PenPals: Björk and Timothy Morton
!!! yessss , lets give it to corals !!!!
- Björk
I took Timothy Morton's English Lit class my Freshman year of college at Boulder. In the first day of class I mentioned that, "Language was chained up drivel that lasts as long as milk." The comment moved Morty (which my fellow students and I called him affectionately) that as soon as I arrived back at my dorm I had an email from him saying that I'd reminded him of a group of literary philosophers from about a century prior. He told me he looked forward to what else I had to say and seemed fascinated with me in general. Basically, what I want to say, is that the things that were curious to him, were all quite profound. That can be seen quite easily in the following excerpt on art from his letters with Björk.
“An artist attunes to what things are, which means sort of listening to the future, which is just how things are - I think time is a sort of liquid that pours out of hatpins, underground trains, salt crystals, So a work of art is also listening to itself, because what it is never quite coincides with how it appears, too.”
Upon discovering that he has gone on to be pen pals with Björk, who is hands down one of the coolest characters in the 21st century drama that is this global evolution reflected through art, I figured I'd throw a post up on it, as it is a nice piece of the puzzle that is my life. Basically, I love everything about Björk, though I do take more of a Hansel from Zoolander approach to her music, "Sting is a big hero of mine. I don't listen to his music but the fact that he's making it, I respect that."
The letters themselves are tantalizingly philosophical. In particular their discussion of Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), and giving all the proceeds to the Coral, warmed my heart a few degrees. If you did your Thesis on Joyce, study Quantum Physics for fun, or happen to be a reincarnated Picasso or Dali, you will find these letters to be top notch. Everyone else, well, don't throw stones at genius just because history has shown that's the most likely thing to be done.
“my favorite favorite favorite thing is how it [OOO] connects to animsm, that in each object there is soul , and therefore asks for different reaction to ecology ? each laptop , each bird , each building”
Professor Timothy Morton taught me what an ekphrasis is, (you can't even look that up in regular dictionaries), "it is a heightened suspension that hovers above things, i.e. meaning, objects, belief systems." He also invents words (like me) and showed me how to detect the inflection patterns in language, which greatly accelerated my craft as a wordsmith and emcee.
““I mean this word i use, “hyperobject” for instance, it sounds like one of your words...”
Hyperobject is undoubtedly one of the coolest displays of ideoglossia to grace the globe. So Professor Morty, thank you for your contributions to thought and consciousness. I love you and I'm happy you are connected to influential artists and the epigenetic web that is the consciousness of this planet. Speaking of the consciousness of the cosmos, I'll leave you with Bjork's brilliant thoughts on galactic resonance as a form of magnetized sound.
i guess i relate most to the more sonic angle of OOO ,
about string theory and how in the core of the atom all vibrates
and resonates and the 20th century was the century
of cause and effect and the element table .
but now it is more about the magnetic force of the sun ,
how we are discovering that now : both on a subatomic level
and also on a large scale : how the magnetism of our solar system
is way more effective than the pathways of our stars .
sorry , crazy far fetched , but if you think of it as a sound
it is super exciting how we are finally opening up to resonance ...
hmm ... perhaps too ambition to explain in a short email
( i blame the whiskey)
May those of you who have not wanted to give your proceeds to coral throw the first stone. Wait, wait a second, that's not how that goes. Give me a moment to put my words together here. Ah fu#$it, without further ado:
The series of letters between Björk and Timothy Morton.