Para Liliana y la familia
Like Tarkovsky and other creatives, I like water and I like the sea. I like to look at it and touch it. I don´t know the exact reason for it and it took me almost two years now to sit down and write a note about it (because there will be a short intermission concerning notes atm and so I can fill the hole with water). Obviously I like water because it is meditative, innocent, mindless, as well as „full of secrets“. Don´t look to the ocean, restless in its dreaming / Don´t look to the heavens, for they will tell you nothing (sing Cop Shoot Cop in Room 429, a splending song about, as I guess, intimacy). That Cop Shoot Cop song is both a bit elegic, as well as assertive, there is some tenderness in it, amidst the possible wildness and roughness the sea can relapse into. Water is both more innocent and fresh, recycling, as well as more powerful and ancient than we are. They think it will win over the rock, though finally it will evaporate as the sun gradually dies and inflates, and only rocks will be left. It is, obviously, the necessary element for any organic life to come into existence on a planet. In its mindlessness, it mirrors the innocent, ready-to-be-productive, recpetive mind – because of this, the mind rejoices when meeting its twin, the water. They say the ocean is sublime, as it is envisaged without boundaries. What is sublime strucks awe in us, says Kant, reverence for „the (unknown) law“. What is sublime annihilates the subject, but then empowers it, as the subject recognises itself in its „infinity“ and „endlessness“. In the sublime, the nuanced, sophisticated subject will view itself in its limitlessness and its limitations; realising one´s own limitations will inspire awe for an, at least abstract, instance that is less limited; realising one´s own limitlessness and limitedness will give a sense of compactness as well as openness and will give the sense of a warming ball inside oneself. Furthermore, the ocean gives me a sense for planet. Gazing at the ocean (or the sky) in the southern hemisphere gives me a sense for the existence and presence of that that is the other, of otherness, that is – thank God – tangible and can be internalised (internalising otherness, encircling the earth and becoming psychologically water-like is path to the overman, as we remember). I also like to think of megacities, looked at from above, in the night, Los Angeles for instance, at the great frontier, following the eternal call of the west. The network of millions of lights, seems to imitate and mirror the mind/brain, consciousness. I like to think having my mind amalgamated with the big abstract city at the frontier, mirrored in it. Think of standing at a skyscraper of megacity at night, somewhere in the future, in the mid- or later 21st century. Think of the megacity at night in the later 21st century, and internalise it. That gives a sense of mind, and consciousness. Think of another city, in the southern hemisphere, Buenos Aires. One megacity turns out not to be enough to make up the mind, it has to contain at least two, next round. With this, you will finally reach into the cosmos. When I sat at the Danube, in summer 2016, with Tanja, Xav and some others, who have invited me to Linz to talk about my creative approaches (and not many people followed the invitation), I was talking about the sentiments and concepts water gives to me, improvising. Unfortunately, I never came to exactly remember something of crucial importance that I elaborated then. That´s how it goes. But I remember, introspecting into water is a kind of permanent leaving from and returning to base. A hypercycle.
― Arthur Schopenhauer