July 2012
33 posts
“
On Ishmael: Harrison Hayford’s “Loomings”
…a young man who never rests content with merely adequate explanation, who regards every purpose, action, and object as a puzzle to be pondered over and researched by all possible tools—by systematic repeated examinations, by shedding whatever physical cross-lights he can, by inquiring of aged inhabitants, by swimming through libraries, always brooding and speculating, until a provisionally acceptable conclusion occurs to him.”
” —Hershel Parker - Forward of 150th Edition of Moby Dick or The Whale, Herman Melville.
“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than an alphabet?”
—Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.
“But filthy stokers tirelessly tossed coal into open
flaming mouths
And everything that is now already existed then, but
in condensed form.
Our days already existed and our hearts baked
in the blazing stove,
And the moment when I met you may also have existed,
and my mistrust
Brittle as a faience plate, and my faith, no less frail
and capricious,
And my searches for the final answer, my
disappointments and discoveries.
Great ships: some sunk suddenly, arousing consciences
and fear,
Gaining deathless fame, becoming stars
of special bulletins.
Others went peacefully, waned without a word in provincial
ports, in dockyards,
Beneath a coat of rust, a ruddy fur of rust, a slipcover of rust,
and waited
For the final transformation, the last judgment of souls and
objects,
They wait as patiently as chess players in Luxembourg Garden
nudging pieces a fraction of an inch or so.” —Great Ship by Adam Zagajewski
flaming mouths
And everything that is now already existed then, but
in condensed form.
Our days already existed and our hearts baked
in the blazing stove,
And the moment when I met you may also have existed,
and my mistrust
Brittle as a faience plate, and my faith, no less frail
and capricious,
And my searches for the final answer, my
disappointments and discoveries.
Great ships: some sunk suddenly, arousing consciences
and fear,
Gaining deathless fame, becoming stars
of special bulletins.
Others went peacefully, waned without a word in provincial
ports, in dockyards,
Beneath a coat of rust, a ruddy fur of rust, a slipcover of rust,
and waited
For the final transformation, the last judgment of souls and
objects,
They wait as patiently as chess players in Luxembourg Garden
nudging pieces a fraction of an inch or so.” —Great Ship by Adam Zagajewski
“
Tempest
Across the broad and barren sky,
The clouds revolve and tremble;
Turgid tempest blossoms nigh,
Where rage and wrath assemble.
Through lust and mediocrity,
Mankind fell ill to feeling;
There sullen sought monstrosity,
Left man and kindred reeling.
Then storm on darkened gables drew,
As turbid gales persist,
In districts blood and bleating knew,
Where swords rest cold in fists.
So silence veiled the lost remains,
And nature ceased to stir;
The slain deluged the streets and lanes,
Where frigid drafts abjure.
And somewhere in a city square,
A squire wrote in blood,
Upon a pristine wall left there,
Whose sermon looms above:
In every square of land and plain,
The story read the same;
Tempest high and lowly maimed,
Till only grace remained.
” —Alex Carroll
“The necessary condition for an image is sight,” Janouch told Kafka; and Kafka smiled and replied: “We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.”
—Roland Barthe
“The most exemplary nature is that of topsoil. It increases by experience, by the passage of seasons over it, growth rising out of it and returning to it, not by ambition or aggressiveness. It is enriched by all things that die and enter in it. It keeps the past, not as history or as memory but as richness, new possibility.”
—Wendell Berry
“
Elbows
The sacred quality
of arms, particularly
elbows that make
each of us working class,
put us here for a purpose.
Look at elbows
and what they say:
elbow your way
into the passive crowd
to do what is needed,
give it your elbow grease —
this is enough.
Elbows, no one can
possess them because
they can disappear and
you move them
into action by choice.
And that choice
is prayer in action.
The deepest current of love
is not found in the heart.
That is the certain spring,
the natural ease, the flow
from the mountaintop.
The greatest current of love
rushes forward in the choice
to make a cradle of the body.
“When Nietzsche says, as he frequently does, that “the truth is terrible” he has in mind three kinds of terrible truths: (1) the terrible “existential” truths about the human situation (the inevitability of death and suffering); (2) the terrible “moral” truth that “life is essentially something amoral”; and (3) the terrible “epistemic” truth that most of what we think we know about the world around us is illusory. These terrible truths raise Schopenhauer’s question: why continue living at all? nietzsche’s answer, from early in his career to the very end, is that only viewed in terms of aesthetic values can life itself be “justified” (where “justification” really means restoring an affective attachment to life). Something can have aesthetic value even if it has no epistemic value—indeed, Nietzsche takes it to be a hallmark of art that “the lie hallows itself” and “the willl to deception has good conscience on its side.” Similarly, something can have aesthetic value even when it lacks moral value, something well-exemplified, he thinks, by the Homeric sagas. But how could the fact that life exemplifies aesthetic value restore our attachment to life in the face of the terrible existential truths about our situation? I suggest that there are two keys to understanding Nietzsche’s answer: first, his assimilation of aesthetic pleasure to a kind of sublimated sexual pleasure; and second, his psychological thesis, central to the Genealogy, that powerful affects neutralize pain, and thus can “seduce” the sufferer back to life. Finally, life can only supply the requisite kind of aesthetic pleasure if it features what I call the “spectacle of genius,” the spectacle represented by the likes of Beethoven, Goethe, and Napoleon. Since such geniuses are not possible in a culture dominated by “morality” (in Nietzsche’s pejorative sense), the critique of morality is essential to the restoration of an affective attachment to life, since only by defeating morality will the spectacle of genius continue to be possible.”
—Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: “The Truth is Terrible”
