candidacy for being
Or - we now approach one of the most subtle and urgent suggestions of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - what is real is the life we lead when we lose ourselves, when we abandon or are driven from the rational fiction of our identity; when we fall in love, for example, and especially when we fall deeply, hopelessly, brutally, stupidly in love.
Michael Wood, The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction
Man is a useless passion.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Wood implies "the real" can somewhat be attained if we are willing or forced to do what's unreal - "willing" and "forced" in this case might have no difference and are of the same thing. But we cannot know what is real and unreal till we keep a certain distance from it, till we pause to think, to realize if it is real. Such distance would no doubt break the momentum of what we do and by rationalizing it we risk undoing the very realness we are after. Realness or passion is thus unknowable, and what we can know, including our identity, can always be fictionalized, falsified. I think that's what Sartre means by "We must act out passion before we can feel it." To act out without the assurance of passion's certainty, without the assurance of anything, but act out nevertheless and bear the full weight of one's action. To reconcile oneself with the immediacy of being.
___
A friend asked me to supply soundtrack for his party. I suggested the party should be themed as "Spring Revival" and Meg White should be the party's patron saint.
Some of the songs on my playlist for the party:
Stereolab - Vonal Declosion
Cibo Matto - Sci-Fi Wasabi
Brazilian Girls - Sirenes de la fete
Manu Chao - Bongo Bong
Sophie E Baxtor - Murder on the Dancefloor
Esthero - Fastlane (L.E.X. Sound Factory mix)
Saint Etienne - Side Streets
Michael Wood, The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction
Man is a useless passion.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Wood implies "the real" can somewhat be attained if we are willing or forced to do what's unreal - "willing" and "forced" in this case might have no difference and are of the same thing. But we cannot know what is real and unreal till we keep a certain distance from it, till we pause to think, to realize if it is real. Such distance would no doubt break the momentum of what we do and by rationalizing it we risk undoing the very realness we are after. Realness or passion is thus unknowable, and what we can know, including our identity, can always be fictionalized, falsified. I think that's what Sartre means by "We must act out passion before we can feel it." To act out without the assurance of passion's certainty, without the assurance of anything, but act out nevertheless and bear the full weight of one's action. To reconcile oneself with the immediacy of being.
___
A friend asked me to supply soundtrack for his party. I suggested the party should be themed as "Spring Revival" and Meg White should be the party's patron saint.
Some of the songs on my playlist for the party:
Stereolab - Vonal Declosion
Cibo Matto - Sci-Fi Wasabi
Brazilian Girls - Sirenes de la fete
Manu Chao - Bongo Bong
Sophie E Baxtor - Murder on the Dancefloor
Esthero - Fastlane (L.E.X. Sound Factory mix)
Saint Etienne - Side Streets