THE SAME TIME

1.   THINGKAH header
2.   Tanduay Rhum, mixer and peanuts
3.   the THINGKAH doll
4.   the THINGKAH Wittgenstein gif
5.   a council meeting - Lunglei, Mizoram, Northeastern India
6.   Queen Susan Wills There Be An Heir from kolumboo.com
7.   a monkey
8.   the THINGKAH eyeball globe gif
9.   a ticket to Michael Buble's Crazy Love Tour
10. Pu Vana
11.  a still from a video game
12.  STOP LYNAS SAVE MALAYSIA
13.  Thing Kah Ying
14.  an iphone component
15.  GRUNT. GET TO WORK. Walter De maria quote on kolumboo.com
16.  a man stirring a coffee
17.  a woman looking into a glass of water
18.  Shahriza Embi ‏@shahembi
19.  Still from Steel Rods of Reason post on THIGKAH (Manipulated excerpt from The Rebel (1961))

20. Saddam Hussein addressing a tent full of Iraqi soldiers
21.  The Holy Bible
22. Together We can make It formed from black Scrabble tiles on a map
23. an office somewhere in Mizoram
24. a pencil drawing titled Silent Breath
25. A plate of dough balls, two bowls of something

The first twenty five Google Images when THINGKAH is the keyword

Light is not a swimming pool. Light does not contain us the way a mother might take all her children in her arms. Light is as linear as a circle. It radiates out from a source. Every ray travels A to B (let's ignore its continuing journey - reflected, refracted, whatever). The light that lights me is not the light that lights you. Light is not simultaneous, it only appears to be. We are lit simultaneously. The event of being lit is simultaneous (until we look more closely). In torchlight, each of us torchlit, the quality of that light is inconstant - it depends on the brand of torch, of bulb and of batteries (+ the state of all those things). It begins to appear that nothing is simultaneous. Existence is simultaneous (if we assume the singularity of mankind's viewpoint). We cannot say we all experience being the same way (because we don't experience it as one). Yet we cannot dispute everything we experience exists at once (even if what we perceive is illusional).

If you close your eyes what you experience continues to be simultaneous (even if what you previously experienced seems to no longer exist). It could be said that experience/simultaneity is a fixed point by which all else streams. This would suggest what you seem to experience often, say a wife/a husband, cannot be the same wife or husband you previously experienced (because once a thing passes out of your immediate experience it ceases to be). If this were the case, things are created in the image of previous things, and the difference complete. Immediate experience - experience is continual, all experience is immediate -  so are we (the experience of ourselves is continual). Are we distinct from experience? Do we stand on its riverbank? Or is experience a simultaneity of variant rates of passage (my experience of myself is most slow, seeming continual)?

If existence is simultaneous (of ourselves and all else), then it can be said everything is one. Think of it thus: all is water. Yet this statement is unsatisfactory - what stirs that water, causes its evident currents (the slow and fast)? What stimulates the constant creation of apparent replicas? If we remove ourselves (accept that we are an element apart), it might be we that generate these currents. If this is the case, we are dictating experience. Are we then the authors of experience? If so, experience depends on our being - thus, we are experience. We are water. Everything is water, everything is us. Even if this is correct, we choice not to accept it - mostly we do not want to perceive or consider we are the be-all and end-all. If it is the case, it does not matter whether we accept it or not - we alone would experience it.

It is healthier for mankind if each of us is a water in a cocktail of waters. That we flow about each other, mingling, effecting etc. So, there is your water-husband or your water-wife - and all things are their own water. This suits our categorical systems. It means we can accept that all these waters occur simultaneously (before passing on into some other state of being - think of death as steam or ice). This swimming pool of being can be said to have volume (though we cannot guess at its width, depth and breadth) - and we can assume that the physical limits of our individual water (limiting us to experience the immediate) allows us to go from A to B (elsewhere) assured that we can return to A - so we say A and B are simultaneous.

The whole of Jacques Demy's Lola (1961) in three parts:
The First Twenty - intervals of 5 mins overlaying
The Middle Twenty Five - intervals of 5 mins playing simultaneously
The Final Twenty Five - the last 25mins at 833%, 1666%, 3333%
and 6666% looping to match slowest duration

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N'ABOLIRA LE HASARD
(Constructed from a Google translation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem)

a prayer
of the dice

can never

though thrown in the continuance
of a shipwreck’s fathomlessness

overcome the bleaching fury of the abyss

it’s a precarious wing
an acute deck’s plummeting
its attempt to beat against the claws of brine spat
the planks awash with boarding spouts of sabre blows

the luck of the dice only encapsulates the whole situation
the ocean depths swallowing 
the death rattle of a sinking hulk

a roll of the dice is to grab for the rail of a tilting horizon
the desperate reaching out
from a deathbed
that vessel
inevitable as the shroud waves
the entwining ash and silvered beard of the seabed
the idea of life (that secret concern)
that lastly fills our thoughts



once the master
the supposed master of this craft
his mastery no longer figures in the equation
the great sum of his experience is not equal to this end
he is zero
now that actual destiny coils and tightens about his stance
it’s evident there was a previous miscalculation

he lived as pivotal
his was the wheel

but life is dice

there is only one certainty
as immediate as it is distant

longevity
the continual  grind
this whetstone ocean
the churn of spume
it only polishes the inevitability to a shine
the light that consumes us in the deep dark

the flint of his being
braced
stood proud of the bridge just about
is wearing
as rock divides into stones into pebbles into gravel
into sand
that weeps through the decking
lost

sobbing like a child
he calls for the intercession of his forebears
most of them sailors
all of them come to nothing
their cessation
assault and battery
or stillness
or somewhere in between they
as he is zero
they zero’d out

the gesture of casting dice
is a veil that passes across
that obscures

the blackout that exists
between the exposed frames
of a movie reel

they go unseen



as if

nought is a rumour spread throughout

a tumbling of laughter
and fear

an open wound
left untreated

a puzzle
not allowed a solution

as if
loudly

a single tongue

the plush of its interwoven frequencies
saying nought but noise

might score the paralysis of the Stygian sky

and not scar

the unsuspecting
disappointed

wannabe hero

as flash as lightning
as brief as a lightning flash

cocksure and sorry

but mute as any incoherence

when the clarity of the excited, authoritative sea

its song of dashing white plumes
and granite plumage

will always overwhelm
with its guffaws of dizzying heights
that befall

its breakers dash and split us open
on the rock of time

time is a treacherous edifice
of our own design
where we live

we are shattered against time
a self-imposed measurement of being
we can never live up to



if it is

(worse
if it is not)

it is universal

and approximates
the whole

the roll of the dice
is everything

and comes to nothing

existence is every facet
face upturned
every aspect
chance

something
nothing
compete
something
or other

and it seems agony

the beginning
the ending

no greater no less than one
all outcomes
are one
that is all there is

zero is one
everything

and it claims in a beat what there is
as its own

a burial under snarls of foam
the continuance of a going down
the wreck of that becoming this
the delirium of changing states

illusional

the circle becomes a line
the line a circle

identical

open mouthed
tight lipped

only the violence of that switch
is memorable

though it is nothing
it is everything

it will have occurred

if it is uplifting
it is unrewarding

if it is lowering
it’s lowness is not perdition

existence shifts between solid liquid gaseous states abruptly
existence is

his calling for mercy
God’s mercy
Poseidon’s Neptune’s Nemo’s mercy
going unanswered
the heaped saltwater collapsing
humanity

no exceptions

existence is.

UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS N'ABOLIRA LE HASARD
(Constructed from a Babel Fish French to Spanish to English
translation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem)


although
dice are rolled
in the nadir
of a shipwreck

(an attempted putsch by chance)

those dice
cannot
annul
the abyss

it’s one of the ocean’s fundamental inclinations
to whiten
to snarl
to encroach upon

just as those aboard a fated vessel will pray for wings
to lift themselves out of reach of the sea’s violent assault

to be freed from the rule of destiny

that sum’s up everything

that other sail
true sail
ghosting the wind-swollen canvas of our voyages

get used to it

it’s the bowl of seabed that cup-holds of us,
it’s the smut, aggressive sky over us (the capped us)

heads and tails always called
heads for heads
tails for tails


the captain (made master by ancient rites
forgotten now) has the wheel

as if he can steer

the waters are a crumpled chart

the horizon is unanimous
in its throwing together of punches
heavyweight jabs, hooks and uppercuts

a brawl of dead weight brine

as if he is captain still

when there is but one certain course

one last port of call

one is a number that cannot be made by dice

one that is called unity
one is entitative

and you are one

Man
a man

a unity
an entity

one is a secret kept from dice

one sustains

it takes a body by the hand and leads
a body where a body goes

to be played by the savagery of these white-haired waves
that overwhelm as old age overwhelms
as anything can undermine our time at the helm

one is taken before one’s time we say
when one is one’s time
onetime

the captain steers in vain


lovers cannot open its fist hold

clumsy
they will continue to wrestle with it

after one’s love is lost
grief grapples on

haunted
one fights one
such an ambiguous bout
one on one

until
subtraction

that immemorial daemon
in between one
and the land of zero
our ultimate destination

we all come to nought

subtraction shadows us throughout

it is the final proof of a probability calculation

a final wash and scrub with the brutal flannel of a typhoon’s raging

and subtraction

the hard bone of being worn away to sand

you might invoke your forebears to intercede

for just a moment’s respite

your ancestors might seem to appear
in the smoke of foam risen off the beating ocean

their presence only guarantees your madness
the insanity of rolling dice

they cannot stop a chance encounter with death


as if
is simply a suggestion

as silence is drowned out by zero
zero’s deafening rainfall

almost a whirlwind
a mouth wide open in laughter
a mouth opened wide  to scream

as aerial acrobatics on the brink without a net
attempt to out-manoeuvre the virgin integer
the arithmetical nothing
zero

as if
is as distraught as a solitary pen writing

as if
is the pen’s rendezvous with the severity of whiteness

the paper’s surface being touched as it touches the touch of ink

vellum frozen in the black velvet cloaking of a moment
in its folds like the cacophony of an orchestra tuning

a page’s ridiculous lightness that has to be impinged on
a formidable task for anyone

the writer
o petulant nobleman of life’s curbside
is writ large (in capitals)
lauded as heroic
irresistible
but staid

why must your words
in the full glare
of public scrutiny
in the battle against nihilism
be so puny

too defining
so adolescent
without humour

what if

is the lucid high nobility of the heron
the transparency of its fleetness in flight
the shadow that follows it on the lake as it comes close
and closer and closest to landing
the wailing of its prodigious cry
as it slaps down
causing the water to shatter into a squall of the brightest whiteness

the heron’s rock
its stately home
no foundation to be relied upon
for right now it has disintegrated
dissolved in the mist of its own lord’s return

what if

is an imposition
a go at being infinite


astrology was fashionable once
but there’s little to be had but hurt
from reading the stars
the trend (as trends do) came and went
just as soon as it had begun
its so-called predictions were riddles
nonsense without solutions

the astrologist’s pronouncements
suited any interpretation
none any better than another

it could be worse, no



an unseen hand in authorship of the devouring waves
that eat into wreck with a rhythm of spume

the same author that wrote with such vivacity
the shipbuilding, launch and service of the vessel

the penmanship of zero

all things come to nought

all things human must swell the coffers of absence

absence will end the storm like that

the great lie is that absence is the road to perdition

a concern that ripples throughout being

but perhaps
the idea of a heaven suits some
it would seem largely agreed upon
it must fulfil a need to still be touted so

it’s the Aura Borealis
that illuminates with colour
the null and void
the cold oblivion
of the most northerly of Norths

it underlines the arctic blankness
the deathly icebergs
with its celestial fireworks

the sum total of our readiness
of our knowledge
is a catalogue of possibilities
that ensures fearful doubts
and promotes liars
before the clarity of simplicity

one becomes zero
one is whole
one closes
zero is the consequence of one’s collapse

though that sequence is sacrosanct
immutable

one minus one is always zero

our every thought is a throw of the dice.

The original 1914 version here. An accurate translation into English of this significant poem/art thing can be read here. Other intriguing versions (translations of sorts, visual translation):

 

Ernest Fraenkel, ‘Les dessins trans-conscient de Stéphane Mallarmé’, 1960 (Paris: Nizet)

 

Mario Diacono, ‘JCT 1, a MeTrica n’ABOOlira’, 1968, (San Francisco: Futura Press)

 

 Marcel Broodthaers, ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’, 1969

 

Ellsworth Kelly, ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’,

New York Limited Editions Club, 1992

 

 

Cerith Wyn Evan, ‘… après Stéphane Mallarmé’, 2008

 

Raffaella Della Olga, ‘Constellation’, 2009

All is eggs,
The world is an egg.
The world is born of the great yolk, the sun.
And the belly of a wave is white.
A heap of eggshells, the moon.
Dust of eggshells, the stars.
All, dead eggs.

                                                                        M.B.

Marcel Broodthaers