...tired... on a flat seat, below a high window, in a gallery of Levantine or Cyprian miniatures, tiny sculptures... feeling tired by too many galleries and too many exhibits that are hierarchical or imposing... i'm waiting to see what thoughts occur as i rest here for a while...

...all these French people (if that is who they are) with so impressive a culture... but they seem to me to be restricted (or even immobilised) by it... while keeping an air of everyday humour and unspoken resistance, despite officialdom...

...outside the Louvre, in the central courtyard, i saw two young soldiers with automatic rifles walking among the crowds of people who were there on a Sunday when there is no charge for admission... i was slightly shocked to see them, the armed soldiers, though i know that now one can expect to see such at London airports also, if not yet in the streets... this official culture is too strong and parts of our freedom are being lost, though not without protest... in fear of fanatics, or true believers... or in favour of obedience, and death... a culture of distrust, surely a bad thing... though it may save lives...

8 january 2008: new version

...to continue digitising notes handwritten written in the Louvre... this is a substitute for the digital diary (the broken handheld is not yet replaced) and a new version of it, written indoors as well as out, and perhaps more cultural than physical (in that the diary was written mostly out of doors, and perhaps more outside the existing culture than in it)... i'd like this version to be an exploration of what is missing from the existing culture, and of what a new culture might be like!...

...but on the face of it this writing in the Louvre, (a gallery of classical art) is as far from being in a new culture as one can get!... but it provokes thoughts of where new culture may already exist, or may be induced into existence... even in a few words?

...i am writing now within sight of a broken but pieced-together sculpture from 9 thousand years ago... perhaps the oldest exhibit in the Louvre... and to me the most inspiring... in this cave-like room with walls and ceiling of sandstone, vaulted, pillared, and with a chequered marble floor... and with a window only at one end... containing only a few glass cases of ancient sculptures...

...the air, in here, feels very stale, i guess there's no ventilation, just high ceilings... so it may not be stale art that may make the Louvre seem stuffy, but stale air!

...this artificial cave, large in the span of time that it exhibits, is i suppose as new a thing as i could desire if i regard it as a thinking part of evolution, or of nature... (as in the conception of Teilhard de Chardin in his book The Phenomenon of Man*)

...and now, reading the Lecture on Something** by John Cage, i am taken aback by this statement:

...trying to force life into one's own idea of it, of what it should be, is only absurd. The absurdity comes from the artificiality of it, of not living, but of having to have first an idea about how one should do it and then strugglingly trying...

...the way that the museum attracts people of many kinds (not only those who know much about art, or pre-history) suggests an almost magical role for for museums and art galleries... that of realising a concept of who we are, collectively, all of the people ever born, or who will be...

...where then is the equivalent to a museum, but exhibiting the future?... is it in science fiction, in futurology, even in history... or in literature and art, viewed as evidence of our human presence, and of how we change nature, from what it was without us, as revealed by the fossil record... but of course the future does not exist... and what we know of the past is but an interpretation of it, varying for different times and people...

(if by 'us' i mean Teilhard's view of people, animals, plants, rocks, even fluids and gases, flames, all parts of evolution and thereby a single phenomenon in which are combined everything, from the stars to our latest actions, trivial, moral, immoral, or whatever...

...all of these he sees as the ingredients of life, still evolving... and transcending the distinctions between organic/inorganic, live/dead... (because as ashes, or as decaying bodies underground, we are or will remain as parts of nature, all that is... and still alive in Teillhard's sense...)

hmm!... more later...