what is living and what is dead
…and lately it has become impossible to walk around or sit and not to notice what is living and what is dead, and furthermore what was once living and what is now dead, and furthermore what was never alive and is still dead or, better, unalive. When you think about the world in this way, there is a kind of horror to it, because many of the things that are alive are covered in concrete and you think ‘o my God who could do such a thing’, but then there are also more beautiful ways of covering up the essential truth that something is dead and this is no less horrible, and in some ways is more terrible because more of a lie, and more distracting. And even if you give a name to every object as a way of making it clear that things matter too this is only an attempt to stop people from breaking things that are dead by pretending that they are a bit like people, and this is nice because preservationist which is what people should have called a politics but they got it wrong and now there is no preservationist party and no group of people called preservationists although there are similar words, but everything turns into its opposite in any case so the preservationists would have become destructivists and the vitalists would have become deadists or necrotics ultimately in any case and this is the way of things because everything turns into its opposite and not only that it turns into its worst, and it is a wonder that there are any birds and bits of grass left at all.
And I remember this book that I started to translate…twenty years ago…Called la vie n’existe pas! by Ernest Kahane, published by Éditions Rationalistes in 1962, and I thought it might be useful because originally I wanted to write about French philosophy of science but ended up writing about humanism instead, for better or worse, but probably worse.
I still have this book, and I should have translated it, and I do not think that anyone else did. There is when I look a reference to it in this book The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics by Giuseppe Bianco and Marjorie Gracieuse from 2014 which I do not have a copy of but the little tiny bit of it you can see on google books says of Kahane’s book that it ‘did not leave any room for a biology other than mechanistic or reductionist’ which seems right. I’m sure Kahane had a point: if you are ‘doing science’ life does not matter one bit. It’s an abstraction, a bit of metaphysical flim-flam. All the things you might be interested in hover somewhere beyond life and death - DNA, atoms, viruses. What do you need of life? Life is the stuff of idiots, poets, mad people.
So what sense does it make to walk around dividing the world up into ‘alive’, ‘dead’, ‘never alive’, ‘always dead’.
What is the difference between ‘still life’ and nature mort? Both are very beautiful ways of describing the attempt to represent at a higher life, a meta-still life, a meta-nature mort. All art is dead.
The angel in ‘Melencolia I’ is it smiling or sulking? It really depends on the mood of the viewer: what an incredible thing. Either way, there is no competing with nature!!!!! Which is not, of course, to say you should give up, although sometimes you must, hands open, sun high, passive, f*cked…the pineal eye!
And you must tidy your shelves for the videos and stop thinking about the car park and all the worms and albino grass under it, but it’s very funny that you can write whatever you like here and it doesn’t matter! And there is a freedom in that, and a beauty, and my God the clouds