Monday, April 27, 2009



this is a collection of clips of an installation i did with the full track by my friend, the magical d. seaver ... the track changes over time which is why i wanted to record the full few minutes --some of the zooms are disorienting-sorry about that...

also here is a nice bit from the first few pages of that book i haven't had enough time to read lately!:

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the
hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host.
Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant
reads off his own position on the earth's surface and the amount of time
that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt
to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning,
after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading,
in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to
sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back
in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the
time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he
gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair,
say, after dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit,
the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space,
and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep
months earlier and in some far distant country. But for me it was enough
if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my
consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had
gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was,
I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary
sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an
animal's consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the
cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I
was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very
possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up
out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped
by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of
civilisation, and out of a half-visualised succession of oil-lamps,
followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by
degrees the component parts of my ego.
Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon
them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else,
and by the immobility of our conceptions of them. For it always happened
that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful
attempt to discover where I was, everything would be moving round me
through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy
with sleep to move, would make an effort to construe the form which its
tiredness took as an orientation of its various members, so as to induce
from that where the wall lay and the furniture stood, to piece together
and to give a name to the house in which it must be living. Its memory,
the composite memory of its ribs, knees, and shoulder-blades offered it
a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept;
while the unseen walls kept changing, adapting themselves to the shape
of each successive room that it remembered, whirling madly through the
darkness. And even before my brain, lingering in consideration of when
things had happened and of what they had looked like, had collected
sufficient impressions to enable it to identify the room, it, my body,
would recall from each room in succession what the bed was like, where
the doors were, how daylight came in at the windows, whether there was a
passage outside, what I had had in my mind when I went to sleep, and had
found there when I awoke. The stiffened side underneath my body would,
for instance, in trying to fix its position, imagine itself to be lying,
face to the wall, in a big bed with a canopy; and at once I would say to
myself, "Why, I must have gone to sleep after all, and Mamma never came
to say good night!" for I was in the country with my grandfather, who
died years ago; and my body, the side upon which I was lying, loyally
preserving from the past an impression which my mind should never have
forgotten, brought back before my eyes the glimmering flame of the
night-light in its bowl of Bohemian glass, shaped like an urn and hung
by chains from the ceiling, and the chimney-piece of Siena marble in my
bedroom at Combray, in my great-aunt's house, in those far distant days
which, at the moment of waking, seemed present without being clearly
denned, but would become plainer in a little while when I was properly
awake.

-proust swann's way

2 comments:

  1. oh so first comment well mskltaylor i don't know what to say after proust but it took me the entire time to realize i wasn't looking at the earth from space but clouds making up the earth anyway bellissimo!

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  2. I have often wanted to climb out my window when i was a little girl. so i can relate that little girl!

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