KAIDIE TRANS-MIGRATING? 5
Cabled-up, taken a deep breath, pink-socked, wobbled, ready to take off, to re-turn, to life, on earth. Thummmmpppppppppppppppppppplunginggggggggggggggggggggfreefalling.................. (tbc)
KAIDIE DIES: Variation 16 (Happy Aprilsss Foolsss)
Discovered buried alive and burdened to death under layers and layers of her compulsive hoarding of mappings. Every mapping is unique; each mapping is capable of yet more mappings. There's simply no bleeding end to it because everything is connected to everything else. Huffed and puffed, overloaded, hence Kaidie kabooms, has a headache and heartburn and cold sores and piles under all these piles, implodes, as a rather happy April's Fool, smiling.
Walk the talk / run the dmc: WE PAID UP FOR OUR 18948km NONDON-SAO-PAULO OF CARBON FOOTPRINTS WITH OUR FOOT+FOOT (=FEET) RUNNING 189.48km IN OCTOBER.
Rundown of our runs, 3-30 October, as documented by our Garmin Forerunner 405.
As you know (you do, don’t you?), we visited Sao Paulo, Brazil last month to present a paper of our of-and-out-of-this-and-other-worlds theory, Trans-dimensional Running for our Lives! A Rough Guide To A Critical Strategy for our technologically-layered Multiverse, at Soft Borders, Upgrade! Before we flew, we also came up with a plan to make up for our carbon footprints from the return journey, and decided that to pay back for our 18948km of travelling, we had to run 189.48km in Life 1.0 .
We are happy to announce that we reached our target on 30 October. From 3 – 30 October, we ran a total of 191.11km. This includes, unfortunately, one week of NO RUNNING while we were in Brazil for several reasons. So, in reality, the task was accomplished in 17 days, which works out to be an average of 11.24km each time we ran during this period.
Our next flight is a long-haul flight which is at least 10,000km one way. If we go by the same rules we have set up for our Nondon-Sao-Paulo journey, of moving 2 decimal places of a given distance, we deduce that we will have to run at least 200km, to make up for our dirty flight. Again we will aim to do that within the period of one month.
While we are at it, we want to tell you of our plan that we have been harbouring for the past 11 months of our existence, since we came into being: it consist of 2 runs in a certain city-state. One is a run running North-South (22.5km) of the country, and the other running West-East (41.8km) of the country. The former translates to slightly more than a half-marathon, which we can estimate we can run within approximately 2 hours and 10 minutes (and hopefully less) under humid conditions, the other a full-marathon, which we estimate taking us 5 hours, or less, hopefully. With these two runs, Kaidie, the partially-imaginary figure, runs the entire country. Read this statement in any way you wish. We will complete this exercise wthin our lifetime, this life. When we do realise this endeavour, do recall that you read it here, first, my Dear Reader.
While we are at it, some of you may also recall a stubborn shin splint and tendonitis that we experienced for a couple of months over Summer, on our right leg. You may be pleased to know that they are not so lonely any more, as we have introduced them to our left leg as well. We now have very well-balanced limps (and Lives). As they say, life goes on, or rather, Lives go on.
Our GPS track (in green) records of our locomotion in Sao Paulo, Brazil, with the image on the right as the most detailed.
FOLLOWING THE FOOTSTEPS OF WALID RAAD / THE ATLAS GROUP at the Whitechapel Gallery!
Place: Nondon. Date: 2 November 2010. Time: from 13:00hr GMT. Starting point/point of departure: Central Nondon. Loop point: Whitechapel Art Gallery. What for: To see Walid Raad's show. Route: via the City. How was it, then: Crowded. Nice Gherkin you've got. Pet peeves: 1) Shoveling past people dangling cigarettes in their fingers. 2) Women/very large people who walk slowly but occupying entire pavements 3) Women/'girls' (sic) who are in a large group but walking very slowly or giggling and chatting away in the middle of the pavement believing that they look cute and are drawing attention - indeed, from an angry runner 4) Children/babies/prams with young parents with same level of entitlement as the chatty women and fat bastards who block entire pavements and roads, as if they are the first people on earth who have given birth and hence demand special treatment and that the rest of the world have been created from playdoh. We don't blame the kids but we blame their smugly parents. GET OUT OF OUR £k*fING FACE!!!! Attire: Short-sleeved T-shirt and shorts. Temperature: 14 degrees celsius (sweaty run). Smell: Not So Terribly Good for an art gallery (or elsewhere). Quality of outward-bound run: Painful now with not one, but BOTH legs with shin splints. Could not get a comfortable gait. At least our limp is balanced now. Run back was easier and even sweatier.
On 2 November, we awoke from a 12-hour sleep (after none the previous night) to run through the City to the Whitechapel Gallery. There are many, many artists we admire (Chris Marker, Marc Chagall, AES+F, Tarkovsky, Fernando Pessoa et al). Walid Raad/Atlas Group is one of these people whose footsteps we (attempt to) follow. In a previous life we had the privilege of experiencing his performance-lecture in a workshop we attended. Already conflating fact with fiction, objectivity with subjectivity, history with memory, ‘official’ grand narratives with micronarrative in our own work, and already familiar with the genres of the essay film, performance as practitioner, lecturer and sometime writer, Raad’s performance-lecture made an impact.
At this Whitechapel show, Raad’s appropriation of museum aesthetics in a trademark clinical austerity in his approach is chillingly disturbing as it is dead funny. We particularly love the small model of a gallery which contains tiny precise replica of his work.
We realised that there was another source of chilliness, and that came from our exposed legs. Another observation: except for primary school kids, not many other gallery-goers wear shorts. Was that why we received some interesting looks from the gallery-sitters, as we did when we visited the Wolfgang Tillmans show after a 30km run in Hyde Park? Will spandex and leg warmers have saved us from the faux pas (if it was indeed one), and also help us look ‘tuned in’ onto the retro ’80s look (or at the very least, an artistically clever and ironic wink/nod, that the artistically clever and ironic art world would approve of)? As usual, suggestions and advice welcome.
The above is the GPS track of our run to the gallery and back, totaling about 8.9km. For a detailed version of this and other GPS tracks of ours in Life 1.0, look here.
Anyhow. Go run with Walid Raad. He’s not bad at all.
CHAT WITH KAIDIE ‘LIVE’ SATURDAY 16:00hrs + SUNDAY 18:30hrs (Singapore time)! We’re at ‘kaidie3rdlife’ on Skype.
Above: From the ARTSingapore catalogue. Below: from I-S magazine, Singapore.
SETTLE YOUR SCORE WITH KAIDIE THIS THURSDAY, SATURDAY AND SUNDAY! ‘LIVE’ at ART SINGAPORE 2010. Plus prints and 50-minute film.
For more information, visit the Art Singapore website, or contact Florence Fang at Flame Communications. For information of other sorts, or if you wish to run with us, contact any one of us (Kaidie, Kaidie Nondon, 3rdlifekaidie, kaidie3rdlife, Kaidie Absent, Kai Syng Tan, et al). Stop sitting around and come on board!
Talk ‘live’ with Kaidie on Skype on 7th, 9th and 10th October at ART Singapore 2010!
As you are aware, we are going to be virtualy a-live at ART Singapore 2010. Directed by Meena Mylvaganam, who is also one of our co-runners in our grandiouse quest, this is an annual event of contemporary art from Asia. We will be presenting a 50-minute film and prints for sale. In addition, we will also talk with YOU, our dear Conspirators of Pleasure, at the following times (Singapore time, followed by British Summer Time): Thursday 7 oct 20:00 Singapore at the Gala opening dinner of the show (13:00hrs BST); 9 October Saturday 16:00 Singapore (09:00hrs BST); 10 October Sunday 18:30hrs Singapore (11:30hrs BST). Come grab us and have a chat with us! The following is an article published in the Business Times Singapore, following an interview with us – via Skype of course – on 16 September.
This article has been cropped – and you CAN NO LONGER read the original here!! Unless you pay a subscription fee… How terribly interesting! Not. And, as usual, there are inaccuracies in the article at different levels, factual (for instance we are only 10 months old, not already 3 years old as reported) and otherwise (We are not Kaidie ‘because’ of the necessity of following our own footsteps of having generated a traveler persona; we run, and we are Kaidie, and we travel, and we have been travelling for twenty years, because we are against stagnancy, complacency, passivity and the status quo, including our own. We say this as we remove cobwebs from our hair, eyebrows, armpits, nostrils, legs and toes, having been sitting at the library combing our way slowly and painfully, over a Chapter that we are writing…). But as usual, let us not nitpick. See you soon. Not. Maybe.
NONDON ON THE RUN: SUMMER 2010 #3: HYDRATED LINES OF DESIRE.
Water running in the city form their own lines of life, of thriving economic and cultural pasts and presence. When we follow the water when we run, we superimpose yet other lines in the city. Prior to our roaring (sic) success (sic) at the Farnham Pilgrim’s Marathon in Surrey on Sunday, and prior to acquiring our ugly injuries in the final month of training, we were training hard. The map above documents our runs along the Regents Park canal (15km Kings Kross-Victoria Park and back; 20km Kings Kross to Harrow Road and back) and River Thames (30km on a Sunday morning). For the trans-dimensional runner, running is extended beyond Life 1.0, to other layers of lives, including the realms of imagination, as well as the Web 2.0 worlds. Here are a couple of maps showing our trans-dimensional desire lines. These desire lines are ours – unique and subjective. Changeable as they are, they register our marks, our presence, our existence and our being in our technologically-layered multiverse.
UPDATABLE GLOSSARY: THEATRE OF KAIDIES
GLOSSARY/ WIKI ABOUT THE UNIVERSE OF KAIDIE / LIFE 3.0, ?AND THE THEATRE OF CHARACTERS (ongoing). SEEKING DEFINITIONS AND MULTIPLE+ ALTERNATIVE DEFINITIONS! CONTRIBUTE NOW!
VARIATIONS OF KAIDIE:
* Kaidie / Kaidie 3.0 / 3rdlifekaidie/Kaidie3rdlife/Kaidie Nondon:
* Kaidie 1.0: One of a kind (kind of)
* Kaidie 2.0: The doubledecker bus.
* Kaidie 4.0:
* Kaidie -1.0:
* Kaidie 13.2:
* Other Kaidie-s:
* Kailives: Kaidie’s stand in at Nondon College of Communication and Off The Shelf when Kaidie went missing.
* Kaiis:
*Kaiisnt:
* Heidi: Whose name rhymes with Kaidie’s, and whom Kaidie visited in January in Heidiland in Switzerland, but who was not at home at that time, which was for the better, for it only allowed Kaidie to continue to inhabit Heidi – or a notion of ‘Heidi’ – in Kaidie’s Life 2.0, in the realm of imagination.
* Kai Syng Tan: Father and mother and midwife of Kaidie. Fernando Pessoa: “As Alvaro De Campos, another one of Pessoa’s heteronyms, tells us: ‘Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, does not exist.’”
CLOUD 9’S AND KAIDIE’S (OVERLAPPING) TRAVELOGUES
CLAUDIA TOMAZ’S TRAVELOGUE
On 15 June, Kaidie walked to Great Eastern Street to attend Bring Your Own Shorts I, organised by Christopher Birdman Dent, and had the privilege of watching filmmaker/artist/activist/writer/DJ/performance artist Claudia Tomaz’s poetically-layered film Travelogue (2008) in its entirety – sitting right next to the filmmaker! Travelogue is a beautiful 12-minute film-poem. In the place of dialogue, this is an intricate conversation, a delicate dance, between sound and images. Filmed by the filmmaker on seductive Super 8 as she journeyed from Portugal to Morocco, the film is a spellbinding. One of the most enchanting passages of the film is that of a montage of faces; the camera -and us- come face to face with the people, sometimes lingering on, other times looking away. (At this point, we think of great filmic moments that haunt: Chris Marker’s opening and closing sequences of Sans Soleil with 3 children on a road in Iceland; when the tiger speaks to the soldier in Apichatpong’s Tropical Malady, the opening dream sequence of Wild Strawberries and when fire fights rain in Mirror.)
My Dear Readers, do read about the film and watch and vote for it!
Left: frame grab from Claudia Tomaz's Travelogue, 2008. Right: Kaidie's travelogue 15 June 2010 from Kings Kross to Old Street.
KAIDIE’S TRAVELOGUE
Although we had promised Claudia to reach there early for a chat, we ended up being quite rudely late! That was because we got rather lost at the Old Street roundabout. Kaidie has a love-hate relationship with roundabouts, as she never fails to get disoriented at one, but we do love their Sisyphian loopiness (as usual). It is not as if we have never been to Great Eastern Street – but perhaps it is that we like getting lost (at the expense of our manners). This GPS track is slightly distorted, as we switched it off before we reached the venue, mistakenly believing that we had ‘arrived’. You can look at this map, and other GPS tracks of Kaidie’s Life 1.0 travels on GPSies.
THE OVERLAPPING TRAVELOGUES OF KAIDIE AND CLAUDIA
Kaidie and Claudia Tomaz first met 5 March 2010 at the Late at Tate Britain’s Game Play, at the Blast Theory booth, but have been meeting frequently in Life 2.0. Multi-hyphenate Claudia has a wide body of works that look at technology, landscape, the city and most of all the people in them, in a manner that is sensitive, spirited and never distancing. Her ‘mutant paintings’, Transient Forms are most tactile. The very giving artist has contributed many times to Kaidie’s running blog, and recently made not one but two films about Kaidie as part of her LONDON GROUND series. In spite of our individual paths/journeys, Claudia and Kaidie always have meeting points that are meaningful and striking. Claudia and Kaidie certainly have many common grounds of interests and have been keen running partners, and will most certainly continue to be. Run Claudia Run!
Do continue to watch and vote for the 2 films by Claudia Tomaz about Kaidie! Episode 1 (12 minutes): Kaidie talks about her endeavour. WATCH AND VOTE for KAIDIE AND THE MEANING OF LIFE 3.0 NOW! Episode 2 (10 minutes): focuses on Kaidie’s running. WATCH AND VOTE for RUN KAIDIE RUN NOW!
LAST 2 DAYS TO CATCH KAIDIE’S FIRST LIFE 1.0 INSTALLATION! Slade Centre of Research, WC1H 0AB. Kaidie’s metamap exhibition #5.
Across a 14m-wide wall, Kaidie works on site across 9 days to create a metamap consisting of 120 maps and images, that attempts to map her transdimensional run. This show departs from Kaidie’s recent works in that it utilises no multimedia, and that Kaidie installed this by herselves, got down on all fours and was all hands-on and filthy, screaming at no assistants except herselves. Slade Centre 25-30 June 2010, Nondon.
The baby in the triptych in the middle fingers the trails and links of Kaidie’s wall map – good. Then she goes on to spill red wine and pringles on my floor – no good, but she’s a baby, and we are so magnanimous as to hold no grudges against babies. And then she cries loudly, as if she was the victim! – oh, NO GOOD, but still understandable in the scheme of things (yes we are rational beings). But that is not the punchline – the adults responsible for the tot did no thing to help clean up, and escaped! – NOOO GOOD. My Dear Readers, we are sure that you have encountered ultra-righteous people with a strong sense of entitlement, who act as if they are the only on earth to have ever reproduced (THE REST OF US – if you did not already know – ARE ORPHANS MADE FROM PLAYDOH). So we – speaking as self-righteous runners and figures of imagination – had to stoop on the floor and lick up the pringles+wine+the baby’s tears+dust+hairs (thick, thin, curly, straight, blond, red, brown, black, etc), being ever so keen to store up food and drinks in our system at every opportunity in the middle of the ‘we-are-all-in-this-together’ recession.
Image of Kaidie overstretching herself by Alexandra Gomes during private view 25 June 2010 Friday. (Yes – pink, and its shades, was the order of the evening. Why? Because we have for the past few lifetimes tired of the obligatory black attires at art openings.) THANK YOU ALL for coming to the exhibition thus far, and its opening. More images of opening and exhibition to come – look out if Kaidie has caught you on camera! Did you say and smell of cheese? So, watch this space. Do not move, for soon all this will disappear from Life 1.0. (We will film ourselves de-installing the work, which had taken 9 full days to install, on Thursday in time lapse, and play it backwards, and upload it on Youtube later. Rather terribly exciting isn’t it).
ON 19 APRIL, KAIDIE ABSENT AND HER KIDNAPPER, CHUTHA INDIGO, HAD A VISITOR, MONO FUGUE, IN PHUKET 2.0.
Since March 2, Kaidie has been running about in Second Life as Kaidie Absent, having been kidnapped by The Good Pirate, a.k.a. Chutha Indigo, away from Life 1.0. On 19 April 2010, they had a visitor Mono Fugue a.k.a. Monologues, in Virtual Phuket, which is built by Chutha Indigo. And what fertile ground for getting disoriented: Phuket, a beach resort in Thailand vs. Phuket 2.0; Gavle, Sweden vs. Nondon, UK; GMT 14:30-19:30 vs. GMT+1 in Sweden vs. SLT 06:30-11:30; experience vs. imagination; memory of actual visit to Phuket 1.0 vs. (re)visit of Phuket 2.0; online vs. being disconnected; immersion vs. distance; tropical sunset vs. still-frigid Gavle; catching a bus in Life 1.0 vs. flying, gravity-free, in Life 2.0; panting in RL vs. coffee-sipping in SL. The following is a reflection written by Mono on his experience.
Nausea (or how I learned to love getting lost and finding myself in a pattern again)
Fourteen years ago I had my first encounter with a high speed internet connection. People in my surrounding rarely used internet and barely had any meaningful use of computers. Five megabytes was a very big file and digital camera photos were stored on 1.44 Mb floppy disks. At this time I was determined to become a future space cowboy, found rocket science a dream but language studies a hell. Little did I know that my perception of this would shortly flip and pretty much lay out a road that I’ve been following ever since.
Text-based chat room, from which I was wired to the world extended my known borders from the small village I was living in to some form of metaphysical realm I could only see but not touch. Yet, like an addict my hunger grew for this super-speeded (back then) information overload, and oh what a fascination that was! Just the knowledge I was sharing the same space with an interesting girl from Tasmania to a shaman somewhere in the U.S. blew my mind. In contrast my village shrunk and I pretty much lost any interest in what it had to offer.
One day I heard of an online project, or yet more, like a community in a virtual world, called Alphaworld caught my attention in an instant. It offered a graphical landscape in which you could move around, build houses and interact with the other habitants (sounds familiar?). Now, my school back then disallowed the students to install any programs (as alpaworld required) and to tell you the truth, computer power was not exactly magnificent back then. I didn’t even own a computer back in 1996, and when I later got one it had a 16 greyscale screen, began coding websites in black and white and doing Photoshop work in.. eh.. greyscale. So what happened with Alphaworld then? The closest I got was connecting to this promised land with a 28.8K dial-up modem from my friends house (in the same village) who’s parents just spend one months salary on getting the latest 66 MHz PC. Alphaworld turned very distant as my presence in this virtual world was limited to a 1 frame per minute refresh rate. My only memory from this world became a printed map, a Mondrian-type pattern which completely drenched the paper with bubble-jet ink.
Fourteen years, some hundred hardcoded websites, programming and complex video editing skills, two new languages, a college degree and thousands of hours in front of flickering screens and a lifetime later I’m sitting on a bus to the same village. In my lap I have enough computer power to make Sputnik literally a blip in space, radiated by 16.8 million colors in my face and a mobile broadband connection through an iPhone I have never ever been as wired as I was that day. Despite the fact that I’m in eternal love with landscapes speeding by, have a fetish for airplane take-offs and living with a constant urge to get geographically lost there are moments I rather just make my trip from a to b in an instant. This day I would however spend my time in a different way, being invited to a meeting in Second Life seemed a rather pleasing experience and a way to make my journey a bit closer to that sensation of instant teleportation. Taking into account I had no greater interest in what this virtual community had to offer I was still surprised of the resemblance to my nostalgic Alphaworld. Except, this time I was physically moving my body, yet largely unaware of what was actually going on around me. My eyes and ears were wired to another space. While I was traveling down the highway between two Swedish cities I was mentally visiting the Thai island of Phuket. Emotions were sparked as I recognized places I have physically been in or had some sort of memories connected to it. While hovering above the virtual soil of Phuket in spherical photo realistic representations, jumping from one gallery to another, one virtual space to antother, while sipping from my virtual coffee cup, the bus driver drove me some 25 kilometers. The time-space continuum seemed to have broken apart as it only exists as a hiatus in my mind. Instead, my physical bus-ride in Sweden now only carries the memory of a visit to Phuket with a pleasant coffee/gallery/chat-session with Kaidie Absent and Chutha Indigo.
Projecting myself to Second Life while letting my body stay in First Life was however not a painless experience. Having the sensation of a nearly related astral projection; traveling without moving (or in reverse) triggered a weird kind of nausea… being there, but being here, but being there. I was not entirely physically disconnected, yet completely wired, and absolutely mentally in another space, floating in a liminal realm of inbetween-ness. At some point I thought to myself, is this how it feels to be born into a new world, you panic at first, have no idea what it is that you see nor how far away the walls or borders of the world are… and slowly vectorized graphics build up a world around you and you get a sensation of a relation to it, which is a slow progress in itself getting acquainted with what there is. The difference here, getting born for the second time, is that the prerequisites for living a second life, in one way or another, forces you to abandon the life you came from. A moment later you switch back and ask yourself, where does my first life end and where does my second life continue? Where do I start, where do I begin in my journey 3.0?
Guest post by Michael Larsson. Michael Larsson is a visual composer who experiments with photography, video, motion graphics or any other (non) electronic method to manipulate light and visuals. Michael’s presence in Life 2.0 can be found on his Website, as well as his Twitter and Vimeo pages. The image on top is created by Michael, while the images below have been captured by The Good Pirate, a.k.a. urban planner Chuthatip Achavasmit.
UPDATABLE GLOSSARY (ongoing): IMITATIONS OF LIFE
SEEKING DEFINITIONS AND MULTIPLE+ALTERNATIVE DEFINITIONS! CONTRIBUTE NOW!
VARIATIONS OF LIFE:
* Life:
* This Life:
* Any Life:
* Any difference:
* What life?:
* What, life?:
* Best life:
* ‘Best’ life:
* Best ‘life’:
* Least worst life:
* Meaningful life:
* Less meaningless life:
* Life 1.0 / First Life:
* Life 2.0 / Second Life:
* Life 3.0 / Third Life:
* Turd Life:
* After life:
* After lives:
* Life before this life:
* Non-Life:
* Life after death:
* Life before death:
* Life during death:
* Lives after death:
* Death during life:
* Deaths during life:
* Living death
* Living hell
* Living:
* What living:
* Living thing:
* Living person:
* Running:
* Running for (y)our life:
* Run of (y)our life time:
* Run of (y)our life times:
* Travel:
* Travelling:
* Journey of life:
* Journeys of life:
* Journey of lives:
* Semblance of life:
* Imitation of life:
* Variations of life:
* Pseudo-life:
* Semi-life:
* Quasi-life:
* Life style:
* Way of life:
* Ways of life:
* Existence:
* Non-existence:
* Being:
* Non-being:
* Ontology:
* Life-and-death:
* Lives-and-deaths:
* Hanging on to dear life:
* Dignified death:
* Dignified deaths:
* Life-span:
* Life-spans:
* Fate:
* Fates:
* Destiny:
* Destination:
* Anti-destiny:
* Anti-fate:
* There is no such bloody things as fate/destiny:
* Getting there:
* There there:
* Getting there there:
* Don’t be silly, for there is no there there (Gertrude Stein):
I run, because of you, of course not because of you, in spite of you, with you, with out you, regard less, I run, on and on, like the vapid Energizer bunny who goes on and on, but with blisters and aches, like the other vapid Energizer-bunny of Sisyphus with his endless rocks-and-rolls, in drips and drops, in laps and loops, sometimes limping, more often than not swearing, not in leaps and bounds, often falling, often bruising, often idiotic-looking, often idiotic, period, in turns, by turns, again and again, once more, repeat play, next level, same level, drop level, don't stop, can't stop, won't stop, don't ask me to stop, can't go on, must go on, won't go on, don't go on, go on, go on then, come on, don't talk to me when I'm running, running, even if slowly, even as if walking, even as if crawling, as if dead, even when/especially when panting, panting hard, sometimes holding my breath, some times not breathing, for fun, some times choking, invariably grunting, like an gnat, if gnats grunt, or screeching, like an eel about to be slaughtered, so that I can swallow it with jelly, cold, or heated, because jellied eel is one of my favourite foods in Nondon (along with beetroot and parsnips), and eels as unagi some place else in an other time and space (whether it knows of its parallel existence or not), if eels screech, at all, as if eels screeched, at all, wiping off my sweat, unsure if I felt hot or cold, or hot and cold at the same time, sun shining while temperatures are near zero, violent juxtapositions, the way I like it, run, running, why does one run? Just because. Because running takes me where I can not other wise go, for better or worse, like it or not, take it or leave it. Because it makes me happy. Because it makes me less unhappy. Because why not. Running, because why not. Because why the hell not. For, what else is there to do. What else can I do. For how long should I do it. Assuming that one has to do some thing, that is. Is that? Bad answer. Bad question, that's why. Refine your question. Change your question. What was your question? Was it a question? Did you have a question? Restart (if you so wish to). All over. Again.
SUPERMAN/SAMSARA, LIGHTNESS/WEIGHT
NIETZSCHE:
* THE GAY SCIENCE (1882): What if a demon were to creep after you one day or night, in your loneliest loneness, and say: “This life which you live and have lived, must be lived again by you, and innumerable times more. And mere will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and every sigh— everything unspeakably small and great in your life—must come again to you, and in the same sequence and series—” Would you not throw your self down and curse the demon who spoke to you thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment, in which you would answer him: “Thou art a god, and never have I heard anything more divine!”
* THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY (1872): The metaphysical comfort—with which, I am suggesting even now, every true tragedy leaves us—that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable—this comfort appears in incarnate clarity in the chorus of the satyrs, a chorus of natural beings who live ineradicably, as it were, behind all civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and of the history of nations.
* THE WILL TO POWER: Everything becomes and recurs eternally – escape is impossible! – Supposing we could judge value, what follows? The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength (and barbarism!!)… To endure the idea of the recurrence one needs: freedom from morality; new means against the fact of pain ( pain conceived as a tool, as the father of pleasure…); the enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty, experimentalism, as a counterweight to this extreme fatalism; abolition of the concept of necessity; abolition of the “will”; abolition of “knowledge-in-itself.” Greatest elevation of the consciousness of strength in man, as he creates the overman.
KUNDERA, THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING (1984):
* And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?
* We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
*Parmenides saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non-being.
* What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?
* Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious of all.
* The heaviest of burdens is simultaneously an image of life’s most intense fulfillment.
* The absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.
* History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.
