With the invention of digital photography, yesterday and today have coexisted with unprecedented intensity. It’s as if the waste chute in a building has been blocked off and all the trash just keeps piling up forever. There’s no need to save film, just press the shutter release, even the deleted pictures remain in the computer’s long memory. Oblivion, the copycat of nonexistence, has a new twin brother; the dead memory of the collector. We look through a family album with a sense of affection–it contains a little, perhaps just what remains. But what should we do with an album containing everything, without exception, the whole disproportionate volume of the past?

— Maria Stepanova, from In Memory of Memory: A Romance, transl. Sasha Dugdale (New Directions, 2018)

Everything that we are aware of—and can possibly know—is contained within our own consciousness. It’s impossible for us to get “outside” of our consciousness because it defines the boundaries of our personal universe. The so-called real world of objects existing in space and time initially exists only as objects of my consciousness....We act as if the space-time world is primary and our immediate consciousness is secondary. This is an inversion of the way things actually are: It is our consciousness that is primary and the space-time world that is secondary, existing fundamentally as the object of our consciousness.

The Self Is Embodied Subjectivity: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty

Sophie Taeuber-Arp

Douze espaces à plans, bandes angulaires et pavés de cercles

1939

Starfish, 1978. From "Sea life" by Maurice Burton and Jane Burton.

Science fiction in yet another sense, one in which the weaknesses become manifest. How else can one write but of those things which one doesn’t know, or knows badly? It is precisely there that we imagine having something to say. We write only at the frontiers of our knowledge, at the border which separates our knowledge from our ignorance and transforms the one into the other. Only in this manner are we resolved to write. To satisfy ignorance is to put off writing until tomorrow—or rather, to make it impossible. Perhaps writing has a relation to silence altogether more threatening than that which it is supposed to entertain with death.

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Theo Felten, Das Zeppelinluftschiff über Köln |The Zeppelin airship over Cologne, 1930s