Letters from a Librarian

I have a stack of lovely books awaiting me, but what I wanted to share today was a small passage from Ursula Le Guin's Tales From Earthsea. I have been reading my way through this series (which until now had escaped my notice), as I finish up semester work and set myself up for a quiet summer.

I've written before of my love for the old stories, the well-told stories, myths and fables and magic. I love to drift into those worlds and then stay a while, feeling the strength of my convictions well up inside me -- that it is good to be close to the earth, to live simply, to do good to those around you, to care for growing things, plant and animal, to accept responsibility, to know when silence is best and when to listen. I've always thought that the stories we tell can hold that knowledge -- the knowledge that needs no ornate language, no elaborate explanation -- only the conviction of experience and something else, something deeper that moves away from the one and understands the many.

So I love these new stories and I also loved what Le Guin wrote in preface to them:

All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.

It’s unsettling. For all our delight in the impermanent, the entrancing flicker of electronics, we also long for the unalterable. We cherish the old stories for their changelessness. Arthur dreams eternally in Avalon. Bilbo can go “there and back again,” and “there” is always the beloved familiar Shire. Don Quixote sets out forever to kill a windmill... So people turn to the realms of fantasy for stability, ancient truths, immutable simplicities.

And the mills of capitalism provide them. Supply meets demand. Fantasy becomes a commodity, an industry.

Commodified fantasy takes no risks: it invents nothing, but imitates and trivialises. It proceeds by depriving the old stories of their intellectual and ethical complexity, turning their action into violence, their actors to dolls, and their truthtelling to sentimental platitudes. Heroes brandish their swords, lasers, wands, as mechanically as combine harvesters, reaping profits. Profoundly disturbing moral choices are sanitized, made cute, made safe. The passionately conceived ideas of the great storytellers are copied, stereotyped, reduced to toys, molded in bright-coloured plastic, advertised, sold, broken, junked, replaceable, interchangeable.

What the commodifiers of fantasy count on and exploit is the insuperable imagination of the reader, child or adult, which gives even these dead things life — of a sort, for a while. Imagination like all living things lives now, and it lives with, from, on true change. Like all we do and have, it can be co-opted and degraded; but it survives commercial and didactic exploitation. The land outlasts the empires. The conquerors may leave desert where there was forest and meadow, but the rain will fall, the rivers will run to the sea. The unstable, mutable, untruthful realms of Once-upon-a-time are as much a part of human history and thought as the nations in our kaleidoscopic atlases, and some are more enduring.

We have inhabited both the actual and the imaginary realms for a long time. But we don’t live in either place like our parents or ancestors did. Enchantment alters with age and with the age.

We know a dozen different Arthurs now, all of them true. The shire changes irrevocably even in Bilbo’s lifetime. Don Quixote went riding out to Argentina and met Jorge Luis Borges there. Plus c'est la même chose, plus ça change.

More advice

2010-04-15T19:23:00.004-04:00

[Yamamoto]

Lately I've been reading travel diaries, biographies and natural history books. Armchair travel, living and exploration.

I am currently reading Out of Africa and am waiting for Durrell's Bitter Lemons to come in to the library. I finished a wonderful book on mosses a couple of weeks ago, and am hoping to find some more books to add to my stack.

Any recommendations?

Advice

2010-04-15T18:43:00.003-04:00

[The Owl Mocked -- can't recall the source]

From an address given by SJC tutor Eva Brann to the Graduate Students in Classics at Yale, 2006.

"The scholarly world is more and more a virtual world, spatially expansive but often topically restricted. For my part, I think the humanly full life is concretely local and intellectually wide, to be lived in a face-to-face community whose members can talk to each other about anything, where nothing of human interest is interdicted; where you don't have to mount a colloquium to have a colloquy; where discourse does not divide into either shop talk or chat but observes the truly interesting human mean; and above all, where no one owns a specialty so that others have to venture opinions with the disclaimer, 'Of course, that's not my subject.'"

"So don't use words you don't understand or don't mean to come to understand at least partly. Graduate school is rightly more training than education, more preparation for a profession than learning for the sake of being all there. Hence, the possession of a professional vocabulary, often well-invented and always serviceable for expressing yourself within the guild -- and, I can't help but adding, for marking greenhorns and amateurs -- is not only an accomplishment but also a professional deformation. So talk human whenever possible and know something, at least a little, of the explicit or implicit theory behind the language of the humanities. "

"Before I stop, one afterthought: if you could all band together to found a movement for the abolition of the 'original contribution' requirement of the doctoral dissertation you would do the world of learning a great service. For in the humanities the drive for originality and the search for insight are often at cross-purposes."

That final advice is echoed in Borges' essay 'Partial Magic in the Quixote,' which begins:

"It is plausible that these observations may have been set forth at some time and, perhaps, many times; a discussion of their novelty interests me less than one of their possible truth."

In moments of disillusionment with it all, I return to these thoughts.

Synthesis

2010-03-22T02:16:00.005-04:00

Of course it is strange, feeling no desire to write -- but then there are moments when I think I've glimpsed something that I must share. Perhaps I'm wrong about it (surely I am), but that is no reason for cowardice.

Almost four years ago, when I began writing on this webplace, I was reading Kant for my classes and Virginia Woolf for myself. I wrote of those two together then, and I want to return to them again.

Last week in class we were speaking of the notion of synthesis in the Critique of Pure Reason, and relatedly, of the different uses of apperception, consciousness, self-consciousness and others. What is it that Kant is speaking of when he speaks of the I, the I think, the presentation of myself to myself as an appearance and not as a thing in itself? We spoke of the chance that what he meant was something like what contemporary philosophers call indexicality. Could it be that all of those analytic philosophers who thought they had come across something new hadn't in fact? Could it be that Kant was first to realize the something special in our use of the first-personal pronouns, and to accurately describe it? Could he have been first to notice that there was something which could not be analyzed out of the statement 'I think,' and yet imparted no content, no quality, nothing other then the pointing-toward, the ostensiveness?

These are deep tangled issues, they are unclear to me and will remain so, of that I'm sure. But I knew as we were speaking of this, and as I was reading scholars and philosophers writing about Kant, I knew that I had encountered these ideas in other areas. It isn't a question of who came first at all, for there was an explosion of literature that dealt with these exact problems. I remembered Proust and Woolf especially, and the problems I have dealt with in this space -- the problem of feeling as though there a multitude of selves, all anchoring themselves in some shadowy unknown self -- the problem of doubting the return of the self, night after night, sleep after sleep, how is it we find our way back? where does the continuity come from?

I thought of these things, of The Waves and of Marcel, and I wondered what I wanted to say about all of this. And now I think of what Kant says -- how reason hungers to ask these questions, how they are our natural urge, how we will inevitably try and solve them, try and reach past the appearance and to the thing itself -- to the self itself. He condemns philosophy for trying to anchor a metaphysics on such pursuits -- in doing so, reason illicitly lends substance and sense to something which was mere abstract idea. But what if instead we were to use art to explore these problems -- not to solve them, but to understand them. What if we were to try, with Woolf, as she describes in the passage below, to confront our selves, to find the thing itself, the quick of life. And if something incandescent comes of such a project, the better for us, the better for art, the better for the life trying, doing, acting.

Kant says that there are two ways of understanding self-consciousness -- there is the consciousness of oneself as a receptacle for the play of appearances in inner sense -- and then there is the consciousness of oneself as the one who makes, who synthesizes, who combines, who unifies, who acts. He says: "I exist as an intelligence conscious solely of its power of combination."

That is the consciousness of the artist -- the one who experiences the hurt and the suffering, the joy and the love -- the one who receives shocks, who receives blows, who receives impressions -- the one who reacts to those impressions by rearing up, by acting, by putting into words or deeds the experience -- the one who makes order, who imposes order on what comes in, on what is received.

It is fascinating to me to see, as I write this, the great similarities between what Kant says of the possibility of experience, and what some of my favorite artists have said of the process of creating -- I think here of Paul Valery, of Robert Musil, of Proust, of Beckett, and of course of Virginia Woolf. There are many others of course -- but I think now that there is much here, much to be understood.

We are the thing itself

2010-03-22T02:03:00.004-04:00

[Yamamoto]

From Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, on some themes I've explored here before:

Out of this image of a narrow, perilous strip of existence, Virginia Woolf developed her sense of herself as a writer. She had already, as a small child, experienced moments of profound horror or desolation. Now these deaths intensified her anticipation of a hidden enemy waiting to deliver a 'sledgehammer' blow, and the need for some form of fight or resistance. When she came to explain to herself in her late memoir what made her a writer, she described it as a process of welcoming or finding valuable these shocks: 'And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer." The shock is followed by an immediate desire to explain it. The 'blow' is to become 'a revelation of some order'; 'it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words.' This making of 'order' or 'wholeness' out of 'shocks,' is, she says, 'the strongest pleasure known to me.'

This 'pleasure' leads her to the philosophy of life which she was beginning to evolve in her 1903 notebook: that there is a pattern hidden behind the 'cotton-wool' of daily life and that all individuals, and all individual works of art, are part of the pattern. So the making of art, in reaction to the blows of life, is both an active, controlling process, in which she orders reality by 'putting it into words'; and a passive, self-abnegating process, whereby she recognizes that what she is making is part of something pre-existing and universal: 'There is no Shakespeare; there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music' we are the thing itself."

Tapestry

2010-03-14T13:40:00.005-04:00

Months go by and still I feel the reluctance about everything. Strange months when the inner disappears and all is outer, outer, outer, and its infiltration. I think of small changes -- a haircut, a small project, some new shoes, and they seem like cowardice to me -- an attempt to just close my eyes. We're moving soon and that's a change, but I feel it's not enough.

The only fiction I have read since the new year is Greek tragedy (as translated by Anne Carson) and the short fiction of Isak Dinesen. Reading these together is enough to level anyone. The superlative beauty of Dinesen's characters -- never before have I met with such beautiful women, such noble men -- the terse emotion of the tragedies, winedark silk shot through with bright thread-of-gold.

In Sorrowacre, the uncle says:

The most famous tissue ever woven was ravelled out again every night.

And the nephew:

He saw the ways of life, he thought, as a twined and tangled design, complicated and mazy; it was not given to him or any mortal to command or control it. Life and death, happiness and woe, the past and the present, were interlaced within the pattern. Yet to the initiated it might be read as easily as our ciphers -- which to the savage must seem confused and incomprehensible -- will be read by the schoolboy. And out of the contrasting elements concord rose. All must suffer; the old man, whom he had judged hardly, had suffered, as he had watched his son die, and he dreaded the obliteration of his being. He himself would come to know ache, tears and remorse and, even through these, the fullness of life. So might now, to the woman in the rye field, her ordeal be a triumphant procession. For to die for the one you loved was an effort too sweet for words.

As he now thought of it, he knew that all his life he had sought the unity of things, the secret which connects the phenomena of existence. It was this strife, this dim presage, which had sometimes made him stand still and inert in the midst of the games with his playfellows, or which had, at other moments -- on moonlit nights, or in his little boat on the sea -- lifted the boy to ecstatic happiness. [...] As the song is one with the voice that sings it, as the road is one with the goal, as lovers are made one in their embrace, so is man one with his destiny, and he shall love it as himself.

I revel in the metaphor and the language -- ways of speaking I have had to shed -- ways which, to me, must always join clarity in speech. The oblique and the hidden should not be led to the operating room again and again, as if the truths are best found by dissection.

And then there is the tragedy -- in Sorrowacre, the young wife and the nephew sing an air from Alceste, that tale of life, death, and the dusky spaces between. Anne Carson calls Euripides' Alkestis a strange sort of play -- part tragedy, part comedy, part satyr play. She describes the the confused halfling nature of the drama, the language, the characters.

With Euripides, there is confusion -- Bernard Williams wrote of this in Shame & Necessity -- Euripides uses the gods and the fatalism in a hamfisted way -- he designs his plays so that they show their seams -- so that you don't trust the truisms of destiny anymore. But with Dinesen you do -- I trust the beauty of her characters, their supremacy. I trust the lessons they learn about unity and life and art and beauty. I trust her creations the way I trust Aeschylus' creations -- they are noble and they show their convictions. Dinesen is a mythmaker and a wordweaver, but there are also sparks of satire throughout -- sparks I do not find in Aeschylus, sparks that have engulfed Euripides' works -- the conflagration that they are.

I want to write more about how good it is to read these works -- and also about how good it is to read Williams on tragedy, something which has affected me in ways I was not expecting.

in minor keys

2010-02-06T16:46:00.002-05:00

[Hammershoi]

I've decided to make my other writing space completely private. It just seemed right given how reticent I feel myself becoming. I apologize to those who followed it.

Notes & Thanks!

2010-01-20T12:03:00.004-05:00

[Joseph Pintauro via Snail and Cyclops]

It seems morning posts happen a bit more organically this week -- interesting and out of character.

I'm at the beginning of another new term, reading my way through Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (and many, many secondary sources), reading a lot of contemporary philosophy on action and causation, teaching for the fifth term in a row, and assisting with some research on early modern discussions of regret by French and English contemporaries of Descartes. It's a busy term, but I'm already looking ahead. I moved to Vancouver to do this degree after a lot of tumult and decision -- mostly to pursue some of the few things I take to be real, important and invigorating -- teaching especially. And it has flown by.

I'll be finished my coursework in May, writing in the summer, and applying for PhDs (again) in the Fall. I'm hoping that a relaxation of coursework demands will allow me to read in a sprawling way again, and maybe increase my writing here. It's really incredible how little time I have to read outside of classes, much less work up enthusiasm to write about those readings.

But I wanted to say thank you to the group of people who continue to read my thoughts, as well as those who comment and send emails despite my being the absolute worse correspondent to ever run a blog. I read your emails and they brighten my day and keep me motivated to make some more space for writing here.

Also, briefly

2010-01-19T00:49:00.001-05:00

I wanted to mention the beautiful film I watched recently -- The Fox and the Child -- it was gorgeous and gripping and not a little dark.

Briefly

2010-01-18T13:09:00.004-05:00

[Vilhelm Hammershoi]

... thinking last night while reading my new biography of Virginia Woolf (Hermione Lee's), just how much of her life has been taken and made into art by others. Byatt's recent The Children's Book struck me as so similar in strange places -- at one point in Byatt's book the family is in Paris, visiting Rodin's studio -- as Virginia visited Rodin's studio just before her breakdown -- the scene described in Lee's biography rang so similar. Just an optical illusion?

The Hours was on the television this weekend and I stopped and watched four minutes before I was just frustrated by how awful Nicole Kidman was -- none of the warmth and frivolity and all nervy selfishness.

The biography is wonderful -- my knowledge of her life was restricted to the later diaries -- beginning around the time of the publication of To the Lighthouse -- so I missed out on all of the gossip-mongering about scandal and sex and illness. Lee is also admirably cool and clear about how easy it is to embellish VW's life into some coruscating mass of provocation and victimhood -- and how she wants to stay very far from that.

Crimsoncovered

2010-01-08T04:00:00.003-05:00

[via Blind Pony Books]

... I will walk with my song torn open.

says Kassandra in Anne Carson's translation of Aiskhylos' Agamemnon --

... I will walk with my song torn open.

And Klytaimestra, after killing Agamemnon -- a sort of dragnet of doom entrapping him -- Klytaimestra says to her lover Aigisthos --

Ignore their yelpings.
You and I, as masters of this house,
will dispose all things as they should be.
Beautifully.

Oh the doom in these plays. The excruciating blood -- the shame -- the sense of character, overwhelming each individual. I cannot get Kassandra's words away from me -- I will walk with my song torn open. I think of Philomela whose cry is cut out so she can't proclaim Tereus' violence. These thoughts insinuate themselves into my new classes and I sit and think of how silly it now seems to me to talk about actions and reasons as if they were wholly analyzable physical events, to be completely explained in terms of physical causation. That's what some would like to do. And then I think of how to speak of Agamemnon's choice to sacrifice Iphigeneia to save the fleet -- and of Klytaimestra's overwhelming vengeance -- and of each character's notion of justice -- of Elektra grieving and Orestes vengeful and then mad. I think of the experience of such a play -- seeing Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf on stage two nights ago and feeling my entire body resonate with Martha's howling at the end -- shivers and tears and fear and sorrow all at once.

Truthfulness

2009-12-30T15:33:00.004-05:00

I feel as though I have been collecting thoughts about truthfulness lately. First there was the work on Bernard Williams and my paper about his great truthfulness and realism, and since then there has been Isak Dinesen on truthfulness, Andre Gide on truthfulness, and now the Oresteia -- also about truthfulness and deception.

With Williams I thought of one of the final lines in Shame and Necessity, where he writes that of all the modern ideals we have (many of which are flawed, misleading and harmful), there is one we may hold on to -- that human beings should live without lies. I've been thinking about this and thinking about how harmful it can be to tell oneself falsehoods about oneself, one's actions and one's world. But I also must recognize that it cannot always be harmful. Dinesen gives us two ways of thinking of this --

In the story "The Roads Round Pisa," the main character begins --

How difficult it is to know the truth. I wonder if it is really possible to be always truthful when you are alone. Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon human intercourse. What is the truth of a mountain in Africa that has no name and not even a footpath across it?

And if truth needs human intercourse, truthfulness about oneself and one's world must also need human intercourse -- and so we have a reliance on others -- a need for friendship and love--

So your own self, your personality and existence are reflected with the mind of each of the people whom you meet and live with, into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and pretends to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is a caricature and a lie. A friendly and sympathetic mind, like Karl's, he thought, is like a true mirror to the soul, and that is what made his friendship so precious to me. Love ought to be even more so. It ought to mean, along the roads of life, the companionship of another mind, reflecting your won fortune and misfortunes, and proving to you that all is not a dream. The idea of marriage has been to me the presence in my life of a person with whom I could talk, tomorrow, of the things that happened today.

And in a different story we see a different way of approaching truth and truthfulness. In "The Poet," the Councilor notices his young bride's "extreme disregard of truth."

He himself was a rearranger of existence, and in many ways in sympathy with her; also he found her methods to fall in well with his own plans. But more than once this talent of hers impressed him. It was, he reflected, an especially feminine trick, a code de femme of practical economy, proved by innumerable generations. Women, wanting to be happy, are up against a force majeure. Hence they may be justified in taking a short cut to happiness by declaring things to be, in fact, that which they want them to be.

And at the end of the book, when she ends the life which is already ebbing from him, she thinks --

Just because it suited him that the world should be lovely, he meant to conjure it into being so. Perhaps he would hold forth on the beauty of the landscape. He had done that to her before. Perhaps he would tell her that it was her wedding day, and that heaven and earth were smiling to her. But that was the world in which they meant to hang Anders.

And so she kills him.

What do these passages show us? I'm not sure yet, but I do think that these are themes that are immensely important -- what is it to be truthful and how far must one be truthful? What does it mean to seek the truth, especially when it is about life and human interactions? It cannot mean what Gide accuses the philosophers of doing -- the "mathematicians or neo-Kantians" who "kept as far away as possible from troublesome reality, and were no more concerned with life than the algebrist with the existence of the quantities he is measuring." Seeking truth and being truthful must not require a step away from life -- whatever that means.

But can we still be rearrangers of existence? I think it's probably unavoidable -- but how should it be done? I used to rearrange existence in a way that was not healthy, I can recognize that now, but I cannot now know whether the small moves I make to understand and deal with my world -- the small adjustments of existence -- are also healthy. It seems I cannot easily (or ever?) evaluate my own truthfulness. And perhaps this is the reason for thinking of truth and truthfulness as dependent upon others -- that to be truthful about oneself we must have others to confirm our assessments and to teach us where we have gone wrong.

In another story of Dinesen's, a character notes that he does not trust a certain priest, for he was wary of those in life who had "neither taken part in an orgy nor gone through the experience of childbirth, for they are dangerous people." I think this captures something I am mistrustful of in many philosophies, something which Williams has also given me good reasons to suspect (among others). The philosophies that seek to detach themselves from life, or seek to condemn the messy bits of life -- they are misguided and they are antithetical to living itself. What value in a philosophy which has no power over life, which closes its eyes to life and contemplates something it finds more pristine, more manageable? There is something ridiculous and excessive about life -- which Dinesen writes of well -- who, if they were making up the world, fresh out of her own imagination, would make up the bits about love, forgiveness, and the sufferings of creativity?

Wordweaving

2009-12-30T15:10:00.005-05:00

[Serafini via Giornale Nuovo]

Long, long stretches of silence this year, and as it ends I think of how little I say here and how I am to think of that. I'm reading Anne Carson's Oresteia and relishing language again -- savoring words like dreamvisible, griefremembering pain, allenveloping doom. I love this and yet it pains me a bit because I think of how little time I have to soak up these words and to play with them. Yesterday, as I traveled home I slipped sideways into that travelmind which besets me and thought of beautiful phrases and important ideas and then they left me, gusted away and forgotten.

There will be time yet, I know, to dwell on these things and lay them out slow and careful and maybe sometimes fitfully -- the language I want to play with and weave and set down. But now I do these other kinds of thinking and writing and I must guard carefully those chances to lay my mind down upon beautiful language, terrible language. But still I wonder -- why are these things segregated? Why not describe Spinoza's theory of adequate knowledge using words like those Aiskhylos uses? Well, perhaps because that would take a greater mind than my own. I must compartment out my thoughts and words and relish those few moments where insight arcs across the space between and a true idea fires in my mind.

There is not a little nostalgia in the ending of this year -- nostalgia for a present that might have been -- but it is so heavily tangled up in great joy and satisfaction and abiding happiness that I must see it clearly and dismiss it as something for another time. Wordweaving and scenemaking for another time -- now is the time for peopleloving and crisp thought.

White-hot angels

2009-12-10T16:46:00.003-05:00

[via Blind Pony]

Working hard lately -- a paper on the realism of Bernard Williams and the falsity and (sometime) cant of optimistic philosophy. Another in the works on Spinoza and his mysterious idea Dei. And then of course my wonderful boyfriend is back. But I have had time recently to read a bit -- I fell hard and fast for A.S. Byatt's The Children's Story -- she is at her absolute best in that book -- lush, vivid language and incredible dexterity. She writes of things so very well -- objets d'art and the simple rustic tools. I'm reading Dinesen now and sinking into the winter spirit, wishing for my trip home and some comfort and warmth -- fires and food and family.

I remember my first experience with Dinesen -- Sorrowacre -- read in a tutorial at St. John's with an incredible class of people and a tutor I respect and admire. It was the final piece we read, after Chaucer and Keats, after Frost's swirl and ache of honeysuckle, after Shakespeare, King Lear and Sonnet 73 -- those Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang -- then I found Dinesen. I learned anew what it is to love language in that class -- not to study it, though we did that too, but to love it -- to love the turns of phrase, the images of darkness and coruscating light, the ability to wrap up in one phrase a welter of emotion and insight.

From "The Old Chevalier"

All this happened in the early days of what we called then the "emancipation of woman." Many strange things took place then. I do not think that at the time the movement went very deep down in the social world, but here there were the young women of the highest intelligence, and the most daring and ingenious of them, coming out of the chiaroscuro of a thousand years, blinking at the sun and wild with desire to try their wings. I believe that some of them put on the armor and halo of St. Joan of Arc, who herself was an emancipated virgin, and became like white-hot angels. But most women, when they feel free to experiment with life, will go straight to the witches' Sabbath. I myself respect them for it, and do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at some time or other, been up on a broomstick.

Core

2009-11-11T01:52:00.007-05:00

What is the value of a philosophy which has no power over life?

And so I return to Virginia.

I have been thinking much about the value of philosophy -- going again through the morass of difficulties I have with doing this study and this work in an academic setting. I have also been reading Bernard Williams' brilliant and infuriatingly tortuous book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. I have been thinking about how I want, above all, to live and to live well, and how I have learned that this living well is not done by holding firm to some project or pinning down some fact or isolating some discovered relation. This living well is an immersion and it is difficult and nuanced and elusive -- but it can be done, and I have had glorious stretches of time where that is exactly what I have (miraculously) managed to do.

I have also been thinking about how rare it is to read a philosophy -- or, to keep it simple, a work of philosophical interest and intention -- which has power over life. It happens of course. There is something in Spinoza which does this and I love him for it. There is something ascetic and yet amiable about Spinoza -- the amiability of the misfit perhaps, but the asceticism of the genius who saw too far and was not able to communicate what he saw. There is something about Williams which has this power -- or at least promises it. He has to first cut through the weeds -- has to show which philosophies have no power over life -- which assumptions confuse us -- which theories turn us away from living in the first place, or set up life as some path toward immunity or slow refinement of the personal into the ideal.

And so I have been thinking about philosophy and life and about how I have a sense of what I want to do -- how I have a sense of what philosophy would have to be for me -- and then I found a paper by Martha Nussbaum on To the Lighthouse and felt that familiar frisson of connection and assent and the joy of discovering something in a text -- something which is important and hard and far more nuanced and complex than others have taken it to be. The problem of how we come to have knowledge of other minds and how this problem is epistemological when philosophers approach it and can be ethical when people approach it -- people who are immersed in life -- in the interests of individuals in a nexus of relations.

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey know one another. They seem closed in and off like everyone else -- they seem sealed, like the buzzing hives that Lily Briscoe thinks of when she imagines what it must be like to be Mrs. Ramsey -- and to be Lily Briscoe wanting desperately to know exactly what it would be like to be the beautiful, powerful, mysteriously private Mrs. Ramsey. They seem sealed, but they are not, and they are not because of the love that they share, the love which is different from one to the other, but is the same in accomplishing the same intention -- to know the other, and to respect the other. As Nussbaum says, they have each learned the other. They have each learned the mannerisms, the idiosyncrasies, the wishes and the unspoken desires, the little frustrations, the deeper, hidden sadnesses -- they have each read the other, each thought of the other, in times of togetherness and in times of solitude. It is their love which motivates this great work of learning to peer in to another, and it is their love which respects the boundedness and privacy of the other. Their relations are not symmetrical in content and yet they are in intention, and in their utter importance.

Nussbaum says in concluding her paper,

It is the distinguished contribution of this novel to show how a problem that philosophy frequently cordons off from the messy stuff of human motivation and social interaction is actually a series of human problems of great complexity, many of them ethical and social, which can't really be adequately described, much less resolved (where resolution is possible) without reflecting about emotions and desires, without describing a variety of possible human loves and friendships in their historical and social setting, without asking, among other things, how love, politics, power, shame, desire, and generosity are all intertwined in the attempt of a single woman and man to live together with understanding.

It is an incredible paper and reminded me of my own nascent ideas about the incredible philosophical work that a novel like Orlando can do -- and the even more staggering philosophical work that a masterpiece like The Waves can do. There is so much to be said and read and written about these books -- and about others as well, about Robert Musil and Pessoa and so on. This is the work that gets to the heart of living and it's the work that takes the reflective stance and does not destroy the wealth of emotion and imagination and mental activity that buzzes beneath the surface.

Completely different

2009-11-03T23:28:00.005-05:00

A little bit of silliness, but its dear to my heart ... some of my favorite cats-and-their-people portraits:

[via The Selby]

[source unknown]

[via The Selby]

[via The Selby]

[via Apartment Therapy (I think)]

[via The Selby]

[via The Selby]

Quoted

2009-10-31T16:04:00.003-04:00

Some gems from Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy:

On consequentialist moral theories:

G.E. Moore also thought that the forward-looking type of consideration was fundamental, but he allowed things other than satisfaction -- such as friendship and the awareness of beauty -- to count among the good consequences. It was because of this that his theory was so attractive to the Bloomsbury group: it managed to reject at once the stuffiness of duty and the vulgarity of utilitarianism.

On what to do about religious ethics:

In fact, the logical or structural questions about religious ethics, like many questions about God, are interesting only if you believe in God. If God exists, then arguments about him are arguments about the cosmos and of cosmic importance, but if he does not, they are not about anything. In that case, the important questions must be about human beings, and why, for instance, they ever believed that God existed. The issues about religious ethics are issues about the human impulses that expressed themselves in it, and they should be faced in those terms. For those who do not believe in a religious ethics, there is some evasion in continuing to argue about its structure: it distracts attention from the significant question of what such outlooks tell us about humanity. Nietzsche's saying, God is dead, can be taken to mean that we should now treat God as a dead person: we should allocate his legacies and try to write an honest biography of him.

Such strength

2009-10-10T01:01:00.004-04:00

I'm reading Bleak House at the moment and it is a true joy. Today, as I read Esther's narrative with tears in my eyes (always, always Esther makes me weep), I realized something. When Bleak House begins and Esther begins it all seems so quaint and lovely and rosy and overdone that it is easy to dismiss her goodness and amiability and general effect on everyone as so exaggerated that it must be comical.

But there is something so sincere and endearing and absolutely noble and joyful about her that her narrative becomes something that I grip on to and cherish. When she tells of her illness and does not tell of her love -- when she communicates her worries and her joys -- when she iterates and reiterates the importance of duty, duty known intuitively and steadfastly -- when she worries about the ravages the fever has taken on her looks and admits to herself some small scrap of vanity (but always for the sake of someone else) -- it is all so touching, so heart-wrenching. She is never saccharine, never insipid, never a caricature of the virtuous little woman. She is a beautiful person -- she gives hope and joy to everyone around her, and Dickens is so, so careful to communicate this.

Not before I was alone in my own room for the night, and I had again been dejected and unhappy there, did I begin to know how wrong and thankless this state was. But from my joyful darling who was coming on the morrow, I found a joyful letter, full of such loving anticipation that I must have been made of marble if it had not moved me; from my guardian too, I found another letter, asking me to tell Dame Durden, if I should see that little woman anywhere, that they had moped about most pitiably without her, that the housekeeping was going to rack and ruin, that nobody else could manage the keys, and that everybody in and about the house declared it was not the same house, and was becoming rebellious for her return. Two such letters together made me think how far beyond my deserts I was beloved, and how happy I ought to be. That made me think of all my past life; and that brought me, as t ought to have done before, into a better condition.

Busy

2009-10-04T00:25:00.003-04:00

[Christine de Pizan]

I'm in New York this weekend, having the most incredible time at a conference I feel incredibly fortunate to have been indirectly invited to. I have so much to think through and write about-- the women philosophers of the early modern period who I have just now started discovering -- and the re-invigoration of my sense of purpose in doing philosophy, and in returning to issues that used to be at the front of my mind, but which have somehow been swept into corners and forgotten. Exciting times!

Forgotten and Found

2009-09-19T14:17:00.004-04:00

[Roxana]

Maie woods: 11 July 1942. The pine trees all around me. I am sitting on my blue cardigan in the middle of an ocean of leaves, wet and rotting from last night's storm as if I were on a raft, my legs tucked under me! In my bag, I have put Volume II of Anna Karenina, the diary of K.M. and an orange. My friends the bumblebees, delightful insects, seem pleased with themselves and their buzzing is profound and grave. I like low, serious tones on the voices in nature. The shrill 'chirp, chirp' of the small birds in the trees grates on me ... In a moment or so I will try to find the hidden lake.

-- The final entry in Irène Némirovsky's writing notebook -- she was taken two days later by the French police and sent to Auschwitz by way of the French internment camp Pithiviers.

For the last month or so I had been meaning to find Suite Française at our university library and finally read it. I first saw the book in 2006 in my favorite neighborhood bookshop in NY and remember being drawn to it and yet not wanting to purchase it at the time. The french edition had only been discovered and published in 2004, the English translation arriving in 2006. But I waited, and two weeks ago, finally sitting down with the book that had been persistently following me around, I began to read -- and discovered that I had read this book before, that I knew the fates of all the characters, remembered the beautiful, vivid scenes, and was familiar with all the small details that so enrich the work.

I went back to my reading journals, beginning in 2005, searching the indices and pages for any mention of Suite Française -- and found nothing. In these journals I record (almost) every book I've read, noting passages and thoughts on the books as I finish them, especially for those I've borrowed from friends or libraries. I went to my blog, beginning in 2006, searching for any mention of Némirovsky or Suite Française, and found nothing. I thought that maybe I had only read the first few chapters -- but no, I was familiar with the entire story -- the entire, beautiful, unfinished story.

I finished Suite Française for the second time last night and am still overpowered by the book and the incredible tale told in notes and correspondence following it. When I read of that final summer day amongst the pines, with Tolstoy and Mansfield -- it just breaks my heart.

To become God

2009-09-11T02:39:00.004-04:00

[Yamamoto]

Is it becoming obvious that Scott's Escapade was an incredibly rich and rewarding read? It was, I highly recommend it. She writes so well of the self, of love and of vanity. Of the self she captures the dangers of feeling so vastly separate and different from the world -- or so alienated and misunderstood -- the dangers of falling into a tyrannical sort of self-love. This comes out in Escapade but she studies it closely in Narcissus.

One of the central features in Escapade is her relationship with John, the married man with whom she has an affair and runs away from Tennessee to Brazil. They have a child together in Brazil and are stranded there, in increasing poverty, while war and social mores keep them from returning home. She writes of their love --

In recalling my adolescence I can remember no true understanding or sympathy from any source; John has given me both. He is the only person I ever knew who was really capable of love, who, without any of the cant and falsity of sacrifice, considers in the most delicate sense the inward happiness of another being.

This is the first of several passages about John's incredible caring and respect -- Scott never writes of this love in a saccharine way, she is stark and frank in her descriptions of their love and how vastly different it is from the romantic ideals that must have abounded in her education and upbringing in the Deep South at the turn of the century. She writes of their suffering and their struggles, of how their love changes through various trials -- but in every clear-eyed description it is clear that what remains is a deep and convincing sense of truth about their relationship. It is only in this one relation that she feels recognized -- only in this that she feels acknowledged.

After their son is born, she writes differently of love and of herself. She writes of the pain after childbirth and how obliterating it is, and also of motherhood itself, and how obliterating it is --

This gorgeous death of happiness. The ugliness will only begin when I try to cut the soft color with the bitter glassy edges of myself -- with clothes, food, responsibilities, my relation to other people -- the hard little facts that make up the routine of individual life. There is nothing frightening about death, I am sure. The horror is in being forced to come back to old things again. Having destroyed the illusion of the personal, one has to recreate it with terrible effort.

There is a recognizable anxiety that begins to creep in after Jackie's birth and as the worries and poverty increase. A tension also surfaces -- she begins to write almost longingly of sleep, abandon and annihilation -- but she also speaks of love as the luxurious indulgence and assertion of one's self. She describes life as sightless sleep and love as a kind of benevolent tyranny.

These tensions are vividly present in Narcissus, a novel from 1922. She quotes Blake in her epigraph:

Nought loves another as itself,
Nor venerates another so,
Nor is it possible to thought
A greater than itself to know.

This is an incredible story of self-involvement, vanity and the horrible destruction wreaked by such self-infatuation. The writing is often tense and taut and so crystalline. There is nothing of love in this novel -- nothing of what is described in Escapade -- neither the relationship she shares with John, nor the different love for her son, her pets and herself. There isn't even self-love -- what these characters describe cannot be amour-propre, for if it were it would not be so destructive, it would not be so all-consuming. To want one's self so much -- to be so tangled up in it -- so beset by it -- so lost in it that one craves to hurt others just to maintain the grip on one's secret self -- that is not love.

She reveals much in her characters though -- the men are all obsessed with what they can do -- with what they might do -- and they make all of the women in their lives feel small and ineffective. The women are all lost, so obsessed with the vagueness within, the shadowy something that seemed to lurk always and yet was ever unnoticed and misunderstood. The women all made idols of that shadowy thing -- the self, undeveloped as it was, a small fledgling something. The women were all so obsessed with not doing -- with the impossibility of doing anything that they were ferocious about guarding whatever scrap of self to which they could cling.

When one became God, one destroyed in order to accomplish one's godhead. By destruction one brought everything into one's self. But she was heavy with everything that she had become. It was too much. Only Laurence remained outside her. He would not have her. He was more than she, because he would not take her and become her. Love could not annihilate him. She understood the strategy of crucifixion, but could not accomplish it.

There was no love -- neither self-love nor romantic love -- only a series of lost people, stubborn people, asserting pride in something which was at most, a ghost. It was a sad book. I thought of Duras' Ravishing of Lol Stein and how it was likewise so sad. I thought of Lol's friend, I forget her name, and of the golden field and the long black hair and the waiting and the hurt that everyone dealt to everyone. These people went to such great ends for innocent, unwitting cruelty -- the cruelty of vanity and blindness.

Learning to live

2009-09-11T02:02:00.005-04:00

[Roxana]

I wanted to say some more about Evelyn Scott -- and to share some more passages from Escapade.

The aromatic smell of the leaves was sharp and sweet in my nostrils. I wondered why the birth of a child appealed so little to the imagination of the artist. Why were all the great realistic novels of the world concerned with only one aspect of sex? This surely was the last -- the very last thing -- one needed to know before one came to conclusions about life.

There is, of course, the easy answer to her question -- but I think that answer can be passed over in silence. What she says at the end of this passage is so interesting to me -- again because of Montaigne. So many philosophers and intellectuals attempt this investigation into living -- the right way to live, the best way to live -- and, as I wrote at the start of the summer, there are often some truly worrisome notions that work their way into treatises on the art of living. When I spoke of Montaigne before, I noted that he emphasizes the importance of solitude, as does Aristotle at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, and this emphasis seems to me to be deeply flawed. Montaigne knows as well as any great thinker the importance of self-study -- it is the only project he ever claims for himself. When he writes that he cares not whether his books are read, there is an authenticity about it -- these essays are true to themselves -- they are attempts to work one's way through one's self --

Painting myself for others, I have painted my inner self in clearer colors than were my first ones.

And --

Whatever I may be, I wish to be elsewhere than on paper.

It is for these thoughts that I continue to return to Montaigne (and for his humor and his erudition), but I worry. I worry about the emphasis on solitude which I cannot entirely agree with. And I worry about what Scott notices -- about the utter silence on the events of pregnancy and childbirth. Why has this been ignored? What could we discover by thinking about this, imagining this, writing of this?

These women live in a house filled with their own subjective emanations, and they never go out of it. Even if they walk in the street they carry with them an atmosphere which encloses them like the atmosphere of a dream. And they will die in the same dream, a long dream of little things. After all they are much nearer fundamentals than the people outside. Men come into the House to them. It is in the House that all matters of birth and death are attended to. I wonder if in their 'pettiness' is not, after all a juster sense of proportion than most of us exhibit in careening through space.

This passage recalled Donoso's Obscene Bird of the Night -- I thought off the grotesque old women in the beginning who spend their life collecting small scraps and treasures and then hide them under beds and in corners. When they die their little scraps are found and squabbled over -- small dusty treasures. But more than that simple connection, when I read this I thought of those ever-present discussions of the simple life -- they reoccur again and again in conversation, in artist's letters, in novels -- some civilized intellectual always wishing to turn his back on the world and watch lemon trees grow on the rocky coast of some Greek island.

Collections from Escapade

2009-09-09T02:40:00.004-04:00

I was directed to Evelyn Scott by The Existence Machine some time ago, and like Richard, I have been trying my best (or least) to remember to sit down and collect some thoughts about that experience. So in lieu of anything substantive, I offer the following passages and thoughts from reading Escapade.

I am afraid of the world -- of people -- but my fear surrounds me. It doesn't permeate me any longer. I believe in myself, just as I believe in things outside me through the objectivity of touch. I realized a long time ago that a belief which does not spring from a conviction in the emotions is no belief at all. When I am convinced of something, I am convinced with my whole self, as though my flesh had informed me. Now I know. Knowledge is the condition of my being.

There was something about the passages Richard cited which struck me and made me excited to find this author, and nine pages into the text, I was convinced that this was worth it. That this was the writing of someone who had sunk deep down into herself, but also learned to scrutinize, inspect and understand. I was convinced that this was someone that spoke to me and said things that I would both agree with and argue with -- but those things would stay with me -- what she said and what she described and what she experienced would linger.

People believe in moral codes because in relation to their immediate acts fear touches their imaginations. But they do not believe in death. They do not believe in life either, or in their own flesh from which their being proceeds.

I have been reading a lot of Montaigne lately -- and he speaks so long and so often and so wonderfully about learning to live. Scott also knows this process of learning oneself, studying oneself, and remembering throughout that one is studying first how to live and then how to die. It is strange at first to think in such a way -- it feels unnatural, or wrong -- but there is something undeniable about the worth of this endeavor. It is the crucial part of my distance from the philosophy I do in the classroom -- I care most about learning how to live -- and that means that I must also care most about learning about my self. There are loads of related contingent questions that come sprawling and squirming out of these two fundamental studies, but they are silly and I'd much rather forget about them and not be distracted.

In suffering intensely one's being cannot be reduced. And the worst of it is that I cannot even establish relations within my individuality. My body fades out and becomes one with the turmoil.

Oh I know nothing about this suffering -- she's speaking here of the experience of childbirth -- some of the most incredible, poignant, strange, intelligent writing of pregnancy and childbirth I've ever encountered. I remember a line from A.S. Byatt's Still Life that stuck with me mostly because it was so new -- Stephanie is heavily pregnant and trying her best to read Wordsworth and think and maintain some hold on her self and she speaks of being sunk in biology -- eradicated by the movements of her physical body. I remember feeling a new sort of terror at this -- the same sort of terror I felt reading Scott -- what she described was so fundamental -- so much at the heart of something I cannot yet describe or draw lines around.

She also speaks of how displayed and scrutinized she is -- of the strangeness of being a woman in her position (the young, pregnant mistress of an older married man). This writing is also strange and so so satisfying. She writes of what occurs when one realizes how one's body is understood as the end-all of one's being -- of what occurs when one is reduced and ignored, when one's individuality is utterly, completely ignored. This experience (the same as Mrs. Ramsay's in To the Lighthouse? the wedge of darkness?) -- this is something incredible -- it is both infuriating and excessively liberating. It is as if one has successfully fooled the world and can keep hidden and secret and sacred the self which is not just misunderstood, but completely ignored -- denied even.

There is much more to say of this and also of her novel Narcissus, which reminded me so much of Duras' Ravishing of Lol Stein. And so perhaps the writing returns.

Boring updates

2009-09-09T02:30:00.005-04:00

No good excuses for the withering of all activity around these parts -- busy summer with classes and such, busy August with visits and vacations, busy September with classes and so on.

I have written a paper on Avicenna's discussion of why sheep know to fear wolves and how dogs learn to fear sticks, but I doubt that's stuff of interest around here. I'm currently writing something on the problem of reconciling theories of perception with theories of art and pictures -- which is of slightly more relevance, so maybe something of that will end up making its way here.

I'll be studying Spinoza and Bernard Williams this term, as well as auditing (again) the intro seminar for new philosophy grads. I'd say that I'll write about those learning experiences, but to be entirely honest, the writing urge is dying out, or down, as it may be. I doubt this is anything to be concerned about or to analyze too closely so I'll just leave it as it is. It's just as likely that a flourishing of blog-activity is just around the corner!

Welter

2009-08-20T20:57:00.003-04:00

[Asako Narahashi - Kawaguchiko, 2003 via]

Today -- reading Moby Dick on the bus, so keen to the sensations of heat and sweat and the prickle of the rough bus seat fabric on the backs of my legs, reading about Ishmael and his absolute, infinite love for the globules of spermaceti through which he must run his fingers, bursting the casings and returning what had separated off to the vast pot of strange, expensive liquid.

The book is so surprising to me -- just as when I read Don Quixote -- a leviathan of literature that carries ponderous weight with it and yet, upon reading, becomes so fresh, so hilarious, so surprising. It's the sensuousness that surprises me the most -- not the catalogues of facts or the musings on human nature, etc -- it's the shocking, curious sensual descriptions -- Stubbs eating his whale-steaks by whale-light, Ishmael and the spermaceti, the 'Hindoo' fumes of the rendered blubber, the amber-gris in all its perfumed and visceral glory. Twice now I have had vivid dreams taken straight from this book, the most recent featuring a cone of spermaceti ice cream adorned with gold flakes and amber clusters. It was described on the placard as tasting of 4 cinnamon rolls all in one.

Thunder-heads

2009-08-18T12:40:00.004-04:00

[ Coelenterata via BibliOdyssey]

Reading Moby Dick at the moment, while also trying to finish papers and projects.

As before, the Pequod steeply leaned over towards the sperm whale's head, now, by the counterpoise of both heads, she regained her even keel; though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.

Away

2009-07-31T21:50:00.004-04:00

It has been a crazy couple of weeks for me, but I have finished the bulk of my work for the term and fulfilled almost all teaching responsibilities. I'm now off for a brief trip to my Maryland home and the ever-wonderful Ocean City, to be filled with family, a lot of relaxation, and Maryland crabs, corn and home-grown tomatoes! I'm hoping to catch up on some posting while there -- but we will see.

Flight

2009-07-22T21:31:00.003-04:00

Words of a feather -- the phrase came to me as I leafed through the first pleasant reading all week. I'm dreaming now of upcoming trips and a break in the pattern.

On Rousseau

2009-07-21T03:25:00.002-04:00

[José Hernández via A Journey Round My Skull]

I had occasion today to return to some notes I took in 2005 on my readings in Rousseau's corpus. I am astonished now at how influential those readings were -- in a way I didn't expect at the time and that I'm glad I've grown out of -- romanticism can be a dangerous spirit to drink down unquestionably.

From Reveries of a Solitary Walker I find:

Thus, in order to contemplate myself before my decline, I must go back at least a few years to the time when, losing all hope here-below and no longer finding any food here on earth for my heart, I gradually became accustomed to feeding it with its own substance and to looking within myself for all its nourishment.

This idea, far from being cruel and rending to me, consoles me, calms me, and helps me to resign myself. I do not go as far as St. Augustine, who would have consoled himself to be damned if such had been the will of God. [...] God is just; He wills that I suffer; and He knows that I am innocent. That is the cause of my confidence; my heart and my reason cry out to me that I will not be deceived by it. Let me, therefore, leave men and fate to go their ways. Let me learn to suffer without a murmur. In the end, everything must return to order, and my turn will come sooner or later.

And on his philosophy:

The whole present generation sees only errors and prejudices in the sentiments with which I alone nourish myself. It finds truth and evidence opposed to mine. It even seems incapable of believing that I adopt my own in good faith; and although I give myself up to it wholeheartedly, even I find it has insurmountable difficulties which are impossible for me to resolve but which do not prevent me from persisting in it. Am I then alone wise, alone enlightened, among mortals? To believe that this is the way things are, is it sufficient that they suit me? Can I put enlightened trust in appearances which have nothing solid in the eyes of other men and which would seem illusory to me if my heart did not confirm my reason? [...] I believe myself wise, but I am only a dupe, a victim, and a martyr of vain error.

Dark moments during those solitary walks.

Angular

2009-07-17T03:33:00.004-04:00

[Vilhelm Hammershoi]

[A brief break from the Perception series].

As I mentioned in another place, my reluctance and bewilderment in this new field of mine continue, despite my apparent grasp of jargon. I am honestly interested in the topics raised by Gibson and his various respondents, and I am honestly interested in trying to figure out how this all links up with those concerns closer to my heart, but I often feel completely at sea. I also often wonder what on earth they are talking about (and likewise, if I even understand what I'm saying and writing). There is always a sense of something glimpsed -- something looming or intruding, but I can so rarely say what it is and why it is important or noticeable.

But all of that is vague. When my wonderful boyfriend wrote me from Bristol saying that he had begun reading To the Lighthouse, I decided to return to that text myself. And so now I can say that I feel like Lily Briscoe thinking of what Mr. Ramsay does. Mr. Ramsay with his splendid mind --

For if thought is like the keyboard of the piano, divided in so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q.

As Mr. Ramsay thinks of how he has reached Q, how so few men will ever reach R, how some may even have the power to reach Z, he also sees his wife and son -- his beautiful wife and his son, the two who need his protection, the two he scolded that morning for thinking it would be fine tomorrow when it would not -- for thinking that they could go to the lighthouse when they could not.

And Mr. Ramsay has his work -- work described by his son Andrew as subject and object and the nature of reality. And when Lucy says she hasn't the faintest idea what that all means, Andrew tells her -- Think of a kitchen table then, when you're not there.

And Lucy thinks of that scrubbed kitchen table when she thinks of Mr. Ramsay's work -- his work in philosophy, one of our finest minds. And so, too, I think of the kitchen table.

The Perception of Pictures - Part 3 - Art Without Illusion?

2009-07-16T19:59:00.007-04:00

[Hans Memling - The Last Judgment]

Gibson may end up with a problem of how he can account for pictures of things not perceivable, but I want to leave that problem to stew and turn to some insights Gibson has -- insights which point to strong reasons to prefer his theory of perception and picture perception.

In "Pictures, Perspective, and Perception" [PPP], Gibson spends much time discussing the fidelity of a picture. In this discussion, he uses a 2-component definition of fidelity. He eventually discards the first component, so I'll look at that only briefly. Gibson originally subscribes to a version of what he later calls 'The Point-Projection Theory of Pictorial Information.' This essentially says that the fidelity of a picture to the object depicted depends upon the identity of the two sheaves of light rays. Without going into the technical explanation of this, I will only note that this theory presupposes an explanation in terms of geometric optics (rays of light), and that Gibson, in preferring descriptions in terms of his own ecological optics, rightly changes his tune.

A better definition of fidelity will not be in terms of geometric optics and absolute values of points of color, but in the picture's ability to convey the right sort of information. This is a picture's functional fidelity to the thing depicted. “A picture’s functional fidelity to the scene represented is simply the degree to which the variables to which the eye is sensitive are the same in one array as the other” [223]. These variables are the familiar invariants of the optic array, things like contours (defined as 'abrupt transitions of intensity in light).

Concluding this discussion of fidelity, Gibson notes that the development of perspectival rendering is an advancement in depiction which facilitates visual education – it allows for faithful representing of solid objects and “permits the vicarious experiencing of an absent thing or the mediated perception of a distant place” [224]. He goes on to describe this faithful depiction as important knowledge, citing anatomical drawings and scientific records as the sorts of pictures from which we can get knowledge at second-hand when first-hand knowledge is not possible.

This may seem like a widely applicable definition of pictures, but we should note that Gibson seems constrained to privilege faithful or veridical depictions over non-veridical depictions insofar as he sees visual perception as communicating more or less useful information. Mediated perception will be useful so long as it conveys ‘truthful’ information – reading ‘truthful’ as ‘information that could be found by the percipient if she could actually experience first-hand.’ This implicit tie to 'real' experience is understandable for Gibson, but will not allow him to provide a satisfactory account of the variety and strangeness of the illusions that are an essential component of pictures.

I want to stress that this is not Gibson's final definition of a picture, nor is it his final discussion of depiction, but on this account, we should see what he can claim and what he cannot claim.

Gibson can claim that pictures 'work' by mediating visual perception -- that when the individual cannot go and see Mont Sainte-Victoire (for a variety of reasons, including the interesting puzzle of how one actually 'sees' mountains to begin with), they can still pick up information about that mountain by looking at a picture of it. To be sure, the information available will be already constrained in an important way (the artist made a series of selections in depicting the visual experience), but for Gibson, these constraints are themselves valuable and available for information pickup (a percipient like Berenson may be a skilled selector of the constraints Da Vinci uses when depicting).

Gibson can also claim that we understand a picture when we receive the information conveyed -- and that this information does not depend upon the beholder knowing some language of pictures or symbols, but on the information carried by the invariant structure of light. This doesn't mean that upon looking at the picture above, any beholder will know it as a picture of the Last Judgment, nor as Hans Memling's particular depiction, but they will be able to perceive the low-level invariants which all percipients learn through normal experience in the world. For Gibson, that's a fact of how the perceptual system develops.

[Albrecht Durer - Rhinoceros]

What Gibson cannot claim is that he has successfully described pictures at all. As Ernst Gombrich elegantly shows in Art and Illusion, the very process of depicting is rife with tricks, conventions, illusions and learned developments. Pictures themselves are never actual imitations, and they often erroneously depict the thing they were trying to depict. Durer depicted the rhinoceros with armored plating, the Dutch flower painters depicted spring tulips in the same bouquets as summer roses and peonies, Parmagianino depicted a strangely 'stretched' Madonna and Child, and so on. Even depictions which 'preserve figure' and attempt to imitate reality are founded on a framework of illusion and trickery in order to accomplish their imitation.

Gibson also cannot claim to give us any way of understanding any of the modern art trends away from figure and toward what is called 'abstraction.'

Gibson has a way around these two problems, but does he solve them at the expense of another aspect of his theory? I turn to his effort to resolve some of these problems next.

The Perception of Pictures - Part 2 - A Wished-For World?

2009-07-16T19:17:00.004-04:00

[Bosch - The Haywain]

To begin this discussion of Gibson's theory of perception and pictures, I want to look at a 1960 essay published by Gibson in Daedalus’ special volume on ‘The Visual Arts Today,’ titled “Pictures, Perspective, and Perception.” [PPP] In PPP, Gibson describes his understanding of pictures in the theory of ecological optics. I have already mentioned much of what he describes, including the new notions of the ambient light array, the optic array at a station point, and the generalized geometry of perspective. In his initial discussion, Gibson also repeats his point about the irrelevance of the retinal image (or any other image) to visual perception. At the end of this summary he states:

The human retinal image is only one stage in the human process of seeing. What the instrument makers, the photographers, the visual educators, and the artists in their own way are trying to do is to aid or enhance the process of seeing. By ‘seeing’ I mean understanding, not the special process of considering one’s sensations or the special act of seeing in perspective. [219]

It is worth noting that this assumption of the importance of the retinal image is almost ubiquitous in art theory and history. John Ruskin presents a nice version of the unexamined assumption in The Elements of Drawing:

The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye, that is to say, of a sort of childish perception.

Everything you can see, in the world around you, presents itself to your eyes as only as an arrangement of patches of different colours variously shaded.

The Impressionists often described their intention to capture just that image -- the fleeting or momentary experience of color and light. The Cubists and Abstract Expressionists often cited their intention to turn away from such a 'sensory image' and focus instead on the 'form' or structure of the object or scene depicted. Gibson would say that all of this talk is misguided. As we will see -- all artists only ever depict invariant properties of the ambient light array -- to do otherwise would be to make something that could not be looked at.

Gibson also discusses his theory of ‘how perception works,’ describing the direct pickup of invariant properties and the dependence of the pickup upon structured stimulation and “the interests of the individual observer” [220]. I haven't discussed these theoretical notions in detail, but it should suffice to say that Gibson conceives of the information in the world as unlimited and available for selection by an individual. That selection will follow the interests of the individual -- interests as low-level as 'good-for-eating' and 'good-for-using-to-cut' to interests as high-level as 'those-are-my-shoes' and so on.

He initially characterizes the artist as a sort of specialized perceiver, one “who pays special attention to the points of view from which the world can be seen, and one who catches and records for the rest of us the most revealing perspectives on things” [220]. He also characterizes the perception of objects depicted as necessarily second-hand. For Gibson, perception can be mediated in various dimensions, and one of them is the immediacy of the perception. Perception of objects depicted will always be second-hand perception and can never approximate or transform into first-hand perception, no matter how skillful the depiction. Gibson returns to this later when he refutes the traditional view that there is a sliding scale between artistic representation (illusion) and reality.

So, what is a picture?

A picture is a human artifact which enables another person to perceive some aspect of the visual world in the same way that the artist, the maker of the artifact, has perceived it. This definition is intended to apply to any picture – any drawing, painting, photograph, motion picture, or television image, whether representational or not – so long as it is intended to be looked at.

Concretely, a picture is always a physical surface, whether of canvas, paper, glass, or some other substance, which either reflects light or transmits it. It is an object, in short, commonly a flat rectangular one, but what is unique is the light coming from it. The surface has been treated or processed or acted upon in such a way that the light causes a perception of something other than the surface itself. It delivers a sheaf of light rays to a station point in front of the surface, rays that contain information about quite another part of the world, perhaps a distant world, a past world, a future world, or a wished-for world; a delicious or a horrifying world; but at any rate some part or aspect of a world which is not literally present at the station point. [221]

My first potential problem with Gibson begins to take shape here – this description of what a picture is seems to presuppose that the object represented was perceived or is perceivable. Combined with his description of what the artist does, it seems like art is, at its best, a faithful and natural depiction of an actual visual experience. Gibson later amends these statements, but the question arises – what if no artist could have ever seen what they depicted? How do they make such a picture, and what sort of information does it contain? These questions can be lumped under the more general question of how Gibson can account for artistic invention, if at all.

Next -- on pictures that are faithful to the things depicted!

The Perception of Pictures - Part 1 - Ecological Optics?

2009-07-16T18:30:00.008-04:00

[Vermeer - Delft Street]

I have been reading for a course on Perception this term and have found myself enamored of the theory of James J. Gibson, a psychologist who proposed a radically different theory of perception -- The Ecological Theory. In particular, I have been reading his account of pictures -- what they are, how they are perceived and what they can/should do. I want to work through some of these findings here.

And since I don't really want to detail Gibson's general theory of ecological optics, here is a brief summary by Robert Schwartz in his introduction to Gibson's work in the2004 text Perception:

Gibson's criticism of the tradition goes much further than that found in Gestalt writings. He argues that it is necessary to: (1) replace talk of 'sense organs' with that of 'perceptual systems,' (2) abandon all explanatory appeal to, if not the very idea of, 'sensations,' and (3) reconceive the notion of a 'stimulus.' Stimuli should be thought of in terms of the information contained in higher-order invariant properties of arrays of ambient light, particularly those that result from movement. Adopting this framework, Gibson believes, dissolves the traditional problem of explaining how the mind turns impoverished sensations into rich perceptions. The information in the stimulus is not impoverished.

Schwartz later continues his summary:

Although there were always serious dissenters, the consensus in vision theory well into the twentieth century was that perception of the spatial layout was, in one way or another, a multi-stage process. [...] According to Gibson once the concept of 'stimulus' is properly expanded, it can be shown that the invariant properties of arrays of light contain all the information needed to perceive the layout veridically. The stimulus, in and of itself, accurately reflects the way the world is. There is no need to derive or infer environmental properties from sense-registered cues. We immediately and directly see how things are without the aid of intervening mental states and processes.

Gibson allows that in many instances we may have to learn to see. The expert can see things and properties the untutored cannot discern. Learning, though, is not a matter of bringing in past experience to alter or enrich the interpretation of the sensory data. Perceptual learning is the honing of an ability to pick up directly the information in the light array (Gibson and Gibson 1955).

To conclude the briefest of summaries, Gibson is entirely opposed to every establishment theory of how visual perception happens. He rejects the sensation-perception distinction, he rejects the notion of unconscious inference, he rejects the traditional focus on the retinal image (citing the inevitable homunculus theory that falls out from it), and he rejects the notion of perception as the result of some background or underlying processing.

So why does this interest me? I think Gibson gets so much right that I want to see how far he can actually go with his theory. He must provide an account for what we perceive when we perceive a picture, and I want to see what he says about that. I also want to see if I agree with him. What I think comes out of his discussion of pictures is a very interesting and oft-ignored confusion that occurs in discussions of aesthetics. Gibson's theory shows that much of what has been said in aesthetics and art history about what a picture is and how we perceive it is wrong. I also think that many of Gibson's critics misunderstand what he tells us about the artist's effort and the resulting picture. I want to now work through this mass of debate.

'Harmonious' Hens

2009-07-04T14:09:00.003-04:00

[Vincenzo Campi - Chicken Vendors]

Two recent events: First -- I watched Jamie Oliver's 'Fowl Dinners' the other night -- exposing the process of the egg and chicken industry in Britain (and then preparing a gala chicken dinner for his guests). Some truly frightful information. Second -- I have been reading a lent copy of Philosophy in History (1984) with the intention of finding some perspective on how I can better orient myself in the wash of current philosophical debate, while relying on my footing in previous history-based degrees.

Flipping through some of the later essays in the text, I found Wolf Lepenies's piece, " 'Interesting Questions' in the history of philosophy and elsewhere." He quotes Nietzsche from The Use and Abuse of History:

The progress of science has been amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider the savants, those exhausted hens. They are certainly not 'harmonious' natures; they can merely cackle more than before, because they lay eggs oftener; but the eggs are always smaller though the books are bigger.

Lovely convergence.

Séraphine de Senlis

2009-07-02T20:11:00.008-04:00

[All images by Séraphine de Senlis - via]

Last weekend my mother and I watched the 2008 movie Séraphine , about the life and art of Séraphine de Senlis. The movie was a bit broad and quick but beautifully showcased the art of an artist of whom I had never heard. Yolande Moreau is incredible in the role -- primitive, powerful and enchanting. The movie plays up the primitive or naif aspect of her art -- strongly representing her as a visionary artist with religious fervor which is really just a pure and childlike devotion to the Madonna. It's a beautiful story about a woman who was an artist first, not a personality.

I'm hoping to draw from her beautiful colors and composition to design something for a new embroidery project.

On Montaigne's Backshop

2009-07-02T00:07:00.004-04:00

[Julie Morstad]

I have put Montaigne aside for a bit to pick up Evelyn Scott (as recommended by Richard at The Existence Machine), but before I turn away from him, there are a few passages I'd like to share.

As I read my way deeper into the philosophy I am assigned to read for classes, I feel a great gulf opening up between what I am seeking and the knowledge that is sought by others. I often feel like an utter fool when I sit in discussions about the brain and our perceptual systems, I cannot follow metaphysical discussions any further than their metaphors, and I have never yet grasped the logical underpinnings of much of the philosophy that is so important. What I am seeking, like Montaigne and so many others is a way of living that is fulfilling and good and as true as living might be.

Montaigne says in 'Of Solitude' that The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to ourselves. -- this goes beyond 'Know thyself' and admonitions to practice virtue. It is something greater and more thorough.

In the same essay he advocates 'the backshop' -- so similar to Woolf's 'Room of One's Own' -- a place wholly one's own, where one might be entirely free,

wherein to establish our true liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. In this we must hold our ordinary conversation with ourselves, and so privately that no outside relationship or communication may find a place there [...].

He goes on, interestingly and with a sinister undertone, but to stop for a moment -- is this 'backshop' not what so many of us have lost? It is a luxury for sure, one for those who have time and money to spare. But those of us who do, have we not foregone that luxury for our other 'luxuries' -- the television, the internet, the pasttimes of a culture fatted on observing itself go through the gestures of living? I am as guilty as the next, spending my largesse (time) on activities that disappear from my mind the moment I turn my attention. I often scold myself for not readin as I ought, for not exploring some new writer or thinker, and those criticisms are fair enough.

But I also begin to recognize that I approach reading in a new way now. No longer do I search for the meaning or explanation of things. No longer to I read to glut myself or to distract myself or to cram the crannies of my mind with quotations and observations. When I read it is to sink in somewhere -- to revel in the joy that is the word, the language, straining itself to express and to 'retrieve from formlessness' some experience of oneself or the world. And I have replaced the time I spent reading with time spent on something I have overlooked for far too long -- myself.

What do I mean? Here is Montaigne again on the 'backshop' as a foil to my own view:

There to talk and to laugh as if without a wife, without children, without followers and without servants; to the end that, when the occasion comes for us to lose them, it may be no new thing to be without them. We have a soul that can be turned upon itself; it can be its own company; it has the means to attack and to defend, to receive and to give; let us not fear that in this solitude we shall stagnate in tedious idleness, "In solitude to be to thyself a throng." Virtue, says Antisthenes, is content with itself, without rules, without words, without deeds.

Echoes of Rousseau and so many others -- attach your heart to imperishable beauty and never to something that can be taken from you. Live amongst others as is necessary, but preserve for yourself the distance of the Sage strving always to overcome and move beyond. This model enchanted me for so long -- the model of perfectibility, of elevation. But it does not square with the other tenets -- at least not for me. How can I know myself if it is from one, flawed point of view only? How can I live fully and learn to choose and act with nobility and virtue if I limit myself to a secure backshop where the only disturbances are those manufactured turbulances of the spirit?

Montaigne agrees with Pliny that one ought to study oneself -- to examine oneself closely -- but to do this one must not live apart from others, but live with them and amongst them. I am beginning to do this work (work that I've long known I must do). To live ethically one cannot live alone -- to be virtuous one cannot persist in solitude and one cannot feign the gestures of friendship and companionship while existing only in the backshop. Use the backshop to learn of yourself and to stretch your mind and your abilities, but do not grow comfortable there. Do not tell soothing half-truths about solitude and perfection -- do not jealously guard the moments of liberty one finds in solitude. Rather, fuse those moments together -- use those lessons -- become a person that acts in concert with others and yet preserves a core of vitality and authenticity born from those long excursions in self-study.

To borrow from Montaigne: This is not my teaching, it is my study; and it is not a lesson for others, but for me.

Art and Illusion

2009-06-19T02:45:00.003-04:00

[Piranesi - Carceri Invenzione]

It might be said, therefore, that the very process of perception is based on the same rhythm that we found governing the process of representation: the rhythm of schema and correction. It is a rhythm which presupposes constant activity on our part in making guesses and modifying them in the light of our experience. Wherever this test meets with an obstacle, we abandon the guess and try again, much in the way we proceed in reading such complex pictures as Piranesi's Carceri.

In this emphasis on elimination of false guesses, on trial and error in all acquisition of knowledge "from the amoeba to Einstein," I am following K.R. Popper. It would be tempting to take up the problems of Gestalt psychology from this angle, for Popper emphasizes that the assumption of regularity is of utmost biological value. A world in which all our experiences were constantly belied would be a lethal world. Now in looking for regularities, for a framework or schema on which we can at least provisionally rely (though we may have to modify it for ever), the only possible strategy is to proceed from simple assumptions. Popper has shown that paradoxically this is not due to the fact that a simple assumption is more probably right but because it is most easily refuted and modified. [...]

Without some initial system, without a first guess to which we can stick unless it is disproved, we could indeed make no "sense" of the milliards of ambiguous stimuli that reach us from our environment. In order to learn, we must make mistakes, and the most fruitful mistake which nature could have implanted in us would be the assumption of even greater simplicities than we are likely to meet with in this bewildering world of ours. Whatever the fate of the Gestalt school may be in the field of neurology, it may still prove logically right in insisting that the simplicity hypothesis cannot be learned. It is, indeed, the only condition under which we could learn at all. To probe a hole we first use a straight stick to see how far it takes us. To probe the visual world we use the assumption that things are simple until they prove to be otherwise.

--Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion

Another summer project -- this wonderful book and trying to figure out what can be said of the importance of representations (illusory, veridical, and all the steps in between) to our perception of the world. Can there be a Gibsonian account of this and do I agree with it?

On Avicenna

2009-06-19T02:09:00.005-04:00

[Yamamoto]

The period of study that culminated in his seeing the point of metaphysics completed Ibn Sina's [Avicenna's] education, at least the phase that was predominantly receptive and retentive rather than actively productive and synthetic. He was eighteen. His knowledge, he tells us, would mature, even as his memory grew less elastic in adulthood; but, he insists, he made no really new departure beyond this date. This sounds like a boast that he had nothing more to learn and may shock our sense of modesty or propriety, or seem hyperbolic in relation to our ideals of a lifetime of learning. But what Ibn Sina actually said (although consistently mistranslated), was simply this: "My memory for what I understood was keener then, but the understanding is riper now. Yet it is the same, not reconstructed or reborn in the [...] least." What he meant was that the framework of his understanding was firm and his central beliefs would not alter radically as he matured.

--Lenn E. Goodman, Avicenna, 1992 [17]

Avicenna was 18 when he finally understood Aristotle's Metaphysics -- he had read it so many times that he had it almost by heart. But it was after reading al-Farabi's book On the Objects of Metaphysics, that he began to understand. He was able to step outside the framework of theology and understand Aristotle's questions as they were for Aristotle. Questions about what it is for something to be (ti en einai), about being-at-work (energeia), about being-at-work-staying-itself (entelecheia).

I have only just begun researching into his life and writings and already I am jotting down notes and understandings. I am hoping these notes will turn into some understanding of the metaphysical implications of Avicenna's theory of intentionality -- oof -- there is much work to be done.

Liberal Arts

2009-06-16T23:40:00.002-04:00

[Hammershoi]

From Montaigne's 'Of the Education of Children'

He will be told [...] what it is to know and what to be ignorant; what ought to be the end of study; what valor, temperance, and justice are; the difference between ambition and avarice, servitude and submission, license and liberty; by what token a man may know true and solid contentment; how far death, pain, and shame are to be feared, "How to avoid and how to endure each strain;" what springs move us, and the reason for so many different impulses in us. For, I think, the first lessons with which one should saturate his understanding ought to be those which regulate his habits and his common sense; that will teach him to know himself and how both to die well and to live well.

Among the liberal arts let us begin with that which makes us free. They all serve in some measure to the formation of our life and to the use made of life, as all other things in some sort do; but let us make choice of that which directly and professedly serves to that end.

Noted

2009-06-16T02:36:00.004-04:00

[Beardsley]

I have a few small projects in the works and finally taking some form -- so as a reminder to myself most of all, I plan to work through some thoughts on the following:

Sarah Scott's Millennium Hall -- in relation to Lucrezia Marinella's argument discussed earlier. I'm mostly just planning to work through the various character studies and tales of virtue rewarded and vice punished, but I also want to try and spell out an argument that rests upon an essentialist picture of men and women. Scott seems to argue that the essential vice of a woman is vanity -- a vice to which even the noblest and best-educated woman will be susceptible. The essential vice of man is passion for women/'love' -- though the evidence for this is more diffuse. But as such, women will be nobler than men because even in her essential vice a woman will harm only herself, whereas the man, in his essential vice will cause the destruction of others. Much to work through here.

I am assisting with some research this summer and the reading has begun to turn over some very fertile ground -- I hope to look closer at Marinella, and then Scott and her contemporaries. Rousseau will also be revisited.

I'll also hopefully continue some course work on issues in perception, tentatively branching out into aesthetic perception and/or issues in deception. I'll probably return to various articles from the most recent issues of Cabinet which are sticking in the back of my mind as relevant to these topics.

And finally, I've begun reading some selected essays by Montaigne and hope to share some excerpts here.

The generall & the particular

2009-06-06T00:28:00.002-04:00

From the new issue of Cabinet, the article 'Rain and Rainfall -- Great Britain -- Periodicity -- Periodicals' by Edward Eigen:

Here, at last, is the argument: "in his bare was," the historian "is so tied, not to what should be, but to what is, to the particular truth of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence." And the philosopher, for his part, in his "bare rule," gives the precept for what should be, without convincingly showing why it is so. The argument, such as it is, comes from Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesie (published 1595). [...] what made him a mantic poet of rainfall are his reflections on how to "coupleth the generall notion with the particular example," the philosopher's precept with the historian's example.

I always read and learn the loveliest things in this magazine.

Renaissance

2009-06-04T23:58:00.005-04:00

I've been trying to find a way in to a set of thoughts which keep recurring to me, so here is an effort --

I've spent the last three weeks in a strange state of longing -- there is the particular longing for the one who has left, but there is also a nostalgic longing, for a return to a different way of knowing. I have been writing imaginary letters, re-reading books from my childhood and fighting against the sort of learning I do here. In the books from my childhood all is simple and yet vastly complicated -- there are forces which are beyond our ken, working in the world and in individuals to change and create and eradicate. There are a set of lessons which arise again and again -- love is the strongest force in the world, creation is preferred above all, effort is always rewarded, self-knowledge is opposed to selfishness, the whole is much more than a sum of its parts, and so on. They are lessons which I believe in so strongly and so deeply that to realize how easily they are forgotten is painful.

I have forgotten these lessons -- lessons which will last long but require attention and engagement. But I am returning to them now, like Proust's undersea diver, feeling my way across symbols and representations which promise some sort of wonder-ful contentment.

But these lessons stand opposed to so much of the other lessons in my life. What do I mean? I do not know. It has something to do with Leibniz, the philosopher to whom I have been turning these days. It has something to do with his monads and his apperception and his God. It also has something to do with Cassirer and his philosophy and his history. It has something to do with Sophocles and Oedipus when he dies -- the lesson he has learned. It has something to do with little Meg Murray and Charles Wallace and Calvin O'Keefe in Madeleine L'Engle's wonderful books. It has something to do with persepective and perception -- points of view. It has something to do with God -- but not what most people mean by God, but rather some other sense which has always lurked inside of me -- believing not because of justification or evidence, but because to believe is to trust and to tend and to strive. It has something to do with understanding and wonder -- and less to do with knowing (though I can rarely tell the difference). It has something to do with the self -- the thing of which I know so little.

I grow weary of the 'philosophy' and the 'teaching' I do here. It breaks my spirit. Maybe I would like it better if it masqueraded under a different name -- but it is both too close and far too far from the philosophy and the teaching I have done elsewhere.

There are little lights though -- the light today when reading Koffka's strange Gestalt theories -- a hybrid of Whitehead and Leibniz. The light reading Spinoza last week and speaking of his creation -- learning what it was he had done, and how little it is understood. The light reading these small, simple books -- books about love and friendship and communication and understanding. The light that comes from thinking about a paper project -- a paper on perception and beauty that turns outward to understand the inward. But the greatest light comes from remembering to be strange and to be open and to be sensitive and to remember laughter and make-believe and finding voices and understanding in the places that others have forgotten to look.

Interlude

2009-06-01T19:41:00.004-04:00

[Redon - Evocation of Butterflies]

Apologies for the recent lack of posts -- I have been busy with classes and teaching, but mostly I've finally decided to read the Harry Potter series and have been, well, ensorcelled! Writing to come soon.

Three

2009-05-23T21:09:00.002-04:00

Current favorites:

A single word

2009-05-23T20:47:00.004-04:00

Bad Habits

One such is the need to ponder every living thing with which I am confronted. The slightest encounter arouses in me the most peculiar urge to think. [...] I am possibly a somewhat high-strung person, but I am also a precise one. I feel even the most trifling losses, in certain matters I am meticulously conscientious and only occasionally am I obliged, for better or worse, to command myself: Forget this! A single word can thrust me into the most monstrous and tempestuous confusion, and then I find myself utterly possessed by thoughts of this apparently minuscule and insignificant thing, while the present in all its glory has become incomprehensible to me. These moments constitute a bad habit.

This little letter -- for it is a letter that young Joseph Marti writes to himself and then discards into the wastebasket of the small, yet well-appointed technical office, located on-site at the Evening Star villa -- this little letter so sums up these lovely stories of Robert Walser's. This next passage does as well:

What swimming person, provided he is not about to drown, can help being in excellent spirits? It appeared to him as if the gay, warm, smooth surface of the lake were taking, vaulted shape. The water was simultaneously cool and tepid. Perhaps a faint breath of wind came whispering across it, or else a bird flew above past his head, high up in the air. Once he came close to a small boat; a single man was sitting in it, a fisherman peacefully fishing and rocking away his Sunday. What softness, what shimmering light. And with your naked, sensation-filled arm, you slice into this wet, clean benevolent element. With every stroke of your legs, you advance a bit further in this beautiful deep wetness. From below, you are buoyed up by warm and chilly currents. You plunge your head briefly beneath the water to irrigate the excitement in your breast, squeezing shut your mouth and eyes and breath, so as to feel this delightful sensation in your entire body.

Walser writes so easily, so effortlessly -- all is simple and yet strange -- all is poetic, verging on purple and yet never, ever falling on that side. There is so much celebration! so much silliness, so much beautiful longing and love for the world just as it is, seen through the eyes of a young man who is so self-aware, so reckless, so lovable.

The wine-dark ivy

2009-05-20T23:13:00.005-04:00

How many have read Oedipus Rex and not read Oedipus at Colonus?

In his first lines in Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus reveals the following fact:

Suffering and time,
Vast time, have been instructors in contentment,
Which kingliness teaches too.

This play is about will and fate; about struggle and acceptance; about character and nobility. Oedipus and Theseus -- both exiled, both governed by fate -- how are they different, how are they the same?

Oedipus will die with contentment -- this tragedy is about the end of action, about transitions and acceptance -- he has been pursued by fate for all his life -- the fate which forced his hand at every turn. Oedipus will die in the grove sacred to the Eumenides -- the gentle-hearted -- Oedipus will die in the grove sacred to the Furies -- the relentless:

Ladies whose eyes
Are terrible: Spirits: upon your sacred ground
I have first bent my knees in this new land;
Therefore be mindful of me and of Apollo,
For when he gave me oracles of evil,
He also spoke of this:

A resting place,
After long years, in the last country, where
I should find home among the sacred Furies:
That there I might round out my bitter life,
Conferring benefit on those who received me,
A curse on those who have driven me away.

Oedipus was given portents and signs to tell him of this day. The Fates guided him, 'with feathery influence' to this final place, and here he is -- in Athens. He has come to pass on a blessing to one who will receive it, one who gives the wanderer, the cursed shelter -- Theseus.

I come to give you something, and the gift
Is my own beaten self: no feast for the eyes;
Yet in me is a more lasting grace than beauty.

[...]

I shall disclose to you, O son of Aegeus,
What is appointed for you and for your city:
A thing that age will never wear away.
Presently now, without a soul to guide me,
I'll lead you to the place where I must die;
But you must never tell it to any man,
Not even the neighborhood in which it lies.
If you obey, this will count more for you
Than many shields and many neighbors' spears.
These things are mysteries, not to be explained;
But you will understand when you come there
Alone. Alone, because I cannot disclose it
To any of your men or to my children,
Much as I love and cherish them. But you
Keep it secret always, and when you come
To the end of life, then you must hand it on

[...]

For every nation that lives peaceably,
There will be many others to grow hard
And push their arrogance to extremes: the gods
Attend to these things slowly. But the attend
To those who put off God and turn to madness!
You have no mind for that, child of Aegeus;
Indeed, you know already all that I teach.

This image: the nation that pushes its arrogance to the extreme is equated with those people who ignore the will of God and instead turn to ‘the madness’ of a similar arrogance. This is what Oedipus has learned from his life -- from the curse of his own fate. He is a man who has been entirely manipulated by fate and the playing out of prophecy. However, the prophecies that governed the events of his life were sequential. He was not governed by one all-encompassing prophecy spoken at birth that he gradually fulfilled; his prophecies followed one another, each growing in horror and resulting in greater misery.

Perhaps the prophecies of Oedipus' life were not static -- perhaps there was elasticity in the dynamic nature of the prophecies -- perhaps Oedipus was never locked into one irrevocable path. Perhaps the events of Oedipus’ past -- the ones which originated at the hand of a mortal, the decision of Jocasta and Laius to kill their son in the hopes of circumventing the first prophecy, the decision of the Shepherd to spare the life of Oedipus, Oedipus’ relentless questions, and eventually his self-mutilation -- perhaps these events are examples of mortals putting off God in the ‘madness’ of arrogance.

If this is true, then it seems that somewhere along the way, the gods blessed Oedipus and gave him a secret to bestow upon the nation who gave him shelter. Does Oedipus’ grace originate in his final willingness to accept his fate, to surrender to the prophecies of the gods? He is now in the position of bestowing a great and potent secret upon Theseus, a secret which will allow Theseus and his heirs to protect the city of Athens. But why to Theseus?

Why is this mystical secret is being given to a nation that is governed by law, a nation that is ruled by a king who knows all that Oedipus can teach, a king that says, ‘I must not speak in ignorance.’ Theseus is already in possession of all qualities Oedipus has had to learn from tragedy, and Athens under the rule of Theseus seems to have no need of a mystical secret. Even the protection against Thebes seems inconsequential as we learn within the play that Polyneices is leading seven companies of men to a battle against Thebes that will surely result in some devastation. If the secret is not useful to Athens, then is it merely a way for Oedipus to finally fulfill the role of oracle, and in that fulfillment, to disappear at his death like one who has been blessed by the gods? What does it mean that Oedipus has a secret to give, and why does he give his secret to Theseus and Athens?

To transform the world

2009-05-20T20:17:00.006-04:00

[Gabriele Beveridge]

'Knowledge can never transform the world,' I blurted out, skirting along the very edge of confession. 'What transforms the world is action. There's nothing else.'

[...]

'There you go!' he said. 'Action, you say. But don't you see that the beauty of this world, which means so much to you, craves sleep and that in order to sleep it must be protected by knowledge? You remember that story of 'Nansen Kills a Kitten' which I told you about once. The cat in that story was incomparably beautiful. The reason that the priests from the two halls of the temple quarreled about the cat was that they both wanted to protect the kitten, to look after it, to let it sleep snugly, within their own particular cloaks of knowledge. Now Father Nansen was a man of action, so he went and killed the kitten with his sickle and had done with it. But when Choshu came along later, he removed his shoes and put them on his head.

What Choshu wanted to say was this. He was fully aware that beauty is a thing which must sleep and which, in sleeping, must be protected by knowledge. But there is no individual knowledge, a particular knowledge belonging to one special person or group. Knowledge is the sea of humanity, the field of humanity, the general condition of human existence. I think that is what he wanted to say.

Now you want to play the role of Choshu, don't you? Well, beauty -- beauty that you love so much -- is an illusion of the 'other way to bear life' which you mentioned. One could say in fact there is no such thing as beauty. What makes the illusion so strong, what imparts it with such a power of reality, is precisely knowledge. From the point of view of knowledge, beauty is never a consolation. It may be a woman, it may be one's wife, but it is never a consolation. Yet from the marriage between this beautiful thing which is never a consolation, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other, something is born. It is as evanescent as a bubble and utterly hopeless. Yet something is born. That something is what people call art.'

-- From Yukio Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.

Invention

2009-05-08T00:50:00.005-04:00

Live and invent. I have tried. I must have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is live. No matter. I have tried. While within me the wild beast of earnestness padded up and down, roaring, ravening, rending. I have done that. And all alone, well hidden, played the clown, all alone, hour after hour, motionless, often standing, spellbound, groaning.

Beckett -- Malone Dies

It's very silly really -- this continued fixation -- what would it feel like -- what would it be like --

I ask these questions of art -- writing especially, because it's the only medium which seems within my reach -- but these questions can be asked of music, of painting, of making something, anything.

But I wonder also if the greatest invention is the self. How do I mean this? There are tropes -- we don masks, play roles, assume characters -- this is the work of an individual, one in a society, one who is surrounded by standards and seeks some way of developing. But this all seems like the description of some process of contrivance. It also describes a process far more concrete than that which we experience.

What is the self? Is it some coral reef-like structure? Is it like water seeping into sand, bleeding out and over barriers? Is it a core of darkness -- a wedge of light coruscating or wrapped in filaments? Is it a globe held delicately and safeguarded? Is it a nothing? Is it rather a process -- the process of invention or retelling or recollecting? A process of sense-making and story-telling?

Is it good to do this work -- the work of engaging with the self, of pretending that it is something, and somewhere? If so, why is it good? How does it help? Why is it a help? If it is not good -- a harm or at least an obstacle, why is that so?

In The Ravishing of Lol Stein, by Marguerite Duras, everyone invents. The narrator certainly does, he tells us about it. Lol also invents, and John Bedford does, inventing his role with regard to his wife -- Tatiana Karl does -- they all invent. Lol lives a life which she must invent after her own is interrupted. She is a young woman who is living as fully as could be imagined, or so we are told -- she is a dancer, and dancers live with body and mind united. But she is interrupted, arrested from living -- she sees her lover love another, and in that seeing she ceases to be herself -- she ceases. And from that point on she invents. They call this madness. Duras calls Lol 'her little madwoman' in Practicalities.

In Hiroshima, Mon Amour there is also invention. How does it work here? There is something which is enormous, unfathomable -- Hiroshima. There is also the Frenchwoman's love in Nevers. She is also a young girl, living and loving, arrested by the murder, the humiliation, the rejection. She is also mad, mad because of a lover and a loss. She becomes an actress and invents. And Hiroshima? It is a madness which is beyond understanding. It is death and madness. It dies, and then reinvents itself. There is the New Hiroshima Hotel. The new city does not sleep. It watches always. They make a movie to tell of Hiroshima -- they invent it anew. Both events are beyond understanding -- both surpass and overwhelm and yet seem to beg for interpretation and understanding.

The Frenchwoman tries to understand Hiroshima. She believes she does. She does not.

The Japanese man tries to understand Nevers. He believes he does. He does not.

Does the Frenchwoman tell the truth about Nevers, about her lover and her madness? Does it matter whether she invents?

In Lol Stein, the narrator tells us of his lies, his inventions. He gives us his opinion -- tells us how he thinks it is. Does he invent Lol's madness? Does it exist before its invention? Does he invent love? The love between Michael Richardson and Lol, and then between Michael Richardson and Anne-Marie Stretter, then between Tatiana Karl and Jack Hold, then Jack Hold and Lol, and so on.

Does it matter how the invention is done? I go beyond myself now, but what if I were to tell a tale of fabrication -- complete fiction? What if, like Bernard in The Waves, I made Percival into a great knight, riding against death -- what if I inflated his stumbling horse into a pure charger, made his death not a twisted back but an elemental annihilation? What if I reported the facts, straight as they are, no embellishment, no filigree?

It comes down to effort -- for Beckett at least. 'Live' is not the right word; nor is 'invent.' It is trying which matters, whatever that is.

Spun

2009-04-26T15:15:00.004-04:00

[miso via my love for you is a stampede of horses]

On writing, Duras says that it is not translation, nor transition, nor passing from one state to another --

It's a matter of deciphering something already there, something you've already done in the sleep of your life, in its organic rumination, unbeknown to you.

Proust says the same thing --

As for the inner book of unknown symbols (symbols carved in relief they might have been, which my attention, as it explored my unconscious, groped for and stumbled against and followed the contours of, like a diver exploring the ocean-bed), if I tried to read them no one could help me with any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work for us, or even collaborate with us. How many for this reason turn aside from writing!

This deciphering -- it must begin from a place of desire -- wanting to understand or to communicate the experience (to oneself or to another). Also some recognition of the thing experienced as worthy of recognition and communication.

I wonder about these past months of mine -- when I have learned to become so wary and skeptical of ideas. It becomes harder and harder to take the risk -- to do the sleepwalking that Pursewarden spoke of to Clea in Durrell's book -- no willingness to commit to a set of unknown symbols and spell them out. Or rather to commit only so far as to hover lightly over something unseen and unspoken. That's what this web-writing does, it allows for lightness and frivolity and a way of being cavalier. It's good for that, but it encourages the lightness too much -- allows me to stay away from committing to something - from seizing upon something worth deciphering and believing in it -- taking it up and seeing how I might unravel the filaments and spin them to their lengths.

Essayer

2009-04-26T15:04:00.004-04:00

[Deth P. Sun - via My Love For You is a Stampede of Horses]

In this sort-of-a-book which isn't really a book at all I'd have liked to talk about this and that, as one does all the time on an ordinary day just like any other. To drive along the motorway of the word, slowing down or stopping as I felt inclined, for no particular reason. But it's impossible -- you can't get away from the road itself and the way it's going; you can't not go anywhere; you can't just talk without starting out from a particular point of knowledge or ignorance, and arrive somewhere at random amid the welter of other words. You can't simultaneously know and not know. And so this book, which I'd have liked to resemble a motorway going in all directions at once, will merely be a book that tries to go everywhere but goes to just one place at a time; which turns back and sets out again the same as everyone else, the same as every other book. The only alternative is to say nothing. But that can't be written down.

Marguerite Duras -- Practicalities

Ineffable

2009-04-18T01:30:00.001-04:00

[mine]

Three more days of work, then three days of vacation, then a return to writing and reading as I please, if however temporarily. Hope spring is as beautiful for you as it is for me right now!

Forever

2009-04-16T03:46:00.001-04:00

This drop of frozen mud

2009-04-14T02:53:00.005-04:00

When I first read Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson I had not yet read the book from which Wilson derived his title -- Axel by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. I finished this book today -- a welcome respite from the logic-studying and paper-writing and marking that have consumed me and will continue to consume me for another week or so.

I had forgotten how resonant some part of me is to the symbolic, mystical, self-abnegating story. Axel is a story about purification -- about renunciation and temptation -- it is about nobility, about living and studying and desiring. But it ends in the ultimate leap of faith -- the renunciation of earthly life for the Ultimate, the Infinite, that which must exist beyond.

Axel and Sara meet in the family crypt, caskets and barrels of hidden gold flowing about their feet, jewels of beauty and rarity dazzling the cold marble walls of their holy meeting place. They love, they are sublime, mystical lovers. And they renounce.

AXEL, in an undertone, thoughtful, and as if to himself. A god no doubt envies me now, for I-- I can die.

SARA. Axel, Axel, are divine thoughts already chasing me from your mind? ... Come, here is the earth! Come and live!

AXEL, cold, smiling, and clearly punctuating his words. Live? No. Our existence is full -- and its cup is running over! What hourglass could count the hours of this night! The future? ... Sara, believe what I say: we have just consumed the future. All the realities, what would they be tomorrow, compared with the mirages we have just lived? Why follow the example of cowardly mortals, our former brethren, and barter this golden drachma with its effigy of the dream -- obol of the Styx -- which sparkles in our triumphal hands?

The quality of our hope no longer allows us the earth. What can we ask of this wretched star, where our melancholy lingers on, save pale reflections of such moments? The earth you say? But what has it ever accomplished, that drop of frozen mud, whose Time is never more than a lie up in the heavens? It is the earth, don't you see, that has become the Illusion! Admit Sara, that in our strange hearts we have destroyed the love of life -- and it is indeed in REALITY that we ourselves have become our souls! To agree to live after that would be but a sacrilege against ourselves. Live? Our servants will do that for us [...] the only fever of which we must, in fact, be cured of is that of existing.

The beautiful ideal of renunciation. There are many obvious glimmers of Platonism throughout -- the world is called a dim reflection of the True, the Real; Axel is entreated by his teacher, Master Janus, to listen to the calls of the god he bears within.

Axel goes on --

AXEL. You see the external world through your soul: it dazzles you! yet it can never give us one single hour that would compare, in intensity of life, with one second of the hours we have just known. The true, absolute, perfect fulfillment is the inner moment we have lived, one with the other, in the funereal splendor of this vault. We have just experienced the ideal moment: it is now irrevocable, whatever name you give it! To try and relive it, by shaping, each day, in its image, the ever disappointing dust of outward appearances, would merely mean taking the risk of perverting it, diminishing its divine impression, annihilating it in what is purest within ourselves. Beware of not knowing how to die while there is still time.

It is obvious why this book would have been so fundamental to the Symbolists. But what lies hidden just slightly deeper is this notion of renunciation as it was taken up by artists like Rimbaud -- or perhaps that attribution is wrong. Perhaps this myth of renouncing -- renouncing after having secured the most transcendent, momentous achievement -- renouncing in order to step away from the immutable, the irrevocable -- perhaps this is a myth that is attributed to artists when no other explanation could suffice to make clear why they have stepped away.

I wrote about Rimbaud previously -- in response to Wilson's characterization --

I have only ever known the Illuminations and the letters they excerpt -- I've only known his writing -- I knew nothing of his life and his history. Wilson seems to think he was the ultimate -- the man of letters who turned from the old ways, who invented new ways, brilliantly, violently, and then abandoned literature -- threw it to the ground and trampled it -- the man of letters become the man of action. He left the world of intellect and imagination -- the world represented by Valery's M. Teste, Huysman's des Esseintes, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Axel. No more mysticism, no more dreams, visions -- no more obfuscation. Down that path lie dragons -- the dragons of disillusionment, renunciation, resignation. No joy to be found on this cold, barren earth. No hope to be found in society.

Wilson doesn't see Rimbaud as a sort of Axel, renouncing the dreams of art in order to capture them forever -- like jewels of amber -- he sees Rimbaud as the anti-Axel -- as rejecting the incense-ridden dreams of disillusionment, melancholy and the ideal death -- and choosing instead the vibrant life of the non-artist -- the tradesman who lives in a full and admirable way. Wilson goes too far though -- the opposite Ideal -- the myth of the artist-turned-simple-man.

I wrote before -- writing which, upon return, is very important to me --

I feel a vague rhetoric underlying this assessment -- the same sort as I found when studying the monographs and histories of Gauguin -- it's too facile to laud this sort of life. The life that searches for originality -- primitive and primal -- native. The search for humanity in its rawest state. Perhaps I can't help but see this incorrectly, as wrongheaded appropriation -- the worst sort of insidious colonialism. Wilson does qualify these statements and ideals for what they are, but nevertheless, they were pervasive. The 'life of action' - also a problematic phrase. Why is action and life equated with destruction and self-annihilation? Why is it equated with rejection, violence, even a masculine sort of triumph. Why not laud the lives of those who have balanced things? Those who have stood, feet planted squarely in two kingdoms? It seems there is an immediate assumption that to live in grayscale is somehow less than the life in black & white. Wilson creates an opposition throughout this -- he places the mystics -- Yeats' 'A Vision,' Valery's M. Teste, Proust's invalid, Joyce's sleeping man -- he places these mystics, these minds in opposition to action, rigor, boldness. Axel, the character in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's story, opposed with Rimbaud -- rejection vs. renunciation.

That's the problem though, the same problem I have with Wilson's sentence of the long passage -- "if actions can be compared with literary writings." Can they be? To what end and with what success? With what intention? Why separate them at all? They seem to be such separations -- the sorts of separations you can only make from the outside.

That's the problem of thinking of things as static -- a problem I found with Wilson, surprising for someone so clearly enamored of Bergsonian and Whiteheadian metaphysics. He made it clear that it was important to attempt what Proust attempted -- to see one subject from every view -- to see it through its effects and influences and in observing, to understand. That was a very good section -- and a very interesting application of Whiteheadian process to literature. Examine the connections, elucidate the influences, see the process behind the snapshot. But in the end, works of literature are seen as almost-theres -- as not-quite-life. He expects literature to discover its own 'theory of everything,' wondering whether he and his readers weren't watching the beginning of a new world order in literature and the arts. He wants to distill some pure stream of simplicity from the complexity and chaos which resulted after the 'false dualisms' of classic arts had crumbled.

There are so many problems with trying to think about art, creation, writing. One doesn't just think about these things -- one writes about the problems of writing, one writes about the problems of having written. I cannot understand how to articulate the problem of the multitude in a single person: I think of an individual, an artist, more specifically, a writer. I think of her with her family -- then washing her hair -- then at the office, -- then in bed with a lover -- then sharing a glass of wine in a crowded bar -- finally, working on a story. If you were that person, which part would you say mattered most? Which part would be easiest to describe?

I can't describe my mind in repose. The thoughts flash too quick for transcription. The best ones are always lost. Sometimes I'm successful -- a string of six little fishes pulled from the roiling lake. If I write though, that remains. It persists for some time at least -- it becomes something of its own. And my writing is little writing, it's sampler writing -- meant for a small clutch of eyes. What about the big writing? What if it's read recklessly, appropriated, interpreted, translated, adored, displayed, misunderstood? We want to make things simple -- that's what analysis is about. It's why we compare, it's why we question. We want to simplify and in so doing, to understand. Sometimes we go further -- we want to understand in order to respond. That's fine, but it's a false attempt.

There is nothing simple about reading. Nothing simple about writing. Nothing simple about art. Sometimes I wonder if anything is simple -- a statistical anomaly -- I read that somewhere -- simplicity is a statistical anomaly. But see, here I'm writing about simplicity -- that makes it automatically complicated. But there are moments -- perhaps falsely constructed by a brain that craves simplicity, perhaps not -- there are moments when everything flattens out, reduces to a single point. Yesterday I fell asleep in the grass -- I fell asleep with my hand on our cat and when she miaowed I was startled awake. For a moment, lying eye-level to a clover flower, things felt simple. This doesn't happen often -- and I think it's best that way.

'Sensitive Knowing'

2009-04-05T19:15:00.004-04:00

If we look at things squarely the only thing left from the greatest philosophical enterprises is a pitiful aphoristic aftertaste, he said, no matter what the philosophy, no matter what the philosopher, everything falls to bits when we set to work with all our faculties and that means with all our mental instruments, he said, I thought.

Bernhard -- The Loser

I've been wondering a lot about this 'philosophy' I'm doing -- trying to see what it is about it which bothers me so much -- which causes my guard to raise, puts me on my defensive. And yesterday, when reading Bernhard, I thought about how these philosophers now are nothing of the sort -- they speak so little of real learning -- of that feeling of something having awoken within -- or moved -- the turning round of the mind from darkness into light. There is something so much more important about the conversation -- the conversation between individual and idea, between individual and text, between individual and individual. Philosophy is done in conversation -- in the process of working upon something -- of trying out a new line of thought, of struggling with a new problem. It is not this new sort of sophistic science which employs words calculated to affect and then promises to pry them open so that we can all see how they work. This new philosophy does not understand it eviscerates -- it isn't analysis it's evisceration -- it leaves empty husks behind -- the path of the woodworm -- chewing its way through everything and leaving only emptiness behind.

Philosophy is at its worst when it begins to write. I suppose this opinion could be a question of temperament -- that's fine -- I have the sort of temperament which prevents me from seeing much of contemporary analytic philosophy as philosophy at all. I have a temperament which disposes me to want something else -- to want philosophy to be some enduring endeavor, one which grapples with problems, both by battle and by embrace -- problems which change their face and form, like Proteus grasped too tightly. I want philosophy to be some sort of endeavor which moves -- which motivates and guides and develops. Something which cannot be a profession. Something which cannot be donned like a mantle and cap.

These thoughts returned to me today as I read through an interview of Jill Marsden by Christopher Branson sent by a friend (thank you Robert!). I was particularly struck by the exchange below. This notion of 'sensitive knowing' joined with the notion of philosophy as narrative -- as a likely story crafted to combat against forgetting -- these are what speak to me -- they are what seem right to me, they are lifelong endeavors, they could do the work of motivating and moving.

CB: I’d like to ask you about the relationship between the philosopher and art, as it is developed in your thought. I think, overall, what I most appreciated in your book was the idea of ‘affective’ knowing. If we are to take the death of God seriously—as our unbelief in forms of identity—then we have to pursue philosophy as sensitive knowing, i.e. as aesthetics, in the broadest sense. I completely agree with you that it is incorrect to pigeonhole aesthetics as the study of art. In fact, it makes it seem altogether absurd that aesthetics, in that sense, should be one of the central four philosophical disciplines, along with metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. It makes the whole enterprise seem trifling by comparison. You have the questions of ‘what is it?’, ‘how do I know it?’, ‘how should I live?’, and then we tag the question of art on at the end. ‘What is beautiful?’ To most ears this sounds like a flighty little trifle by comparison, a superfluous luxury. Such a view of aesthetics shows precisely that we have forgotten its original significance. But it does strike me that, if we are to pursue philosophy in the way you are proposing, it presupposes that the philosopher has an aesthetic sensibility, that he is sympathetic to the types of experiences you are thinking from and about. Now, we all have this to some extent: we all respond to music, for example, but then music is less problematic. It’s my intuition, however, that the majority of our systems of education, particularly philosophical and scientific training, actually inhibit the aesthetic sensibility, insofar as these processes alienate us from the act of seeing. We have a habit of over-intellectualising, wishing to determine a work’s ultimate “meaning,” or wishing to interpret its signs as simple referents of thought. And yet what we are faced with is not a collection of ideas, not even a text, but a piece of art, a composed form. In such cases, we are intellectualising something insofar as we are viewing it under the form of the same, seeking to find in it the concepts that we had already brought with us. The possibility for seeing the new, of the sensation of ecstasy, is thereby minimised. I was wondering if you could talk about your own relationship to art in this context, of the relation between art, philosophy and aesthetic sensibility.
JM: I suppose the idea of rapture has romantic overtones and I’m aware that to speak about aesthetics in terms of rapture seems to focus on a notion of pleasure which is a very old, eighteenth century notion. For me, by contrast, what was important was to really think what it means when you describe aesthetics as a science of sensitive knowing. That gives us a definition of aesthetics, and I liked what that definition suggested for philosophy. It’s too easy to equate thinking with consciousness and mentality, but if you pursue a Freudian line of enquiry, then very quickly you have to relinquish that prejudice and recognise that thought is already ‘of’ the body. If philosophy could abide with that notion, then ethics, epistemology and metaphysics would look quite different. So, for me, it was an attempt to start from a position which doesn’t assume that thinking is the soul’s silent dialogue with itself. I think that Nietzsche is exploring something like that in the ‘physiology of art.’ Art then would be one of the opportunities in which you might talk about that sensitive knowing, and it might be one of the vehicles for encountering that, but, interestingly, in Nietzsche it’s in other places that an aesthetic sensibility might prove more subtle and telling. I do have interests in certain artists, usually the tormented ones [laughs], and that’s not ancillary, but it isn’t imperative for me that aesthetics is thought about in relation to art. I suppose that there are states, and Nietzsche talks about these states, which inspire a kind of ecstasy, because they communicate something of the ecstasy of the creator of the artwork. I suppose this touches upon the question of what you are entering into contact with, when you encounter something which you want to say moves you—and we do use this language of transport, because something is happening. Again, it’s not so far away from Kant, when Kant is talking about the genius not knowing what he has produced—for obvious reasons, it can’t be rehearsed: Kant can’t have a genius knowing in advance what he is doing. So there is this illegibility of an artwork, which, at the same time, is communicated. It’s something which never seems to arrive within the circuit of cognition, it seems to add relatively little to cognition, and yet something happens, something is transmitted. Nietzsche is fascinated, particularly in the notebooks, when he’s talking about that element of perception, things which we are sensing all of the time, but of which we are unaware.

Earth

2009-04-04T01:32:00.004-04:00

[Anna Atkins - Ocean Flowers via Woolgathersome]

A rap on the skull, I think -- is that what it would take? It seems so. I returned today to Bernhard -- The Loser, and also to my excerpts and notes on Beckett.

What was it I wanted to share? On what it is like to collapse --

perhaps the far unchanging noise the earth makes and which other noises cover, but not for long. For they do not account for that noise you hear when you really listen, when all seems hushed. And there was another noise, that of my life become the life of this garden as it rode the earth of deeps and wildernesses. Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be. Then I was no longer that sealed jar to which I owed my being so well preserved, but a wall gave way and I filled with roots and tame stems for example, stakes long since dead and ready for burning, the recess of night and the imminence of dawn, and then the labour of the planet rolling eager into winter, winter would rid it of these contemptible scars.

And so what do I think of? A veritable flood of thoughts -- I think of spring and the outpouring mostly. When I was reading this morning and I felt my world slide away and this other created world of words that don't quite hang together (it's Bernhard after all) and words and people that are familiar and yet strange and death appears and then disappears and the same for art and all those repetitive phrases guaranteed to give the effect of anaesthesia -- an anodyne for the feverish mind, but one which has but a short-lived effect and will soon wear off and does. For when it wears off I realize what is missing and then I feel the throat-tightening feeling of having just now felt a thirst and lack that had been haunting me for too long.

And then there is Beckett's phrase above -- the self as a sealed jar -- or maybe it is that the sense of existing is a sense of being insulated and isolated -- preserved -- hermetically sealed and kept locked up in a pantry somewhere. And that that jar-feeling can give way to the feeling of a wall knocking down, crumbling into mold and dust and earth and mortar and old roots and new worms and rusting metal and growing seeds and a pile of that which lies forgotten in basements and cellars and pits. But the wall-crumbling also seems to be something else, I don't know what, but perhaps a growth of sorts, tilling or turning.

And Beckett also writes that when you are in the jar you have to ask yourself questions --

as for example whether you still are, and if no when it stopped, and if yes, how long it will still go on, anything at all to keep you from losing the thread of the dream. For my part I willingly asked myself questions, one after the other, just for the sake of looking at them. No, not willingly, wisely, so that I might believe I was still there. I called that thinking. I thought almost without stopping, I did not dare stop. Perhaps that was the cause of my innocence.

I think almost without stopping, I dare not stop. Perhaps this is the cause of my innocence.

Longing

2009-03-30T21:42:00.003-04:00

Still swamped -- until some semblance of freedom returns, some Musil [from notes on 'the novel' in his diary]:

And Robert was exceedingly arrogant. When, yet again, he had read a book without getting anything from it, indeed even when he seemed fated never to find the right way, he was ashamed to confess this to a comrade.

Often he came home, firmly determined to give up reading altogether rather than to read the kind of books he studied up till then -- when he went into his room he was seized by a sense of sadness and pointlessness and, as if to rescue himself, he forced himself down on the chair at his desk to work at his books in the place where he sat as a child.

Interlude

2009-03-22T15:59:00.003-04:00

[van der Weyden - Portrait of a Lady]

I'm continuing on in my series of posts on Women, Beauty and Love -- many of these thoughts have been born in the interstices of conversations, in moments between steps on my walk home, in moments in the darkness of night, trying to fall asleep and yet also trying, for the first time to see this mess I've discovered -- a mess which perpetuates the worst sort of dualism between mind and body, a mess which perpetuates 'battles' of the sexes and confusion both in relationships and in identities, a mess which makes people long to consume abstract things because they cannot find the nourishment they actually lack, a mess which turns external 'controllable' uncontrollables into a currency by which value is determined and traded for -- a mess I cannot help but see all around me.

I'm going to first look at a way of understanding the dangers of the longevity of the classical myths of beauty and love -- a brief foray into theories of identity-formation as a process in narrative-formation and role-creation -- then on to the contemporary Beauty Myth and its persistence, and finally where we might go from here. I'm not sure when these installments will come out, but that's what to expect.

On Women, Beauty and Love -- again; part 4

2009-03-18T02:10:00.005-04:00

[Botticelli -- detail from The Birth of Venus]

Of a decorative value ...

Lucrezia Marinella's polemic, The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men has a particular place and function in the history of feminist literature -- one which I will largely be ignoring. A few comments before the ignoring begins -- Marinella was responding to the publication of Giuseppe Passi's 1599 polemic, The Defects of Women. Both were part of the centuries long debate now known as the 'Querelle des Femmes' -- a debate which attempted to 'decide' what a woman was, what she was for, whether she was even of the same species as men. Marinella begins by systematically addressing and overturning Passi's attack, using the same authors (poets, philosophers, and church fathers) to prove opposing points. Taken in its historical context, Marinella's work is of the utmost importance and interest. Marinella provides an important opposing voice.

But her argument has dangerous implications -- and that is what I will be focusing on.

Marinella appropriates a Platonic notion of Love -- Love is a motivating force that works upon the Lover who becomes inflamed by his Beloved. Marinella makes significant additions to this basic analogy. In her model, women are always the Beloved and men always the Lover, because women are already noble, by nature, and thus need no purification or elevation (which is what the force of love provides). Men must love women because men are lowly, rustic creatures that will never learn to stretch themselves toward the heavenly if not motivated by the love of a beautiful woman.

And that is the second important addition in Marinella's model -- Love loves only the beautiful, and all women are beautiful in her argument. Furthermore, all outward beauty is evidence of inward beauty, which is itself testimony to some divine grace.

Her argument runs as follows:

P1. Beauty is the mark of virtue
P2. Virtue indicates a greater degree of excellence and proximity to divinity
P3. If women are more beautiful than men, then they are more virtuous
P4. If women are more virtuous than men, then they are more excellent/divine
P5. Women are more beautiful than men
C1. Therefore, women are more excellent/divine than men

Marinella argues from a Platonic tradition that sees the Forms as the Ideas located in the mind of God. As such, anything that seems to express greater perfection ('beauty' being the obvious mark of perfection and excellence and divinity, etc), must necessarily express a greater degree of virtue and excellence. Marinella argues that it is obvious that,

the Idea of women is nobler than that of men. This can be seen by their beauty and goodness, which is known to everybody [...] Women's souls can, therefore, be nobler and more prized in their creation than men's [...] because the nobility of the soul can be judged from the excellence of the body -- which is ornamented with the same character and beauty as the soul, 'which such a body manifests in itself.' The greater nobility and worthiness of a woman's soul is shown by its delicacy, its complexion, and its temperate nature, as well as by its beauty, which is a grace or splendor proceeding from the soul as well as from the body.

So women are more beautiful. In fact, it is their beauty which gives them the claim to greater excellence -- are the problems yet obvious? Is an unbeautiful woman a contradiction? If not, what is the unbeautiful woman? If outward beauty is the necessary mark of inward beauty, anyone who does not exhibit outward beauty can be immediately dismissed as having no inward beauty. And what about this connection between beauty and the divine? How much trouble (and misery and hunger and pain and confusion, etc) has this identification of Beauty with Perfection caused? How much trouble has been caused by this reduction of a woman's value to her beauty?

But there are even more problems -- Marinella refigures the ladder of loving and knowing that Diotima had given to Socrates. A version of her model:

‘Woman’ is beautiful, and as beautiful, she is the only object for the loving/admiring gaze which is so pleasing to the gazer
Gaze on the beauty of body leads to the internal awareness of the beauty of the soul which has given form to the beautiful body
‘Inflamed by love’ and ‘avid’ for ‘more vivid beauty,’ the mind of the lover ascends to the love of celestial beauty and heavenly beauty. At this stage, the lover is comparing the celestial beauty to the earthly beauty
The lover contemplates angelic beauty
The lover finds rest in the contemplation of God, He who anchors the chain and is its ultimate end, the ultimate end of Love

And so woman is the catalyst for the ascension of the lowly, rustic, imperfect man from his depths in the swamp to the heights of devotional thought. But if Marinella wants to show that women are already more excellent, because they are already more beautiful (which is the mark of virtue and the divine), then what do women do? They don’t need elevation through learning, they don’t need to love, so do they just remain passive, turned quietly inward upon their thoughts of the divine? She says,

I wish to go further and show that men are obliged and forced to love women, and that women are not obliged to love them back, except merely from courtesy. I wish also to demonstrate that the beauty of women is the way by which men, who are moderate creatures, are able to raise themselves to the knowledge and contemplation of the divine essence.

And so women are beautiful -- they are in possession of some excellence already -- it is so evident! And as beautiful, detached and noble, women stand outside the activities of learning and self-improvement -- why would they engage in unnecessary toil? What to do with women then? Craft pedestals perhaps. The muse tradition tells us that we should use women -- use their closeness to the divine. Except that once God leaves the picture, woman is refigured as close not to the divine, but to madness -- close to the limits of reason. Hysterical, nymphomaniacal, inspiring and maddening. The muse tradition -- woman is now to be used for her beauty, for her dreams, for her sexuality, for her wild, untamed power -- used and transformed in fetishized objects, dismembered images. And the very notion of what it is to be a woman becomes so void, so contentless, so abstract that no person could possible inhabit that gender. How could an individual be that sort of woman? What on earth would that be like?

I wrote years ago in favor of the muse ideal -- I wanted to be that woman, though I had no way of knowing what that meant. I had (still have) internalized the value system which tells me that I am valuable insofar as I am beautiful. Everything else is an extra adornment and is worth more in light of the fact of my appearance. In Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, Osmond speaks of the intelligent and beautiful Isabel Archer --

His egotism, if egotism it was, had never taken the crude form of wishing for a dull wife; this lady’s intelligence was to be a silver plate, not an earthen one—a plate that he might heap up with ripe fruits, to which it would give a decorative value, so that conversation might become a sort of perpetual dessert. He found the silvery quality in perfection in Isabel; he could tap her imagination with his knuckle and make it ring.

Marinella's argument for the recognition of the virtues of women can be used to support the argument that women are, at best, for visual consumption. They are nothing for themselves. They have no right to demand activity, no reason to engage in any process of learning, no reason to seek out love or challenge. They have no reason to seek out an identity -- no reason to try and understand what it means to be an individual. What does young Jakob say in Walser's Jakob von Gunten?

But one thing I do know for certain: in later life I shall be a charming, utterly spherical zero.

And that's the notion of 'woman' that we get from this tradition. Look at it closely -- look at the notion of beauty, the notion of love -- what are they but dusty, sclerotic leftover myths that do nothing but perpetuate ridiculous ideals?

And so -- onward to The Beauty Myth!

On Women, Beauty and Love -- again; part 3

2009-03-17T23:37:00.005-04:00

[Bernini - detail from The Ecstasy of St. Theresa]

‘Do you want, then, to live happily and wisely? Attach your heart only to imperishable beauty.'

~Rousseau, Emile

So what does Diotima say?

Diotima begins her account of erôs with a mythic description of Erôs the spirit which serves as an insightful allegory of love. Erôs is the child of Poverty and Resource, conceived during the celebration of the birth of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, and he embodies his contradictory lineage as well as his love of beauty. Erôs is by nature the spirit of desire, he is the spirit who has his being from being in between wealth and poverty, immortality and mortality, wisdom and ignorance. Love is by nature an admixture of opposing qualities, and as such seems to be the manifestation of perpetually unsatisfied desire. Diotima makes this clear in her description of Love’s place between wisdom and ignorance,

Those who love wisdom fall in between those two extremes [the wise and the ignorant]. And Love is one of them, because he is in love with what is beautiful, and wisdom is extremely beautiful. It follows that Love must be a lover of wisdom and, as such, is in between being wise and being ignorant.

Since no one would ever desire that which they already possess, Love, as a lover of the beautiful and thus of wisdom, must fall somewhere in between wisdom and ignorance, understanding that he desires wisdom without ever being capable of attaining it. Diotima is here assuming the same thing that Aristophanes assumed, that love desires that which it lacks.

It is important to see that Diotima is trying to establish an argument for the most excellent sort of love -- this will, if it is to be coherent with the Platonic philosophy, be the sort of love which is closest to the divine, closest to the mind, furthest from the mortal, furthest from the body. Love must be able to approach the Good, which must be Beautiful in this philosophy.

Diotima describes the process of love as 'The love of some [person/thing/Form].' There is a Lover and there is the Beloved -- one is active, the other passive, and Love is the force which motivates the Lover to maintain the activity of Loving.

Diotima describes the process of love as the process of coming to more excellent knowledge of beauty, progressing from the love of beauty in particular instances to the love of Beauty-itself. The lover begins by loving all instances of material beauty, the beauty of bodies. He will then progress to the love of a single beautiful body, and in this love, realize that,

the beauty of any one body is brother to the beauty of any other and that if he is to pursue beauty of form he’d be very foolish not to think that the beauty of all bodies is one and the same.

The lover will continue to progress, coming to realize next that the beauty of minds is superior to the beauty of bodies, and then to an appreciation for the beauty of all activities, laws and kinds of knowledge. At this penultimate rung of the ladder,

The lover is turned to the great sea of beauty, and, gazing upon this, he gives birth to many gloriously beautiful ideas and theories, in unstinting love of wisdom, until, having grown and been strengthened there, he catches sight of such knowledge, and it is the knowledge of such beauty …The man ... who has beheld beautiful things in the right order and correctly, is now coming to the goal of Loving: all of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labors.

The lover can here gaze upon the goal of all his loving and learning, the form of Beauty-itself, which is imperishable, unchanging, and completely perfect in beauty. Beauty-itself doesn't come to be, it doesn't perish, it doesn't change. It is. And it is an Ideal -- it is intimately tied into Goodness and Virtue and thus the Beautiful is the object of Knowledge.

Diotima’s description of the process of love is the process of moving ever closer to contemplation of Beauty-itself. This contemplation is the most excellent form of love, and it is only attainable after a long and arduous development of proper loving and knowing. Diotima says that it is in this state of contemplating and loving that one should live their life. Love is the force that motivates understanding and gives birth to understanding and wisdom. Love is the desire for Beauty-itself, for something divine and virtuous, and thus love is the only force which can effectively catalyze the lowly mortal philosopher. A sort of Philosopher's Stone perhaps -- the only thing capable of transforming the mortal into the immortal.

But how is this a picture of something good? How does this allegory work? It works by identifying beauty with perfection; it works by identifying the beloved with the passive medium for some external process of purification and ascension; it works by identifying love as a force which motivates only in the presence of some lack, by identifying love as a force which seeks, when most excellent, to reach beyond the mortal to the immortal.

And so? These are lovely myths, no? They are powerful myths, no? Aristophanes tells us that lovers will complete one another. Diotima tells us that lovers reach beyond -- that they attach their hearts to imperishable beauty, in Rousseau's words. And just as Aristophanes' myth has been taken up by writers and artists and lovers, so too has Diotima's myth. And the dangers inherent in the original myth have been exacerbated in the consequent adaptations.

I turn to Lucrezia Marinella next (tomorrow) to show one very dangerous (if unintentional) consequence of this myth's power.

On Women, Beauty and Love -- again; part 2

2009-03-17T23:25:00.006-04:00

[Van Eyck - The Arnolfini Portrait]

I begin with The Symposium --

Of the seven speeches in The Symposium, the speeches of Aristophanes and Socrates/Diotima are the two which present an enduring, mythic and also dark picture of erôs -- Love. Both speeches describe love as the desire for something lacking, but only the account presented by Diotima seems to offer some hope for mortal men in search of wholeness and completion. That apparent hope unfortunately rests on a grand illusion which seems to itself give birth to some serious dangers -- what does Diotima's picture of love mean for our understanding of beauty? What does it mean for our understanding of love? How much does it assume?

Aristophanes presents a mythic account of erôs which is both fanciful and perceptive. According to Aristophanes, mortal beings were originally of three varieties, each variety being an amalgam of the genders as they are now known. These primitive humans were strong and defiant and, as such, were too much of a challenge to the gods’ power and rule. Zeus decided that these beings should be punished and decided to split them all down the middle. With one other dexterous anatomic correction, Zeus gave human beings the ability of interior reproduction, allowing for a simulation of the original fused state,

This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other. Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.

Aristophanes’ description is telling; love desires a fusion of parts, and will thus result in a perpetual pursuit of the missing part. The lover in this description is he who feels the pain of his wound and longs to have it healed; he longs for completion, and for a return to his original harmonious state.

For Aristophanes, love is the desire to be returned to the original state of wholeness and harmony. Lovers thus exist in one of two states, either the lover is searching for the beloved who will complete him, or the lover has found his beloved and is longing for a complete fusion. Aristophanes describes what it would be like for a person to meet his lost half,

And so, when a person meets the half that is his very own, whatever his orientation […] then something wonderful happens: the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment.

The lovers who are fortunate enough to find one another would feel such a strong sense of desire that if Hephaestus were to appear and offer to fuse them together, to make one out of two, they would accept his offer wholeheartedly. But as much as lovers may desire complete fusion, they will never achieve it; the gods divided the primitive human beings as a punishment, and no god would ever heal that wound. Aristophanes presents a bleak picture of love; the lover might never find his missing half, persisting in the misery of endless pursuit, or the lover may be fortunate enough to find his missing half, but be made miserable by the impossibility of any real return to wholeness. Aristophanic love is not a state of being, it is a continual struggle and pursuit which has varying degrees of misery and yearning,

‘Love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.

Love is not the name we have for a satisfied desire; it is the name of unsatisfied and continuing cravings, a fitting punishment from the gods.

It is from this mythic description of love that we derive our notions of Romantic love, soul mates, missing pieces, etc -- all of the happily-ever-afters come straight from this myth of completion. What those derivative stories ignore is the implicit failure of this attempt to regain that which was lost. They ignore the darkness -- ignore the subtle warning that no unity is possible and that to hope for unity is futile. Those derivative myths also assume that this unity is possible -- and that the unity entails some happiness -- entails some stasis. How much danger has this myth promoted?

There is another problem. At some point this myth was joined with the myth that Diotima presents -- in Aristophanes' myth there is no talk of beauty and gender does not determine who is the Lover and who is Beloved. But Diotima introduces the Ideal of Beauty and in so doing introduces the second of the two myths of Love.

On Women, Beauty and Love -- again; part 1

2009-03-17T23:09:00.005-04:00

[Duchamp - Nude Descending a Staircase]

And so as these things go, frenzy and fever give way confusion which gives way to torpor and darkness and out of such numbness (perplexity even?) comes some semblance of understanding. Why have I been so quiet? Not an easy question and so there is no easy answer. What I can say is that part of the silence was self-inflicted -- silence so as not to say something hasty or unfounded. But that has either stopped being something I care about, or I have just moved beyond worry and into exasperation.

What am I talking about? This problem of what it is to be a woman -- and then also the consequent problems. I wrote a lot about what was said about these things last month and my words were largely misinterpreted, probably because of ambiguities on my part, but also because I hadn't yet figured out why I felt the need to speak of all this, to make sense of it (if sense is even possible). But then I re-read the Symposium for this class on feminism, and also read Lucrezia Marinella's The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men. And I have spent a week stewing over these two readings, trying to work out what I wanted to write about in this class (seeing the writing as a chance to crack open these problems and see them for what they are) and then I began reading Naomi Wolf's Beauty Myth and so I can no longer be silent. So I will work through some of these things -- with as much methodical plodding as I need to. I also want to look again at Nochlin's piece "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?"

So here we go.

Scarcity

2009-03-07T16:45:00.002-05:00

[mine]

I have been feeling a lack of words lately, largely due to the lack of time to explore my own reading and studies. I hope this changes soon, but writing here will, until then, be a bit scarce.

Incidentally

2009-03-04T21:58:00.004-05:00

[Hammershoi]

After adopting my cat, my sleeping patterns shifted to accommodate early morning cat feeding. Generally, she wakes me up between 4:30 and 6:00 am with a series of deep, troubling/troubled howls. This is peripheral. What is fascinating is that I've often noticed that the dreams which are interrupted at this stage are very different from the dreams I'm accustomed to remembering. I'm accustomed to remembering technicolor, vivid dreams which are exciting, varied and a bit on the surreal side. But these new dreams are very different -- when I wake I am struck by the sense of having been in the middle of some deep reflection on some issue that I had been thinking of earlier in the day. When I was in the middle of writing a paper on identity theory, I remember waking up with those thoughts in my mind. Not vague but rather some fine-grained aspect of U.T. Place's argument, which I had been teasing out. Last night I fell asleep after a(nother) class discussion on Dennett's 'Quining Qualia' and some independent work toward a paper topic on the problems of consciousness. When my cat woke me I was very aware of the fact that I had been just tangling/disentangling those same issues in philosophy of mind.

Never before have I been aware of this substantive nature of my dreams -- it feels almost as though serious work is going on without my being aware of it (very interesting in light of the topic of this work).

Janus

2009-02-27T21:42:00.004-05:00

[Odilon Redon]

According to the assumptions of this book, thoughts accompany the brain's workings, and those thoughts are cognitive of realities. The whole relation is one which we can only write down empirically, confessing that no glimmer of explanation is yet in sight. That brains should give rise to a knowing consciousness at all, this is the one mystery which returns, no matter of what sort of consciousness and of what sort the knowledge may be. Sensations, aware of mere qualities, involve the mystery as much as thoughts, aware of complex systems, involve it.

[William James - The Principles of Psychology]

Or else it is the sudden storm, analogous to those outside, rising and drowning the cries of children, the dying, the lovers, so that in my innocence I say they cease, whereas in reality they never cease. It is difficult to decide. And in the skull is it a vacuum? I ask, And if I close my eyes, close them really, as others cannot, but as I can, for there are limits to my impotence, then sometimes my bed is caught up into the air and tossed like a straw by the swirling eddies, and I in it. Fortunately it is not so much an affair of the eyelids, but as it were the soul that must be veiled, that soul denied in vain, vigilant, anxious, turning in its cage as in a lantern, in the night without haven or craft or matter or understanding.

[Beckett -- Malone Dies]

Were it only so

2009-02-27T21:25:00.005-05:00

[keith evans - plant morphology - drawing on homemade paper - 1999 - via the art of memory]

Democritus believes that the nature of the eternal things is small beings unlimited in multitude. [...] He holds that the substances are so small that they escape our senses. They have all kinds of forms and shapes and differences in size. Out of these as elements he generates and combines visible and perceptible bodies. contend with one another and move in the void on account of their dissimilarity and the other differences I have mentioned, and as they move they strike against one another and become entangled in a way that makes them be in contact and close to one another, but it does not make any thing out of them that is truly one, for it is quite foolish that two or more things could ever come to be one.

The grounds he gives for why the substances stay together up to a point are that the bodies fit together and hold each other fast. For some of them are rough, some are hooked, others concave and others convex, while yet others have innumerable other differences. So he thinks that they cling to each other and stay together until some stronger necessity comes along from the environment and shakes them and scatters them apart.

[Aristotle, On Democritus, quoted by Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle's On the Heavens]

He makes sweet that which is round and good-sized; astringent that which is large, rough, polygonal, and not rounded; sharp tasting, as its name indicates, that which is sharp in body, and angular, bent and not rounded; pungent that which is round and small and angular and bent; salty that which is angular and good-sized and crooked and equal sided; bitter that which is round and smooth, crooked and small sized; oily that which is fine and round and small.

[Theophrastus, Causes of Plants, referring to Democritus]

Grey Incandescence

2009-02-25T00:37:00.003-05:00

[Antonia]

But the light, instead of being the dawn, turned out in a very short time to be the dusk. And the sun, instead of rising higher and higher in the sky as I confess I confidently expected, calmly set, and night, the passing of which I had just celebrated after my fashion, calmly fell again. Now the reverse, as you might say, I mean day closing in the twilight of the dawn, I must confess to never having experienced, and that goes to my heart, I mean that I cannot bring myself to declare that I experienced that too. And yet how often I have implored night to fall, all the livelong day, with all my feeble strength, and how often day to break, all the livelong night.

That's from Malone Dies which -- like Woolf's Orlando and Musil's "Perfecting of a Love," this has come at such a perfect moment for me -- the sensation again of reading over lines which say better what I was so recently trying to say myself. First this dawn-dusk, and then there is this --

But before leaving this subject and entering upon another, I feel it is my duty to say that it is never light in this place, never really light. The light is there, outside, the air sparkles, the granite wall across my window, but it does not come through. So that here all bathes, I will not say in shadow, nor even half shadow, but in a kind of leaden light that makes no shadow, so that it is hard to say from what direction it comes, for it seems to come from all directions at once, and with equal force. I am convinced for exampe that at the present moment it is as bright under my bed as it is under the ceiling, which admittedly is not saying much, but I need say no more.

And he continues -- there is so much and I will have to continue some other time.

Precision

2009-02-21T15:14:00.003-05:00

[Yamamoto]

There is so so much in these Diaries of Musil. Every page. And also in Malone Dies (more on that later). I feel like I'm swept up in one of those eddies of convergence that used to be so familiar and are now so rare.

From Musil --

Today I came across Mach's lectures on popular science which proved to me at just the right time that it is still possible to base an existence on the understanding and for that existence still to be deeply significant. In the final analysis I've never doubted this -- but I'm here taking the precaution of reminding myself again.

How often has this happened? Some span of time will hit me wherein all seems desolate, wherein all attempts at understanding seem like rote job training. Just yesterday I felt this. And then, lying in bed this morning, books at my side and a cat purring on my chest things felt entirely different. I suppose I will always love mornings for just this reason -- they begin something.

Musil also says --

The paths of intellect are strange ones. One can say that, in the course of evolution, the intellect has made the greatest progress. But one could also express this as follows: in the course of evolution, intellect has shown the least degree of stability.

Intellectual progress has always simply consisted in correcting, at every stage, the errors that one produced {for oneself} at the previous stage.

and then --

it is the quality of understanding that demonstrates the greatest capacity for giving shape and substance to any human life.

And finally, he writes, in a letter which he has excerpted into his diary --

I'm experiencing the old conflict between brain and the rest of the nervous system, between the pleasure in logical speculation and that more 'lyrical' kind I've practiced in recent times. In my last letter I was still very angry with the understanding -- I'm always moving from one state to the other and will probably continue to do so for some time to come. It's a full year since I wrote a piece of any consequence and when I think back it appears to me like one of those many Sunday afternoons that I used to spend in my shadow-filled room -- reading a sentence from some book or other, then moving to the desk to fetch a sheet of paper or a box of matches, then stopping next to the desk or window and standing for ten, twenty minutes, the object motionless in my hand as I stared out vacantly -- then another sentence, and so on until dusk and supper.

This letter goes on, it is wonderful. It also recalls Malone's description of light and greyness --

Strangeness

2009-02-20T02:32:00.004-05:00

[Tem Doran - from How to Be in Love]

I am hanging on to this term -- small successes in logic, in teaching, in writing -- but I have less and less time for any outside work. I still manage to read through some fiction and have just started Malone Dies, having decided to jump straight into this (following Molloy) instead of moving on to some of Walser's other fiction, which I borrowed from the library last week.

I found this immediately:

A bright light is not necessary, a taper is all one needs to live in strangeness, if it faithfully burns.

I wonder about my reaction to that sentence (strong), and also about my immediate desire to import so much meaning to it, to rip it from the pages and paste it up over my own life. This phrase 'rings true' -- but then I think again that it only rings true for a different me -- one of years ago, maybe even months ago, but not now. I live more and more on the surface these days, restless in stretches of time. I'll move on now -- this restlessness comes from knowing about obligations -- I have so many, for there is always another paper to write, another batch of papers to mark, another paper to read, notes to take, correspondence to continue, etc. And I grow inert and static -- I flip on my procedural crime dramas and pet the cat and cook a meal that takes some fraction of an hour to prepare.

There is no more strangeness -- well I don't know what sort of strangeness the narrator is speaking about, but MY sort of strangeness has dissipated. I used to be strange, I think. Now -- in these comfortable moments -- moments of restlessness, sure, but also of comfort -- for I crest every wave that comes at me -- that has not changed. [I've paused here to wonder whether I have begun writing between my two web-spaces -- I can never discern what belongs where and this happens to my often -- I start writing in one web-box and then the words start to creep beyond boundaries and slink away over to some other realm, crabwise]. But back to strangeness -- I wonder now whether the strangeness before was feigned -- like des Esseintes crafting his decadently beautiful world, full of strangeness, replete. The tapers were collected because they scatter a delicate, animal-like light over things -- light which moves, jumps, spreads, intensifies, fades, flutters, rests -- it's a light which adds strangeness because it adds motion and life where before motion and life had no place.

So perhaps that's what I think about this strangeness -- it was a posture before, just as so much is a posture now. Masks grow familiar when worn overlong -- and it's easy to cite Nietzsche here and tell this story as the tale of some sort of greatness. That great old wine-casket, banded green and rolling around. It isn't. Or maybe I've understood him poorly (probably). This is a tale of cowardice and necessity (the normal-person sort, not the philosopher-sort).

Lately I listen to simple country songs. They seem real. They are about God and playing music and loved ones and children and the country. They are not strange to me.

Split-World

2009-02-20T00:26:00.004-05:00

[Sassetta -- The Blessed Rasnieri Rasini Freeing Poor People From Prison in Florence]
[via the article below]

From Cabinet, Issue 32, "The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future" by Aaron Schuster:

For Lacan, the precarious situation of the cosmonaut hooked into an impenetrable mechanism is not an isolated or extreme case, but reveals the universal condition of the human subject. We are all erotic cosmonauts, split between our everyday, phenomenological life experience and the computing apparatus -- what Lacan calls the "symbolic order" -- that parasites our body and secretly controls our thoughts and desires. The lot of the modern subject, adrift in a universe of significations without substantial support or foundation, is perfectly encapsulated by the "experience of the cosmonaut: a body that can open and close itself weighing nothing and bearing on nothing."

Growth

2009-02-14T18:21:00.005-05:00

[Miranda Lehman]
[She has a new album, Sleepwalker, released under the recording name Kourova -- www.korouva.com. It's beautiful and haunting]

The eternal formula, the key to this world and the beyond. (Oh, Robert, why do you use, for things that are so indifferent to you, such highly charged words!), did Kant, did any other discover it? Can anyone ever find it?!

I have never finished reading Kant but I don't let that keep me awake at night, nor do I feel that I shall die with shame because another man has already grasped the world in its entirety.

There are truths but no truth. I can quite well assert two totally antithetical things and in both cases be right. It's not permissible to weigh ideas, one against the other -- each has a life of its own. Cf. Nietzsche. What a fiasco it is if one tries to discover any system in his work except for the spirit which the wise man chooses as his guide.

Another species is made up of those who loved greatly -- Christ, Buddha, Goethe -- myself, in those days of autumn when I was in love with Valerie.

These do not seek after any truth, but they feel that something within them is coming together into some kind of whole.

This has something purely human about it -- a natural process.

And such people can balance one idea against the other, for that new thing which grows within them has fastidious roots.

--Robert Musil -- Diary, 1902

These days I sometimes long for ignorance, or at least for erosion -- some erosion of mind or idea -- weathered, foxed, forgotten. But I suppose this too shall pass in its own time -- this learning of new things. Exams, papers, discussions -- forgotten, eroded, weathered, foxed. I still worry about this forgetting -- I also worry about holding on tight to the few things I have collected. But more and more often I feel my grasp slacken. -- These days it is so easy to forget.

In sanity

2009-02-11T21:41:00.003-05:00

I finally finished reading and taking notes on Kierkegaard's Fear & Trembling (hopefully more to come later), and found this passage tucked away toward the end.

'nullum unquam exstitit magnum ingenium sine aliqua dementia' ['there was never great genius without some madness']. For the dementia here is the genius's suffering in life, is the expression, if I may say so, of divine jealousy, while genius itself is the mark of divine favour. Thus the genius is disorientated from the start in relation to the universal and put into relation to the paradox, whether, in despair over his own limitation, which in his own eyes turns his omnipotence into impotence, he seeks a demonic reassurance and therefore will not admit the limitation to either God or man, or he reassures himself religiously in love for the divine. There are psychological topics here to which it seems to me one could happily devote a lifetime, and yet we so rarely hear a word about them. How is madness related to genius? Can the one be constructed out of the other? In what sense and to what extent is the genius master of his own madness?

In Response

2009-02-11T12:48:00.005-05:00

[Magritte, Je ne vois pas l'énigme cachée dans la forêt]

After reading some of the continued discussion on the topics I raised in my earlier posts on submission and 'secret'/'secretive' women, I've realized that I left something very important unsaid.

I find these passages frightening because I somehow, in spite of myself, can read them as 'beautiful.' I say 'in spite of myself,' because I think that these words mask something deeply insidious. I also say 'in spite of myself' because I can see and feel the effects of this sort of delicate speech about ugly, messy, horrific things. These passages speak of women as subjects, as slaves, as weak. They say that this is how it ought to be, that this is best. Sometimes the women seem to speak of themselves in the same way. These 'notions' are wrapped up in prose, passed along in anecdote, they influence thought and behavior, they influence notions of gender, of 'normal' and of 'proper.' They rise to the surface everywhere, serve to condone actions that should be otherwise reprehensible, horrific, tragic. It is rare that we question what a book says to us -- especially if it has behind it the weight of a "master's" name -- these are masterpiece works, they are canonical, widely-read, held aloft. We read these books expecting to enjoy, or at least to be impressed, and those intentions set out to confirm themselves.

Of course these are real issues -- the literature relies upon their reality -- but it also serves to perpetuate the reality of this violence and subjugation, in ways that are masked -- these words seem impotent when they are swallowed whole, but they work on our ideas and our actions. As I copied out these passages, from books I read when I was a girl, books I've read multiple times, I had to notice how little I questioned them. I did not question what I read -- at least not until I started to realize how much of 'what I read' contradicted with itself, and also with reality. Now I do the questioning; now I try and navigate this morass of accepted idea and belief -- I try and see what is a sham, what has been impressed upon me -- I try to see if all this ink is really so indelible. I also try to see which ideas and beliefs, if any, are worth keeping.

But I failed to remember that one can contribute to a rhetoric without necessarily intending to. I posted those passages, accompanied them with nice pictures of nice women who are not hurt or in pain or submitting. The women are all alone -- there is no power structure in any of the images. And in doing so, the passages were condoned in a sense. In fact, my excerpts that came without comment (or with only obscure poetastic comment) they can also be read as now-condoned.

I do not condone this sort of submission and demand for submission. I do not think it is beautiful. I do not think it can be noble. I do not think it can be 'love.' And to say more would be to slide away from the point.

Full Circle

2009-02-09T13:45:00.002-05:00

I just missed my three-year web-writing anniversary! I started this site in February of 2006 and it has become such a wonderful place for me. Thanks to all who have supported me over the years!

Musical

2009-02-09T12:00:00.000-05:00

New favorites:

Secretive Women, Part III

2009-02-08T18:16:00.002-05:00

'Ah! I am not pleasant to look at.'

I could not help saying this; the words came unbidden. I never remember a time when I had not a haunting dread of what might be the degree of my outward deficiency; this dread pressed me at the moment with special force.

A great softness came upon his countenance; his violet eyes grew suffused and glistening under their deep Spanish lashes. He started up. 'Let us walk on.'

'Do I displease your eyes much?' I took courage to urge. The point had its vital import for me.

He stopped, and gave me a short, strong answer -- an answer which silenced, subdued, yet profoundly satisfied. Ever after that I knew what I was for him; and what I might be for the rest of the world I ceased painfully to care. Was it weak to lay so much stress on an opinion about appearance? I fear it might be, I fear it was; but in that case I must avow no light share of weakness. I must own a great fear of displeasing, a strong wish moderately to please M. Paul.

This last passage that I have recalled is not so simple -- in fact I think it is much more than the sentiments expressed by the speakers of Bachmann and Dickinson. It is Lucy Snowe speaking of her love for M. Paul -- she has struggled fiercely, just as Jane Eyre struggled -- struggled to maintain her independence, to hold fast to her spirit, her passion, her abilities. And still she loves -- to the point of distraction. But the reunion between Jane and Mr. Rochester was contrived -- Mr. Rochester had to be weakened (he becomes blind and crippled, his force dimmed after the fire, Jane had to be empowered (independently wealthy, no longer required to work). In Villette there is no artifice, no contrivance.

Lucy works hard, she becomes independent, she loves and challenges. She despairs, she rages, she rebels. And she is rewarded. In the chapter from which I quoted, M. Paul reveals a secret to Lucy, a secret project upon which he has been working for weeks -- working so diligently that she has felt abandoned and lost and forgotten. He reveals to Lucy that he has purchased a small schoolroom where she can take pupils independently, working and saving and awaiting his return from abroad. When this gift is revealed, she is overwhelmed:

I hardly knew what to do. I first caressed the soft velvet on his cuff, then I stroked the hand it surrounded. It was his foresight, his goodness -- his silent, strong, effective goodness -- that overpowered me by their proved reality. It was the assurance of his sleepless interest which broke on me like a light from heaven; it was his -- I will dare to say it -- his fond, tender look which now shook me indescribably.

[...]

I promised to do all he told me. I promised to work hard and willingly. "I will be your faithful steward,' I said; 'I trust at your coming the account will be ready. Monsieur, monsieur, you are too good!'

In such inadequate language my feelings struggled for expression. They could not get it. Speech, brittle and unmalleable, and cold as ice, dissolved or shivered in the effort. He watched me still; he gently raised his hand to stroke my hair; it touched my lips in passing; I pressed it close, I paid it tribute. He was my king. Royal for me had been that hand's bounty; to offer homage was both a joy and a duty.

-- There is more, of course -- this is one of the finest love stories ever written. Lucy is one of the finest women I've ever read of -- and yet there is this rhetoric -- it is slight here, it is different here -- it makes me wonder whether the words we must use are foolish -- whether they're the real trouble. How else to describe these sacrifices? How else to describe these beautiful moments of generosity and acceptance and gratitude?

Secretive Women, Part II

2009-02-08T17:48:00.004-05:00

From Dickinson's Master Letters, found here and here

Oh, did I offend it -- Daisy -- Daisy -- offend it -- who bends her smaller life to his meeker every day--who only asks--a task-- something to do for love of it -- some little way she cannot guess to make that master glad -- A love so big it scares her, rushing among her small heart--pushing aside the blood and leaving her faint and white in the gust's arm --

Daisy--who never flinched thro' that awful parting, but held her life so tight he should not see the wound--who would have sheltered him in her childish bosom -- only it was'nt big eno' for a Guest so large -- this Daisy -- grieve her Lord -- and yet it often blundered -- Perhaps she grieved his taste -- perhaps her odd --Backwoodsman ways teased his finer nature. Daisy knows all that -- but must she go unpardoned -- teach her, preceptor grace -- teach her majesty -- Slow at patrician things -- Even the wren upon her nest learns (knows) more than Daisy dares--

Low at the knee that bore her once unto wordless rest Daisy kneels a culprit -- tell her her fault -- Master -- if it is small eno' to cancel with her life, she is satisfied -- but punish don't banish her -- shut her in prison, Sir -- only pledge that you will forgive -- sometime -- before the grave, and Daisy will not mind -- she will awaken in your likeness.

[...]

Master -- open your life wide, and take me in forever, I will never be tired -- I will never be noisy when you want to be still. I will be your best little girl -- nobody else will see me, but you -- and that is enough -- I shall not want any more -- and all that Heaven only will disappoint me -- will be because it's not so dear.

Secretive Women

2009-02-08T17:15:00.006-05:00

I wrote recently about certain Secret Women -- the women valorized, glamorized in literature -- the women who lay down in front of a man, who sacrifice, who submit, who are more beautiful and stronger and greater and nobler for their submission. I wrote, earlier, that this rhetoric frightened me -- that it was too beautiful to be dismissed, too pervasive to be ignored, and too terrible to hold in my mind for very long.

But I've been thinking about this -- about this rhetoric -- wondering if it is in fact rhetoric, wondering if there is some truth to it, if there is truth, what that truth might be -- wondering whether or not it matters if it is true, for it may be so well-accepted that it has become instinctual -- woman submits, man controls, though with an entire spectrum of what that submission and control may look like. I'm also wondering whether this inequality is necessarily a 'bad' thing.

I picked up a slim, small volume from the library a few days ago -- Bachmann's Letters to Felician. These letters and poems, written by a woman, with a female speaker, they seem to echo the masculine picture of submission and control that I quoted earlier.

Some excerpts:

[May 17, 1945]

My only happiness is in loving you, my duty is to avoid you, but my virtue is nothing more and nothing less than remaining true to you for days, for years, for life, holding my head up high through the dust of life to a new purity that is greater than that of innocence. And all this for you, you who are the god of my life!

[May 25, 1945]

And I keep loving you, out beyond all consciousness, beyond all time, like an altar where I can plead with God on my behalf.

How merciful is the lord for letting me serve I would lose all dignity, all purity, all faith, if my highest thoughts were not on you, who keeps me upright and strong year after year in the farthest and saddest distance.

[June 27, 1945]

You should come and cast your will over me. I will never be more ready to serve than now.

[July 6, 1945]

This longing, these sighs from soft pillows. I am happy, endlessly happy, to be so filled with this thought. Maybe you will come, maybe you will walk through the door and take from me. I am so ready to give.

I am waiting, no, I can't wait anymore ... I will stand up to things and act. A decision. A first decision! Now all that's missing is the happiness of fulfillment. -- What prayers God must hear today! And I call this stammer of expectation a prayer.

You smile. --Oh, if only you could. I'd like to kneel before you so that joy might come to me from your dear mouth. I would wrap my arms around you in the purest, abundant love. My kisses would be leaping springs with their own glee at the source. --Even the coolness lying outside my night window shivers into warmth within me. This courage is so divine, it's so uplifting to feel oneself 'Lord.'

I am young, rich, I am the world.

But oh, if only you would come. I would be even richer in the giving.

Everything, everything is yours.

Nothing should remain mine, if only you were present. Extravagance is freedom. And you cannot begrudge me this.

I love you and kiss you, I am enchanted, in every thought I am in your arms!

I don't much care who is speaking -- I don't care if it is Bachmann or not. What interests me is what this woman is saying -- what does she mean? Also, how different is this sentiment from the sentiment in those other passages, the ones written by men, spoken by men.

How can this be real? That's what I wonder most -- how is this love? How is this good? And there are more excerpts, there is more evidence --

Empty

2009-02-05T03:06:00.003-05:00

Free

2009-02-02T04:19:00.003-05:00

[Dürer]

I've been extra busy lately, and the rest of this term promises to be similarly challenging. Nevertheless, I continue on with my reading of Musil's diaries, Bachmann's poems, and now, Molloy once again.

And once again I am I will not say alone, no, that's not like me, but, how shall I say, I don't know, restored to myself, no, I never left myself, free, yes, I don't know what that means, but it's the word I mean to use, free to do what, to do nothing, to know, but what, the laws of the mind perhaps, of my mind, that for example water rises in proportion as it drowns you and that you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.

Philosophical Rhetoric and Reflections of the Self

2009-01-26T15:00:00.001-05:00