At the time of writing, it’s been a very dry spring. It’s looking more like second fall around here. The Noodler’s Red Black  and Rome Burning I’ve been using lately are really helping with that fall color feeling.

Here’s some sketches from the smaller of our neighborhood cemeteries: Notre-Dame-des-Neiges.

These are sketched in a Moleskine Folio Watercolor Album, (11.75 x 8.25″) – which is a beautiful book, with this very wide format. But it is frankly just a little bit too large for every day use. It takes up a lot of room in a bag, and I’d definitely consider a backing board and bulldog clips to hold it open when drawing.  It wants to flop around, fall off my knees, or otherwise behave badly. I’m starting to think that a book bigger than you can easily hold in one hand calls for an easel for sketching. But if I was going to do that I’d just paint…

The key philosophical implication of Hegelian retroactivity is that it undermines the reign of the Principle of Sufficient Reason: this principle only holds in the condition of linear causality where the sum of past causes determines a future event— retroactivity means that the set of (past, given) reasons is never complete and “sufficient,” since the past reasons are retroactively activated by what is, within the linear order, their effect.

– Slavoj  Zizek – Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism

Graham Harman’s first book Tool Being takes note of Zizek’s concept of retroactive causation saying:

The present book roughly accepts Zizek’s concept of retroactive causation, though without accepting the attitude of “deflationary realism” with which Zizek frames this concept. In the end, his problem will turn out to be that he restricts retroactive causation to a narrowly human realm, and orbits around the same unique gap between human…

Utter nullity. In the words of the ancient sages of ruined Ashenzohn, it was the endlessness that ends in itself. Dark silence beyond sleep and time, from whose oceanic immensities some bedraggled speck of attention – pulled out, and turned – still dazed at the precipitous lip, catches a glimmer, as if of some cryptic emergence from eclipse. Then a sound, crushed, stifled, broken into gasps. Something trying to scream …

– Nick Land: Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator

What do you fear most? What lies in the shadows of your thoughts like a lost memory on the edge of oblivion? In the long night of our despair the slow realization awakens out of the outer silences: the ‘Thing’ we fear most, the monstrous truth that will not go away is that we are alone in a universe that neither cares about us nor even acknowledges our existence. That behind the dark screen of the…