We know of time being another dimension in our complicated universe. We can go up and down, left and right, forward and backwards in the other three dimensions that we are aware of, but there is only one direction we can associate with time. Nonetheless, the human mind does play a lot with time. It can remember the past and imagine the future. It can make time go slower, faster or even stop it. This is what happens with Hopper and Dali: they stop time. Not in the manner a picture or a usual painting does, but in the way our minds do: with thought.
In the loneliness of Hopper’s restaurant, late in the night, there is she. She is unused to this place at this time. She “automatically” takes a coffee. There is nothing but reflexes taking care of her body while the mind is blocked in a thought. The lights reflecting in the window are the lights of an inverse runway, a runway ending in the black hole of a tormented mind. The mind doesn’t need the infinite mass of a black hole to stop the time. It only needs a thought, a persistent thought, a persistent memory. Use the runway to pass the black velvet of the night. You’ll find yourself in Dali’s nightmarish landscape. There it is, right in the middle, the focus of the thought: the deformed profile of a man. Minds don’t just deform time but also space and with that the whole reality. Enormous eyelashes, nose and tongue – symbols of sexuality. “He” is still there blocking the mind, stopping the time.
Loneliness against a screen. A painting is this space, one space. It promises time - which is just more than one space, super-imposed. It doesn't deliver.
What is change? We have time in looking at a painting, the more irreconcilable its elements the more time references of space we need to understand them, to mitigate contradiction enough to savor it. Is change the absurd? Does it and does it not make sense?
Some want it to. Regardless of the truth - these ones are right, justice is theirs, for they can give meaning, build, exist. Playing the game is based on the presupposition that the rules will help you. What is the point of a malign order?! - it is perverse because you need to think about it and insert a paranoid malignity in your conscience. It is of no metaphysical utility: I want to be pragmatic about the ultimate things.
Loneliness against a mirror: the other side has a connection to me, but it isn't me, I can only see me looking at myself in it!
But I can do so much more than that. And a mirror is a shield, protecting me. In the other side of the mirror, inside the glass-world-of-illusions-castle I can show entire worlds, though limited to space. This is morality: what becomes of my being as I do it.
Immorality is first and foremost failure; the worst failure is resentment. The failure is a bad copy of success. These we all know, they can be avoided. In a failure I can't see myself, it is a incompetent mirror, foul space, undeserving of my time and self.
I need to see myself so that I reflect that initial will. The puzzle of my not knowing, not being sense, I can live with: I do live with it. I never want to be that alone that I stop wanting: foreign to my self, de-doubled in some other medium enough so that I appear to myself self-same, I am real. Only in death do I coincide, for once, with myself...
Still space decays into still life, it is naturalist, it looks like things look like, but it is not realist, things are not that. Again, a failed mirror. And beware, it is within imagination to know these mortifying mirrors.
And there are other realities in imagination, these we look for, if we avoid the others. Dream. Dream is real - it happens, I happen with it, it is event and my presence in it. I can think about it, though not know it. Travel these unknown words, come back and live in this reality as well. Absurdity does not help with this. We need more, we need myth, we need belief.
Salvador Dali, The Persistence of Memory (1931)
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We know of time being another dimension in our complicated universe. We can go up and down, left and right, forward and backwards in the other three dimensions that we are aware of, but there is only one direction we can associate with time. Nonetheless, the human mind does play a lot with time. It can remember the past and imagine the future. It can make time go slower, faster or even stop it. This is what happens with Hopper and Dali: they stop time. Not in the manner a picture or a usual painting does, but in the way our minds do: with thought.
In the loneliness of Hopper’s restaurant, late in the night, there is she. She is unused to this place at this time. She “automatically” takes a coffee. There is nothing but reflexes taking care of her body while the mind is blocked in a thought. The lights reflecting in the window are the lights of an inverse runway, a runway ending in the black hole of a tormented mind. The mind doesn’t need the infinite mass of a black hole to stop the time. It only needs a thought, a persistent thought, a persistent memory. Use the runway to pass the black velvet of the night. You’ll find yourself in Dali’s nightmarish landscape. There it is, right in the middle, the focus of the thought: the deformed profile of a man. Minds don’t just deform time but also space and with that the whole reality. Enormous eyelashes, nose and tongue – symbols of sexuality. “He” is still there blocking the mind, stopping the time.
Loneliness against a screen. A painting is this space, one space. It promises time - which is just more than one space, super-imposed. It doesn't deliver.
What is change? We have time in looking at a painting, the more irreconcilable its elements the more time references of space we need to understand them, to mitigate contradiction enough to savor it. Is change the absurd? Does it and does it not make sense?
Some want it to. Regardless of the truth - these ones are right, justice is theirs, for they can give meaning, build, exist. Playing the game is based on the presupposition that the rules will help you. What is the point of a malign order?! - it is perverse because you need to think about it and insert a paranoid malignity in your conscience. It is of no metaphysical utility: I want to be pragmatic about the ultimate things.
Loneliness against a mirror: the other side has a connection to me, but it isn't me, I can only see me looking at myself in it!
But I can do so much more than that. And a mirror is a shield, protecting me. In the other side of the mirror, inside the glass-world-of-illusions-castle I can show entire worlds, though limited to space. This is morality: what becomes of my being as I do it.
Immorality is first and foremost failure; the worst failure is resentment. The failure is a bad copy of success. These we all know, they can be avoided. In a failure I can't see myself, it is a incompetent mirror, foul space, undeserving of my time and self.
I need to see myself so that I reflect that initial will. The puzzle of my not knowing, not being sense, I can live with: I do live with it. I never want to be that alone that I stop wanting: foreign to my self, de-doubled in some other medium enough so that I appear to myself self-same, I am real. Only in death do I coincide, for once, with myself...
Still space decays into still life, it is naturalist, it looks like things look like, but it is not realist, things are not that. Again, a failed mirror. And beware, it is within imagination to know these mortifying mirrors.
And there are other realities in imagination, these we look for, if we avoid the others. Dream. Dream is real - it happens, I happen with it, it is event and my presence in it. I can think about it, though not know it. Travel these unknown words, come back and live in this reality as well. Absurdity does not help with this. We need more, we need myth, we need belief.
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