A No Know?

I feel a need to break free from blogging about Plato, and it is a curious sensation—will what I write even make sense, I feel as if I am cheating on him, which is to say, cheating on myself, for that's how I understand this concept of "cheating on."  I think reading 20 of Plato's works so far this summer has made me nobler, and that by not writing about what I am reading, I will appear deficient, like walking out of the house in pajama bottoms, though people do that now.
Plato aside, and still not getting enough sun, I have made several discoveries this summer and observations some quite Francophile.  One discovery was Fip radio, which I actually recognise now as the station I listened to when I first arrived in Paris and lived at a Foyer Catholique pour jeunes femmes, where I shared a room with two Irish girls working at pubs and a French girl who worked nights at a hotel, and where we all groggily ate the breakfast at the allotted time, made by a seedy character who gave special treats to some of the girls (otherwise the food was just a piece of bread and watered down coffee in a bowl).  The foyer would lock up at 11, I was never among the unlucky who had to make do after arriving a few minutes late.  Fip Radio is a treat because of the variety of music played (it's like a mix of Marcos Valle, the Cannonball Adderley Quartet, Rabih Abou-Khalil, Rokia Traore, and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, though when an intense piece is played, it is followed by something mellow); also noteworthy is that there is so little talking by the DJs who are manifest through the selection and segue of songs.  Back in those Paris days, I would listen to Fip to ward off insomnia, and remember one song in particular sung by pretend British grannies with the refrain of them huffing, "All we want is to be loved!"
Also bringing me back to those days de France in Athens.  On my previous trip I had already noted how expertly two French families navigated their way through the Benaki Museum: with no guide book, one mother explained choice exhibits to her children.  This time, when I walked around the little settlement on the northeast side of the Acropolis, Anafiotika, the only tourists to pass me by were French and Greek.  At the Archaeological Museum, one French father instructed his son to make sketches of some of the sculptures, which brought to mind my own mother telling me to write in my travel notebooks every night and I remember how difficult the exercise seemed.
"Variant: whether the writer really had to KNOW something about the subject or scene before being able to write the page under consideration."  Thus writes Ezra Pound in his ABC if Reading, which I began to reread on this trip, praising myself for the choice of literature for his emphasis on looking while the bus entered Greece and the sea opened up to view, and when we entered the hills, gymnastic wind-harvesters made delicate cartwheels seeming to scratch at the sky yet reminding me of the gravitied limits to our earthly existence: how the illusion of perspective seems to have us reach the heavens, when in reality, we are merely standing at a good vantage point.

"One has to divide the readers ... who want to see the world from those who merely want to know WHAT PART OF THE WORLD THEY LIVE IN," writes Pound.  That latter part of the world is probably the part that looks like it is reaching the sky.
It is the part before knowledge has been sought, which is the point of realising emptiness, deficiency, and asking questions.  It is a Platonic concern as to how right a right opinion is that is held accidentally, without knowledge.  Pound writes, "Even if the general statement of an ignorant man is 'true', it leaves his mouth or pen without any great validity.  He doesn't KNOW what he is saying. That is, he doesn't know it or mean it in anything like the degree that a man of experience would or does.  Thus a very young man can be 'right' without carrying conviction to an older man who is wrong an who may quite well be wrong and still know a good deal that the younger man doesn't know.  One of the pleasures of middle age is to find out that one WAS right, and that one was much righter than one knew at say seventeen..."
But the perspective of knowledge, if it is ever had at all in whatever small quantity, surely changes the way one would present what one ever thought one knew: ideas change with knowledge.  Like how that insolent Cliotophon keeps asking about "justice" (though not to Socrates himself, and he is bold enough to criticise Socrates on this matter, for Socrates' stand that he has never adequately determined), always asking what it is and never embarking on the steps one must take to reach it: thinking that the mind alone could touch the heavens by positioning itself on a hill.
In other words, there is a distance that must be travelled.  This distance can also be heard, as in music.  But music ultimately plays second fiddle to words, which can be explicit about meaning, which is complex enough to warrant paradoxical explanation.  And as for the other languages, culture, the longings of the Francophile—surely this is the bridge out from where one is standing, as one gives oneself over to, say, a sculpture, that one translates by lines onto a notebook, growing up as one who has witnessed otherness from the early start, experience always pointing one onwards from where one is standing in the hopes of completing the picture before the story is done. 

Brush: Lauren Harrison.

Verbal Air

We are such paradoxical creatures. I was talking to someone I have known for years who was saying, "I don't like X; I never have," when just last year, she said, "I long to X, but my life doesn't let me." Who does not see themselves between these binaries: feisty but frail; dour but indolent; extravagant yet unfussy. It may be helpful to think in more organic terms, "more like a flower blooming than an airplane leaving a gate," as Toelken writes in a different context.
There are times the mind requires air, as G. K. Chesterton suggests, far more than (linear) argument. It may be that the argument is that heavy mantle that restrains one from thought.
"Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite," Chesterton writes. Poetry accomodates the figure of speech that is the paradox. It also works at the level of the generalisation: a person is no longer bound to to their bones but becomes the woman or the lover or at least observer. Insofar as the Lover, Observer, etc, are symbolic, poetic freedom of thought may also be depicted visually.
It is easiest to think of poetry this way because poetry, being philosophical, manifests what might otherwise remain hidden. Like paradox. Or the elusive stag called "meaning," which are those symbols that become ever more fruitful on their being revisited. It is noted that there are shapes, such as the gammadion, that are considered fruitful by more than one culture.
The decorative conventions in Byzantine art are also symbolic, writes Gervase Mathew in Byzantine Aesthetics. "Much that was most vital in Byzantine art came into being through the effort to apprehend and to convey a hidden meaning." Beauty is apprehended through the senses of the Mind, not just mathematically harmonious sense perception. "The body is immediately apparent to the senses; the soul and mind are to be discerned through contemplation." The mosaic stars in the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia may represent the gems man may become if he shines to consummation. Does one see the stars to shine so bright unless one already possesses the sympathy needed to wish to imitate the heavens? Revisit the star.
"Human hands are only the means of creation" - I add, of the representation of the star. "They too belong to the world of matter, of aisthetos, though like human eyes as long as they are alive they are matter shot through with Mind; the implements they use - pigments, or mosaic tesselae, or polished marble - are purely material." Hidden meaning. Mind behind matter. Idea behind mind.
One may think of the Zen Buddhist Enso: mind let free to let the universe through to the hand that paints, though it departs from the Byzantine and classical to asymmetry with its different message of the human component in the world and the terrestrial experience. It points beyond itself, however, to transcendence to a simpler life. We want space around us. Space to breathe. This should be poetry. Those wings without wings.

Brushes: 1, 2.
Click image to enlarge.

Sources

I was driven through landscapes today that I could never have imagined. We joked that if we were to relate what we saw, no one would believe us. There was an entire village of intricately-tiled homes, some with ceramic statuary of eagles whose eager and open wings seemed to defy their static form that cemented them between series of otherwise pillared balcony balustrades. Other ornaments - where they indeed were found on this architecture, from the roofs or at strange distances from the entrance - included bucking horses and lions (not the open-mouthed fortuitous Chinese sort). The thing about these houses, though, was that every one of them had their blinds drawn shut: uninhabited. Entire villages of ornamented, freshly painted, but empty homes.
And from the meandering roads, always meandering and never straight, we drove into the desert. Several times we passed people walking from and to who knows where and why as any destination was clearly more than an hours' walk away from where we passed them at noon. In the middle of those sandy lands was a wooden sign inscribed in an antiquated script that read: SOURCE. It was posted near to the road, and pointed past the road in a direction that led to no path nor to any apparent destination. That is perhaps the best summary of these hills and a perfect definition of life as it may seem to the person sometimes.

Along those roads that I longed to walk away from, craving the smell of the earth and the peace and quiet of the journey à pied, were over three score goshawks adopting various poses: one, perched upon a lone wooden post; another, at the top of a tree; a third, burrowing in the black, black earth, etc. Which reminds me of the blackspot road sign we passed - we may as well have entered a black hole, everything familiar was left behind and we drove into more fog and the birds got bigger, the smaller ones probably knowing better than to fall prey to those difficult terrains.
The mind and the soul may be starved for the larger landscape and when finally allowed to gaze at pastures that extend to the horizon, it may suddenly etch those impressions not so much to hoard them as to replenish the empty rooms, so empty that any portrait might also be useful in the time to come.
If as adults we do not know that whatever obstructs, contorts, denies, too, shall pass, perhaps we have not done our growing and if we do know such things, it is wise to store up on whatever leads the imagination back to its sources.

This long journey made today, to the desert and back in a roundabout way, was medicine for all of the petty indeterminacy of the two-faced, which, we may remember, is the symbol for the dual tragic-comedic masks of Μελπομένη and Θάλεια - the Muses of sad song and joyous flourishing, who are the sisters to the Muses of epic poetry, history, lyrical poetry, erotic poetry, hymns, and astronomy. There was something said about how theatre (whose two-faced symbol may also have birthed Janus, the god of this month and who is usually depicted above doorways) derived from what was originally temple worship. There is something that may be said about how to consider sources (such as retreating from pettiness to the perspective of history) shields one from the fracturing of vision, where things divide and multiply, seemingly without end in a rather uninspiring and oppressive way.

Sir Arthur Helps writes about how the temptation to create drama out of life stems from an ill-informed tendency towards entertainment. I shall cite it almost in full because I know I myself will want to come back to these words from time to time: "people will backbite one another to any extent rather than not be amused. Nay, so strong is this desire for something to go on that may break the monotony of life, that people, not otherwise ill-natured, are pleased with the misfortune of their neighbours, solely because it gives something to think of, something to talk about. They imagine how the principal actors and sufferers concerned in the misfortune will  bear it; what they will do; how they will look: and so the dull bystander forms a sort of drama for himself. ... 
"These poor people have nothing to think about; nature shows them comparatively little, for art and science have not taught them to look behind the scenes, or even at the scenes; literature they know nothing of; they cannot have gossip about the men of the past (which is the most innocent kind of gossip), in other words, read and  discuss history; they have no delicate handiwork to amuse them ; in short, talk they must, and talk they will, about their neighbours, whose goings-on are a perpetual puppet-show to them."
It may be the Janus of January that brings the two-faced into prominence: one may prefer indeed to think of it hung upon the door as a sign. If one has grown at all, one shall not take things at their surface value. The journey to the desert may remind one of those larger expanses, beyond the houses of nature in cement, beyond the petty collectivity that man sometimes imposes on the land,  out of tune.

Brush.

Practical Lego

I still cannot look at snow without feeling awe; how it seems to fall in slow motion. Like being summoned to the window as a child, going outside to watch the geometrical shapes fall onto our clothes. What a strange world this is. And even stranger that some historians play with history like little pieces of Lego; if it is a game, then the pieces can be arranged as per will, in as many ways. And so is not truth, truth, which according to Aristotle is above the variability associated with human action. So is there no truth of things past - what absurdity. Unless we subscribe to the mathematics of parallel lives. But perhaps we prefer to look to the past for stability, not fluctuation. The student says: art is so confusing today, I can't find myself in it. Who wouldn't be in that chaotic hall stripped of signposts. I pick up the pieces, from λέγω (2 LSJ). I count and I tell. I speak, call by name and wish to say.
In Aristotle's Ethics (VI), he writes, "the young can only repeat [knowledge of particular facts] without conviction of their truth." Experience is required. I just wonder about what happens if traditional, time-tested principles are not introduced through teaching. A while back, an n+1 article called the Theory Generation surmised that Theory did not provide adequate instruction for life.
To look to the past for stability is today called honoring the dead over the living present; to look for order is called exercising outmoded hegemony. Meanwhile, in the name of relativity, anything goes in the rewriting of history, all manner of ridiculous things get said but pass in an obscured game of scapegoat. How convenient for those who bend to caprice without the extra thought that goes in to φρόνησις, practical wisdom. While practical wisdom is not the same as art or even a means of knowing it is nonetheless concerned with the truth, which some people call a fiction.
Order has been banished. The great chain of being according to which things took their places has been replaced by trends in mathematics seeking disorder and multiplicities (rhizomes in space?). Yet to argue change is the only constant denies that this pertains to that which is visible. It is no surprise that immaterial words are so easily taken out of context. 
"There cannot be a single wisdom dealing with the good of all living things, any more than there is one art of medicine for all existing things." It is not even enough to know the truth: a person knowing it "will not know what medicines to take merely from being told to take everything that medical science or a medical expert would prescribe."

"It therefore follows that φρόνησις is a truth-attaining rational quality concerned with action in relation to the things that are good for human beings."
That are good for human beings - this pertains to the ability to deliberate the best course of action. " Now it is held to be the mark of a prudent man to be able to deliberate well about what is good and advantageous for himself, not in some one department, for instance what is good for his health or strength, but what is advantageous as a means to the good life in general."
Truth attaining - "Virtue ensures the rightness of the end we aim at," and, "but a man corrupted by a love of pleasure or fear of pain, entirely fails to discern any first principle ...vice tends to destroy the sense of principle." This understanding, as we have seen, is solidified through experience - φρόνησις "is derived from experience."
Rational quality - intellect controls the "action and the attainment of truth".
Concerned with - φρόνησις has a τέλος; "Deliberative Excellence in general is therefore that which leads to correct results with reference to the end in general" and, "Prudence ensures the rightness of the means we adopt to gain that end."
Action - It is "not enough to know how, you must do it." 
While not even Aristotle himself claims to have mastered φρόνησις or even understood it entirely, the point is that his description of it leads the reader to ask themselves many questions. From λέγω we arrive at the Italian leggo, I read. Hopefully, I think, too. And discern those good ideas that might help my actions; learn how to see so as not to be burdened by appearance where it does not help. I saw the picture of one who has tinkered with history; favorably postmodern, graffiti in the background reminding me of Anthony Daniels' observation that, "Egalitarians usually have a very strong sense of hierarchy." Like professors insisting on first-name basis, usually not to be mistaken for equality as two humans trying to figure this life out, but as a sign that the workings of status become more insidious. I ask, what is wrong with deference? It usually teaches - in more than one way.
"For it is absurd to think that political science or prudence is the loftiest kind of knowledge, inasmuch as man is not the highest thing in the world," writes Aristotle. "There exist other things far more divine in their nature than man, for instance ... the celestial system." The unknown and exciting hardly diminished by all of the order of the great chain of being. Two birds just came and ate at my window ledge; I saw one drink the snow. This "distancing" from the quotidian, "surprise of the incongruous" (like that street furniture scene in Hebdomeros I wish I could find) can be found also in order, in the very mystery of being alive.

Book. Magazine. Brush. Funny pepper grinder gift!

Back to Nature

Yesterday at around 8am the skies were blue but for the rice paper of cumulus floating in various corners of sky, also over the moon that was still visible but had chosen that strange veil the auspice of today's weather, oppressed with mist and heavy rain. It is the sign of the fog of humanity when it is heavy with disaster; what happens when we are tested to the core of our beings. It is unpleasant, until afterwards, sometimes only much later if one fails the test, when one may agree with the Latin maxim, res severe, verisum gaudium: the severe task is the real joy. Or, one might prefer the way Kurt Hahn put it, "Your disability is your opportunity."
But of course he was the one who was proud that there was nothing new about his schools and their operation, quoting Prince Max as saying, "In education, as in medicine, you must harvest the wisdom of a thousand years."
The wisdom of a thousand years if we look back to Plato's Republic as Hadot does in Qu'est ce que la philosophie antique?, considers the philosopher powerless to impact the corruption of the city chooses to practice philosophy alone or with the like-minded. Even Marcus Aurelius expresses his own feelings of powerlessness before the lack of comprehension and inertia of his subjects.
Yet, according to Aristotle, the practical life need not be exclusively focused on "practical" actions - as we do today. It need not be directed towards others, either. Rather, "practical" may also be conceived as the activities of the soul (viz., θεωρέω) and thoughts that give rise one to another (Pol.).
The word θεωρέω is derived from look, behold, and is often used in philosophy to denote contemplate, consider - though I find it sometimes translated as science, probably shorthand for speculation to be proved. It is a view, θέα, declined from θεά, conveying with it memories of goddesses.
Through reasoning - observing, contemplating, speculating - we hope to be lifted up from the fog of existence, true to the promise of Athena, goddess of clouds and wind, the first female a male wished to bear in his own stomach. Though the goddess of war, she is also the goddess of wisdom, which she resorts to first before bearing arms, averse to needless combat. Wisdom, too, is promised by philosophy that brings order to understanding. For example, we are taught by Aristotle (Met.)  to look at each animal with the conviction that it came from a perfect seed, and recognize appropriately, therefore, its place in the bigger picture of things (also Ep. 66).

There is stable pleasure that may relieve us from suffering (Rep.). Philosophy is a defense against chance (Ep. 16): "If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich." According to nature is Ruskin' pseudonym, whether he took it from Epicurus or the Stoics. He examined morals and nature and retreated to Switzerland when he felt misunderstood. "There is no unhappiness for those whose habit has brought them back to nature." (On Prov.)
Aristotle also teaches that there are two sciences, one of the perishable and changing, and that "other" science of that which is eternal (Met.). Arithmetic (D.L. 8.1.48; Met. 987b) compels the soul to reason about the abstract (Rep. 7); maths, unchanging, are contrasted with the everyday world, imperfectly approximate. Mathematics is privileged as a means to knowing, though it is through dialogue and desire that man can make the speech-experiments that may lead him to the essential, unutterable, but desired. In this respect, we may consider the full range of the meaning of the word κόσμος, meaning universe, order and rhetorical ornamentation.
While the body weighs a person down, philosophy brings freedom, urging man to look at nature, directing it from the earthly towards the divine: "This is its freedom, this is its escape ... Do you ban me from an investigation of nature, drag me away from the whole and confine me to a part? ... Shall I not inquire who is the artisan of this cosmos?" (Ep. 65.16-20). "These bodies, which you imagine have been strewn about for no other purpose than for ornament, are one and all at work ... Tell me, would you not be captivated by the sight of such a mighty structure even if it did not cover you, guard you ... and permeate you with its spirit?" (Ben.) To reach the author, we are to examine our conscience (Ep. 71.16).
If man has but a "slippery hold" on knowledge (Ben.), he can move towards it. This knowledge of human limits reminds me of Epictetus writing, "I wish to do this only if destiny permits". Lévi-Strauss, too, in our time, echoed this thought, thinking it "naive" to call man master of his destiny. I wonder how much fog is created by the unnecessary strain of thinking one must control everything instead of learning how to be spontaneous, i.e., not forcing circumstance but learning to put it to use. "I do not know whether I shall make progress;" writes Seneca in Ep., "but I should prefer to lack success than to lack faith."
If the going gets tough, there is always the humble contemplation of the stars that requires no practical results but brings happiness, freedom, morals, character.

Brush.

Rings

There is the permanence of the rings worn on the necks of the doves that occasionally visit my windowsill. I have watched the ring grow into one of those smaller creatures, apparently they are not born with that ornament, nor are we to marriage. That institution is wrecked with emotional malice by so many; that wonderful vessel meant to keep a pair intact to the end of life.
Perhaps not everyone needs that vessel, one imagines the vagrant bards of yesteryear who thrived on that particular lack of convention, but what of those who are shipwrecked and lost, like Crusoes without islands and without trust. Trust takes an age to earn but is so quick to be lost. If there is not enough love, if the people peer into each other ready to pull out all the ugly laundry of which there is always an abundance, the thing ends. Vendettas begin and one remembers Plato's wish for men to be shielded from the drama in poetry - if they really must expose themselves to themes of jealousy and rage and so on, they ought at least to be mature enough not to imitate, and even then must perform a solemn sacrifice first.
I am beginning to think that it is precisely the lack of ceremony that may affect the mindset before it enters into activity. No special clothes worn to the work place means too much comfort and sloppy manners. Ceremony - a private kind, a secret shared between one person and themselves - is the almost ubiquitous tattoo; it is not in the marriage, officiated by any person with an internet diploma.
So, two otherwise intelligent human beings may enter into the lifetime schlep not out of deep bonds of respect so much as a knot of other reasons like convenience, crush, confusion. They may soon see the ring as a little metal noose and they gag. What began as a clueless waltz often leads such victims to the halted opera of extremes, claiming they do not need love, marriage is a sham, humankind is hopeless.
But the purpose of union, of which friendship serves the same in miniature, in its own separate bonsai plot, is preservation of self and the other. To turn the other's face when life brings out their less handsome side. Oh, to flee such situations - we would, but their horrible power lurks in the fact that we cannot see them coming. Another person can be our reminder that time resides not in our minds or emotions by bringing us out of ourselves to face a bigger picture; to have a person outside one's self, surely this is something quite mysterious.

The simple ring is much; it is the echo of the crown, the one that is earned through noble gesture, it is the shape of an imagining of eternity, it warns one to go around as one wishes to come around. It may be a thing, but things were never meant to be disposed of. I remember many decades ago in my geography class hearing of one Western country with its piles and piles of trash: how could that be a quotient of greatness, I wondered. Why on earth would something be made if it is not meant to be kept and used to the very end? Surely such a mentality does not help people understand the worth of existence.
There emerges a kind of craziness to the effect: if it isn't pleasing you, toss or swop it. How many unstable characters wonder feverishly to themselves if they are getting all they think they ought? And toss it all, just in case. Or, if not toss it, disrespect it through unhappiness. Sometimes, enough is there - except perhaps enough will to make things work. But why such caprice, one might ask. Sometimes when two such people separate, they each go down their own version of the self-destructive path. They had been perfect for each other, and now they are alone and worse than ever.
Perhaps worse than that is the constant stream of verbal second-guessing. Some people's word-actions seem bent to destroy those around them, these are the creatures that seem most eager to burrow into marriage, most eager to play the hypocrite. Many are the forms of sickness never accurately responded to in the culture of disposable things, illustrated here in the prescribed tablet. One may sit and wonder at such things as one once wrote observations of adults into legal pads, at the dawn of adolescence, not trying to be smart (for knowing the theory does not exempt one from practice) but hoping to enter that helpful narrative stream one once found in books. Writing the book that is needed by oneself.
To think of the ring, one wishes for it to be idealised - as that crown that may be worn at the beginning but is only deserved at the end, if good speech and action outweighs all else. There have been marriages borne by just one of the two; the one bearing the acid of the other, always with grace, always with that kind humour towards others that is only earned under harsh circumstances. Such people are to be admired, but perhaps they had already known love from one time before in their lives.  
To find reciprocity in life, already symbolised in the back-and-forth of the circle, one would surely choose to contain that bond. Not contain it in a vessel, which measures with its grooves, but in a perfect abstract shape.

Magazine in background. Watercolour brush.

Separation

Yesterday, from the market and through a passageway, I came upon a cat emerging from an unlikely place and saw its eyes, large with warning and concern. In it's mouth, was a kitten. I felt, in that single moment, the fragility of life but also the instinctive protective nature of the animal, which some human beings do not have. At the market, I had bought some tomatoes from my favourite granny. Once this summer when it was about a hundred degrees, I came upon her snoozing at her stall, and hailed her loudly, mother, so you're sleeping on the job, and for some reason, from that moment she became my granny. I could see that I had been divided out from the rest of the market-goers: to her, I have my own identity.
These are the scenes I content myself with, at this computer, upon which the work I do inches by so slowly that the tempo itself is enough to make one go to sleep.
During one of those critical breaks from long work hours, I turned on the box and was drawn in by those images of the seventies, wall-to-wall carpeting, corded telephones, even some Al Green from a record. The film spoke in Takovsky's dream language: later interviews of character-as-adult; the montage suggested the film's contemporaneity to us, but the theme - beginning with a teenager taking her life, the neighbourhood boys entering into the girl's psyche by going through her diary, the future Yalie playing psychologist - was so unlike what one is used to in such a quality production. I was left with the ever more disturbing ending about which there is no reason to write except to say that I was so dissatisfied that I looked the movie up on the internet thanks to seeing Sofia Coppola's name at the top of the credits.
The film was her debut as director, which explained everything: knowing the genesis of the film somehow resolved the tension of its lack of resolution, also so disconnected to anything one could imagine through healthy instinct. Putting the unresolved film into a larger context saved it, relieved it - as from the word relieve, to raise (someone) out of trouble, alleviate. To raise something out of trouble indicates having a new context, one that hadn't been there before the raising, the separating out.

Separating is also the word of the horizon; from ὁρίζω, horizon implies I divide, separate, mark out boundaries. I limit, I restrict, I define. We lose the meaning of the horizon in English when we say it marks the boundary between earth and sky, for sky in so many other languages is also the word for heaven. Maybe that's why all we raise up is also so heavily tied to the terrestrial.
What is it that we raise up. It is rarely the words that cost nothing to divide one out from the rest of the market-goers (you come and buy in the market ... but I...). It is not the instinct of preservation even had by the cat - the wordless cat. To look at Coppola's film, to think of Nietzsche, to think of the early French philologists researching language in their white coats, we see mental illness. I would argue that such afflictions are not articulate - and that even the articulate person wishing to relieve may run out of ideas as to how to provide the saving context.
To look further above into the depths of the 'sky' one may think of the heavenly hosts, and how it is said that God is flanked by such protecting forces. I admit that I cannot think of such things for much longer than mentioning them: it is too far out of my league, but I do know what it means when a friend saves one from oneself, reminding one in trouble of one's overall context. To survive wholly - articulately, for to articulate is to connect the joints - is to need this context.
So to return to that horizon is to question our knowledge and experience; τίνα ὅρον ὁρίζῃ - which Liddell and Scott translate as, to mark out for oneself, what criterion do you assign. 
It is easy to see in my workplace, considering that I work where criteria may actually be met literally, in spoken English, I see the incongruity of the horizon, not everyone can agree on the criteria;
αὐτὸν πολεμεῖν ὁρίζομαι I lay it down that the problem is that some people do not wish to teach towards proficiency. Pro + facere. Not wishing, or knowing, how to teach others to go and make, which happens to be the promise of life.
 

Brush.

Crossings

I was putting the espresso maker on the stove for the third time when I noticed a crow on the roof where pigeons gather, eating something meaty. Perhaps a pigeon - I have always wondered where they disappear to. I discerned that crow, now calling out ominously, through the beads of rain that have disturbed the lull of so many sunny days. Seasons cross then change.
Which is to say nothing of the quiet shock one might have when crossed by changing mores, read transgressions, the pet word of postmodernists who would have us acclimatise ourselves to this precarious relationship to geography, both physical and metaphysical. And while it is tempting when on the crossed end of the transgression to denounce all audacity, some transgressions exist that can keep a person whole. After all, it is said that "to go above and beyond the call of duty" is to do the honourable thing. But to discern where the golden mean lies requires so much insight and wisdom, it is understandable why societies have relied on taboos to think for them.
Transgressors today seem to shy away from the responsibility of traversing rules or codes of conduct. If a rule is in place, responsibility is mandatory; where the rule shakes, anything goes.
The most prosaic example of shaky codes was the phone call I received yesterday asking me to translate a text clearly longer than the alleged 100 pages with a deadline of four days. Hardly enough time to write up a style guide and key to repeated words and rally together assistants, even if that was the way I worked. Hardly enough time to do the text justice: the literature being a 'first of' - the rare and quality olive branch to be glimpsed in a non-native language. The publisher's lack of consideration pained me.
Maybe this is an age in which people with principles might not do so well: the lay of the land may fold into a corruption of standards. Perhaps because I am of the fairer sex, time and again I distrust consulting the terrain for direction, preferring to look up. I think of that line in Diodorus Sicilus (II, 54, 2) which I came to in a reader: πρὸς τὰς ἀπὸ τῶν ἄρκτων σημασίας τὴν διέξοδον ποιοῦνται. Those who journey across Arabia's sandy desert as "spacious as the air in magnitude" must "even as voyagers upon the seas, direct their course by indications obtained from the Bears," as per Oldfather et al.'s translation. Difficulties, like the desert or sea, are crossed by looking to the stars.
The practical way would be to compromise with what is at hand. I can only recognise that some of us seem to have barriers to compromising too far. We may look to excuse those around us, but such absence of judgement does not mean that one, with one's measure of rules and codes, has disappeared. There is a time to be firm and a time to be lax (29). But as the hieroglyph for "carry" implies, being the symbol of the chair, there may be a time when anything conveyed is via relaxation: things going their own way. If this must be so, I prefer that nobody claim to know it all, that we all avoid being "clever or rich" (65). I'll be the first to say: I don't always know how to come across.

Watercolour brush.

Two or Fewer

I have a circular table that can spin and roll, with two layers, handy for book access. The glass and curved openings in its construction make it spatially noninvasive and conducive to impatient hands that grab at said books. The table attracted a European furniture catalogue sales company whose production offer stipulated that the design be simplified... as all their goods need to be understood in two or fewer photos. I present this vignette as a sign of our times.
The second story is of space fruit which essentially uses electric light to produce food from yeast on spacecraft. Nicola Twilley describes it as "making visible that new seasonality of the void, culturing alternate layers of symbiotic bacteria to provide a cross-sectional grain" (emphasis added). The question here being whether man can take seasons into his own hands.
My stubborn mind insists, if only to me, that this is also the attempt made by modern literature, as it takes everything into itself as it gorges on stream of thought, disordered dreams, stories within stories with "hardly any meaning left" (viz). The whole world in our hands, not His, as London sang in the 1950's hit.
Some people say that belief is the weakness of the mind, but surely the positivist impetus behind space fruit is also a belief: that man can manufacture exactly the food he wants, overcoming limitations. This belief may also be blinding, as is the fact that said food industry makes ersatz saccharine that is harmful to health. But it is peddled in two photos or fewer: the garlic-eating gum-chewer, Barbie drinking diet soda.
Real sugars require washing, consumption before rotting, knowledge of preparation. Two or fewer photos is taking the box out of the freezer and putting it in the microwave.
Two or fewer photos is knowledge as priding modern over ancient. Because the modern is already homogenized. It is the language we are born into - few reach other perspectives. So it is possible for some to label themselves intellectuals because they have gone through the confusion of Ulysses. The world is wor(l)dplay! We are lost in the digressions of Tristram Shandy, plagiarisms of modernity. In the two photos, we become parodies of ourselves.
But what is true might not be apparent in a picture: we may not know a priori what we may come to know. "We infer more than we see," wrote William Whewell, who worked from the idea that our ideas as shadows of Divine Ideas (viz. Third Bridgewater Treatise). His understanding was ordered by a larger category of ideas as they are in Platonism. This runs contrary to the modernism of "copies of copies" (viz. Deleuze and Guattari). Facts with no guiding principles - just like the demise of schooling. Once upon a time, the bad students were exposed to some form of submission to lessons: today, the bad lesson is simplified for the student, a mockery of aphorisms. Wisdom deracinated on the stage where it takes on a new life without meaning is the one photo I would end with if I hadn't gone past the two or few limit paragraphs ago.

Brush. Magazine.

Hippopotamus, Spiral

The sun has set but there is a persistent dove at my windowsill, not eating grain but watching who knows what in silence with me as I sit and collect my words. I think this is the dove that unfortunately slipped into my flat a while back. The trust these creatures exhibit amazes me: I walked right by it to open the window wide open as it stood, bewildered and disoriented, on my table. (I do not feed doves regularly, but admit that I have attempted to tame them to not fear my hand.)
Most of the time that I think of the words "hand," "sun," or "mercy" I think of Aten, with his hands reaching down from the heavens to the people, including kings, like Akhnaten. To understand such symbols on ancient walls, however, as Hegel pointed out, requires more than just the historical context, but thoughtful meditation. Gadamer writes that we must consider both aesthetics as well as historical consciousness, that we open our senses to our own contemporary life to gain insights into the past. Perhaps a moment with the birds or the animals will do - they appear in so many different ways in ancient art.
We know that the hippopotamus was considered a particularly dangerous animal by the ancient Egyptians (a terrible force for little fishing boats) and it is surmised that it was considered to be a force to be controlled - not only in this life, but in the rivers leading to the afterlife, as well. We may not have to worry about hippopotami what with shipping vessels that outscale the human frame, but we no longer have symbols that may look like animals but point to the perils to be conciliated.

Earlier today, I rifled through old photographs, searching for photos I took of the rock art at the Petroglyph National Monument. I remember standing there and thinking, this makes so much sense, staircases, crosses, spirals - how else does one represent the motions or categories of life. But that was back when I used to assume I could understand anything; now, there is plenty I'd rather not understand at all, rather like what Herzog observed of bears: some things teach us nothing of the world but only about themselves, and their place in the world. Rather like art that takes for its subject the contemporary: there is no guarantee it has the potential to point beyond itself.
But I like to think that bears, if not all human behaviour, does have symbolic potential. In fact, there's a theory that there was once a hunter's taboo on using such animal's names: for whatever reason, it seems some aspects of life are best not addressed head on.
To look through the layers of photographs of oneself from before, one cannot help but wonder whether this creates a new category of the virtual self and virtual thought - labelled as understanding, but rather, nothing more than figments, no longer tangible. Still, one can't but marvel at all the stages one has gone through: up and down the stairs, round and round, plus, minus, there are times perhaps we look nothing like ourselves or who we may later strive to be.
There is shedding in the natural world, and a leaving behind.
What if man could become retrograde, that if there is such a thing as evolution, there is also mental and physical degeneration: the tower falls, the mind is scattered - perhaps across the world, and man is left not even with language but the vaguest primordial intuition to put the pieces back together again.
Like the church Rodin built from nothing more than two hands molded after two people's. I carried that idea with me for years - and think that Gadamer did, too, because he saw the sacred in so many places. He saw it in the symbol that presents the presence of what it represents, thus treated with reverence - as with the flag, for example. Or the holiness of a representation.
I think that to stand before rock art, there is symbolic, even metaphysical, presence, which may be helped by the fact that to see it, one must be standing at the spot, standing among the rocks in their original and natural context. To draw on nature, it seems like a revolutionary idea. We draw over it.

But I could not find my photos of that place, far more varied than the ones one may find on the internet. I remember standing there, and wondering if I would encounter a rattle snake. I was all on my own - I had reached the park by taking the public bus and then walking a way's. All of these factors contributed to the immediacy of my looking. I think this is why people like wildlife safaris: there are no iron bars between the beasts and the jeep, the element of danger is present - but the presence of the animals is also that much closer.
There is no place for presence if interaction shifts to be commanded by buttons. If we are to thoughtfully meditate on life to access the aesthetics, surely we might deepen our inspiration through contact with the animals and plants in the earliest aesthetics. If that is not possible, we may resort to reverence: to behold, become aware of - which, if we follow Hegel's suggestion that we are to interiorise our recollection of an externalised spirit, may be reached less through logic than through the senses of noein.
To see mazes and spirals - is this not to be the amateur mathematician, architect? There is form, measure in this life, translated once into shape, again into language. We feel our way out of this mess.
I could not find the pictures of the past that I was looking for but I found a circular accordion montage of photos from my NM travels, interspersed with renditions of words and images from the petit prince, whose dissatisfaction over drawings of the sheep he requested ended with him being given a drawing of a box. The sheep is inside it, he is told, and he is overjoyed. That was just the sheep he was looking for.
In the box that is our lives - try as we might to break beyond the confines in our audacity to disrespect freedom, for true freedom has no need for greed - in that box, filled with whatever travels, whatever images of past selves and whatever other images that stick to us as if we were a colonne Morris, absorbing instead of reflectively meditating, for that, too, can happen at certain phases of growth, hopefully we see inside ourselves the sheep that we are looking for.

Brush.

Farrago

In the golden hour sun, building-top satellites glinted like so many faces, expectant, seemingly turned toward the sun to receive its last daily rays. So I walked on towards the park, filled with people, like the almost-erased pale woman with her knotty dog, a girl with tanned skin clashing against her neon tank top, youths with their Converses on the benches.
I remember at my first boarding school being told by our Cornish head of house that if we ever were to dare to place our shoes on furniture, she would take our shooed feet and stamp them all over her garments, and then have us pay to have her clothes cleaned.
Such experiences may be indicative of a serious inclination - which of course is a great deception, because merely carrying the responsibility of cause and consequence does not mean that one is always sensitive enough to friends. When we relax, we might sometimes accidentally put our feet on the furniture of a friendship.
And in that same park with the youths were bushy trees that chirped for the preposterously large numbers of sparrows that would dart in among its branches, causing them to shake. Carefree, intrepid sparrows. One came into my home once just to fetch a few grains of wheat. I have a friend who is like that: mentioning a dramatic family tale as nothing more than an aside to why it was that he had to organise his day other than expected. His grain of wheat was his day, the drama required no further comment.
What I wish I had been told as a child is that life is a mixed bag. I continued back home, via side streets, where such an artistic little bushel of weed sprouted from an abandoned aged house, foreground to a blasé series of low rises.

In fact, I noticed today more than ever at how many buildings have had their facades peeled off: with, say, only cornices still in place, cornices of entablatures of no-longer visible bas-relief columns. Buildings revealing the bare bricks, except for the still visible corners reminiscent of bad sunburn. Yet, among it all was that single weed bushel like a promised sign - and the cached garden of clay pots and roses, making of one peeling house an enchantment.
Were it not for the death notices on the next few buildings. There is a very old word, farrago, that was used to describe a mixture of wheat - like the sparrows eat, meal, grits. It means confused miscellany, the mixed bag. Surely the measure of difficulty is to be held up against the measure of good for the latter to stand out, like deep tan vs. hot pink. But it has to happen - the problems, whatever drama. Some days we struggle with others, some days we struggle against ourselves. It is hard to shine, but easy to understand in principle. Ovid writes, video meliora, proboque, deteriora sequor: I see better things, and approve, but I follow worse. Why is it that our weaknesses do not make us more forgiving of others?
We may be wont to whine over misfortune, but it is occurring to me just how much of a fallacy it is to be moved by appearances of things. Epictetus writes, it is never what happens to us that is the problem, but what our opinion is of the events. If it looks bad, it does not necessarily have to spell a tragic end in our hearts. We can wait it out, use the difficulty as fortitude. For the discerning eye, there is never a mixed bag: things may be returned to their places if one knows how to call things for what they really are. Test. Transition. Lesson. Walk-in-training.
There are people who obscure such things for themselves and so for others. They are the ones who are confused, complaining about unemployment, yet not willing to break a sweat, especially not over the little things, the little details where the precise formula of the farrago may be found. Where there is difficulty, there is also good. The good is everywhere at all times. There's nothing jumbled about that.

Brush. Magazine.

Salubrious Respect

There is something to be said for early rising in spring; that first silence of the day, before man-made clatter and the automated chirp that is the siren and horn. There is also something to be said for waterside walks at sunset, observing poppies at the golden hour, watching the message of pink as the sun slips from view, which is not to say that it does not return.
To possess a storage of such observation is to be rich. Even better when accompanied by passages from Cicero, to be mulled over like a good wine, never to just be swallowed. Thence the word respect, to look back on, consider, observe. But even for people who do not read or take up permanent abode in nature when deep with age like Chomei - who writes from his hut of solitude, "of the beauties of the ever-changing scenery of the hills one never becomes weary. And to one who thinks deeply and has a good store of knowledge such pleasure is indeed inexhaustible" - the need to retreat, to observe nature, is apparent. A tear-drop-eyed woman yesterday felt she had to apologise for our having happened upon her alone, on a waterfront trail. "Better to walk alone in nature than not to go at all," she said, not knowing that my friend and I both do the same.
I would posit that it is those people who walk alone - and as the woman said, though company affords its special joy, it is not a prerequisite - are people who can be trusted. But here we return to the apology: why would anyone need to speak in defense of their solo retreats into the womb of the very nature whence we came, also alone? That wicked part of society that ties people to each other like weak slaves. The kind of society that whispers at adults doing things by themselves: the kind that mechanizes marriage, bearing theirs like a police badge, writing up outsiders who include those who are happily married but grant each other free time to pursue their own interests, and simply time to themselves.

Such is the chorus quick to bad-mouth their significant other: saccharine martyrs (martyrs are never syrupy: their love burns within, flames necessarily licking up the pathetic: to consider them is awesome) who would throw others into the jail they constructed from the mistake that is their approach to life. They do not see that the institution of being with another person, a co-helmsman for life, is a special gift, that it is hard, but that if one wants that privilege, there is a burden to be borne. They steal the high social rank they give themselves, always reneging on paying for the favour. And in the mean time, they spread half-false stories of those people getting on with their lives, walking alone in nature if they want to - free as birds.
There is something to be said for enjoying birdsong in the morning, tuning into it, then tuning out, then capturing the calls again - the noisy swifts! No money or status could possibly pay for such pleasure and privilege. There is indeed a price tag on everything in life, but some things are worth far more than what they cost.
We have all been granted freedom to understand life as we will. While many intelligent people use their minds in an attempt to pepper other people's stews, there is no over the counter remedy for human life. The freedom of individual decision invalidates the prescription of the universal. While the universal, as an ideal, remains unaffected by 'man's meddling, it is exactly the specifics of each individual's mangling that makes a return to the ideal - if it is desired - dependent on particulars. Universals only apply to healthy respect.

Brush.

Sources, Shapes

This morning as I came out of a monumental edifice filled with symbols so elaborate, that as I looked at what I thought was but an ornamental flourish I realised it stood for crowned wings, I followed a small dog being walked and noticed the diminutive paw prints it left after trotting through puddles. Since I seemed inclined to develop banal thoughts at that moment, I thought of le scrapbooking and how attached people seem to become of what are to my eyes washed out symbols, like daisies or the cartoon heart. Which is not to say they are devoid of meaning, rather the range of meaning is less delineated. 'One-size-fits-all.' Bakhtinian centripetalism.
I keep thinking back to a passing remark Anne Lamott made on what she learned through on-line dating, that when people define themselves as "spiritual" they do not mean that they read Rumi, for example, but that they consider themselves "nice" (though her anecdotes of their "niceties" put even that in doubt). My association with the word "nice" is that we were forbidden to use it in written assignments. "What do you mean by 'nice'?!" the teacher would bellow. Indeed, sometimes the kindest people appear the harshest of all. Where are all the gruff people now.
I recall the slight horror I felt when I inherited a set of questions for the final exam I used to have to give; some of them were pure cliché. But one asked about the "return to nature" that is still a trend, if a minor one. I often think of that phrase, or the equally as hackneyed, "return to sources." This idyllic picture is only "nice" if viewed through the postcard image. All else is work. My favourite essay on country living is "Scipio's Villa" which describes the dank bath of the retired general who had no dirt, per se, to wash off anyway, given his wholesome labour in the fresh country air, in contrast with the city baths with ornate fixtures, where men had to bathe in scalding water to clean from themselves the stink of their turned oils.

One may be wont to conclude, given that Seneca's essay cited above was written so long ago, that man exhibits a frequent struggle against natural sources (of work, living, cleaning: wherein 'natural' is the golden mean). While I agree that it's a fallacy to consider history a series of repetitions, it would be foolish to expect that events and behaviours lack precedent. It is understanding the pattern of human fallibility that led Huxley in the first edition of Nature to write, alongside Goethe's aphorisms, that there would come a day when readers would look back on the latest scientific discoveries in that magazine as passé.
And yet it is possible today for people to walk around with higher degrees even in history who are happy to drink whatever contemporary koolaid lurks in the water cooler. They are all very 'nice' but far more menacing than any taciturn curmudgeon one may learn from.
Anyhow, I am more than happy to return to the past and make my way to lesson two of Pharr's Homeric Greek. I am astounded at how welcoming the language is: all these years, I have been picking up the odd word and idea, and the language is already taking shape in my mind (hopefully this is not an inferior mirage formed by an overheated brain). Like the single word μουσειον meaning dwelling place of the muses, and linked to our 'museum' brought to mind Gadamer's reminder of how much invocation of the muses preceded early philosophy. That the muses can bring much that is true, but also much that is false. That word also denoted a place dedicated to the muses; later a place of learning, as in the Μουσεῖον τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας which included the Library of Alexandria. The relationship between man and learning was mediated. I would argue it is still mediated, by our ignorance.
As I read the Homeric words, and repeated pronunciation along with the few recordings I found, I remembered a hymn by Ephrem the Syrian, specifically the line: "symbols ran to their realisation". I think that line speaks well to sources, of which ancient Greek is one. The more genuine the source, the more accomplished the fulfillment, Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή, to quote the Iliad out of context. As far as I know, in ancient art, it is not the paw print that is of interest, but the animal itself, and the geometric scheme that surrounds it. 

Brush. Magazine.

Tropopause

Large pieces of snow have gradually covered the city white like a pointillist painting. I watched some of the flakes drift down while I walked and felt the dizziness of snow-globes. On the way to work, I saw the body of a bus broken down at the side of the road, the driver in his cube like an orb of silence - he seemed to smile as he read his paper in that hush of peace. No passengers, nowhere to go, nothing but the paper, and time.
Sometimes the picture of absences and emptiness can reveal, by comparison, how many thoughts a person is carrying around. I could hear the hum of concern over the final work I'm doing on a text that in some way justifies the past twelve years of my life. But there is no justification for such whistling wind in the mind.
Trouble begins when sets of days blend into each other like the big grey blah of the overcast. By contrast, is freedom: the green wave of streetlights; the unexpected παῦσις from passengers and the spluttering engines: quiet, choice words on the page.
Such orbs of of silence are like being high above in a commercial plane, at the level above the clouds, above the troposphere with all that snow, wind, and the electric storm from the friction of the mind. What is wanted is that upper limit where things change for the better, alleviating the pointillism of ellipses from Things Not Yet Finished. Just above the tropopause.
The simplicity of formlessness
Without form, so without aim,
Without desire, so tranquil,
All things go right as of their will. (37)
I came home and read some of the Tao Te Ching, benevolent also for all the space around the text. Things go right as of their will - that is my silent orb, the one I have been longing for. It suddenly seems to me that without realising it, one can hold Things Not Yet Finished in front of one's eyes to the point where the eyes go dizzy. The finishing does not lie in the work itself, but paradoxically comes from without.
When I stop caring to the point of exaggeration, work goes smoother, I soar above the weather, problems solve themselves. It is like that engineer whose solutions came to him in dreams, in the pause of the night. The answer is in the rhythm of movement, the IU of linguistics. The answer is in going just a little bit higher, above change, to the inspiring stability of abstraction. Bar-headed geese fly there, above Qomolangma.

Element. Photo in background.

Far From

I am sitting at my computer listening to the birds sing. I wonder where they come from, in the middle of winter: if you listen carefully, you will notice that some of the song changes from month to month. New birds arrive in the city.
As I sit, I think of my friend visit the Matisse exhibit as he reaches his octogenarian year, and regret this aspect of space that divides us. He says he goes so often, he knows the security guards. I imagine him in his horn-rimmed glasses, feeling relief at the lilies, symbols that never die, in the silence of the museum, away from the blare of the news that disturbs him. I feel relief knowing that the show arrived to take him away from the other thoughts he would otherwise entertain.
And it is this taking away, or drawing out, that I am mindful of. Because this week I had the strangest feeling that sometimes, and maybe most of the time, the most Important Things may not actually be before our eyes, rather the Important Things stand behind this silly game that must be played, and played half-hearedly, lest we lose sight of the Things through petty distraction - like when we let our minds get carried away with Other People.
But Other People are but a smoke screen - what a terrible fate, to be walled in to a smoke screen. The human being wants to imagine a way out of the plaster. This does not have to be violent, it could be like those early-Byzantine discoveries: behind one mosaic is another of a phoenix, found by seeing through the top layer.
There is a percentage of life that does not deserve attention. It is a large percentage, like the percentage of ocean over land. This percentage is called "the seas" and it looks like a giant mirror, but beneath the reflections are magical creatures, some as transparent as rice paper, but with fairy lights that can be seen only in the dark.
So the darkness, the Other People, appear like creatures on a cave wall, testing our vision. No, it is not those creatures we must be perceiving, but the wall behind them, with its own creature-esque shapes, telling us about the movements of this giant body called earth, which reminds us of Life, and Mystery.
I have felt this excitement at the under-layers. I found it, too, in the Greek epigrams that open so many Victorian books. It is these epigrams, and the seabed of knowledge they contain, that is inspiring me to finally study ancient Greek, something I have always wanted to do. In one line, a different, more complex light shines on the work of prose - I found it in this line from the Illiad, μοι χάνοι εὐρεῖα χθών, quoted here to express the depth of scholarship. The Iliad line reads, let the wide earth gape for me (deciphered from here and here), but without being sure of its meaning, I just like for now the vistas the association opened up for me: the context of the Iliad passage is the promise of justice being done.
There are people who look at me askance because to their eyes I overcomplicate things by trying hard and reading so much (ha, and I don't even know if I am getting it right). But those people are becoming to me like a smokescreen, behind which lies a Better World that I cannot wait to learn more of. And in this way, I associate myself with my friend at the Matisse exhibit, wandering in silence among flowers, far from the maddening crowd (origin; poem).

Element.
P.S. When I wrote this, I had Monet's lilies in mind, probably due to a muddle of memories from
a visit to the Musée de l'Orangerie.

This Is Not a Boutique

Last week, it snowed so hard that the city became a silent hamlet, and depressing jokes were made about how one only notices how many elderly people there are in this city when they are not around to cram the buses and cafes. Then the snow receded like a hairline, leaving emptiness in its wake: and the farmer's market, which the week before was as populated as a spring field with flowers, lay bare, with but a few vendors at the stalls.
I walked through it in a haze, nothing to take my attention outside of myself as per usual - until a frustrated seller at one of the stalls shouted at someone in protest: "This is not a boutique!"
How that made me laugh, deep in my heart. I imagine that a woman with nothing better to do, having suffered recent cabin fever, was releasing tension by provoking a poor seller just trying to do an honest day's work. Do you have it in a larger size, no, not that size, but the half size, no, not that shade of blue...
Just looking. Like that Rumi verse, "These spiritual window-shoppers, who idly ask, 'How much is that?' 'Oh, I'm just looking.' They handle a hundred items and put them down, shadows with no capital." I think such window-shopping applies to theory: by window shopping, one can get an idea of the clothes in the window, but unless one has the experience of having tried on scores of garments, one will not know by looking if the clothes will fit. Without experience, the theoretical belongs to the flâneur.
Unless one has walked a thousand moons in another man's moccasins, or has a great well for the resonance of empathy, the object (or subject) is removed: one does not possess it. Through empathy, or affinity, one can possess more than one owns. One is open to enjoy the thing: like how one can feel another's success as if it were one's own.
But since some people like to magnify their brains through reductionism of all else, they come up with odd ways to sweep mismatched bedfellows under the carpet of theory. This is not the same as having universal ideals to guide our understanding. Without knowing something about the nature of life, theory is as superficial as window-shopping.
Experience unfolds gradually, like a flower. Who could painstakingly spend their days patiently watching a flower bloom? Only the person who loves the flower could bear to do that - and through such shared time, the person's relation and feelings toward the flower change. Almost imperceptibly, but enough to impact their understanding of the flower. To experience together is to transform perception. Life is not a boutique. "You come and buy in the market and go back to your homes laden with goods, but the spell of homeless winds has touched me I know not when and where. I have no care in my heart; all my belongings I have left far behind me."

 

Boxy border. Cross sketches. Book in background.

Offstage

If ladies are not meant to take to the stage, thespian inclinations can be fostered in the private study of delivery, poise, the "beats" of Method (exposing the emotions hidden behind the curtain of words), a sensitivity to expression and movement through space. Perhaps the greatest challenge is associated with Method - so well described in The Satyricon, in a passage relevant today:
Detractors of the times, who bear the Cynic's scrip, are known
To often sell the truth, and keep their faces!
So Justice is at public auction bought,
The knight gives judgement as Gold says he ought. 
Sometimes, when I look at people's faces, I see that they have mastered the art of "white and red face" opera makeup: eyes raised, to look authoritative.
I have been thinking a lot about faces, and economy. Keeping up appearances requires so much energy that something is lost. It isn't economical. Also, with the fort sealed up, no goods can come in but must be the result of hard labour (no stumbling upon apple trees by the roadside).
This past week, a few unexpected conversations - the kind that catch one unawares - left me perplexed at how stubborn some people become through the years - that brittleness with words where anger erupts at any thought that is not theirs, and if it is similar to their own, is not uttered by them, first.
In response, one is inclined to be happier with less; though there is a tension between what one could achieve through practical experience, maybe even knowledge, and what is finally worth the trouble. To not cross the Rubicon. But I see people wearing huge masks fighting over the world - even if I apparently view the world the Asian way, taking in the entire field, instead of individual details. O, the bigger picture...
I was once astonished watching some bees flit around tiny flowers, as I connected what I saw to what I'd learned in environmental science, that there is enough in the world. The entire field of vision includes pulsing jellyfish; technicolour algae; leopard seals like lithe poodles - until they open their serpent mouth; sharks that bite their own tail (real-life ouroboros); and schools of sardines, swallowed in one gulp by whales... And just like in The Satyricon, one remembers that:
The father, son, the rich man, all are here,
But soon the page is turned upon the comic actor's art,
The masque is dropped, the make-ups disappear!  

Carving Spaces

I often see "corrections" to what I write in what I read elsewhere, afterwards. Two such recent messages were: 1. as one gets older, one inclines toward ideas of places or times that never existed; 2. there is a good reason why adults who cite more youthful literary genres are looked at askance. What I take from this: it is tricky to articulate ideals, and the true adult is to be selective of the narrative used to clothe ideas.
Biases may develop against certain genres. I have personally always disliked the "dumb guy" role used ostensibly for edification purposes (yet am unable to avoid a patronising tone, myself). The universal message can be drowned out by choice of presentation. If one has an affinity for certain genres, they are best reserved for special occasions, because to employ them requires clever apologia, which can be beside the point.
Ideals do, however, appear rather readily and simply in intellectually contested genres, like Sendak's observation, "What is a children's-book artist? A moron!" (via). But such reductionism can lose sight of those who are suspicious of any idea that is imprisoned by jargon, and prefer the simple. So we are left with the challenge of presenting complexity simply, and the further challenge of not losing sight of ideals along the way of intellectual education. If we look carefully, we see that the "places or times that never existed" are actually the residence of the ideal, the truth that Socrates points out can only be proved by argument.
In the universe the difficult things are done as if they are easy. In the universe great acts are made up of small deeds. The sage does not attempt anything very big, And thus achieves greatness. (63)
Stories are told to attempt to localise the ideal - just as localised vilification occurs, to "translate" complex ideas into terms everyone, adult and children alike, can understand (though deeper meaning requires experience). Such stories are not meant to be taken literally, and are but illustrations painted over life.
The laudator temporis acti knows that the narrative/s of any age is/are but just one possible view, that the hubris of each rising age will have its ebb. I say "age" and not "generation" because I think few people mature properly during their one life.
To retreat into a story is to also bring space to perspective: standing back brings the larger view. I always tell my students that part of the difficulty in seeing is perceiving what isn't there: to have an absence with which to compare a presence.
On my shelf is a Chinese woodcarving that has somehow continued to survive among my limited belongings, with its under-layer of fiery burgundy, and over-leafing of metallic gold. It has plenty of openings, spaces carved out of that wood. Sometimes I think it is enough of an accomplishment in one day if we, through what we say, have created such a space, and allow the light to shine in.

Element.