A Thousand Plateaus

listened all day long to “the decemberists” compilation that alice had sent me. about a year ago bernd had already tried to get me to listen to them. hm, seems that intelligent, attractive, eloquent women have an easier time convincing me of their taste of music. alice must have known that the last two minutes of “sons and daughters” would fill me with INSANE JOY!

when i skyped with princess superstar the other night, the first thing she said was:
“jesus, phil! how *could* you??!?”
“how could i what?”
“how could you post this weird video with ‘you’ on the train!? who do you expect to believe that this is you?! where did you find the footage, anyway?”
“i shot it on the train. really!”
“get out!”

and when elaine arrived at the office this morning the first thing she said was:
“one question. just one question! how did you get that guy in the train to pose for you?”
“he didn’t pose” i smiled “in fact he didn’t even notice that i was filming him. the train was crowded and he was sitting opposite me on the floor. so i started the camera and pointed it his way while i was pretending to look for something in my bag…”
“you’ve got *some* nerve! what if he had noticed?”
“oh, i would have said that i started it by accident. what was he supposed to do? punch me?”

we went down to the cafeteria to get a coffee (the coffee-machine in the office is in too close a vicinity to the genetic bioweapon-experiment that’s mutating in the dark of the fridge) and suddenly elaine said rather shyly:
“you know, i’m going to meet the dubinis today.”
“come again?”
“i’m going to meet with the dubinis this afternoon.”
“oh” there was a pause. “i suppose you have to?”
“there’s no way around it. we’ve got to negotiate the details for the dvd deal…”
“hm…”
“i promise we will not talk about you.”
“even if they ask you about me?”
“yes. i promise.”
“i’m scared.”
“i know.”

so, in the afternoon elaine packed her things and went to a nearby café to meet them. the dubinis are filmmakers who have made a documentary called “journey into the mind of p.“, a film about thomas pynchon and the mysteries surrounding him.

if you remember, incidentally mr. p. is editor-in-chief of this very company i’m writing for, and therefore he’s elaine and my boss. which - of course - nobody must know. in 2002 the dubinis premiered their documentary during a thomas pynchon conference at cologne university. that’s where i got to know them. and now, five years later, elaine has contacted them because their film will be part of a special edition of pynchon notes - an academic journal publishing the proceedings from the 2002 conference which is edited by a befriended literature professor at miami university–hamilton. and elaine is in charge of the organization of the editing process.

three hours later - when she had just returned from the meeting with the film-makers - elaine and i met at a café.
“you know” she said” they are very nice people!”
“i know! i’m sure they are. but does this give them the right to direct and influence, and on top of that : *film* my life? they *never* even asked me whether i’d consent to that! casting s. and s., and coming up with the most absurd screen-play ever!”
“oh come on! you’re being paranoiac now!”
“am i?” i asked sardonically.
“hm, now that you mention it. one of them showed me film-clips for a future project on his mac, and there was a folder called ‘phil’…”

i wanted to mp3 some stina nordenstam cds for a friend of mine, but i had to realize that they don’t work anymore. they were copies of the original albums. sigh. seems i better mp3 my entire cd collection before the rest of them gets corrupted as well

boy, i *can’t* believe that victoria is in my latin parallel course! and that she’s studying philosophy! if only i was ten years younger!

extracted a drum sample from phoenix’s “one time too many” today, which might make a good ryhthm section for “aglajan sea”, for which i still don’t have any music yet.

And I am a writer, writer of fictions
I am the heart that you call home
And I’ve written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones
I am a writer, I am all that you have hoped on

And I’ve written pages upon pages
Trying to rid you from my bones
My bones
My bones

And if you don’t love me let me go
And if you don’t love me let me go
And if you don’t love me let me go
And if you don’t love me let me go

listened all day long (and yesterday, too, and the day before, too, and the day before that, too) to joni mitchell’s hejira. not just to the song with the same title, but to the entire album, which is among the top ten best albums ever. period. and you should, too!

4 - i loved that article on cohen…
Written by: leah at 2007/05/30 - 06:43:43

hey leah, it’s a pity that you’ve ended your journal. i do understand your reasons, though. drop me a line when you’re keeping it up again

click here. third image. mind the caption [incidentally the following photo's caption refers to a midlake song. *scratchhead* this world. i tell you!].

hm, received an invitation to d’s birthday/housewarming party today. not quite sure what to think about it or whether to go. i mean we don’t really know each other (nor do i know anybody who’ll be there) because the times we’ve met we didn’t do a lot of talking.

when i was paying yesterday night i overheard how victoria the beautiful was saying to a guest. “…but before i can continue studying philosophy i have to pass my latin exam.” so, she’s studying philosophy and she’s learning latin right now.
“you’re taking a latin course at the university?” i asked her.
“yes.” she answered and it turned out that she’s in the parallel course which always takes place at eight in the morning!!! very weird. i’ve never met her at the university before! and she’s studying philosophy! who would have guessed! and i thought : ‘great! someone has just coated the cookie that’s dangling just out of reach in front of me with chocolate and sprinkled kissables all over it!’

comments to yesterday’s post:

1 - …. how could there BE any PASSIONiate kind of love for you if YOUR
passion in your mirror looks only in one way - back?
Written by: today at 2007/05/29 - 00:44:35

2 - hm. though there’s some essential wisdom here, not entirely fair.
you only deal with what you’ve been given…
Written by: libertine at 2007/05/29 - 02:31:04

3 - ah, the connoisseurs of passion… so, they do exist! why not impart
to us your magic formula, dear sir/madam, so that we can all bathe in
the perennial stream of love?
Written by: MJ at 2007/05/29 - 12:12:36

folks, folks, relax! let me quote this great encounter-passage from dialogues:

“But what precisely is an encounter with someone you like?”

this, obviously is the important question because it relates back to passion. passion is that which fills the ‘in-between’ that an encounter constitutes. in that it is very close to a becoming. because a becoming, also, is always ‘in-between’. it’s not the transformation of one term into an other (ahab becoming ‘like’ the whale or the whale becoming ‘like’ ahab) but a deterritorialization of both terms/poles which creates something new. the whale-becoming of ahab and the ahab-becoming of the whale.

“Is it an encounter with someone, or with the animals who come to populate you, or with the ideas which take you over, the movements which move you, the sounds which run through you? And how do you separate these things?” (D 11)

and now : concrete example:

“I can talk of Foucault, tell you that he has said this or that to me, set it out as I see it. This is nothing as long as I have not been able really to encounter this set of sounds hammered out, of decisive gestures, of ideas all made of tinder and fire, of deep attention and sudden closure, of laughter and smiles which one feels to be ‘dangerous’ at the very moment when one feels tenderness – this set as a unique combination whose proper name would be Foucault.” (D 11)

and similarly, there is a set of unique combinations whose proper name is s.. and this combination (and sometimes even those parts that are not necessarily bound to a ‘presence’ such as a recorded voice or a captured smell or a photograph) can trigger passion. of course this passion is then necessarily directed into the past.

new question: “How to shatter even our love in order to become finally capable of loving? How to become imperceptible?” (D 46)

concrete example from Miller’s Tropic of Cancer:

“I no longer look into the eyes of the woman I hold in my arms, but I swim through, head and arms and legs, and I see that behind the sockets of the eyes there is a region unexplored, a world of futurity, and here there is no logic whatever … this selfless eye neither reveals nor illuminates. It travels along the line of the horizon, a ceaseless, uninformed voyager … I have broken the wall created by birth and the line of voyage is round and unbroken … My whole body must become a constant beam of light, moving with an ever greater rapidity … Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth. Before I shall become quite man again, I shall probably exist as a park …” (quoted in Dialogues 46).

To “become finally capable of loving” is a real ‘becoming’. note that being capable of loving is here synonymous with passion. passion, then, initiates and presupposes a becoming imperceptible:

“There, we no longer have any secrets, we no longer have anything to hide. It is we who have become a secret, it is we who are hiding, even though we do all openly, in broad daylight. [We're becoming imperceptible because we] have painted ourselves in the colors of the world.” (D 46)

“Your secret [the little, dirty Oedipal secret, "Signification and interpretosis are the two diseases of the earth, the pair of despot and priest. The signifier is always the little secret which has never stopped hanging around mummy and daddy"] can always be seen on your face and in your eyes. Lose your face. Become capable of loving without remembering, without phantasm and without interpretation, without taking stock. Let there just be fluxes, which sometimes dry up, freeze or overflow, which sometimes combine or diverge. A man and a woman are fluxes. All the becomings which there are in making love, all the sexes, the n sexes in a single one, or in two, which have nothing to do with castration. On lines of flight there can no longer be but one thing, life-experimentation.” (D 47)

loving without remembering only functions in an encounter.

“Other becomings will link up here, molecular-becomings in which the air, sound, water are grasped in their particles at the same times as their flux combines with mine. A whole world of micro-perceptions which lead us to the imperceptible. Experiment, never interpret.” (D 48)

i *love* deleuze.

back from the front. with the help of a lot of alcohol and my sister i survived it. my sister was really sweet. when she picked me up from the station she said : “i’ve bought two big boxes of cookies for you only!” i spent the nights at her place because my parent’s house was already filled with other guests. she’s living with tom, her boyfriend, and two cats, for one of which they have created an elevator from the garden to the first floor:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6CNjM2crgE

i don’t know why exactly my father had chosen this particular restaurant as a venue (well, he’s a passionate hiker and climber and he wanted a place that had a resemblance to an “alm-hütt’n”, which this place had because it is located on top of a hill overlooking the entire city) – but it was horrible : narrow and dark and with gruesome furniture from an interior-decorator’s worst nightmare (so un-farbman-like!) and with yellowed, bad prints of horrible paintings on the wall and all the lamps were equipped with energy-saving-bulbs which made the light artificial and neon-like. yikes!

at one point the dancing started (the horror! the horror!) and i was glad that i was sitting at the end of the room with my cousins and if you listen closely you can hear my cousin t. starting a longer discussion about god. he teaches religion at school and when everybody was pretty woozy the topic changed landslidelike from soccer to ‘is there a god or not and who cares anyway’. he responded with heavy tongue addressing all of us  :
“you know, albert camus, a philosopher and mathematician of the late middle ages, said…” everybody was clinging to his words which, granted, sounded authoritatively enough.
i looked at his brother in amazement and whispered:
“i didn’t know camus had a time-travel machine…”
“oh, just let him…” his brother (and my favorite cousin) smiled “…he’s totally pissed. also, this proves again that it’s not important *what* you’re saying as long as it falls on dung that doesn’t care to verify what you’re saying…”

i know, elaine, you’ll get a real kick out of this!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en8I-Pk4CX8

and of course there were the obligatory speeches such as this one by this fellow
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMhlPxeYmxY

later in the evening he tumbled over to me and started to give me advice in the most patronizing fashion (even though he had seen me the first time in his life):
“phil, do you like it in cologne?”
“sure!”
“but it’s important that you get somewhere with your job” and as he’s saying this he’s leaning with his entire weight against my body, his face only inches from mine: “it’s important that you know what you want in your job, so that you get somewhere! what about your professor? is he exploiting you?”
“eh, no, not really…”
“how old are you?”
when i told him he was startled.
“this old! then it’s important that you get somewhere with your job, that you know what you want, that you’re successful.”
i had the almost irresistible desire to give him a swift kick in the balls. but i only nodded my head and said “sure, sure” because i knew that not even all the time in the world would suffice to explain to him how much our notions of ’success’ differed.
 
princess superstar sent me this link today: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/leonardCohen.

i’ve become useless for art or for science. all i fill my days with is stabbing at my stubborn heart to see if it still bleeds, and then – kind of welcoming the pain – i’m leaning back to see the thin red lines create magnificent, delicate patterns no words could describe. e v e r . my only aim has been to praise you or to combine the right words to summon you to me to you to me to you to me. and even though i tried numerous combinations, even the least likely ones, there hasn’t been a single knock on my door. y e t . at night, the only thing that’s louder than my own breath is not the breath of someone lying next to me but the humming of the broken fridge. i read an interview with lenny today, and he said: “I’m not interested in taking off my clothes with a woman right now“. i  a m .

it’s eight at night, i’m sitting at the café, watching the rain darkening the sidewalk. gorgeous victoria is working and i’m sitting at my favorite table, my bad conscience sitting opposite, having one beer after the next. which means trouble, because it usually starts to hackle me when it’s drunk, poking into my side with its stiff, pointy index finger, repeating itoldyousoitoldyousoitoldyouso. my usual answer is a resignated “don’t drink if you can’t handle the alcohol” and i’m patiently waiting for it to become sleepy or harassing the women at the next table. once or twice it even puked onto my shoes. which is not a nice sight because it brings up ugly, ugly stuff.

had bad dreams again. throughout the dream it became clear that there’s a connection between the gym and the two hungry polar bears who are still trying to track me down : the more miles i make on the cross trainer the more i would have a lead over them.

you know what i realized : what i hate more than anything else are these “i don’t want to lose you” moments i’ve had too much of in the past months. “i don’t want to lose you because you’re such a nice guy, such a pleasant boy, such an interesting person…” i’d rather have people hating me than being soaked with this lukewarm, platonic, passionless kindness time after time.

enough complaining. here’s a photo of my uncle wearing my sweater and improvising hip-hop moves. meine herren, was war der abgefüllt!

instead of a proper entry:
alice had sent me a compilation cd which arrived friday. and the first track is “roscoe” by midlake.
“fleetwood mac attack!” alice commented, and wrote
“this is the perfect song for driving on the highway! i’m not sure whether it works for the train, too…“

it does.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QU4NlpSCZiw

i’m missing you. i’m missing you. i’m missing you so much that my nose starts to bleed. f u c k .

see you after the week-end!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNTxNt3yPok

woke up after five hours of sleep, dragged myself to the the gym, did the laundry, hurried to the university to meet bernd and discuss professional and private issues, hurried back, did half of the latin mock test i’ll have to hand in tomorrow, talked to princess superstar on the phone.

i’ll be in bielefeld over the week-end to visit the folks and celebrate my father’s 60th birthday. hope they’ll have the quantities of alcohol it will take to get through this halfway sanely.

yesterday night after the café had closed jodie, victoria-the-beautiful and i were standing behind the church. it was after one and jodie said:
“okay, so *i* will go to the connection now! [the connection is a bar that is run by a friend of hers]. wanna join me?” and victoria thought for a moment. actually i was pretty tired and wanted to go straight to bed. but then victoria said:
“why not. at home nothing is waiting for me except for my boy-friend who’s fast asleep. so let’s go!” this changed my mind pretty quickly. because i’m a superficial man, and i must confess that her cute kindchenschema-face does not fail to fascinate me.

and then, tonight, i came across an equally fascinating or, hm, touching or affective moment : an accidentally recorded sigh/gasping (even more tender than the by now famous 3:45-gasping-moment in stina nordenstam’s “fireworks”) followed by an aspirated “okay” that is laurie anderson worthy.

Love’s a repetitious danger
You’d think I’d be accustomed to
Well, I do accept the changes
At least better than I used to do
A woman I knew just drowned herself
The well was deep and muddy
She was just shaking off futility
Or punishing somebody
My friends were calling up all day yesterday
All emotions and abstractions
It seems we all live so close to that line
And so far from satisfaction

it’s 5 in the morning, the sun is coming up and the birds are singing. i’ve just returned home. first i had met blaine and sharon for a beer, and on my way back home i stopped by the café because jodie and victoria-the-beautiful (who just is unbel*iev*ably cute) were working. i didn’t want to stay that long (and i hardly had any alcohol at all) but at one point jodie started to talk again, and it became clear that she was really desperate and needed to talk badly. so i stayed and we talked - good talk, even though i couldn’t really help her - until a couple of minutes ago. now it’s morning and i need some sleep.

i ordered this before the two white beasts were brought to life by leaping out of her gray glacier eyes. and now it’s too beautiful not to hang on the wall. and besides : i don’t think they obey her orders any longer.

another dream tonight. this time it was you [oddly enough the third and last s.]. you were in a limo, and you were crying. the car wasn’t driving, though, just standing in the avenue. suddenly the door opened and i came in, sitting next to you on the back seat and trying to console you until i realized that you had been crying because i hadn’t been there. when you noticed me you looked up, and you were laughing, with all the tears still streaming over your face, and the same feeling of unconditional tenderness that i had found in the eyes of last dream’s s. was overwhelming me, and i felt it all for you.