Announcement

Attention all rhizomatic nomadologists: Grab your De Landan stratometers and head on over to the holey space at Sportive Thoughts’ Deleuze Carnival Premiere!

A Poem (for a change)

The following is a poem I wrote a couple of years ago during my sophomore (that is, wise-moron) year in college. I just found it again in a notebook stashed away in a packrat corner on the shelf..

 Upon Looking at a Construction Site in the City

Concrete yields no life.

Concrete constrains life.

The harder we make these structures,

The longer we expect them to stand.

Things are better, and things are worse.

Things are the same by never staying the same.

Each new location serves as a new point of departure.

History begins at fixed points.

It evolves everywhere.

The sun was shining today. The sky was blue.

There was a pleasant, invigorating smell

Of the earth cooking. It’s getting warm again.

I can’t help but imagine how this area once was,

In the prime of a past existence.

Things change and develop toward the prime

Of the new manifestation.

Concrete is the set of this new play.

It’s climax will come some evening,

When the day’s festivities are culminating.

Life will shake the concrete.

Then, it might begin again.

When they all realize its spirit has gone.

 

The next post will deal with “Lucretius and the Simulacrum.” Time to brush up on De Rerum Natura!

A Brief Meditation on “Enduring”

What is the meaning of “to endure”?

 As in: “The stone house is enduring the weather.”  The question of activity versus passivity is important to the notion of enduring. An act of enduring is a suffering of antagonistic conditions. Antagonistic conditions act on that which does the enduring. In this sense, that which does the enduring exhibits passivity. Enduring contains a passive dimension. On the other hand, the active dimension of enduring has to do with the continuation of a condition or the continuation of existence of that which does the enduring, especially in the face of antagonistic conditions.

Enduring also occurs within a temporal interval. From one point in time to another (the type of time that is measured like distance), that which does the enduring somehow actively maintains a way of being—i.e. of not becoming other or destroyed—in the face of a (most likely abnormally) fluctuating environment.

 

Work is almost over for this week. More Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense later this weekend…