Sunday 21 December 2008

Flaneur -- Walter Benjamin

A landscape huants, intense as opium --Mallarmé.

The appearance of superposition, of overpla, which come with hashish may be grasped through the concept of similitude. When we say that one face is similar to another, we mean that certain features of this second face appear to us in the first, without the latter's ceasing to be what is has been. Nevertheless, the possibilities of entering into appearance in this way are not subject to any criterion and are therefore boundless. The category of similarity, which for the waking consciousness has only minimal relevance, attains unlimited relevance in the world of harshish. There, we may say, everything is face: each thing has the degree of bodily presence that allows it to be searched -- as one searches a face -- for such traits as appear. Under theses conditions even a sentence (to say nothing of the single word puts on a face, and this face resembles that of the sentence standing opposed to it. In this way every truth points manifestly to its opposite, and this state of affairs explains the existence of doubt.) Truth becomes something living; it lives solely in the rhythm by which statement and counterstatement dispalce each other in order to think each other.


I find this fits into my perfectly...pathetically...

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