Babel Babel Babel Babel 
 
 
 

Babel babel Bab el Babel Babel baBel Ba'el Babel Babe' ''bel Ba''' babel Babel Babel Babel babel babe' babel Babel babel
 

b abel '''''

Appendix 1⁽¹⁾
 

(I am the true author of the paper, which unfortunately has been destroyed. Everything that is below is the work of a charlatan. What I had written was indeed farcical, and should not be taken seriously -- it was to raise the problem of interpretation within the modern age, and with its use of excessive sources, what it creates is meaningless and nothingness.)
 

I do not know who wrote the above, or how it got there and into the paper, but I am forced to keep it because of posterity. But if I were allowed to have an opinion, the genius of abstraction and Yves Klein in particular, is that it and he say everything. -- I am the third translator of this, the English edition of a truly erudite text -- the original author's name has been lost, but several commentators state that it was a simple pheasant hermit, while others are steadfast that the work could have only come from a scholar writing in the condensed style of Pico della Mirandola gone mad. This conflict has often caused the erudite to be degraded and the hermit to be elevated in the eyes of other various commentators. Because of this debate, several others have suggested that there must be a third author. Yet most recently, modern scholars have concluded that the work could have only been made from a group of men, since the knowledge is too diverse in content and this is the only way to explain the many errors and stylistic irregularities found in the text.

Of course, this is all quite well known. It is as clear as 2+2=4. But as 2+2 may equal 5, what I have said before may be problematic (I make reference to these numbers in Dostoevsky's underground man's refutation of Belinski's example which inferred that all is rational and unavoidable, who might have been making reference to Luther's "Unfree Will" as well as Pindar's notable comment; Nietzsche's sixth letter to his sister which also uses this claim of the number; and Orwell's use of the number five). I cite each work in itself, but not in reference to each other; although with this comment, I cannot disregard my influence from non-Euclidian geometry. 

. . . . at the very beginning, in Klein's art, it is the shirt with its questions. These are question marks that brilliantly parallel each artificial construction of the hand and feet, while also avoiding the nature of words -- questions act to eliminate the sentence -- all becomes a questioning. The hands and feet are obvious references to the basest part of men that must trudge along the ground -- unable to rise into the stars and sky. But it is the brilliant use of hands that contains the act of creation in art -- the multiple hands, one more than the pair of feet, bring in the very first elements of man's wish to create, and the impossibility to touch any of his surrounding. The genius of choosing a third hand is that he could have made anything, chosen anything (like a pony or a lamp-shade), but he didn't -- the third hand is important by its being a third hand; it is the trinity of the artist's creation, including not only the artist himself, but the world around him. Of course, all this is meaningless because the hands are artificial. 

There are deeper meanings in the work, it clearly cites Clement of Alexandria and Epicurus. In the former, one of the founders of Christianity, was at war with the newly founded cults -- among them the left and right hand cults -- the cult has its roots in earlier religions. In Judaism, it was thought that the power of God was found in the power of the right hand of God and all that was evil in the left. But this obvious reference is much deeper and more complicated, as it plays on the beauty of how to attain thoughts within Epicurus, who had the open hand as grasping for and not attaining knowledge-- while the closed hand possessed it. Not only does this parallel the religious and heathen, with its way to find the truth and the validity in life, but the inability of having knowledge when the creation is artificial. Such heights of thought recall all of Klein's work, but especially the void, the leap into the void, the monochrome paintings, the fire paintings, the anthropometry series, and his other art works -- of course, to say "especially" is to give one emphasis of a work of art over another.

The paint, unaltered and dry on the floor, is perhaps the most clear parallel with the T-shirt. With it I have found both a problem and a solution to representation. The raw paint is not used, as it would have suggested at being used by the hand of the artist if made into paint and applied to the canvas. Yet someone did create this paint, it was made by a craftsman who is a type of artist. The brilliance in this apparent: a craft is learned by another craftsman who learns from another craftsman ultimately leading, by necessity, to the first craftsman -- and with this we return to the cave painting, seemingly; but we go far beyond that. What was used in the cave painting was raw material in nature. This raises the very issue that each element is natural, and every element in nature can only be understood in some relation to another element -- so this creates a two-fold problem: we find the totality of things and space, with this clever use of referring paint back to nature, but we are also confronted with the problem to explain the work of art with a word, since every word relates and suggests a multiple of systems as a result of genealogy and by the use association. But with the association of words, I must understand all words or none of them -- Klein's suggestion of this is apparent. I begin to think on the nature of words and feel deep melancholy at not knowing all the words, perhaps one of them in relation to another will solve the problem of my lack of being able to explain what is Klein's T-shirt. 

I feel clever, and see that words are actually made up of letters. So I must obviously possess the truth of everything that can be said and ever will be said, and just have not realized the truth of which all things are contingent, yet I must know it. But Klein is smarter then this and my reasoning. On his shirt he uses only the letters, but then I realize these may not be letters but something more profound and inheritably deeper and true -- perhaps they are just random lines made in the form by accident to look like letters. With letters, I no longer think of words -- I think in every possibility but of the impossible because I cannot think, state it, or understand it. Klein, by doing this, suggests the profound realization of a need bot the body and only the body. The wealth of books which this entails is staggering; the phenomenologists, Camus, all the existentialists, the stoics, and Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra -- yet this brings the problem of the nature and proximity, one has but to think of the debate between Heidegger and Fink, when trying to understand Nietzsche and his break from metaphysics while establishing his new grounds of philosophy. 

But there is something much more important here, by emphasizing the body without words, I am sentenced to go back to the origins of man, when there were no words. Maybe Artaud is right, it is guttural sounds, and breath words that we find the truth of language-- the hidden. But as I write, I realize this is false-- breath sound have deep religious implications within another type of metaphysics, the east, the father of metaphysics, which probably had influence upon the Jewish faith. Breath sounds where made in the east as forms to find God and conjoin with him, yet the Jewish faith concentrates with this in writing YHWH, which follows the breath sound when trying to be spoken, and this is the reason it is unspeakable (however there are certain notable passages within the Bible: David could go in and out when speaking to God, yet Solomon could not; which clearly makes mediation the true possibility of interpretation). And yet it is with the written form that we come into contact with another set of problems, and create ambiguities within Freud's Moses and Monotheism. Freud believed the creation of one God eliminated the use of superstitious, when Amentophoh the IV's God, which made the Christian God (for Freud), had no name it was simply referring to the earlier use of possession with names (this also influenced fairy lore), making it an all powerful God, it does not escape possession of words and superstition but grounds it even deeper within the past history. However, I believe Klein carefully avoided all of this with the body and not having words. Primitive man implies some basis of understanding, and if we are to believe evolution -- as there are no less 673 complaints against it -- we find that unintelligible word structure goes back to the elementary speech of beasts -- perhaps even bacteria or protoplasms, there we finally find the body of organism acts as a form of speech and allows for communication -- this is what I believe Klein is suggesting. 

At this very primitive beginning Restany is perfectly right, Klein does suggest Prometheus from his use of how organisms were created by the combination of water and light, and this mimics the myth of fire itself -- as a creative and a life bringing element. But Klein's use of fire is much more complex than initially suggested by Restany, as it incorporates the symbolic changes and manifestations that make a unity with the colour blue, fire, and the universe. These have many roots which he draws on fire. The Bible suggests the clarity of tongues through fire -- he elevates our understanding into an universal language, but also suggests the complex nature of the soul within medieval thought having a hierarchy of earth being the lowest which the soul must escape from and go through the spheres of water, air and ultimately fire -- where it is union with God's light. In Greek thought, especially Heraclitus, the soul again is fire and also explains his use of water on canvases -- as it was "death for a soul to become wet" and the truth of life was found when the soul realized its essential fire nature within the logos, the universe, and the King of all -- this "flash up" is like lightning in understanding Klein, as all of his elements are suggested in it. The Egyptian thought Klein refers to more is of a desire to escape from the self and its restrictions, (which later obviously inspired Plato's Phaedrus), where through the revolution of the plebeian masses over the metaphysical nature of the Pharaohs who had exclusive rights to the stars, thus Klein suggests that we all have the right to experience a type of eternity; and one cannot neglect that he was probably influenced by his travels in Japan, the bliss of nirvana when finally we can escape the false identities of world -- which Klein would have interpreted as words and representation. 

This essay as has clearly shown that Klein does follow strict interpretations of Freudianism. He did resent his father by his acts (sidra, 250) and loved his mother, and as he empathized with her, he tried to emulate his love for her and his aunt, which is why he was an artist -- a creator who is able to give birth to ideas. And, again, everything can be understood with the Void -- though if one relates meanings to something that is not, this essentially brings up the impossible contradiction of Permenides, the first logician, who thought that one cannot speak of being as non-being, or the reverse. Saying this, I refute myself every time I learn, but find validity in that I can understand, in some manner, every new thing -- yet such an assumption is to be left with no assumptions, no words to explain or understand, since every object becomes the same object; and by being that it loses its object of selfhood and becomes simply an abstraction. Truly, one can understand Yves Klein by the Void, a word which I do not understand but have interpreted by the letter "d", fortunately I saw through this illusion and saw that "d" is nothing but an "o" with a stick attached to it. And "o" I have again interpreted as meaning diverse things: infinity; God; creation; perfection; and the mouth which thereby indicates speech-- the many meanings of which will all be cleared up in the interpretation given in the second part of the essay.⁽²⁾

Every book with a letter or symbol from the past to the present time of Hegel's "Now".

1. This is not my original essay, but must be considered my original essay because of its being all that is left, and by being presented first to you. However, as it is presented first but was last, what is left of the first essay is included in the first appendix, and this here, the first appendix, must be considered as the original. 

2. Note from the translator: tragically, the second part has been lost, but I am in the opinion, that through the first part of the manuscript, the second part may be suggested at and, with much diligence, recreated-- yet that is for another, I did not have the skill.