30 June 2007

El hombre sabe que hay en el alma tintes más desconcertantes, más innumerables y más anónimos que los colores de una selva otoñal....









This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought - our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography - breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a `certain Chinese encyclopedia' in which it is written that `animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies'. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.

3 comments:

Karen said...

I think all of these photos could go well together, but in the format that their being presented, eight photos is just too much. It's hard to get the big picture. By the time I've scrolled down to number five, I've forgotten number one. I think I would have stopped at the wire.

mark said...

as usual, you're right...but last night when i was posting i did edit it down from 12 or so photos to the existing eight. i couldn't part with the bucket, and i felt if the bucket was there i needed the out of focus flower.

Karen said...

What's scary is that I can almost understand your logic.