"There are things that you just don't want to see," a policeman at the house said. "The fewer pictures you have in your head, the better."

The weird awful abuse and incarceration shit in Austria continues to produce strange scenes - incomprehensible fragments from the meeting between one world and another.

[Chief inspector of the regional police in Lower Austria] Leopold Etz said that when they emerged from their cellar on Saturday night the boys thought they were in heaven, having always been told by their mother, Elisabeth, "heaven is 'up there'."

On seeing his first cow in a field, Felix was said to have produced squeals of delight and clapped his hands with joy. He and Stefan also nudged each other and whispered with joy at seeing the moon.

"The sun fascinated [Felix] even more than the moon," Etz said.

The police inspector added that the five-year-old boy had put his hand in front of his eyes and then taken it away again, as if not able to believe what he saw.

"When the sunbeams struck his face, he squealed loudly," Etz said.

At one point, when Felix and his mother waited to be transferred by car, he "found it so strange that he clung to his mother in panic as the door opened, as if he was fearful of what would come out of it"

More here.

as we stop in the shelter
of a doorway in the thunderstorm
s. holds out his hand to feel the rain

Two fragments re what I wrote briefly below on things that cannot be imagined. The first from Vlatka:

"i remember coming across some guy's site - an ongoing list/catalogue he was keeping - along the lines of 'things the internet couldnt find today'. i think it started with a few things he was googling and the search came with 'sorry. no results' - type thing. and then he started trying to come up with things to type into search engines which it would produce no hits for. i dont know why this came to mind - clearly such a different universe from your 'cannot be imagined' things... but the fact that the internet cant come up with it at all, anywhere, must mean that it's somehow not imaginable...

I was also thinking about the relation of what can be imagined to what can be said - is that the same thing necessarily? as in: if you can say it, does that automatically make it imaginable... in the sense that words alone conjure it up, make it happen. or is the 'cannot be imagined' more like something that cant even be put into words... - thus your empty notebook..."

 The second from my friend A.:

Liked a lot your thoughts of the person with the two identical notebooks - especially as I am working on a book/dvd-project titled un_imaginable... I like the clarity of this from a text by Jill Bennet:

"The unimaginable materializes as a condition of shock, trauma or surprise in the face of an event that is unforeseen, hitherto unimagined. As Jacques Ranciere observes, the discourse of the unimaginable is only ever 'authorized' by the event's having happened. Paradoxically, it is named as such only once its occurrence renders it imaginable.  ....There is no recapturing a state of unimaginability; the event, once it has occurred, becomes impossible to reimagine in the terms that rendered it unimaginable.  At no point, then - before or after the fact - is unimaginability concretely knowable and representable..."
 

One of those times when a thought gets into your head as you're waking and won't shake loose. Something on the edge of a dream, but in this case more a semi-conscious linguistic spiral, half-formed in the mind. The thought is of two identical notebooks, one titled/named "things that can be imagined" the other "things which cannot be imagined". As the thought (which owes some money to Borges I guess) unravels (ravels?) it's about a person with these two notebooks, constantly making notes in the former, but with the growing conviction that his best work is in the latter. I'm unclear if this second book - of "things which cannot be imagined" - is just empty or if it contains examples of in some way paradoxical or self-canceling images ("a dull light that is blindingly bright"). More likely it seems that it's empty.

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Vlatka sent me a link to Wiliam Lamson's work. There's so much interesting stuff at his site I can't figure out what might be my favourite piece there - the animations/video loops are very cool - short, fragments many involving a simple action, mechanical trick or camera process that generates an enigmatic or blank event - balloons that burst each other, a foot that seems to be dragging a camera, a body that moves along the ground.

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Awake for more than two hours and still wondering what I am doing exactly.

I liked the 'wrongness' of these images.

Listening to Crystal Castles, esp Alice Practice and Airwar which is helping my feeling of distraction. Also (headed in a more mellow direction) listening to Santogold.