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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Richard Feynman said this:
excerpts from The Distinction of Past and Future
from The Character of Physical Law, 1965
It is obvious to everybody that the phenomena of the world are evidently irreversible...The past and the future look completely different psychologically, with concepts like memory and apparent freedom of will, in the sense that we feel that we can do something to affect the future, but none of us, or very few of us, believe that there is anything we can do to affect the past. Remorse and regret and hope and so forth are all words which distinguish perfectly obviously the past and the future. ...
[HOWEVER] In all the laws of physics that we have found so far there does not seem to be any distinction between the past and the future. ...
If I have a sun and a planet, and I start the planet off in some direction, going around the sun, and then I take a moving picture, and run it backwards and look at it, what happens? The planet goes around the sun, the opposite way of course, keeps on going around in an ellipse. The speed of the planet is such that the area swept out by the radius is always the same in equal times. In fact it just goes exactly the way it ought to go. It cannot be distinguished from going the other way. So the law of gravitation is of such a kind that the direction does not make any difference; if you show any phenomenon involving only gravitation running backwards on a film, it will look perfectly satisfactory. ... If you have a lot of particles doing something, and then you suddenly reverse the speed, they will completely undo what they did before. ...
[Experiments a few months ago indicated that] there is something the matter, some unknown about the laws, [suggesting] the possibility that in fact beta-decay may not also be time reversible, and we shall have to wait for more experiments to see. But at least the following is true. Beta-decay (which may or may not be time reversible) is a very unimportant phenomenon for most ordinary circumstances. The possibility of my talking to you does not depend on beta-decay, although it does depend on chemical interactions, it depends on electrical forces, not much on nuclear forces at the moment, but it depends also on gravitation. But I am one-sided - I speak, and a voice goes out into the air, and it does not come sucking back into my mouth when I open it - and this irreversibility cannot be hung on the phenomenon of beta-decay. In other words, we believe that most of the ordinary phenomena in the world, which are produced by atomic motions, are according to laws which can be completely reversed. So we will have to look some more to find the explanation of the irreversibility.
I used to think I was too ignorant to read Jeanne Randolph, but thank goodness I got over it. Sometimes art writers (myself included) undertake to write a parallel text, not meant to describe or explain the art, but rather to bounce along beside it as a sort of responsive sidekick. Some (mine included) may tip into flip flights of fancy or indulgent ruminations. But Randolph, a psychoanalytic theorist, remains ever rigorous. The shapes of her short essays are often unsettling and lead off into unfamiliar territory. Even when it is not about art, Randolph's writing is like art, good art, in that it can shift you into a new position from which to look out at the world.
[Sigmun Freud's] desk, writing tables, windowsills, shelves and tops of cabinets had all been invaded by tiny, ancient figurines. On every surface Freud had stationed the pagan, the supernatural, the demonic and the life-giving beings of antiquity. ... [D.W.] Winnicott would have understood Freud's teeming collection as providing "room for the idea of unrelated thought sequences." Room for surprises, nonsense, non sequiturs, room for the unexpected. Room for the uncanny and the preternatural. Room for the protohuman, subhuman and uberhuman. Room for the extremes of difference that standardized life and standardizing ideologies refuse to accomodate. The relevance of this is completely obvious to everyone who is labelled as a stranger by his or her own society. From the essay "The Metamorphosis of Sigmund Freud" from the 2003 collection Why Stoics BoxIt takes two to tango and two (minimum) to communicate. Sometimes the excitement about looking at good art is the strange detachment of the persons, yourself and the artist, from this third thing: the unique idea that comes into being when both parties have paid attention. Add a third generative element - a writer paying the same kind of attention - and the ideas become thicker, quicker, and stranger.
At the moment when I know that I am the one weilding the power to interpret an object, when I find the interpretation more valuable to me than the function that the object serves, at that moment the object could become cultural. From the essay "Illusion and the Diverted Subject" from Psychoanalysis and Synchronized Swimming, as quoted in Symbolization and its Discontents
Either golden moon or glitter of stars sparkled on alternate bright blue fingernails as they levitated over [the library clerk's] keyboard. Her green eyes followed signals on her video display terminal and she pricked one of these with the lunar nail of her right forefinger. With her left hand she peeled a barcode from a dispenser. She applied the barcode to the back of this book and smoothed it with her palm. She repeated this procedure exactly for the "seventh" book. "This will pass also, " she slurred, obviously unaware of the cosmic implications of what she had uttered. From the essay "Hi-Tech Surveillance and Moral Imagination: A Psychoanalysis" (the tale of the act of stealing a very old library book) from the 2003 collection Why Stoics Box
Those of you who don't live in Toronto might think this building belongs to the burgeoning genre of fictional architecture. But the new Ontario College of Art and Design building is real. Here's how it's looking so far. Based on the artists' conception, Bill the architecture maven says he thinks its working. Which just goes to show you can't displease all of the people all of the time.
I liked the first third of Morvern Callar better than most movies I've seen. The camera plays good games with focus and planes of light. The morality is odd, if not amibiguous, and the storyline strikes an unusual balance between horrific and tender.
BIG TIME SPOILERS BELOW:She leaves her boyfriend's corpse (a suicide) lying in the apartment for days and doesn't tell anybody that he's dead. Next to the body is a blinking christmas tree that emits a loud, low electrical buzz. The lights are cozy and warm looking, while at the same time flashing like some kind of code-red alarm indicator.
She goes to a debauched Scottish party with her friends and dances, smokes, gets fucked up, gets laid. She goes to her flourescent-lit job at the supermarket. Everytime she comes home the body is stil there and the cozy tree lights are still blinking on and off.
She puts her own name on her dead boyfriend's novel and sends it in to the publisher.
Eventually she strips down to her underwear and chops up the body in the bathtub. Somehow this scene is neither camp nor horror.
She hikes up into the mountains with the body in a back pack and buries him. Then she goes off to Spain on the dead guy's funeral money.
That was enough story for me. The film goes on and it's pretty good but the remarkable strange edginess of the beginning fades away into a more familiar type of tale. Still I recommend it a lot - and the mannered, playful camera is really great all the way through.