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April 04, 2009
For a moment there, I
had the weird idea I
should *read* something The first thing one learns
about Dada before I from writings about Dada
wrote about it. is that the idea that
there's something there to
be understood is
distinctly not a Dada idea.
The dadaists often Dada is everything/
strike me as Dada is nothing--
intellectual clowns--
amusing, entertaining, From a contradiction
but ultimately anything follows:
valueless. Or, most Dada might mean anything,
likely valueless. and hence means nothing.
It could be that there's at It is "not
least a historical point to even wrong".
them. They were reacting
against a formalism that's The use of
nearly dead, and they were contradiction
influential in encouraging to break patterns.
other's to react against it. to provoke
enlightenment,
(God is dead, to deflate
and we have pretension...
killed him.)
A venerable
tradition:
They have a continued appeal the satiric joke
among generations of young
hipsters -- a pre-packaged the Zen koan
rebellion no less formulaic
than drugs?
Zen distinctly
has a different
There is this continual vibe about it
see-sawing between than Dada.
forced faiths in doctrines
and the embrace of Mystery. Dada is then
a style of
A distrust in systems rejection
leads to a belief in rather than
the anti-system. the one true
rejection...
That recourse to
Mystery, the retreat And punk is
to mysticism, has then a different
always seemed to me style.
like one of the
worst intellectual
cop-outs.
They go from "I just
can't figure this Consider Cage's
out"; to "No one "chance operations"
knows anything, no vs. the psychiatrist's
one *can* know ink blot.
anything!"
What you see is what is.
The Tao is What you see is what you are.
not the way.
Dada might be:
To try to see undercuts
the possibility of seeing.
web searches to do:
dada zen
john cage ink blot
situationism gestalt
electric sand
morbid joy
religious machine
burning spin cycle
market for enlightenment
flare gun applause
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