for themselves and still hand it on, like a sealed letter, without knowing it.” 4
In fact, both the nihilist and the mystic wrote poetry. This is, of course, what matters. Perhaps their deepest insights, obviously beyond their apparent radical divergencies, are owed to the one woman of whom they were both lovers.
Dr Alberto Pérez-Gómez
______________________________1 J.L. Nancy The Birth to Presence (Stanford, CA: Stanford U.P.) 1993, pp 4-5
2 Letter to Peter Gast, The Portable Nietzsche, tr. W. Kaufmann (New York, 1968) p. 685
3 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters from Muzot in Correspondence, pp.372 ff.
4 Rilke on Love and other Difficulties, tr. John J.L. Mood (New York: Norton and Co.), pp.34-35.
Contents
Fantasies of a Lost Wardrobe [...]
Victoria Claire Bernie
Bed
Pamela Plumb-Dhindsa
La Princesse Blanche
Dominique L'Abbé
The Rites of Artifice
Three Tales of Ratiocination and Illusion
Joanna Merwood
Phantoms and Unicorns
Michael Jemtrud
Apologos, Some Consideration on Architectural Beginnings [...]
Joanne Paul
The Cosmos and its Double: The Role of Play in Representation
Tracey Eve Winton
Alas, Poor Fanny in Mystical China
Daniel Macek
Prometheus Revisited
Dorian Yurchuck
Reflective Depth on the Surface of Reality
Katja Grillner
Reflections on the Reversibility of Vision and Touch, or the Great Peepshow
Franca Trubiano
Between Worlds: H2Merzbau
Donald Labossière
Gorgomatica: The Myth About Vision
Robert Labonté