Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Convulsive!

The spring semester will start tomorrow at UT. I hope for a very green semester; Green with all of its metaphors!

I have two classes and an advance reading tutorial course with my advisor. My January so far was challenging and experimental. I was part of a compact course offered by Anhoek School; Accidental Pornographies - the Visual Effects of the American Women's Health Movement Since 1970. The class discussions made the challenge worthwhile. Besides my accidental course, I prepared, wrote and rewrote the labels for my coming exhibition. I will write about that in detail in another post.

I will end this post with a couple of lines from André Breton’s autobiographical novel, Nadja:

“Beauty is like a train that ceaselessly roars out of the Gare de Lyon and which I know will never leave, which has not left. It consists of jolts and shocks many of which do not have much importance, but which we know are destined to produce one Shock, which does. Which has all the importance I do not want to arrogate to myself. In every domain the mind appropriates certain rights, which it does not possess. Beauty, neither static nor dynamic. The human heart, beautiful as a seismograph. Royalty of silence. […] Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or will not be at all.”*


Nadja Cover



* Breton, Nadja 1928, trans. R.Howard, Grove Press New York (1960), pp. 159-160.
** Please note that the italic words, capital letters and different fonts in Breton's writings are important. I have not changed them.


5 comments:

Don said...

Hay Tameshk,
(btw You should choose an English name for this blog)

What do you think of this one by Rimbaud:
"it is false to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought."

Hope you get time to get to my emails soon. D.

Unknown said...

این رمان هم اسم منه ها...

Tameshk said...

Dear Don,
Thanks for reminding me of this Rimbaud phrase; Breton actually responds to it in one of his writings.

Gistela Jan,
It is interesting! In the book Nadja is the name of a woman whom Breton has sort of fell in love with.

m said...

please keep this name. I'd rather expand my English with this word, this fruit.

Tameshk said...

Dear M.

Thanks for your comment.
I have no intention of changing the name of my Blog. I doubt that Tameshk becomes a common word in English. But I like it for so many indescribable reasons.

Best,
Tameshk