Arts Awesome Systems
posted by January 18 at 13:42 PM
onRussian Futurist Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) wrote:
God, feeling the weight in himself, dispersed it in his system, and the weight became light and relieved him, placing man in a weightless system; and man, not feeling it, lived like and engine driver who does not feel the weight of his locomotive in motion, but had only to remove one part of the system for its weight to come down and crush him. Likewise, Adam transgressed the limits of the system and its weight collapsed on him. As a result the whole of humanity is laboring in sweat and suffering to free itself from beneath the weight of the collapsed system, is striving to distribute the weight in the systems, wishing to repair the mistake—hense his culture consists of distributing weight in the systems of weightlessness. God relieved himself of weight or, as weight, dispersed himself in weightlessness, himself remained free. Man too in all three points strives for the same thing—to disperse weight and himself become weightless, i.e. enter God.
This passage is as beautiful as this image:
A quick note:
In terms of content, Kazimir Malevich passage is a poetic expression of the modernist project—or, to use a more defined literary term, the neo-modernist project (Stein and Williams). This modernism, according to Jeffrey M. Perl, wants thinness as opposed to the thickness of originary modernism (Joyce and Pound).
Neo-modernism corresponds with the international modernism in architecture and ultimately becomes postmodernism. What postmodernism breaks with is not neo-modernism but original modernism. There is, however, a touch of the original modernism in Malevich’s passage, in the sense that he makes a reference to the ancient past, to myth—Adam, Eden, and The Fall.
At the center of the originary modernist project was a doomed drive to salvage the fallen present, a disenchanted society, a mass produced world consciousness. Hence an ad representative for a Dublin newspaper becomes Odysseus. The ancient myth is called upon to give thickness to the thin present.
What our point in time needs is a return of the thickness but without the dead heroes of Eliot and old Europe exerting their ghost force from outside of time, from a distant place (Greece, Venice) imagined to be better than the now. What is needed is a thickness that is synchronic, simultaneous, and entirely in world space. A humanism without a God entering and trying to save the system. We need to be builders of thick, human systems. We must no longer see the heroes of history as reaching out from the past to redeem the surface of the now but must see them and all of history as actually present in the way memories are not in the past but in the flesh of the living body.
To conclude: We must image an absolute but not an abstract one. A functional world absolute, and I limit the absolute to the world, can only be a concrete absolute.
(Thanks to Slog reader Neil Corcoran for the image.)
Comments
Beauty.
Although not to be annoyingly particular, his surname was spelled "Malevich".
How did Chaikavski spell his name?
sorry, you read a draft. i had no idea it was posted.
A contrary view:
DostoevskyIt is almost impossible to respond to such a post, but then if it would truly be impossible, then wouldn't that achieve the goal you seek. To send out a message that no one can answer to is to master the field of answerability, to make it unanswerable, or entirely something else, I would think. And, if so, then such a passage would be something that trips up the reader, that causes him to falter, to become something else...
"and man, not feeling it, lived like and engine driver who does not feel the weight of his locomotive in motion, but had only to remove one part of the system for its weight to come down and crush him."
Perhaps, then, a text is like something that invites the reader to reconstruct it, to make of it a broad machine, which he then drives to its inevitable deconstruction. And this is because he is endlessly trying to reconstruct, or put to an answer, a something that is fundamentally unanswerable, a text without meaning.
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