The Rock Blogger

There was a tear in the world - the world opened it up,

I emptied into it - an empty field

No objects, or subjects - just rushing water, blue-black water

The eyes are always open - I so rarely see

What is there - when they are covered

Gradients of blue-black, orange-black, red-black

emerge from inner-night

-Caspar David Friedrich “The Watzmann”

Within the Alps it is still bright night and the cloud,
Composing poems full of joy, covers the yawning valley within.
This way, that way, roars and rushes the playful mountain breeze,
Steep down through the fir trees a ray of light gleams and vanishes.
Chaos, trembling with joy, slowly hurries and struggles,
Young in form, yet strong, it celebrates loving strife
Amidst the rocks, it seethes and shakes in its eternal bounds,
For more bacchantically morning rises within,
For the year grows more endlessly there and the holy
Hours, the days, are more boldly ordered and mingled.
Yet the bird of the thunderstorm notes the time and between
Mountains, high in the air he hovers and calls out the day.
Now in the depths within, the little village also awakens and
Fearless, familiar with the high, looks up from under the peaks.
Divining growth, for already, like lightning flashes, the ancient
Waterfalls crash, the ground steaming beneath the falls,
Echo resounds all about, and the immeasurable workshop,
Dispensing gifts, actively moves its arm by day and night.

-Holderlin Homecoming

A beautiful short from Belgium by Dwid Hellion, Tine Guns, Ture and Stephanie Van Houtte-McLimans music by Stephen Kasner

Things here will pick up with greater frequency soon, the seasons are changing.

Scott Walker “Cossacks Are” The Drift.

The black snow runs down from the rooftops;
A red finger dips into your brow;
Blue snow flakes sink into the empty room,
They are a lovers’ dying mirrors.
Heavy and torn to pieces the mind muses,
Follows the shadow in the mirror of blue snow flakes,
The cold smile of a deceased harlot.
The evening’s wind weeps in the scent of carnations.
-Georg Trakl - Delirium

Drawing by Marc Ngui

“In rupture, not only has the matter of the past volatised; the form of what happened, of an imperceptible something that has happened in a volatile matter, no longer even exists. One has become imperceptible and clandestine in a motionless voyage. Nothing can happen, or can have happened, any longer. Nobody can do anything for or against me any longer. My territories are out of grasp, not because they are imaginary, but the opposite, because I am in the process of drawing them. Wars, big and little, are behind me. Voyages, always in tow to something else, are behind me. I no longer have any secrets, having lost my face, form and matter. I am now no more than a line. I have become capable of loving, not with an abstract, universal love, but a love I shall choose, and that shall choose me, blindly, my double, just as selfless as I. One has been saved by and for love, by abandoning love and self. Now one is no more than an abstract line, like an arrow crossing the void. Absolute deterritoralisation.”

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari - A Thousand Plateaus

Ivan Shishkin.

The First Snow. 1875.

“Ordinarily we speak of letting be whenever, for example, we forgo some enterprise that has been planned. “We let something be” means we do not touch it again, we have nothing more to do with it. To let something be has here the negative sense of letting it alone, of renouncing it, of indifference and even neglect. However, the phrase required now — to let beings be — does not refer to neglect and indifference but rather the opposite. To let be is to engage oneself with beings. On the other hand, to be sure, this is not to be understood only as the mere management, preservation, tending, and planning of the beings in each case encountered or sought out. To let be — that is, to let beings be as the beings which they are — means to engage oneself with the open region and its openness into which every being comes to stand, bringing that openness, as it were, along with itself”.

-Martin Heidegger. On the Essence of Truth

Having just seen Lars von Trier’s "Anti-Christ", I was compelled to research one of its supposed influences. "Haxan " (1922) was an elaborate silent film from Sweden that depicts scenes of demons, witchcraft and occult rituals. This video takes some visually stunning scenes from Haxan and sets them to songs from Coil’s Horse Rotorvator , easily one of the most disturbing industrial albums I’ve heard.

This piece captures the song perfectly, using extensive takes that invite you not to watch, but to explore.