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b-bear

Last seen: 5 months ago

b-bear is a 29 year old guy from Mountain Air, VIC, Australia

    Drink your Bliss; for every Thing that Lives is Holy. ~William Blake
♫
    Mon auberge était ŕ la Grande Ourse. My inn was under the sign of the Great Bear. ~Rimbaud

  • Sabbathesis

    Created May 27 •




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    Pour Mon Ange.











  • http://www.usyd.edu.au/museums/pdfs_docs/Sigmund_Freuds_C...

    Rated May 26 2009 • 1 review • collecting, psychoanalysis, freud • usyd.edu.au













    Sigmund Freud collected a wall of phalluses. I want one.

  • http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=psar.035.0151.fig0...

    Rated May 26 2009 • 1 review • animals, relationships • pep-web.org











    Ouch! Straight through the heart. Our projections onto animals - be they the ones that divide friends and enemies - become us.









  • Action Restricted | Black on White Fire | Thesis Realised

    Created May 26 2009 •








    You may have guessed from the previous font post that I have chosen the sans-serif for my thesis. Now I need to drop you a little note to say: I need to be on more intimate terms with that font. (That font and my girlfriend, my dogs and our house.)


    I wish I could say, as some bloggers would, that I am taking a sabbatical. Traditionally, a sabbatical is a break from work - however, for me blogging is a pure meditative pleasure, and I take a break from it in order to work harder on my thesis at university. My free time is evaporating, and white fire is burning me.


    White fire is what the old Jews in their Midrashim called the blank spaces on the pages of their holy scrolls. For them the Torah was written by God with black fire upon white fire, and because there was so much white fire on the holy page, it was God's wish that his creation was continued; the white spaces needed to be filled up with more black ink. Thus the inspired rabbis justified their own creativity in commentaries on the Torah; the Oral Torah became dignified as a supplement to the Written Torah.









    When I say I am being burnt by white fire, then I am referring to the blank pages of my thesis - they're the white fiery spaces waiting to be written and that are haunting my dreams. For some time now I have been meditating over those pages, dreaming of a perfect set of letters, the best spell to open every door there is.











    Of course, part of becoming a mature student is to realise that not every door can open at your command, and it's worth being happy with creating a key that makes others happy in its use - even if it can only suggest a WAY OUT of the prison in which we keep ideas.


    And for now the meditating must come to an end, and the torturous realisation must continue. It's a pleasure to be with people meditating, learning, and getting to know others in that charmed way that breaks the spell, but now I must return to settle down on the surface and fill up the page with those traces that burn away the evanescence. It's time to take up the black fire.


    Which is a lengthy and ungodly way of saying: I got heaps of work to do.





    See you when I can see my desk again.
















    Postscript. This is perhaps the only emoticon that expresses what I am feeling right now:

  • Font - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Rated May 25 2009 • 1 review • graphic design, thesis, fonts • wikipedia.org

















  • The new black - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    Rated May 25 2009 • 1 review • bizarre • wikipedia.org








    The new black is X is the new Y.

  • W e b l o g -- Charles Bernstein

    Rated May 25 2009 • 1 review • blogs, books, book arts • buffalo.edu













  • Graphic Witness: visual arts & social commentary [Frans...

    Rated May 25 2009 • 1 review • arts, books • graphicwitness.org















    The Idea [Die Idee], first published 1920, has been republished by The Redstone Press, 1986 and reprinted 1991. The small, 1991 boxed edition contains two (out of a total of eight) original novels by Masereel, all of them "told in woodcuts." These two are titled The Idea and Story Without Words. The cover of the box cites Thomas Mann's response to them "'...so compelling, so deeply felt, so rich in ideas that one never tires of looking at them.'"




    "An Idea springs from the mind of the Thinker and goes out into the world. She is naked, female, radiant, a pocket Venus embodying all ideals, and she finds herself in the mean streets of a twentieth century city -- among politicians and fat cats, torturers and striptease audiences, who take the Idea and use it for their own ends, or reject and try to destroy it..." [from a review in The Independent]





    The first image in the book: the "Thinker" is blocked, as though his thoughts were caught in a web.












    In the second image, the Idea strikes, with the force of lightning. [Next] we first meet the Idea as she springs from his now web-cleared brain.


































    The Thinker demonstrates his love for the Idea, and sad to let her go, sends her out into the world (in an envelope). But this beautiful Idea is not well received. People try to change the Idea, (rather than let the Idea change them); they attempt to clothe her, to tone down her alluring charms. Inspired by the Idea, one person is arrested and ultimately shot by a firing squad, but of course the Idea cannot die so easily.























    After unsuccessfully offering herself to people in the countryside, the small town and the big city, the Idea attracts the attention of a scientist, who tries to confine her -- however, Ideas must be free. She flees and finds refuge at a book publisher. The books and materials that contain the Idea are burned, but as ever, the Idea is not destroyed.







    {ftp sent to me by the clever and generous filippi. Unless we are caught in the University system, we are arguably no longer faced with these difficulties that beset the Idea in Die Idee. That is, unless one wants to freshen up the story and think of the internet as a place that catches your ideas in the web. But puns are a bad Idea!}

  • Created May 24 2009 •














    for the mediate, without traces, becomes evanescent*





  • Sigmund Freud: Conflict &Culture (Library of Congress...

    Rated May 24 2009 • 4 reviews • psychology, books, psychoanalysis, freud • loc.gov













    The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance in their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. It may be that in this respect precisely the present time deserves a special interest. Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man.



    Sigmund Freud
    Civilization and Its Discontents
    1930