Friday, November 12, 2010

The baseline for coordinates

Earlier here, we have been asking what kind of observations, what kind of parameters, one uses in order to deduce where one is in a dream. Of course very often the actual dream landscapes are created using scraps of several different locations from memory, and the actual spatial semaphors (signs signalling where one is) used might relate to just one of these, or several – or just additional signs added without being based in the biographical landscapes the dream landscape is built upon (an example: there is the devil so I must be in hell; or, there is a sign saying Mogadishu so I must be in Somalia). But often, these spatial semaphors can be secondary to the immediate knowledge of where one is, if the location is part of the explicit execution of the dream. This immediate knowledge might also contain a delimitation against places where it's not, and it may either coincide with, take sides among, or entirely contradict, what the spatial semaphors are saying. The little dream I'll be relating is just a small example of this more general observation based on a larger dreaming experience. And furthermore, it starts nicely with a spatial metaphor getting a material expression.




As the conclusion of a long dream of idiotic joking, self-aggrandising, and amorous complications, I'm feeling frustrated over the whole mess, and in order to be able to get an overview, I take my bulldog and start climbing the steep hills of the little town. The bulldog is huge, with a spike collar and an enormous mouth; it is Maldoror's bulldog. The inclination is just like a Norwegian city (Narvik or so), but the vegetation is nemoral and the buildings are English; anyway I don't need to interpret such signs because I know I am in Greenwich, and I feel a certain need to emphasise that this is of course not Greenwich Village, New York, but the real Greenwich, the starting point of all coordinate systems.


/MF

1 comment:

NN said...

With Greenwich an overview of the "origin of origins" is literally found.

This seems to me like a rational(istic) choice for what in spiritual geography would be called Jerusalem or Omphalos.

The *Locus possibilium*.

And thus you are right in talking about spirit (immediate knowledge) as much as about geography here. For, like Hegel says in the beginning of the chapter on sense-certainty:

"The knowledge which is at first or is immediately our object cannot be anything but immediate knowledge itself, a knowledge of the immediate or of a *being*.

That object is knowledge itself. The supreme point, Kether, Mahasheba, thought itself, pippilångstrumpian spunk.

And if the center cannot hold, the periphery is chaotic, and semaphors become nonsensical.

Last night i saw Pasolini´s Medea. Maria Callas panicking while first setting foot on the plains of Argos:

"This place will sink because it has no foundation. You are not praying to God that he bless your tents! You are not repeating the first act of god! You are not seeking the center, you are not marking the center. No! Look for a tree, a post, a stone! Speak to me, sun! Speak to me, Earth! Let me hear our voice! I can no longer remember your voice. Where must I go to hear your voice? Speak to me, Earth! Speak to me, sun! I look at the sun and I can no longer recognize it!"