Saturday, May 27, 2006

"We Love Illegal Cheese!"


by Charlotte Deaver

We do. We really love illegal cheese.

At a recent magical evening in an East Village community garden, a few friends presented a dinner offering of some diving illegal cheese. As I recall, this cheese hailed from Italy, and its delicious and illicit presence made its mark on the entire evening -- the flowers, the green, the lights, the families and friends enjoying themselves amidst this tiny, idyllic spot buried in the heart of the East Village, and the crazy sculpture made out of exotic found objects. . .


"What shall I love if not the enigma?" (Georgio de Chirico, in contemplation of Nietzsche, 1911).


"When you have found a sign, turn it backwards and forwards on all sides; look at it full face and in profile, three-quarter face and foreshortened; make it disappear and notice what shape is assumed in its place by the memory of its appearance" (de Chirco).


"I have often meditated on this strange phenomenon of human absence in the metaphysical aspect. Every profound work of art contains two solitudes: one which can be called "plastic solitude," which is that contemplative pleasure derived from the happy construction and combination of forms (dead-live of live-dead elements or materials; the second life of the nature morte still-lifes considered not in the sense of a pictorial subject but as the spectral aspect, might apply as well to a supposedly living figure). The second solitude is that of signs, an eminently metaphysical solitude for which all logical possibility of visual or psychological education is automatically excluded (de Chirico, "On Metaphysical Art," 1919).


"[A] new sort of air has flooded into my soul. I have heard a new song, and the whole world now seems completely transformed to me. The autumn afternoon has arrived with its long shadows, clear air, and cloudless sky. In a word, Zarathustra has arrived" (Nietzsche).


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