day 232 – 262 – on being meaningless & ‘a tissue for my eyes’

life during lockdown:

thanks Pavane!

The Assembly adopted draft resolution I, “Combating glorification of Nazism, neo‑Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”, by a recorded vote of 130 in favour to 2 against (Ukraine, United States), with 51 abstentions. – from here

note abstention of both Australia and New Zealand.

US maintains it is a freedom of speech issue.

note also that this is not fake but mirage news.

s: who knows what the new year will bring…

c: it will just make us more nuggetty.

thanks Mark!

A controlled population is a living population

what is the role of COVID-19? to discredit democracy

what is the role of Trump? to discredit democracy

Lohraw: In the future there will be infamy every 15 minutes.

via Ttekceb: And once this first ordeal is surmounted, the next will come along, like buses…

to be meaningless is easy as long as you keep your meaning secret

Talking with an old friend I realised:

a tissue for my eyes please

from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfbN_wVDVcw

[Of course, to say to be meaningless is easy as long as you keep your meaning secret is completely disingenuous. Being meaningless is easy so long as secretly you believe that you are meaningful. Being meaningless is easy so long as secretly I believe that I am not. To believe you are meaningless is difficult. … We used to do this thing in Minus Theatre where all meaning is moved up onto the surface. The more meaningful the better. The more intensity of meaning the better. And the more depth of meaning the better. The idea is not for meaning to be lost, to lose or shed meaning from that which previously had meaning and was meaningful. The idea was not to pull meaning up by the roots, to root it out from wherever it sprang. The idea was, the idea is, that once put on the surface meaning can change. To keep it secret (hidden in the deep) or to keep it secretly (because of its depth) keeps meaning the same. So it can’t change. What is meaningful remains rooted in the soil where it grows. But it only seems to grow. What in fact is happening is that meaning has stuck. It remains rooted to the spot. It has only one fixed meaning, when this in fact is only a part of its meaning. A gesture of suicide, what does it mean? Does it mean the desire to rejoin the soil–of meaninglessness? Or is it threatening death to what is too full of meaning, has too much meaning? Suicide seems to be both the absolute statement of personal meaning at the same time as it is the absolute statement of personal meaninglessness. In Minus we would make the gesture and steal it for other purposes. A man tearing out his own hair would be getting his hair done. A woman shooting herself would have suicide as part of its meaning, it would be, in other words, acting. … Acting seems to be both the absolute statement of personal meaninglessness at the same time as it is the absolute statement of personal meaning. It is where the personal changes meaning. Online personal expression fixes meaning. No statement can be made that does not stick to the one who makes it. The selfie mask sticks to the face (…the face to the mask / the root to the plant…). It is not acting but a gesture that by being made is meaningful. And it is not theatre. Or rather it is the worst kind of theatre, the theatre of feelings that are no less meaningful for being manufactured, a factory for the sentimental, a productionline for kitsch, for a politicised engagement with the personal and for a personalised performance of the political. It means taking a stand. Against this: Minus Theatre. What if your meaningful statement was more mobile and less absolute? Your political standpoint–what if it allowed of other meanings? Your personal viewpoint–it is not enough to let there be other and opposite viewpoints from which it either differs or to which it is opposed: what if your personal viewpoint meant different things at different times and places and even the opposite then and there of what it means here and now? Meaning needs to be decomposed just enough for it to become mobile–neither full of meaning nor wholly without meaning. Communication, sympathy, empathy–these are not enough: for each statement, each gesture, each action and each suicide that it is meaningless participates in its meaning. We might say that its deconstruction is present in it, an ongoing part of it, allowing it to travel not only back and forth but in all directions, towards all sorts of unintended meanings and lacks of meaning. Aporetic and ephectic, Beckett writes.]