“I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.”
In physics, a wave is a disturbance that travels through space and time, usually accompanied by the transfer of energy.
Waves travel and the wave motion transfers energy from one point to another, often with no permanent displacement of the particles of the medium—that is, with little or no associated mass transport. They consist, instead, of oscillations or vibrations around almost fixed locations. For example, a cork on rippling water will bob up and down, staying in about the same place while the wave itself moves onwards.
One type of wave is a mechanical wave, which propagates through a medium in which the substance of this medium is deformed. The deformation reverses itself owing to restoring forces resulting from its deformation. For example, sound waves propagate via air molecules bumping into their neighbors. This transfers some energy to these neighbors, which will cause a cascade of collisions between neighbouring molecules. When air molecules collide with their neighbors, they also bounce away from them (restoring force). This keeps the molecules from continuing to travel in the direction of the wave.
Another type of wave can travel through a vacuum, e.g. electromagnetic radiation (including visible light, ultraviolet radiation, infrared radiation, gamma rays, X-rays, and radio waves). This type of wave consists of periodic oscillations in electrical and magnetic fields.
A main distinction can be made between transverse and longitudinal waves. Transverse waves occur when a disturbance sends waves perpendicular (at right angles) to the original wave. Longitudinal waves occur when a disturbance sends waves in the same direction as the original wave.
Waves are described by a wave equation which sets out how the disturbance proceeds over time. The mathematical form of this equation varies depending on the type of wave.
“Die Ewigkeit ist nicht vor oder nach der Zeit, nicht vor der Erschaffung der Welt, noch wenn sie untergeht; sondern die Ewigkeit ist absolute Gegenwart, das Jetzt ohne Vor und Nach. Die Welt ist erschaffen, wird erschaffen jetzt, und ist ewig erschaffen worden; dieß kommt in der Form der Erhaltung der Welt vor. Erschaffen ist die Thätigkeit der absoluten Idee …”
One of the central concerns of the philosophy of 20th century and today concerns the question of subjectivity. What is going on in thinking when someone decides upon its creative possibilities, and what does it mean that the one thinking only develops and finds his own determination, his subjectivity, by way of thinking? In What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari says that what they call “conceptual personae”:
“are the philosopher’s ´heteronyms´, and the philosopher’s name is the simple preudonym of his personae. I am no longer myself but thought’s aptitude for finding itself and spreading across a plane that passes through me at several places.” (Deleuze/Guattari: What is Philosophy? page 64)
Here we see that the relation between thinking and subjectivity is inverted. The question explored in the following article revolves around the problem of thinking and subjectivity. We will take our departure from a quote by the philosopher Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon who speaks authoritatively about real possibilities for transformation. The lecture from which it is taken, the so called Colmar lecture, presentes unresolved riddles in contemporary philosophy in relation to this problem of thinking, subjectivity and the question of the real I of the human being. We will try to see how the dissolution of everyday personality is a part of the transformation, but only mention in passing now that the real problem comes after this is accomplished; what becomes of the individual that has passed through its own dissolution and nothingness? The Colmar lecture treats these questions as they emerge in 20th century philosophy, and one example of how this emerges in the debate in contemporary philosophy we read in a recent book about Deleuze:
“Deleuze’s strategy functions to overcome the opposition between being and thinking in that thought is no longer concieved of as a representation of being but is instead productive of being itself. … In this respect it is better to say that it thinks than I think.” (Levi R. Bryant: Difference and Givenness, p. 12)
As is obvious, we are here dealing with a radical transformation of thinking, and one which strikes directly into the heart of the human being. If Deleuze’s thinking really is to overcome the opposition between thought and being, it must be the actual event of thinking which is that which strikes through the being of the thinker as a thinking on the part of being itself, and not a conceptual representation of this process, -which would of course be an enormous self-contradiction. Thinking can not be attributted to someone thinking about something (being), but becomes the very ground of being as it unfolds itself.
Imagine a world consisting a subject relating to objects around it, and that the representations the subject has of the objects were always automatically determined by the objects. In such a world the subject would never experience its own activity or its own self, it would be an automaton, simply mirroring its surroundings. Only so far as the subject itself is active in trying to relate to its surrounds can it become aware of itself. In order for this to happen, the objects must loose their immediate determining force over against the subject. Through its constant trying to represent the “hidden” objects, the subject finds that it is sometimes seems to be right and sometimes wrong. Now it can become aware of its own activity. But its newly won self-consciousness has as a condition that its relation to the objects is always mediated, insecure and provisional. When the subject relates to the world in such a way that it is not immediately determined by it, it becomes free, but also becomes susceptible to illusion and prone to making mistakes. This is the price for self-consciousness and freedom.
There are two ideas concerning the creation of the cosmos that have always fascinated me. The one idea is of the suffering, lonely god, and the other of the joyful god, overflowing with love. Both relate to the question of why cosmos was created in the first place, i.e. to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Well, why is there something rather than nothing?
The story of the lonely, suffering, god, goes as follows: God, as single being, is isolated, and has no one to relate to. This circumstance causes suffering; the supreme being wants an other, isolation is not the state which realizes what God is. So He creates the cosmos and other beings in it in order to replace the loneliness with the joy of company.
In the story of the joyful god, God is so magnificent that He continually self-transcends and creates. To create belongs to the nature of God; there is no decision to create that were once made. God cannot not create. He overflows in His excellence. One can compare this to the idea of love as an infinite source, a fountain that never empties. On this account, one would say that if you give love, the amount of love you have does not decrease in any way; if anything it increases.
A central conception in the intellectual history of the west is the idea of an original unity. What this unity consists of, can be expressed in many ways, and valued or judged in many others. Plato’s Timaeus gives expression to the idea that the original condition very much was a happy one, before war, strife and needs. Everyone were satisfied simply as they were in the world. In Rousseau there is the idea of a natural state of man, one that existed before his corruption, i.e. the creation of society and private property. Common to both these conceptions of an original unity, is a kind of nostalgia or at least the notion that the original unity was better than what has come to be after it. In the neo-platonic conceptions of the world, this idea has a central position too. The world-I emanates from the original and pure one, which it seeks to returns to.
The Lista installation-project this summer (2009) will have improvisation and «events» as its theme. The gallery will function as the place where work and experimentation is done, and this will be open to the audience. During four days the duo (prep. guitar, prep. piano, electronics) will explore different kinds of material through improvisation. This will be collected and condensed into a closing concert at the last day. This will be an attempt to collect the musical events which occur during the improvisations the preceeding days. The gallery is thereby showing not «works» as objects, but work as events. The lighthouse will show the sound spatially spread out across the stairs so that the audience moves spirally upwards in a field of sound, a «soundscape» created in the gallery and split up into different perspectives inside the lighthouse. More info will come.
Here is a teaser from the duo Silvola-Eftestøl who will be doing the installation together: Improvisation for a lost cage
“I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.”
