On Sat, 2003-11-22 at 18:23, Rebecca Seiferle wrote:

> I too wonder about this judgement of feeling, the assumption
> that nostalgia is "a crime, a guilt of which the pastoral would
> also be too quickly judged as guilty." Is it so simple really that
> some feelings are a crime or at any rate more suspect and
> prone to surveillance? Isn't the root of nostalgia "pain" and
> the term itself analogous to homesickness? A strange thing
> to think of homesickness as a crime. . .
>


I could have replied sooner but have been making compost from the leaves
of a bunya nut pine tree and date palm fronds blown to the ground by the
weekend storm and meditating on the cosmology of compost heaps. Each
compost heap is different with an indefinite number of variables and
dimensions in the topography. Bunya nut pine leaves are spiky and hard
and thick with a water resisting antiseptic oil providing ideal breeding
conditions for demons laterally transferring code DNA and viruses making
genes with fragments of RNA in a patchwork fashion. Compost is
difference in itself on the absolute horizon of life, asymmetric and
non-time reversible through 270 degrees and more phase transitions just
for fun. Such is life in non-life. Life is a way out of equilibrium
pleasure system.

Guilt and nostalgia are not simple but complex affects of pleasure and
and pain. Guilt connected to nostalgia is a complex circuitry of
pleasure and pain to configure and reconfigure. Genre abstractly
understood in socio-linguistic terms as a social relation is not
abstract enough.


Born of the grazier class I know what sheep are. Five weeks annual
holidays in the upper floors of a Sydney hotel suite with panoramic
Harbour views from each window and cool sea breezes away from the
January heat of the western black soil plains paying courtly visits on
matters of business and government. A town house in the best street of a
town in the centre of agriculture. Capitalist agriculture was implanted
onto a land mass nationalised in the name of The Crown with workers
imported to the colony and ruling class immigrants granted land to hold.
There was no simple Feudal heritage to contrast with the complex
deceptions of a courtly life and now administered by capitalist law.

Established on a metaphysics of presence the metaphysical ground is
invented with stories of bush ghosts and spectres of various sorts. A
dancing tableau. The metaphysics of pastoral. To replace the metaphysics
with a pataphysics as Jarry and an artificial ground on an artificial
earth is not enough. If Being logically needs a metaphysical ground why
talk about being at all? Privilege is relational and the terms of
privilege are external to privilege itself. Pastoral is a double memory.
A memory of privilege and non-privilege. Narrative and anti-narrative.
Paradox. Double impossibility of pastoral and anti-pastoral. In between
the broken empty form of time. False narration and fabulation. A story?

best wishes,

and PS. Homesickness is an etymological connection to nostalgia and
of melancholia as a depressive disease. Home as a crime scene with a
clinical diagnosis of depression... but that is a different story.
The primal scene as the scene of the sodomy act sending Postcards home
with nostalgic messages. Disease through clinical diagnosis judged as
crime. Pastoral as disease.

--
Chris Jones <[log in to unmask]>