(some notes written in response to the subject of BORDERS)

                         Le Bout du Monde (The End of the World), Leonor Fini

Words do not express thoughts very well. They always become a little different immediately after they are expressed, a little distorted, a little foolish. And yet it also pleases me and seems right that what is of value and wisdom to one man seems nonsense to another.

                                                                             - Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

• Border = edge, periphery, boundary.  
• It separates one place from another.  
• The frontier of civilization.  
• The brink or verge.
• Boundaries are always limiting.  
• They confine.
• Cloister and enclose.

The music of Bach momentarily removes all obstacles between God and man.  It unites the soul with the sublime.

                                                                              - E.M. Cioran, Tears and Saints

• Boundary Dissolving States of Ecstasy (Terrence McKenna)
• A border is a meeting place.  A crossroads.  Site of transformation.  Axis Mundi.  Material/Supernatural planes.
• A land without boundaries.  The Waste Land.  The Fisher King is neither living nor dead.  A wound that will not heal.

Life begins on the other side of despair.

                                          - Jean-Paul Sartre

                                                                       True life is elsewhere.

                                                                                             - Arthur Rimbaud

• The beauty of things forgotten or unseen, those things society deems undesirable or disgusting; the “border dwellers.”  
• These things belong to the realm of the inappropriate; they disturb and appear out-of-place. Nail clippings, stray hairs, scars (both visible and invisible), bruises, sperm, sweat, menstrual blood and the exoskeletons of dead insects.  
• It is the trace, sign, or mark of something that once existed but has passed away or disappeared.
• a lover’s scent upon your bed sheets
• the haunting of ghosts
• the wet tracks of tears recently shed
• the nagging echo of unrealized fantasies
• residue, rust, rot

"There is nothing real outside our perception of reality" - Videodrome, dir. David Cronenberg

There are 2 types of cyborgs:

1. the coupling of a human and a machine, which is located in the body itself and the boundaries are surgically redrawn
2. Identity of organisms embedded in a cybernetic information system, body is extended to external pathways of information

The body is not fixed, it is merely a boundary that can be crossed.

Technology erases boundaries - between life and death, natural and supernatural

The monstrous body:

1. resists social classifications
2. subverts all boundaries

Cyborg manifesto = reconfiguration of gender and the destabilization of sexual identity

• What is the Self?  What is the Other?
• The infiltration of the Other to broaden the boundaries of the Self
• Death has potentiality
• Death Drive (Todestrieb) - is the drive towards death, self-destruction and the return to the inorganic
• destruction of the organic body in order to achieve higher states of consciousness
• transfiguration occurs
• ecstasies of the Christian mystics
• sublime unity with God
• extreme fasting
• self-flagellation
• eventual physical death to achieve spiritual rebirth

The Norse God, Odin hung himself from the world tree, Yggdrasil, wounded by his own spear.  

He sacrificed himself in order to gain the wisdom that would give him the power over the 9 worlds.  

Yggdrasil is the Axis Mundi which connects the 9 worlds in Norse cosmology.

Butoh idea of "filled emptiness" - become Nothing, and thus, become everything and anything

If you let go of your sense of Self (the characteristics that make you who you are) then the opportunity to become Other can happen.  If you rid yourself of your physical body then there is the possibility that your non-physical self can evolve.

The Gnostics believed that the resurrection of Christ was not just an event of the past, but that it is constantly happening in the present and can be revisited through direct divine communication; that is, achieving a state of Gnosis.