TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Monday, December 10, 2007

6:09 PM
Posted by jodi rose

So, my conceptual ornithologist found my attempt at a local bird lexicon amusing, telling me that the ducks are male and female of the same species... well, and isn't that two kinds ;) and that the non-red-breasted robins are actually sparrows. I wasn't sure when making that guess, but hey it's nice to be completely wrong sometimes. Good for the soul.

Checking the spelling, I find that the real life James Bond, inspiration for the Ian Fleming character, was a leading american ornithologist, who wrote 'Birds of the West Indies' in 1936, and despite his 'ordinary as possible' name, proves that there is the potential for action and excitement in every kind of pursuit.

Today, I continue my peregrinations along the ufer, in search of sunshine. Watching the swan's heavy bodies lurch along the canal, wing tips splashing in the water, while their feet madly pedal along the surface, I can't imagine how they could ever fly. Sometimes they rise up to a few metres, before landing with a swoosh, using their feet to brake as they skid to a gentle stop. One of them - I like to think it's the same swan, who recognises me as the same human, but it could indeed be any swan and any random human - always swims up to the edge of the bank to say hello, his/her white tail wagging in what seems like a friendly greeting. It makes me happy, anyway.

I heard on the BBC World Service tonight in their review of a book: 'Froth on the Capuccino - How Small Pleasure Can Save Your Life,' that it's the small pleasures are what keep us happy, while the big pleauses become ever more unattainable and unreliable. Sounds reasonable, having spent much time and energy re-calibrating my inner balance to appreciate, embrace and find joy in the minutiae of life. The big moments come and go, but it's all about joining the dots.

Thinking that part of what make me so happy to be living in Berlin - regardless of the daily economic situation or how anything 'turns out' - is that I haven't given ground relative to my desire. This is what I really wanted to do, and here I am. That is enough. Thanks to my post-modern philosophy generator for giving me this information, all those years ago during an ongoing conversation at Mario's in Melbourne.

I had to refresh my understanding of this concept about the after imperfectly describing it for a friend, and found a good introduction here. The Lacanian idea about the 'only'moral imperative, is to 'not give way on your desire,' to not "betray the "law of desire" by way of adopting the "reasonable" demands of the existing socio-symbolic order."

Here's to unreasonable desires and immoral imperatives.

Continuing my walk along the canal in the sun, contemplating the ethics of desire, speech, collaborative practice and socio-economic frameworks. That's what you get for reading the surrealist manifesto and Lacanian theory on a Sunday morning. Working on ideas of cross media exquisite corpse, for a project with transit lounge next year.

"The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine"

"Absolute non-conformism and universal disrespect was the rule, and great good humour reigned. It was a time for pleasure and nothing else... Elements of language attacked each other in the most paradoxical manner possible, and so that human communication, misled from the start, was thrown into the mood most amenable to adventure... Finally, with the Exquisite Corpse we had at our command an infallible way of holding the critical intellect in abeyance, and of fully liberating the mind's metaphorical activity."

Something from the swirl of surrealist intention about doing what is the most fun - that disrupts the socio-economic imperative. A philosophical discourse that privileges pleasure, disorder and the random - embrace the irrational, disturb the flow of meaning, disregard all logic and syntax...

"Your desire entails attending to your unconscious, heeding the formations of the unconscious (slips of the tongue, jokes, bungled actions, acts of forgetting, dreams, symptoms). An ethics of psychoanalysis is an ethics that aims at truth insofar as it aims at the truth of one's desire manifested in these formations... Lacan refers to this as the ethics of "speaking well" (bein dire), which consists in not speaking well at all."

A brief foray into the territory I remember from Luce Irigary, about not speaking well, which I guess was part of the feminist deconstsruction of Lacan et al. To be honest I was never a particularly rigorous theory student, I tended to collect fragments that inspired me, to weave into different meanings and associations - more a poetic resonance than anything else. Well it's funny to see how nothing has changed, and if you can develop a strong enough framework, that any creative practice, no matter how grounded in subjectivity and chaos, will eventually find itself a context, even become recognised as a position of strength and coherence.

Filtering ideas for the program residency about creating traces of the interactions that happen, with collaborative drawings, diagrams, sketches - something for the wall. Playing with media/art praxis in various forms, all tangental yet related. Had a nice comment from a researcher on the Creative Journeys website, saying: 'I look forward to seeing how you will push the boundaries of the technology to suit your own practices.' Indeed. Perhaps we can build some diplomatic cultural bridges, apparently using an orchestra is a safe way to do it. (BBC News on NY Philarmonic Orchestra playing in North Korea.)