The Bottom Layer

“… I was terrified to see a face from the inside, but I was far more afraid of seeing the bare, raw head without a face.”

This is from Face and Mask: A Double History by Hans Belting, translated by Thomas S. Hansen and Abby J. Hansen (2017):

… “There are a lot of people, but there are a lot more faces, because everyone has several. There are some people who wear one face for years; naturally it gets worn away,” and it “stretches like gloves that one has worn while traveling.

[line break added] “The question, of course, is — because they have several faces — what do they do with the others? They save them so that their children may wear them.” But maybe the dog runs away with one of them. “And why not? A face is a face, other people put on their faces amazingly quickly, one after the other, and wear them out.”

[line break added] They have barely reached the age of forty, and they’re using their last one. “They aren’t used to going easy on their faces, they’ve worn through their last one in eight days, it gets holes in it … and then, after a while, the bottom layer, the non-face, comes out and then they walk around with that.” [Rainer Maria Rilke]

… The non-face seems to be borne out in the nightmares of Rilke’s young protagonist Malte most horribly when he meets “the woman” on a corner of the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. She “had completely fallen into herself, bent over, with her face in her hands.”

[line break added] His own footsteps in the empty street frighten her so much that she jerks upward, “out of herself,” so violently, “that her face remained there in her two hands. I could see it, its hollow form lying there.” It costs him some effort not to look at the thing that had “torn off in her hands. I was terrified to see a face from the inside, but I was far more afraid of seeing the bare, raw head without a face.”

My most recent previous post from Belting’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The End of Movement

… something that should be, that can be and which is not yet.

This is from Of Habit by Félix Ravaisson (1838):

… In the progress of habit, inclination, as it takes over from the will, comes closer and closer to the actuality that it aims to realize; it increasingly adopts its form. The duration of movement gradually transforms the potentiality, the virtuality, into a tendency, and gradually the tendency it transformed into action.

[line break added] The interval that the understanding represents between the movement and its goal gradually diminishes; the distinction is effaced; the end whose idea gave rise to the inclination comes closer to it, touches it and becomes fused with it.

… In reflection and will, the end of movement is an idea, an ideal to be accomplished: something that should be, that can be and which is not yet. It is a possibility to be realized. But as the end becomes fused with the movement, and the movement with the tendency, possibility, the ideal, is realized in it.

My most recent previous post from Ravaisson’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Feathered Skeletons

“… the metabolic equivalent would be to run 4-minute miles for 80 hours …”

This is from Ornithology, Third Edition by Frank B. Gill (2007):

… Every fall, vast numbers of migrants leave coastal New England and Canada, heading southeast over the Atlantic Ocean. The capacity for such flights by larger, faster shorebirds such as the American Golden Plover has been known for many years. Radar studies now reveal similar efforts by millions of small land birds.

[line break added] As many as 12 million birds pass over Cape Cod in one night, embarking on a nonstop journey of 80 to 90 hours. Wave after wave of the migrants, such as the Blackpoll Warbler, pass Bermuda. Farther on, they encounter strong trade winds from the northeast. The migrants then fly with the wind southwest toward the northern coast of South America.

Tim and Janet Williams put this feat in perspective: “The trip … requires a degree of exertion not matched by any other vertebrate. For a man, the metabolic equivalent would be to run 4-minute miles for 80 hours …. If a Blackpoll Warbler burned gasoline for fuel instead of its reserves of body fat, it could boast of getting 720,000 miles to the gallon!”

Evidence of the strenuous nature of the trip can be seen in the exhausted condition of birds that stop at Curaçao, short of their destination, when flight conditions have been poor. Little more than feathered skeletons, they have depleted their fat reserves, metabolized much of their protein, and drained the remnants of this precious body water.

My most recent previous post from Gill’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

And Frankly Unreliable

… Holistic experience is always immanent, but never actual …

This is from ‘For Andrei Monastyrski from Afar’ (2011) found in Writings on Art: 2006-2021 by Robert Storr (2021):

… If I were to select … [an] inspiring page from Monastyrski to put on my wall, it would be a meager typescript page describing one of the performances of Collective Actions, a page on which the terms of the specific event are spelled out and on which the divergent responses of the various participants in the event appear.

[line break added] Such divergence is owed to several factors: anticipated differences in the innate disposition each witness to the event brings with him or her, carefully structured differences in perspective on the event, and finally, the fragmentary design of the events themselves.

[line break added] All together these factors determine in advance that omniscient apprehension of the event will be denied, and that, given that lack of an all-seeing vantage point and an all-knowing protagonist, no one person’s point of view will be privileged over the viewpoint of anyone else. Holistic experience is always immanent, but never actual or codified.

… By 1980, critical theory had taught us to demote the author in favor of the reader, to set the artist aside in favor of the viewer, but the real shift in consciousness came not from learning that the author/artist is less than omnipotent and frankly unreliable, but in grasping that the artist/author like the reader/viewer are inherently plural, and that meaning is collaborative …

My most recent previous post from Storr’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

This Morning

… thrown towards the perpetual present, forming an exterior without any interior …

This is the last post from Hominescence by Michel Serres, translated by Randolph Burks (2019, 2001):

… War creates the state, which creates war, which creates History, which creates war, which creates man, which creates war — this is the catechism in as many spiraling loops taught by almost all our philosophies, armored from fights to the death, combats, brawls and debates considered not only to be normal, but to be the exclusive motors of renewal and knowledge.

[line break added] Without war, there can be no state, no history, even less can there be man, inventions or advances. From economic competition to competitive sports, cultural formations, philosophy included, are all taken to be wars continued by other means.

[line break added] This bloody civilization looks down on projects of perpetual peace, calling them utopian dreams; squabbling takes on conceptual loftiness and dignity, and peace takes on the ignominy of naïve idealism. No one does or writes History with good intentions. Never search for the causes or the reason for a war; war replaces causes and reasons.

… The universal flood of noise — sounds, music and discourse mixed together, presto e fortissimo, erasing the silence — destroys the old agency of the ‘I’ the way a thin and fragile vase would explode by dint of vibrations, to the profit of a transparency thrown towards the perpetual present, forming an exterior without any interior, weaving relations without reserving any substance for itself, sparkling multiplicities without any nucleus. Formerly a dense seed or dark bit of gravel, single and hard, the self becomes multiple, crisscrossed, mosaic and shimmering.

This is the charm of our grandchildren, closer to Montaigne and La Fontaine, harlequins, than to Descartes and Kant, dark, sad and profound. They no longer have or no longer are the same subjects. What could be worrying about that since such changes have so often adjusted the soul, white and fluid, aquatic and adjustable, possible and contingent? This morning, their innumerable smile succeeds the old, cramped confinement.

I bequeath to them the rare music and the silence.

My most recent previous post from Serres’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Slanting from the True Direction

… definitely different from what he consciously conceives …

This is from ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’ (1901-02) found in William James: Writings 1902-1910 (1987):

… Now with most of us the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal we can aim at. In a majority of cases, indeed, the ‘sin’ almost exclusively engrosses the attention, so that conversion is “a process of struggling away from sin rather than of striving towards righteousness.”

[line break added] A man’s conscious wit and will, so far as they strain towards the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and inaccurately imagined. Yet all the while the forces of mere organic ripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes, which in their way work towards rearrangement; and the rearrangement towards which all these deeper forces tend is pretty surely definite, and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and determines.

[line break added] It may consequently be actually interfered with (jammed, as it were, like the lost word when se seek too energetically to recall it), by his voluntary efforts slanting from the true direction.

… To state it in terms or our own symbolism: when the new center of personal energy has been subconsciously incubated so long as to be just ready to open into flower, ‘hands off’ is the only word for us, it must burst forth unaided!

… psychology, defining these forces as ‘subconscious,’ and speaking of their effects as due to ‘incubation,’ or ‘cerebration,’ implies that they do not transcend the individual’s personality; and herein she diverges from Christian theology, which insists that they are direct supernatural operations of the Deity. I propose to you that we do not yet consider this divergence final but leave the question for a while in abeyance — continued inquiry may enable us to get rid of some of the apparent discord.

My most recent previous post from James’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Thinking

… is carried under the intrusion of an outside that eats into the interval and forces or dismembers the internal.

This is from Foucault by Gilles Deleuze, translated by Seán Hand (1988, 1986):

… We must distinguish between exteriority and the outside. Exteriority is still a form, as in The Archaeology of Knowledge — even two forms which are exterior to one another, since knowledge is made from the two environments of light and language, seeing and speaking.

[line break added] But the outside concerns force: if force is always in relation with other forces, forces necessarily refer to an irreducible outside which no longer even has any form and is made up of distances that cannot be broken down through which one force acts upon another or is acted upon by another.

… The appeal to the outside is a constant theme in Foucault and signifies that thinking is not the innate exercise of a faculty but must become thought. Thinking does not depend on a beautiful interiority that would reunite the visible and the articulable elements but is carried under the intrusion of an outside that eats into the interval and forces or dismembers the internal.

… the relation between composing forces and the outside continually changes the compound form, in other relations, as it is taken up and transformed by new compositions. We must take quite literally the idea that man is a face drawn in the sand between two tides: he is a composition appearing only between two others, a classical past that never knew him, and a future that will no longer know him.

My most recent previous post from Deleuze’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Unloved, Everyday Faces

… Facebook evokes the private face, despite its faceless texts.

This is from Face and Mask: A Double History by Hans Belting, translated by Thomas S. Hansen and Abby J. Hansen (2017):

… “Facial politics and advertising aesthetics” have not only politicized the face, they have also commodified it. “Faciality,” consequently, is no longer derived from the natural face, but rather usurps our screens with blank facial formula.

[line break added] With his own now-anonymous face the viewer consumes faces on the screen; these show projections of the power structures of society. The public face has produced its own mask.

… A special case in cosmetic surgery addresses the desire to have one’s own face transformed to resemble a famous face. Some people prefer to walk around as copies rather than wear and tolerate their own, unloved, everyday faces. This is not mimesis of one’s own self bur rather of an alien ego and its mask.

… Face-to-face contact has retreated from the Internet, where the name Facebook evokes the private face, despite its faceless texts. Mass media rob the face of its corporeal presence by disembodying the habits of our perception.

My most recent previous post from Belting’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

This Sensation That the Will Abandons

… how is it that the increasing facility of movement coincides with the diminution of will and consciousness?

This is from Of Habit by Félix Ravaisson (1838):

… The subject experiencing pure passion is completely within himself, and by this very fact cannot yet distinguish and know himself. In pure action, he is completely outside of himself and no longer knows himself.

[line break added] Personality perishes to the same degree in extreme subjectivity and in extreme objectivity, by passion in the one case and by action in the other. It is in the intermediate region of touch, within this mysterious middle ground of effort, that there is to be found, with reflection, the clearest and most assured consciousness of personality.

… The necessary condition of passion is the contrast between the present state of the subject experiencing it, and the state to which the cause of the passion tends to bring him. Like is unaffected by like.

… But if the sensation disappears in the long run because attention tires of it and turns elsewhere, how is it that sensibility increasingly demands this sensation that the will abandons?

[line break added] If movement becomes swifter and easier because intelligence knows better all its parts and because the will synthesizes the action with more precision and assurance, how is it that the increasing facility of movement coincides with the diminution of will and consciousness?

My most recent previous post from Ravaisson’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Feather Replacement

… They stop the molt of their flight feathers just before migration …

This is from Ornithology, Third Edition by Frank B. Gill (2007):

… The complete molt is a major undertaking. The bird sheds and then regenerates thousands of feathers, roughly from 25 to 40 percent of its lean dry mass (i.e., excluding fat and water content). Molt draws significantly on protein and energy reserves to synthesize feather structure and to offset the costs of poorer insulation and flight efficiency.

… Tropical terns such as the Angel Tern on Christmas Island turn the molt on and off to breed whenever possible. This delicate seabird has no pigment in its flight feathers, which consequently wear easily and must be replaced more often than those of most other terns.

[line break added] Wave after wave of molt is initiated in the flight feathers, The innermost primaries often begin to molt again before the outermost primaries are replaced in the preceding molt. As many as three successive molts may be in progress simultaneously.

[line break added] When an Angel Tern starts to nest (it simply lays an egg precariously on a bare branch), the molt stops suddenly, no matter which feathers may be missing — the molting equivalent of musical chairs. After the tern has finished nesting, molt resumes as if there had been no interruption in the complicated pattern of feather replacement.

… Renesting White-crowned Sparrows molt so fast at high latitudes that they become almost flightless for a short time. Peregrine Falcons and American Golden Plovers, as well as many other shorebirds, begin their molts on their Arctic breeding ground but are unable to complete the process in time to leave for the south. They stop the molt of their flight feathers just before migration and then resume it for several more months after reaching their wintering grounds.

My most recent previous post from Gill’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/