1. |
I
01:58
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If it is asked, "how does a sentence manage to represent," the answer might be, "don't you know? Surely you see it when you use one? after all, nothing is concealed..." One would like to reply, "yes, but it all goes by so quickly, and I should like to see it more fully laid out."
During a dream, and even long after we have woken up, words occurring in the dream can strike us as having the greatest significance. Can't we be subject to the same illusion when awake?
I have the impression that I am sometimes liable to this these days. The insane often seem to be like this.
The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble, and finally a heap of ashes. But spirits will hover over the ashes.
As we get old, problems slip from our fingers again, as they used to when we were young. It isn't just that we can't crack them, we cannot even keep hold of them.
When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.
You must bear in mind that the language game is so-to-say something unpredictable. I mean, it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable or unreasonable. It is there. Like our life.
After all nothing is hidden.
But it all goes by so quickly
-- Quotes taken out of context from Ludwig Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" and "Culture and Value".
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2. |
I Must Be Afraid of Sex
03:29
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Wake
It's 10:02.
Between bone and sinew
you pray for trembling
states
descend like snow
to fill your cracks and folds
of abandoned control.
Wait -
burn away your clothes
(man was made to dance and not dance alone)
I'd die for a pure flow of self control,
to own the soul of a million perfect blemishes.
Bottle me up in something admirable if you'd like,
As if it's true, as if I'm zen with no desire.
With all your words, with every flailing bit of symbol
wrap me up.
But this is it
and nothing is hidden.
Fate -
She'll walk through the gates.
And I'll pretend to be more than this
cold calculation.
Until 12:26...
with the automatic moving of my joints to a rhythm -
The body's now a loose-leaf paper tear-stained with sincerity
and now illegible and plain.
Bottle me up in something admirable if you'd like,
As if it's true, as if I'm zen with no desire.
With all your words, with every flailing bit of symbol
wrap me up.
But this is it,
and nothing is hidden.
Oh love just move
move me.
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3. |
In Wake (Chelyabinsk)
04:47
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The sky shattered like a depth charge
He ran outside with his camera on just to find
the miracle of seeing nothing at all.
And every paint chip and sidewalk tag
alive among the wreckage
of the everyday
asserted itself:
"I am all I am
colliding with myself.
Pan to a sidewalk blowing away
and back to the sidewalk I grew up upon.
I am all that is
colliding with itself -
a quick drop in the mind of somebody else
and torn pages left folded in their shelves."
This is the way the world looks at me
(This is the way the world sees through me)
Does it recognize itself at all?
when he finds
when I find
The quiet song of dropped cloth becomes a deafening cry
the stone throw of a god away from ceasing to sound.
(The miracle of hearing nothing at all)
And every thought that could've burned with the world
is playing out its beauty through a shutter and a piece of glass.
It's singing the through bones of every house in the world
and on the face of every neighbor looking up at the sky:
"I am all I am
colliding with myself.
Now pan to a sidewalk blowing away
and back to a sidewalk I grew up upon.
I am all that is
colliding with itself -
a quick drop in the mind of somebody else
and torn pages left folded in their shelves."
This is the way the world looks at me
Does it recognize itself at all?
A lost glove by the side of the road
Undeveloped film in my mother's basement.
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4. |
II
01:55
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5. |
Objects in Space
04:49
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Between the quietness of walls, before falling into felt,
a sheet and florescent light - here to say goodbye
I see objects waiting to become something more than mundane
and the branches of the tree diverge again like we have and we will again
What's this feeling now? It's so far from sadness
but it's so far from everything - every word I've ever heard.
Once I catch it by the foot the greatest fog can't hide it,
once I learn it's name, and learn to see through my eyes
as if they were windows.
I would sit alone to take it in
Sounds that no one but the Earth will hear
Feel my body melt into her skin
On fleeting nation's dying grass I'd disappear
4am found me at a streetlamp, the hunting pattern of a bat beneath
4 billion transits through the years: I'm her souvenir
I'll find my home beneath her skin, a locked jar of all these memories
and like sounds that crack beyond your ears,
I have disappeared
What's this feeling now? It's so far from sadness
but it's so far from everything - every word I've ever learned.
Once I catch it by the foot the greatest fog can't hide it,
once I learn it's name, and learn to see through my eyes
As if they were windows to a moment
held in hand for just a minute
sending ripples through the fingers
droplets scatter into focus.
Will I finally see the structure
some great web of all connection?
And if it's random what of laughter?
What of drunken crying searches?
Or in some shining revelation
will I find that I'm forgotten,
all the pictures I had cherished
locked in basements full of boxes?
And from that well of holy moments
will my heart grow into silence?
To learn the meaning of objective:
"a ghost removed, in love, not frightened"
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6. |
since feeling is first
03:20
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I'm gonna choose to be happy.
I'm gonna choose to be in love.
These quiet gears of regret in the body
I fear like blanks in a gun.
I can't tell a soul how it was
to feel the bookmarks of time
made of blood red skies
Or how her voice was burned in my head
like the image burn of a camera flash.
Or what
force carried what mass from the start of things
landed her there
against my arm,
but I'm gonna to choose to be happy,
and I'm wise enough to choose to be in love.
These quiet gears of regret in the body
Become blanks in a gun.
I can't tell my brother what it is
to see one's self, to be absurd
or to have walked her, hand in hand,
through all the places ghosts go
when they
can find no sleep.
I have to think they
think back to souls they've held
when flesh begins to feel,
when my senses take her in,
when her hair takes shape,
when the freckles on her back
come to me through these eyes,
when the impressions she left
found their rest in some naked corner,
where my memories lie,
became part of me...
Now i contain more of what lies outside.
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7. |
III
01:23
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8. |
The Gates of Olympus
04:30
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Gates
of a still, guarded place
like the world looking out
through the flesh of a deer:
blank
God,
how I want it to be
just to have something pierce
through me
and the weight of a past
that closes up behind me
leaves just look the same color as always
but I feel strange staring out
from an older self
looking at something always busy that
doesn't need to make sense
There is no pattern.
there's only this,
now this,
now this,
and gone.
Still,
(on the opposite side)
things continue to grow
close,
if I could reach out and feel,
fall in love with a door
become something else...
The body starts to feel tired
but I'm not tired at all
If I could stay awake long enough
If I could keep my eyes open till the end
When it rushes in
I'd die for it.
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9. |
Closer
04:49
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Now he's here
and now he's gone,
evaporated from a skin that once bled into impressions of tobacco sinking heavy in the skin of the wall.
And they all got drunk and told the story of the time he cut himself upon the sharp, red edge of a rake
but did they know it then as he was bleeding that he saw through them, and what he wanted to say:
"Will I die unfelt
and then become unfeeling?"
And what are these words, these tools
we used to bridge the gap,
a gap left when the periodic table takes a look at itself through the eyes of something fated to end.
As if song you knew were leaking out of a car, in some dream I watched myself detached from afar
where I let myself be pulled down to the grass and worms around and called out my greatest fear:
Will I die unfelt
and then become unfeeling?
...and the sun's pouring out like she always has
and the atoms that make me
will go on without me
down all the streets I'd bike past when as a child the summers were fleeting
where strangers would forget my shape as the light would dim,
When they were like films to me and I was always a ghost to them
who'd see a picture tracing just how all the muscles move;
see the channels of marrow,
and see it watching its shadow
from the sun pouring out like she always had
from the atoms that made me
that went on without me
to form things more wholly...
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10. |
IV
02:30
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"The inexorable direction of change, linked to the asymmetry of time (before-now-after), was vividly described by the scientist Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) as "the arrow of time." Throughout the process of continuing universal degradation, the dwindling stock of useful energy encounters a hierachy of fixed physical laws conforming to mathematical formulas, and from the interaction of these unchanging laws with the arrow of time comes a changing world of astonishing complexity, variety, and beauty. The pendulum runs down from a state of disequilibrium to one of equilibrium, and the same is true, we are told, of the universe, the ultimate closed system. From a state of extreme disequilibrium it plunged via the Big Bang toward its future ultimate state of utterly dark, frozen equilibrium. Between the beginning and the end there is a continual, cumulative transformation of useful energy, capable of forming temporary structures and causing events, into useless energy forever lost."
-Anthony Ashton, Harmonograph
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Augustine Esterhammer-Fic Chicago, Illinois
Adult male vertebrate writing songs re: invertebrates
Augustine Esterhammer-Fic recommends:
Distinctive Juju
by Blacker Face
Their politically relevant masterpiece
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Jackie's House
by Joshua Virtue
Joshua Virtue made this in two weeks to support his mother, sister, and grandmother
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This album is insane
go to albumIf you like Augustine Esterhammer-Fic, you may also like:
The Fifth Season (Versions)
by Lafawndah
featured on Bandcamp Radio Apr 9, 2024
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Diamanda Galás In Concert
by Diamanda Galás
A live record from the legendary Diamanda Galás finds the artist exploring the outer fringes of pop with only her voice and a piano.
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The Brooklyn-based cellist cultivates a digital forest with an astonishing array of sounds.
go to album
