Manifest, a new consciousness with laws of dialectics

Een nieuw bewustzijn binnen de wetten van de dialectiek

The dissolution of Western classical culture is a phenomenon that can be understood only against the background of a social evolution which can end only in the total collapse of a principle of society thousands of years old and its replacement by a system whose laws are based on the immediate demands of human vitality. The influence the ruling classes have wielded over the creative consciousness in history has reduced art to an increasingly dependent position, until finally the real psychic function of that art was attainable only for a few spirits of genius who in their frustration and after a long struggle were able to break out of the conventions of form and rediscover the basic principles of all creative activity.

Together with the class society from which it emerged, this culture of the individual is faced by destruction too, as the former’s institutions, kept alive artificially, offer no further opportunities for the creative imagination and only impede the free expression of human vitality. All the isms so typical of the last fifty years of art history represent so many attempts to bring new life to this culture and to adapt its aesthetic to the barren ground of its social environment. Modern art, suffering from a permanent tendency to the constructive, an obsession with objectivity (brought on by the disease that has destroyed our speculative-idealizing culture), stands isolated and powerless in a society which seems bent on its own destruction. As the extension of a style created for a social élite, with the disappearance of that élite modern art has lost its social justification and is confronted only by the criticism formulated by a clique of its connoisseurs and amateurs.

Western art, once the celebrator of emperors and popes, turned to serve the newly powerful bourgeoisie, becoming an instrument of the glorification of bourgeois ideals. Now that these ideals have become a fiction with the disappearance of their economic base, a new era is upon us, in which the whole matrix of cultural conventions loses its significance and a new freedom can be won from the most primary source of life. But, just as with a social revolution, this spiritual revolution cannot be enacted without conflict. Stubbornly the bourgeois mind clutches onto its aesthetic ideal and in a last, desperate effort employs all its wiles to convert the indifferent masses to the same belief. Taking advantage of the general lack of interest, suggestions are made of a special social need for what is referred to as ‘an ideal of beauty’, all designed to prevent the flowering of a new, conflicting sense of beauty which emerges from the vital emotions.

As early as the end of the First World War the DADA movement tried by violent means to break away from the old ideal of beauty. Although this movement concentrated increasingly on the political arena, as the artists involved perceived that their struggle for freedom brought them into conflict with the laws that formed the very foundations of society, the vital power released by this confrontation also stimulated the birth of a new artistic vision.

1943-04-062022-10-20

Radio Levania, émettre dans l’espace de la désidération

Chers passagers, nous vous invitons maintenant à rejoindre le complexe du rez-de-chaussée, où à vous installer à l’étage – la mutation va bientôt commencer. Pour le bon déroulé de cette séquence nous vous engageons à trouver un endroit confortable et à svous asseoir pour écouter dans les meilleures conditions.

« Les grandes personnes sont décidément bien bizarres », se dit-il simplement en lui-même durant son voyage.

Vous qui entrez, n’abandonnez pas tout espoir, ni toute mélancolie
Entrez dans l’espace de la désidération
Entrez dans ce lieu où diagnostiquer le vertige de la perte des étoiles
Quand l’émerveillement pour le cosmos se retourne en mélancolie
Nous faisant sentir tout ce qui est perdu
Quand le plaisir renouvelé des choses spatiales dit aussi la tristesse, et l’abandon
Et la volonté de retrouver quelque chose d’indistinctement cosmique
Et de goûter la douceur et l’amertume du miel laiteux des étoiles
Voilà la désidération qui s’étoile bientôt en affect, en syndrome, en pensée, en fiction, en recherches spatiales, endocosmologiques, tous azimuts
Entrez dans ce lieu fait aussi pour appréhender une voie qui mène à un état autre
Un lieu pour réinventer l’espoir et la mélancolie,
Un lieu pour transitionner, avec les étoiles, les humains, les mondes,
Un lieu pour appréhender l’affect de la désidération, et muter avec lui
Un lieu pour initier cette découverte et cette transmutation
Un lieu pour appréhender l’avenir
Un lieu pour découvrir
Une onde
Un chemin
Des voix dans le cosmos
Un lieu pour voir, un lieu pour écouter, un lieu pour dormir, un lieu pour rêver
Avec l’aide de la cellule Cosmiel
Avec la voix de Radio Levania
Vous qui entrez, n’abandonnez pas tout espoir, ni toute mélancolie.

1941-02-102025-05-19

Paradise & Hell can be one City

In 1941 Bertolt Brecht was living in Santa Monica, California.
He aspired to sell stories to Hollywood …
it did not go well.

Das Dorf Hollywood ist entworfen nach den Vorstellungen
Die man hierorts vom Himmel hat. Hierorts
Hat man ausgerechnet, daß Gott
Himmel und Hölle benötigend, nicht zwei
Etablissements zu entwerfen brauchte, sondern
Nur ein einziges, nämlich den Himmel. Dieser
Dient für die Unbemittelten, Erfolglosen
Als Hölle.

Am Meer stehen die Öltürme. In den Schluchten
Bleichen die Gebeine der Goldwäscher. Ihre Söhne
Haben die Traumfabriken von Hollywood gebaut.
Die vier Städte
Sind erfüllt von dem Ölgeruch
Der Filme.

1934-07-122022-09-24

Later on, the pages of days turned emptily

The Comet

In the dark apartment my father alone was awake, wandering silently through the rooms filled with the sing-song of sleep. Sometimes he opened the door of the flue and looked grinning into its dark abyss, where a smiling Homunculus slept for ever its luminous sleep, enclosed in a glass capsule, bathed in fluorescent light, already adjudged, erased, filed away, another record card in the immense archives of the sky.

THAT YEAR the end of the winter stood under the sign of particularly favorable astronomical aspects. The predictions in the calendar flourished in red in the snowy margins of the mornings. The brighter red of Sundays and Holy days cast its reflection on half the week and these weekdays burned coldly, with a freak, rapid flame. Human hearts beat more quickly for a moment, misled and blinded by the redness, which, in fact, announced nothing, being merely a premature alert, a colorful lie of the calendar, painted in bright cinnabar on the jacket of the week. From Twelfth Night onwards, we sat night after night over the white parade-ground of the table gleaming with candlesticks and silver, and played endless games of patience. Every hour, the night beyond the windows became lighter, sugarcoated and shiny, filled with sprouting almonds and sweetmeats. The moon, that most inventive transmogrifier, wholly engrossed in her lunar practices, accomplished her successive phases and grew ever brighter and brighter. Already by day, the moon stood in the wings, prematurely ready for her cue, brassy and lustreless. Meanwhile whole flocks of feather clouds passed like sheep across her profile on their silent white extensive wandering, barely covering her with the shimmering mother-of-pearl scales into which the firmament froze towards the evening.

1933-01-302023-01-07

den geliebtesten Hilflos versinken, that day he had managed to eat two apples and lay his hands on a little money, enough for a bed for the night

Der Sumpf

Manchen der Freunde sah ich, und den geliebtesten
Hilflos versinken im Sumpfe, an dem ich
Taglich vorbeigeh.

Und es geschah nicht an einem
Einzigen Vormittag. Viele
Wochen nahm es oft; dies machte es schrecklicher.
Und das Gedenken an die gemeinsamen
Langen Gespräche über den Sumpf, der
So viele schon birgt.

Hilflos nun sah ich ihn zurückgelehnt
Bedeckt mit den Blutegeln
In dem schimmernden
Sanft bewegten Schlamm. Auf dem versinkenden
Antlitz das gräßliche
Wonnige Lächeln.

The Monster

Just how many constructions can be put on a man’s behaviour was shown recently by an incident at the Russian Mezhrabpom film studios. It may have been insignificant and it had no consequence, but there was something horrible about it. While The White Eagle – a film about the pre-war pogroms in south Russia, which pilloried the attitude of the police at the time – was being shot in the studio, an old man turned up and asked for a job. He forced his way into the porter’s box at the street entrance and told the porter he would like to take the liberty of drawing the company’s attention to his extraordinary resemblance to the notorious governor Muratov. (Muratov had instigated the bloodbath at the time. His was the leading role in the aforesaid film.)
The porter laughed in his face, but since he was an old man he did not eject him straight away, and that is how the long, thin fellow came to be standing, hat in hand, with a faraway look amid the hubbub of extras and studio technicians, seemingly still nursing a faint hope of earning bread and shelter for a couple of days on the strength of his resemblance to the notorious killer.

For almost an hour he stood there, constantly stepping aside to let people go by until he ended up hemmed in behind a desk, and there he was at last suddenly noticed. There was a break in the shooting and the actors headed for the canteen or stood around chatting. Kochalov, the famous Moscow actor playing Muratov, went into the porter’s box to make a phone call. As he stood by the phone he was nudged by the grinning gatekeeper and when he turned he saw the man behind the desk, whereupon peals of laughter rang out all around him. Kochalov’s make-up was based on historical photographs, and the extraordinary resemblance that the old man behind the desk had been telling them about was obvious to everybody.

1924-02-012025-05-18

We, Mirrorlike point of the pavement

Twenty-second Entry

TOPICS:

Congealed Waves – Everything Is Being Perfected – I Am a Microbe

The building of the Integral will be completed in one hundred and twenty days. The great historic hour when the first Integral will soar into cosmic space is drawing near. One thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subdued the entire terrestrial globe to the power of the One State. Yours will be a still more glorious feat: you will integrate the infinite equation of the universe with the aid of the fire-breathing, electric, glass Integral. You will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficent yoke of reason.

Через 120 дней заканчивается постройка ИНТЕГРАЛА. Близок великий, исторический час, когда первый ИНТЕГРАЛ взовьется в мировое пространство. Тысячу лет тому назад ваши героические предки покорили власти Единого Государства весь земной шар. Вам предстоит еще более славный подвиг: стеклянным, электрическим, огнедышащим ИНТЕГРАЛОМ проинтегрировать бесконечное уравнение Вселенной. Вам предстоит благодетельному игу разума подчинить неведомые существа, обитающие на иных планетах — быть может, еще в диком состоянии свободы. Если они не поймут, что мы несем им математически безошибочное счастье, наш долг заставить их быть счастливыми. Но прежде оружия мы испытаем слово.

Imagine yourself standing on the shore: the waves rise rhythmically, then, having risen, suddenly remain there— frozen, congealed. It seemed just as eerie and unnatural when our daily walk, prescribed by the Table of Hours, suddenly halted midway, and everyone was thrown into confusion. The last time something similar happened, according to our annals, was 119 years ago, when a meteorite dropped, smoking and whistling, right into the thick of the marching rows.

We walked as usual, in the manner of the warriors on Assyrian reliefs: a thousand heads, two fused, integral feet, two integral, swinging arms. At the end of the avenue, where the Accumulator Tower hummed sternly, a rectangle moved toward us. In front, behind, and on the sides—guards; in the middle—three people, the golden numbers already removed from their unifs. And everything was terrifyingly clear.

The huge clock atop the Tower was a face; leaning from the clouds, spitting down seconds, it waited indifferently. And then, exactly at six minutes past thirteen, something went wrong in the rectangle. It happened quite near me, and I saw every detail; I clearly remember the thin long neck and the network of blue veins on the temple, like rivers on the map of some tiny unknown world, and this unknown world was evidently a very young man. He must have noticed someone in our ranks; rising to his toes, he stretched his neck, and stopped. A click: one of the guards sent the blue spark of an electric whip across him, and he squealed thinly, like a puppy. Then—a series of distinct clicks, about every two seconds: a dick, and a squeal, a click, and a squeal.

We continued our rhythmic, Assyrian walk, and, looking at the graceful zigzags of the sparks, I thought: Everything in human society is being continually perfected—and should be. What a hideous weapon was the ancient whip—and how beautiful …
But at this moment, like a nut slipping off a machine in full swing, a slender, pliant female figure broke from our ranks and with the cry “Enough! Don’t dare to … !” she threw herself into the midst of the rectangle. It was like that meteor, 119 years ago: the whole procession stopped dead, and our ranks were like the gray crests of waves congealed by a sudden frost.

1923-10-062022-09-17

Toward an Architecture

Argument

Aesthetic of the Engineer

Architecture

Aesthetic of the Engineer, Architecture: two things firmly allied, sequential, the one in full flower, the other in painful regression.

The engineer, inspired by the law of Economy and guided by calculations, puts us in accord with universal laws. He attains harmony.

The architect, through the ordonnance of forms, realizes an order that is a pure creation of his mind; through forms, he affects our senses intensely, provoking plastic emotions; through the relationships that he creates, he stirs in us deep resonances, he gives us the measure of an order that we sense to be in accord with that of the world, he determines the diverse movements of our minds and our hearts; it is then that we experience beauty.