Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Zukofsky, D&G, Shakespeare: Crazy Motherfuckers

From Louis Zukofsky's essay "An Objective," which can be found in the book Prepositions+: The Collected Critical Essays:

"Add--the core that covers the work of poets who see with their ears, hear with their eyes, move with their noses and speak and breathe with their feet. And yet lunatics are sometimes profitably observed: the core that is covered, the valuable skeptic knows, may in itself be the intense vision of fact" (17).

From Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus:

"Is it really so sad and dangerous to be fed up with seeing with your eyes, breathing with your lungs, swallowing with your mouth, talking with your tongue, thinking with your brain, having an anus and larynx, head and legs? Why not walk on your head, sing with your sinuses, see through your skin, breathe with your belly" (151).

From Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:

"I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had--But man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was" (96).

1 comment:

Future Man said...

This past weekend, I re-visted the (in my opinion) Nietzsche allegory that is Kubrick's adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. How fucking brilliant these two fellows were. (Note: Did you know that the picture was released prior to any U.S. space efforts? Holy shit!) After the picture, I found it interesting to think about how Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical tract Thus Spake Zarathustra, about the potential of mankind, is directly referenced by the use of the Strauss musical piece of the same name. Nietzsche writes that man is a bridge between the apes and the Supermen; a laughing stock. In an article in the New York Times, Kubrick gave credence to this when he said: Man is the missing link between primitive apes and civilised human beings. Man is really in a very unstable condition.