Impending

[Elias Hassos]

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.

-Kundera - Book of Laughter and Forgetting

I attended the end-of-the-semester faculty reception last evening -- mixed feelings of worry (due to going solo and thus exposing myself to the possibility of standing alone waiting for someone to talk to me) and excitement. No worry needed (of course).

I had a conversation with one of the tutors emeritus -- someone who knew me best from my days at the library, someone who always had trouble remembering I was also a student at the college. He didn't remember my name two weeks ago when we ran into each other, but last night he came and sat next to me and talked with me for over an hour. Toward the end of our conversation he told me that he wants to write his memoirs -- he wants to begin with something that had happened to him recently: Sitting in a chair, having his hair cut by a woman who apparently knew him well he said, 'My son has been reading about the second world war ... ' She apparently replied, 'Don't tell me about it, I don't like anything academic.'

He wondered aloud what it was about his statement that signified 'academic' and wanted to begin with that little event in telling his own tale.

I wondered about memoirs, as I have before -- I wondered about our desire to tell a tale, mostly true, mostly personal -- to make sense of a life. I've been recopying my reading journal from 2005, mostly because it's in an unlined notebook and I hate looking through it because it's so messy -- and in the process of recopying I rewrote the notes I initially took on Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which I referenced in the post linked above.

Everyone has trouble accepting the fact he will disappear unheard of and unnoticed in an indifferent universe, and everyone wants to make himself into a universe of words before it's too late.

A 'universe of words' -- Whenever I wonder about what I'm doing here, with my own words, I think about this desire -- to have a story, to convey it -- a story that others will want to read, thoughts that others will want to listen to -- in the book that precedes this in my reading journal, Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami, one of the characters says "Existence is communication, communication is existence."

Re-writing these past thoughts of mine, noticing again what I noticed the first time through and noted in writing in notebooks for future notes -- what does it all add up to? Notes on a life? Notes on a life worth living or not lived at all? I tell stories of my thoughts to make sense of them. Mr. Waggish noted a passage this week on philosophy as narrative. From Donald Philip Verene's Philosophical Rhetoric:

Philosophies, like all narratives, act against forgetting. To forget is to leave something out, to omit or overlook a feature of a subject matter or of the world. Philosophical speech is memorial speech because it reminds us of what we have already forgotten or nearly forgotten about experience. The speech of philosophical narrative can never become literal-minded because to act against forgetting is to attempt to hold opposites together. The narrative is always based on a metaphor; a metaphor is always a narrative in brief. The narrative is also the means to overcome controversy, because for the self to overcome an inconsistency of its thoughts it must develop not simply a new argument but a new position, a new narrative in which to contain any new argument.

Forgetting -- also a concept of Kundera's -- and recollection -- the recollection discussed by Kierkegaard -- his launchpad of sorts. I still wonder why his moment is necessary -- why do we need to understand moments of decisive significance? I'm reminded of a comment from last night, the same man who spoke of writing his memoirs spoke of Kant (I had quite a few conversations about Kant actually). He said that Kant was an undeniably original thinker but we can never know if anything he said is true. A funny comment.

Kundera's book is just so right for me right now -- the infinite variations of Beethoven and of personal life -- I'm reading Richard Powers' Goldbug Variations right now -- Man's place between infinities -- strung between stars -- I also copied this from Madame Bovary today:

Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

And this of course reminds me of 'Only connect' from Howard's End --

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

My auto-biography would be a bibliography -- the real one would be. The true story would be one of the reader -- or is that too facile? It's certainly dangerous, and I'm pretty convinced it wouldn't be very exciting. And again I arrive back at the life worth living or some such well-trod phrase. Kundera also says that our desire to construct a universe of words results in a cacophony -- the sentence I began this post with --

Once the writer in every individual comes to life (and that time is not far off), we are in for an age of universal deafness and lack of understanding.'

We know that fate all too well -- this entire medium, my ever-growing collection of links, bookmarks, online notes. I absolutely hate trying to keep online notes -- I hate having links at work, links at home, I hate that writing I've liked online stays online unless I copy it from the screen into a notebook which feels strange and backward.

My head is cluttered -- with old and new words, original words and words quoted and requoted until there's no telling anymore where they've come from. Primary sources are so refreshing -- no filters -- perhaps I'm like the haircutter -- 'I don't like anything academic' -- or perhaps I just tire too quickly of it -- perhaps I'm too slow for it, two steps too late.

More findings

[Yamamoto]

Today I turned around in my chair and took a good look at the books on the shelves behind me.

This is embarassing -- I sit in a tiny room on my grandfather's chair with my father's books behind me and a map of the Jugolinija shipping company's sea routes on the wall. The books behind me are mostly old, an incomplete set of Encyclopedias from 1967, books on site planning, Hrvatski, and songwriting. But there's also a 1946 edition of Ulysses many small volumes by Mark Twain and Robert Frost, and then a tallish stack of books which surprised me very much.

Many of these books have library imprints or address labels, one, The Century Handbook of Writing, even has a triangular stamp on the frontispiece that states: "Loaned to the Crew by The American Seamen's Friend Society." [I wonder here if this was a book picked up by my grandfather or one of his relatives as many of the men in my Croatian family were seamen ...]

I've also extracted the following:

A 1946 Vintage Book edition of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury

1951 Everyman's edition of JS Mill's Utilitarianism, Liberty, and Representative Government

1951 Everyman's edition of Rousseau's Social Contract and Discourses

1892 Golden Treasury edition of Keats' poems

1960 edition of Cleanth Brook's Understanding Poetry

1969 illustrated edition of Alan Moorehead's Darwin and the Beagle

1866 illustrated edition of Don Quixote

1975 Modern Book of Esthetics -- great because it can replace multiple volumes I have checked out -- I had forgotten my father was a philosophy major as an undergraduate, or rather I forgot that some of his books would be from that time.

I'm really excited about the Don Quixote -- it's in really bad shape -- very brown, crumbling pages, loose binding, missing some pages, but the illustrations are wonderful -- they're engravings done by someone named Dalziel. I couldn't find any images online but hopefully i can try and scan some of them without damaging the book any further.

Now I have to 'catalog' them and figure out which ones can survive the cross-continent trip this summer...

Accumulating

[Yamamoto]

comments from elsewhere that have struck me recently:

[the space in between]

striking me: when you encounter work that, to borrow van gogh’s language, “hits the yellow high note,” it is at once made known to you that what you are responding to is an articulation of your aesthetic that you had yet to realize, something within that you are confronted with, and that once confronted you know that your task is to find a way to wrench it from your being and put it out in front of you. like that which you are looking at, but to have it come from you.

[tea & revery]

Hokenson also states: "The emphasis [in Japanese art] is no longer on resplendence but on simplicity, purity of line and form, spare vivid contrasting colors, delicacy of method, and suggestion of unstated essence ... The artwork therefore entails, radically requires, two moments in time, the moment of creation and the moment of affective recreation." This last is also very important. The greatest value of Japanese art is the way it stimulates the viewer's imagination: "the artist's economy of means and radical simplification operate suggestively to provoke, in the viewer, an affective experience—comparable to the artist's at the moment of creation—and an imaginative completion (of the image, locus, motion) in the mind." This is why Japanese art is so powerful. You are no longer a passive spectator being bludgeoned by academicians but an active co-creator, along with the artist, of what is being depicted. When you respond to a work of art like this, you are then able to enter into "a new order of reality."

[opening issue of Collapse]

If part of the problem with philosophy today lies in its professionalisation, we hope not to offend any of the contributors to this volume by saying that we consider every one of them to be amateurs in the true sense: dedicated and enthusiastic lovers of abstract thought, each engaged in adventures of ideas, each refusing to contain these adventures within strict formal or disciplinary boundaries. It should go without saying that, even if the two are rarely found in pure form, we favour de jure mad scientists with their bubbling conceptual cauldrons over career academics with their meticulously cautious conference papers.

Found

[Elias Hassos - Rauch]

I spent Friday evening in a quiet way, sewing 15 new felt catnip critters to be given as gifts to the many cats and cat-owners I know, and also in indexing my growing set of reading journals. I've been keeping these journals since 2005 and am already up to 6 basic reading journals, 2 small 'incidentals' journals, and one larger notebook for more detailed notes and studies. In the process of re-reading my notes and excerpts, I came across my reflections on reading CS Lewis' Out of Silent Planet trilogy -- these notes have a strong connection with some of my thoughts on Milosz's Land of Ulro and so I wanted to reproduce them here.

____________________________________________

First, an excerpt from That Hideous Strength:

For still she thought that 'Religion' was a kind of exhalation or a cloud of incense, something steaming up from specially gifted souls towards a receptive Heaven. Then, quite sharply, it occurred to her that the Director never talked about Religion; nor did the Dimbles nor Camilla. They talked about God. They had no picture in their minds of some mist steaming upward: rather of strong, skillful hands thrust down to make, and mend, perhaps even to destroy. Supposing one were a thing after all -- a thing designed and invented by Someone Else and valued for qualities quite different from what one had decided to regard as one's true self.

I then wrote this:


Isn't the problem in resisting and hesitating because one wants to hold on to the potential self as seen from the outside? When we force the 'I' which is not clear or distinct to be a sort of precious jewel handled judiciously or flashed strategically, we cut the life out of it -- sever it from its root, its connection to every life-giving element of nature, every formative element of the environment. There is a cleft as the person grows away from her root and into her being, but there is no formal sundering. To do so is to rob yourself entirely, to dash away all those rich hues which alone can constitute personality.

Is it not better to rest yourself in something so final, so ultimate, so entire, that all that is required is to turn inward, to gaze at the core which disappears into a coruscation of light flooding in from the true root. We all open out through one cause and close up on it as well. There is no other way to be. There is no hard self, it's a throbbing, living, rich and mysterious thing. It is neither of the present nor of the past, nor of the future -- it is of all, throbbing through all. It is both the single unit and the helpless part. It demands and needs. It takes and pulls and pries, but it gives and rests and lies still. It is a core and an anchor and it is a moment and a bit of ephemera. It is dark and earthy, it is clear and stellar. It is a blessed thing we have and it is blessed because it is thus.

'I am that I am,' He said, and we are blessed to be able to say that we are as He has made that we are.

When man seeks to reach out beyond the mystery that is part of his essence, he is seeking perversity, unnaturalness, cold and sterile non-existence. Whether or not there are other ways of existence is a question that is itself a mystery -- something to tell tales of and create stories about. They are not things to be achieved.
When man tries to 'perfect' himself he is trying to stab out the dirt of existence that is truth. Do not hide. Do not fool yourself with your own mask -- a protective device that wounds its wearer just as quickly as it fools the observer. There is a darkness, wetness, fertility. There is blood and bone and flesh. There is also mind, Reason (whatever that may be) and thought. But this is the triumph and the misery -- the ecstasy and the agony -- as much as one so divided may feel.

We yearn to be pure, free, united and no longer at civil war, and in so yearning we fall, again and again and again -- there is disobedience in that childish, stubborn refusal to accept. What we are to accept is that we are in this state through fault of our own! It is a choice made at the individual level by one who by nature wills, chooses, decides. The 'by nature' part is tricky and seems to mean that our hand in committing the fault was forced -- and for what reason? We always ask how we might be better, more excellent, more perfect, but we never allow ourselves to just dwell.

What does this word mean after all? Darkness, closeness, length of time -- we must dwell in our mysteries, fold them about us like great wraps of velvet, like great fogs of scent, like deep glades of green.

And as we dwell we must continue to live -- to be surficial as well, to skate and glide and dance, to flit and gleam and shine.

Our mysteries prove the necessity of our life -- we continue to shine forth as organisms because we dip down to that endless well, those 'fonds' of Leibniz -- because our mystery is in that connection -- in why we are permitted to drink ever so deep and bloom forth from those draughts.



I sit here -- heady with the scent of the peonies, awash in words. I was earlier aglow with the amber light creating webs between my fingers. Why do we crave discovery so greatly? We want to root it all out, bring it to the air, kill it with our breath of reason. What a feeble thing that clear light seems now, now, against the pure light of truth.

The shallow but penetrating clarity of light; the deep and secret, perhaps dangerous, depth of heat -- cool, sharp clarity & warm, languid depth -- the well is both -- both deep and embracing and fertile -- life-giving -- and it is cool, active, lit with rays and fierce in its essence.

We try so hard to do the fusion on our own, to combine within one person the facets of being which we can glimpse.

Why shouldn't we stick to the entreaties? I am a woman and I know nothing of what I'm told that means -- of the depth, the sanctity of hearth and womb and birth. I turn from those ideas and question them about their one-sided flat validity. And yet my reluctance is revealing.
____________________________________________________


I see so much in these past thoughts of mine -- a turning away from simple Aristotelian excellence of man and the romanticism of Rousseau, the influence of Nietzsche and of re-reading the Bible as a text and not as something sacred -- I see myself two years ago, fresh from new ways of thinking and seeing, with a new desire to write as a way of understanding myself and my place in the world -- I see myself applying what I've read and learned to how I live -- and I see myself still lost, still amazed at the myriad ways of living, of understanding or not-understanding.

New

[mine]

It was feeling cluttered -- or too dense.



I've also added tags to all my posts, and in the process discovered many patterns!