I - Thou

Let's invoke Shelley. In his "Defence of Poetry" he wrote that learning how to feel another's pain can aid the imagination to contribute to the greatest moral good (the highest political hope being the abolition of slavery).  
I, you, they, he writes, are mere grammatical markers essentially modifications of one mind, though the practise in seeing such connections is a practise, until it becomes a habit. It "tends to abolish the course of history" - it is timeless, rooted in the unchanging aspects of humanity, in case anyone has forgotten one of the paths to immortality. Time washes away even the imperfection of authors where they fail to reach the perfection of which they write - the failure to allow for such disparity is to lose sight of one's own faults (1921: 57). 
This ability to see beauty in something other, to see its relevance, is such a vital practise. I wrote about such 'relief' a long time ago, here. "Good" poetic writing restores order to the world, based on morals, Shelley writes - that kind of romantic imagining certainly seems distant today. But on the personal level, his sentiment has its relevance.
When one might feel like a carcass being devoured by so many thoughtless vultures, the mind can move away from those gory scenes of selfishness by seeking out other practises of healing, which may not be visible in the present scenes but that can be invoked, if one knows or remembers to call on them.
So the story goes. It has (obviously?) been a rough week in these parts, but I retain awe at the classical (not just Greek, also Chinese) rejuvenating and refreshing practise of returning to the font of literature: how is that not a treasure trove?

She descends from the soapbox, to write this week's

B/Logrolling

Other recipes I have made many times this summer:
Chipotle tahini sauce a great way to snack while avoiding processed foods
To make it from scratch, I make my own hot sauce (grilling tomatoes in the oven to avoid canned ones) - this is such a good hot sauce, it is hard to believe how simple it is to make
Nice and light eggplant parm (read: real eggplant parm, not breaded)

Why I am avoiding processed foods now: Have you ever heard of "cracking"? I hadn't either until I watched this (French) documentary. Wow. The process applies to foods now. The processed foods I ate most regularly were "bio" style. But now that I know about "cracking", and how the protein factor is obtained for those foods, I am making new efforts to home cook almost everything.

Another attack on the humanities. Yet again, a very educated person treats Plato as if Nietzsche had the last word. It is so tiring how trendy it is to submit the classics to reductionist gestures. I could write many pages on this but will make one point here. As if people don't understand what reading is. We are never finished reading the classics because the way we relate to them requires relating anew from the changing present. Yes, we do suspend our judgement to attempt to 'enter' the past, but what the past will mean to us and how we receive it will always be different - this is even true from within the limited scope of a single lifetime.

Speaking of history: Understanding religion in late imperial China from Columbia University's Asia for Educators

Apropos mention of acting (Brett) in last week's post: continued consideration of acting re. the individual vs. collective. To this end: a post on Hall, Fo, and Theatrics of Role and Story though I beg to differ on how method (Stanislavsky's approach to) acting is understood. It is very much an "I-thou" type acting and requires the actor to relate, in every 'beat' of dialogue, with their role. Similarly, through this very 'real' evocation (as the actor is calling up from their memory enough emotional vocabulary to make each 'beat' happen in real time - this is very taxing for the actor, who 'relives' the script every night), the audience is brought within a realm of introspection.
"Class wars" seem to efface this dimension of reality.

Two things I am thinking about how to include more thoughtfully in my classes: ethics and new practical skills (last year, it was a business proposal, this year, I am thinking about SEO...)

Ethics:
Daily ethical questions 
A Framework for Character Education in Schools
Ethical storytelling:
A more thorough primer
Another good link - active version of reference links: Concordia's toolbox; Ethics pdf; the Ethics Guidebook consent framework; resource for ethical practice in digital storytelling
Interested in this for so many reasons. One of which, an educational site with the declared purpose of promoting the "good" (ethical) in education, recently published a post in which backhanded, reductionist comments were made about not one but two cultures (in all of about six or seven words, at that). As always, it is the "circuitous route" that is most likely to include not what we want to hear or what is being said - but what we are not hearing. But once you hear, as Gadamer wrote, you cannot "hear away".

Blogger I'd love to meet at a dinner party (forgot this feature last week!): writes and produces the Canadian blog The Art of Doing Stuff - it was her well-written recent post on blogging that got me thinking about introducing SEO skills to my class this year. (I ought to practise her tips myself, but ... actually, there are advantages to being less visible and to amateurism that continue to suit me.)

Song in philosophy of the good that could be

Perhaps it feels that a storm is afoot, or that it is already raging. Someone asked a poet today: "How do you see what you do as a poet in the face of the triple threat of the modern age: postmodernism, globalization, and materialism?" The poet considered, besides the occasional wish to run for the hills and retire to the idylls of yesteryear, that in fact poets mostly thrive on discord. He added that poets are not to be trusted and then invoked the (oft-misunderstood) reference in Plato's Republic where poets are banned. I write misunderstood because Plato himself quotes poets as authority in some places, and uses poetic techniques. Plato takes issue with how poetry is used.
And so the storm continues - from whichever vantagepoint we might be taking. It is funny to think that it exists even for those choosing not to attempt to pursue the classical ideals - like truth or justice or love. Maybe these lessons find us anyway, along the way, even if we do not name them, like a poet who takes up residence in indeterminacy. For it is possible to compare: the vague and the exhortation let your faults die before you die - Seneca. Time is ticking. The storm blows on.
Here is a Senecan quandary (all references below to LXXXI): to be asked by a former student, most of whom are on promotion highways, for class outlines and articles. Seneca writes: it is better to get no return than to confer no benefits. When this person then responds belatedly and perfunctorily after being given the golden mean of help: by which I mean, having been treated as one wants to be treated but without having been given the entire silver platter (especially as it was taught in class the first time round!), Seneca advises when the outcome of any undertaking is unsure, you must try again and again, in order to succeed ultimately.
It is possible to become bitter, unless one has developed the love of wisdom which always says that life treats us better than we treat life. Perhaps for this reason that despite our efforts we will always be falling short in some respect, I aspire to adhere to the advice Seneca gives Lucilius: forget the injuy and remember the accomodation.

The problem lies with how to use criticism: how to recognise a shortcoming without anger, by simply declining to support such behaviour. To retire, withdraw - and not déchirer (with the shears that word suggests). And if one is calm enough, it might be all right in some situations to name the shortcoming, to assist one's self and others in locating what needs improvement - not to remember it like by labelling another person, but to toss it away as soon as it has been addressed. To name something calmly, or to move on, as Seneca suggests, calmly to the next person, but -
There is a storm. Sometimes we stir it up with our own ignorance or lack of character. I think it requires the combination of philosopher and poet to navigate through it - just like the philosopher Plato references the poet Hesiod's opening to the Theogony in his passage in the Republic about what children should be taught (and we readers are like children of the truth). Hesiod's proem begins with the Muses saying: "we know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things". The poet picks up on what the philosopher clarifies.
We may learn that we have words for storms. We can choose to believe that life is good despite them - and suddenly, meaning is nascent all around us.
Plato is not against poetry but in favour of a reminder of the good that could be. Such as, a world without storms or a person who does not have to be flawed. The answer to the storm requires that conditional, but also the philosophical reason to guide it.

Brush: Misprinted type.

Green and Seasonal

Autumn is descending upon this city: suddenly, my long runs have ended in dusk, while they begin hued in gold, as if all plants and objects have become especially receptive to these last rays. As I ran around a bend yesterday, at once freed from lines of trees, the sun struck my eyes without blinding, and in the few wisps of cloud beside it, I saw a tiny rainbow.
It seems particularly intelligent or inspiring to write about the seasons, it is also to step in that river that is the past. There are Virgil's Georgics; seasons as metaphors in Ovid's Metamorphoses (e.g. the line I now relate to: "Autumn comes, when the ardour of youth has gone, ripe and mellow, between youth and age, a scattering of grey on its forehead."); Petrarch's sonnet to Laura.
British poets to address the seasons include Chaucer and Shakespeare, of course, but perhaps most significantly, James Thomson, whose The Seasons straddles the age marking perhaps the (temporary?) end of formal metaphysical, encyclopedic poetry and the beginning of something more subjective. He predates Romantics like Keats and Wordsworth.
The poem is at once located "in the tradition of idealized epic encyclopedism" for its implications of Newtonian physics, Spenserian romance, Miltonic epic, geology, but, because of its "subordination of an individualized poetic vision and the exclusion of conventional organizational mechanisms", it sought a different kind of complete knowledge (Seth Rudy, Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain, 78). The poem includes even political themes: questions of human rights, liberty on the national as well as individual level, patriotism, the historical role of Scotland, which had been unified with England during his lifetime. The book remained popular for decades, in part because booksellers were able to repackage it given its Romantic appeal by playing down the multiple levels of meaning the poem contains (Rudy, 80).
Samuel Johnson's criticism of the work, that it was lacking a clear method that would synthesize its disparate parts, seems to have been part of the reason for its continued popularity. And it is this lack of "proper arrangement" allowing ready absorption of diverse elements (ibid.) that brings us to the colour green.

And so we reach our final book of poems about seasons, The Book of the Green Man, by Ronald Johnson (via). The blurb by the publisher's reads: "Ronald Johnson described The Book of the Green Man as his 'attempt, as a brash American, to make new the traditional British long seasonal poem.' This Poundian endeavor to 'make it new' stemmed from a visit that he ... made to the UK in the autumn of 1962, in search of all things 'most rich, most glittering, most strange.'"
Perhaps more exciting, we learn that he walked the landscapes - as well as gardens and grottoes, and, most notably to me at least, Gilbert White's Selborne. White is best known for his The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, written just a few years after Thomson's death, and a model for natural historians and writers. As a bird-lover, I find his ornithological description movingly astute, and who does not love the phrase "birds of passage" - observed throughout.
Part of one of Johnson's August poems reads: "'August is by much the most mute month', yet, the air may be so strongly electric that bells may ring & sparks be discharged in their clappers: ... Gilbert White quotes from the Latin: He preferred the sounds of birds to those of men..." In these lines, similarities can be seen with Thomson: individualized poetic visions, breadth over formal unity, emphasis on eye and ear.
Scope can be seen in Johnson's lines above where he writes of White, who indeed quotes from the Latin, in Letter LVI. The passage is by French philosopher, mathematician and astronomer (connected to Kepler, Galileo, Descartes) Pierre Gassendi, whose The Life of Peiresc immortalized his patron. White identifies with Peiresc: "This curious quotation [of preferring birdsong] strikes me much by so well representing my own case ... When I hear fine music I am haunted with passages ... elegant lessons still tease my imagination, and recur irresistibly to my recollection at seasons, and even when I am desirous of thinking of more serious matters."
The British Library offers a recording of birdsong rivalling instrumental music, so we might recollect it at seasons, have our imaginations teased, and contemplate what it means to be "green" - infused with nature? But seeing that Johnson also wrote a cookbook that I'd love to get my hands on, The American Table, any lack of unity encountered while walking through, writing of, and eating greens, is at least individualized: the individual being modernity's season of man.
This post (like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) was inspired by Susannah Conway's August Break.

Magazine in background: Marie Claire Idees;

brush: misprinted type, via Pugly Pixel (we will be sad to see go).

Getting to the Styx

"Finding one's way around" and "following one's own path does not come easily," Gadamer writes at the end of the Beginning of Philosophy. He is referring to finding one's way in the atmosphere that emerged with Heidegger, where metaphysics becomes one of the forgetfulness of being. This Being comes across in Heidegger's writings collected in Language, Poetry, and Thought as the ability to perceive higher-level metaphors, by which I mean those prompted by a feeling for mortality. He writes of the importance of such poetry to convey something other than usual, something extraordinary, alien, and that when art becomes familiar and a matter of connoisseurship, it has become business and reveals a lack of precision in the thought that meets it. When art is met by everyday language "it no longer responds to the call". Has Heidegger become familiar? At the end of Gadamer's Beginning, he concludes, "just as Plato was no Platonist, neither can Heidegger be held responsible for the Heideggerians." I have yet to be entirely sure of what Gadamer means by this, but as suggested in this paragraph, I wonder if he is not  addressing the difference of those who "respond to the call" and those who do not, though all ostensibly gathered around the same name (Plato, Heidegger).
We are urged to engage with texts, to think for ourselves, and what is more, as per Heidegger, to be venturesome, "more daring than life" and remove our nature from the realm of "procurement and production" i.e., "things that can be utilised and defended". To will more strongly than self-assertiveness - which thinks it is possible to channel the energies of physical nature to make man happy in all respects and brings a peace that is really "the undisturbed ... relentlessness of the fury of self-assertion". Self-assertive man lives by risking his nature in the vibration of money and currency of values, without knowing the true weight of things. Only "one who stands aside from actuality and  ... the collective" can see that man's dwelling is essentially and foremost poetic. Only those open to the widest orbit, to acknowledgement, to death, can reach the interior of uncustomary consciousness, beyond the arithmetic of calculation.

Speaking of calculation, Heidegger writes that measuring something unknown with rods confines this thing within a quantity and order that can always be determined. A more essential measuring is a sketch of something known indirectly only or a conflict of measure and unmeasure, illustrated by a disclosing that reveals what conceals, such as God appearing through the sky. This measure-taking gauges the in-between, which brings heaven and earth together; the rift, which carries opposites to the source of their unity due to their common ground. This is "inconvenient to the cheap omniscience of everyday opinion which likes to claim that it is the standard for all thinking".
This kind of measuring also comes up in Gadamer's Truth and Method. Similar to the "confinement" of a predetermined "order", he writes of the horizon of meaning of the statement being concealed by methodical exactness: "meaning thus reduced to what is stated is always distorted meaning". There is an aspect in "saying what one means" that is connected to "an infinity of what is not said in one unified meaning" which can be seen by comparing this to someone merely repeating what is said, or someone who takes down statements, who will invariably change the meaning of what is said, without consciously distorting it. He uses this as the premise for his argument that hermeneutics is necessary, drawing us into an event of truth. Like Heidegger, he proposes that man is first addressed before he speaks. 
Man learns to live in the speaking of language that presences through his speaking, that uses him to sound out silence, Heidegger writes. Man's home is in a disclosing that reveals what conceals it, a rift that carries opponents to the source of their unity, something alien in the sight of something familiar, a nothing that presences. Poetic projection comes from a nothing that nonetheless contains the withheld vocation of the historical man himself. Man can only truly speak if he is ready for a command that he is to be already waiting to hear.
So "finding one's way" seems to point to an attentiveness disinterested in trade, unafraid of travelling the Styx for nothing more than an anticipated command of the familiarity of life in the alien underworld. Heidegger cannot be held responsible for this conclusion.

Brush: ~surfing-ant at DeviantART. 
Book in background: Amy Butler's Midwest Modern.

"Hardy"

I return to Thomas Hardy like the a sea that has roamed returns to shore, thinned out. How well he has described the abstract source of where one feels misunderstood, an outcast. He writes of clouds that "echo back the shouts of the many and the strong ... Till I think I am one born out of due time, who has no calling here." One specific illustration I could give of this is: in the face of the new rhetoric in education, according to which students are to develop skills in "confidence," standing up instead for skills like using appropriate vocabulary, making arguments that are well supported, knowing how to make concessions - which build real confidence, though difficult to achieve, and also requiring that miracle of communication: good will.
But there is not always good will, many are the charlatans that wander the square with magic teaching ointments. But "magic" comes from the Persian word for power, and indeed, the ointment works in indoctrinating into a certain form of power that bullies alternative paths to learning as "difficult" in its secondary sense, and so it is that such paths are obscured.
"Let him in whose ears the low-voiced Best is killed by the clash of the First, / Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst, / Who feels that delight is a delicate growth cramped by crookedness, custom, and fear, / Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry; he disturbs the order here."
Hardy's name gives away, I think, part of how this should be read. He writes it himself: to hold "that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst". The glance at darkness is not the final destination.
The excerpts are from "In Tenebris II", meaning "in darkness" and in the third part to this trinitating poem, he begins with an excerpt from Psalm 120, in which the phrase, "woe is me" originated; in fact, he quotes that very line, "woe is me, that my sojourn is prolongued". It is a Psalm about finding oneself amidst the treachery and falsehood of barbaric strangers.
But there are unsaid implications of the Psalm cited, like its notion that justice will find a way. We know from the title of Hardy's poem, "In Tenebris" that it is part of a longer phrase, "lux in tenebris" (John 1:5). This does not assuage the pain of problems, but can bring relief on some level: one was initially castigated precisely because one held that better can be attained through worst.

Magazine in background: Marie Claire Idees; brush: Ewansim at DeviantART.

Different Applications

I was going through Goethe and Schiller's Xenions (1797) again, and paused at the section entitled "The Philosophers in Hades," recalling Dante's Inferno, except the two poets make quips at their subjects, their answer to Descartes: "If I am thinking, I am. Very well! But who constantly thinketh?" The phrase only looks inane. And so it is that the different ages of writing are reflected in a mirror composed by the genius or intuition of inspiration and interpretation.
I'd like to pick up a few threads of these thoughts as if they were materials, to attempt to pick threads that may be woven into more sources than listed here and imitate the origin of the word fragment in Latin and Greek, fragmentum and (apo)spasmata, (apo)klasmata which originally denoted bits of material things - like textiles. Each fragment will be preceded by a xenion, untitled to lead back to the original source or to stimulate the imagination to try to complete it.
I. AGES
That you may roast me like Huss, it is possible; but it is certain, 
After me cometh the swan who will my mission complete.
Out of one, comes another. Whether we prescribe to the metallic ages, Plato's four regimes in The Republic, Vico's ages of barbarians, heroes, and men, which released a primitive poetry into the more modern imagination and dissolved the subject into the subjective, or whether we believe in the golden age of Arcadia, whether we place it behind or ahead of us, or in the present, like a wine-making professor living with and off the earth, it seems the civilized thing to do, to put history into boxes. Or at the very least, age enough (in terms of wisdom) to appreciate consequence and sequence.
II. HADES AND HEAVEN
Well met! I come here to question concerning the one thing that's needed.  
That, philosophical friends, made me descend to this place.
It may seem that every man crafts hell in his own fashion - except what if it were what we did with it that counted. Dante visits the Inferno with Virgil. They share an age, in more ways than one, like in the classics of the common speech. Dante uses Virgil up to a point, it is his work after all. Where Dante emerges from hell to the Paschal stars, Virgil makes a starry, grand pronouncement in the opening lines of Eclogue IV, Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo: the great order of the ages is born afresh. And indeed, a Declaration arose to those prophetic words, also borne by Queen Elizabeth I and other seekers of a new age, back when 'age' had not yet become the 'worldly' (i.e. non spiritual) 'secular'. Is there heaven or hell in the secular?

III. TRUTH AND TRUTH IN NAME
Enmity be between both, your alliance would not be in time yet.  
Though you may separate now, truth will be found by your search.
Truth dissolves in moral relativism. Socrates in the Cratylus dismisses the study of language in favour of studying things themselves, "surely no man of sense can put himself and his soul under the control of names". What is the essence?
IV. IMITATION
Bom is the poet 'tis said; and we add, the philosopher also.  
For it is certain that truth has to be formed to be seen.
It is said that mimesis, the imitating Aristotle says the poets do, came first from seeing the stars and reflecting on their ordered movements. We meet this account also in Plato's Cratylus, "the earliest men in Greece believed only in those gods in whom many foreigners believe today— [397d] sun, moon, earth, stars, and sky. They saw that all these were always moving in their courses and running, and so they called them gods (θεούς) from this running (θεῖν) nature". There are a lot of stars in this fragment.
V. WORK
Science to one is the Goddess, majestic and lofty, — to others  
She is the cow that supplies butter to put on his bread
(We remember at this juncture that Goethe was also a successful natural philosopher.) There was no work in Arcadia per se as much as there was some kind of monastic co-habitation. One also imagines Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution, with his 'do-nothing' technique. Farming as the imitation of our relationship towards the earth. Agriculture, the thin veil disguising talk on good and bad government in Virgil's Georgics. Or the great argument in connection with land and justice, Hesiod's Works and Days. We come full circle here - back to the myth of ages, if with the moral tone: to steal the means of life as Prometheus does brings "a shameless mind and deceitful nature" in the guise of a woman with her pithos of other problems - leaving other work in her place, though not leaving man without hope.
What is the purpose of Poetry? Say ! " — By and by I shall tell you.  
First of the real, my friend, tell me the purpose and use.

Brush. Magazine.

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.

Screens

There are times one may question one's life vision, all that makes up what Kenneth Burke calls the terministic screen, one's perception and symbolic action. The 'perception' part can be illustrated by the 2010 German documentary Die See der kleinen Monster about the Lembeh Strait and how a German vet and her partner discovered sea life never thought to be existent at 10-15 meters below the surface because nobody thought to look for it the way they did.
I write this because I feel myself failing in the resonance of my own perception; so little is in my hands and I have lost that fighting power that says: "I." I find myself somewhere between Isaiah Berlin's account of stoicism, according to which it is defeatist to privilege the interior life that one has control of over the agency one has in society, which he sees as promoting an era's collapse, and Julia Kristeva's account of Russian writers who keep one eye in hell, which sounds far uglier than what it means: akin to memento mori. Except that I do not agree entirely with either.
They are too literal: orienting human relations on too literal a plane - which soon descends into the eye for an eye mentality that none of us would like to partake of because let's face it, no matter how well meaning we are, we will all be seriously in debt. But our age insists on the literal. I read a book review recently that claimed the modern taboo to not be profanities but, and this is my interpretation of the author's word choice, a figurative understanding of life.
I will go so far as to say that it is this understanding that creates good art, and it is being lost. I take my cue from Shelley who in his Defense explains that where humour loses its ideal universality, wit takes its place and man laughs from self-complacency instead of pleasure. Man learns to laugh out of contempt, malignity, and sarcasm instead of “sympathetic merriment.” Obscenity emerges, a “blasphemy against the divine beauty in life” and becomes a monster fed by the corruption of society. How's that for a response to the book review.
For those willing to listen, there is much harm in adopting the wrong terministic screen which happens to be one of the points of Bacon's idols. In the context of self-questionning, it is still possible to speak of a human truth, if rarely presented in its complexity. Instead, in our age, inaccurate stories are told; long ago, Plutarch at the beginning of Lycurgus wrote about how much is called into question by the uncertainty of what we may call the screens. We are wont to reread Tristam Shandy with its Epictetian epigraph.

What has happened to the privileging of nuance and tone. This was taught by Peter Kussi, whose course The Writers of Prague opened the imagination to the interplay of meanings beneath the surface - like the meanings in R.U.R., the play which introduced the word 'robot' into English (unfortunately replacing the much more obvious word, αὐτόματον). He was as humble as the subtle messages he decoded with us, invisible to the occupiers.
To deny the figurative is to become a robot. Also, humility rarely mixes with profanities, at least where I am standing: a friend who works in a horrific international supermarket chain for below minimum wage doesn't use expletives; the only people I know who do, do so in 'their' company for regional reasons.
It is the abstract and figurative that gives us wings in difficulty. We can also abstract out of our lives to check the terministic screen. Lao Tzu writes, "Returning to one's destiny is known as the constant. Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment. Woe to him who innovates while ignorant of the constant."
The constant is that abstracting outwards to the place where metaphors may be created between one's narrow life and another's; a platform for innovation for the disinterested.
People congratulate themselves today on their coarse language. But it is not just Western prudishness that led to taboos. We may think of the Japanese byôbu, explained as "demarcating space and shielding ... from prying eyes". They are a beautiful example of schools and styles of craftsmanship. But surely we would want to constrain the view of ourselves as if we were ever capable of seeing the full picture, which we are not, we would be too disappointed at all the shortcomings, too constrained to the present, which denies the promise of what we may yet become.
The screen is liberation, if chosen well. In the Edo period, one different type of screen painted for a desk portrays a man crossing a bridge. This is among the ultimate symbols to my mind: the metaphor is the crossing over, connecting the figurative to the literal.
I hold fast to this constant, and trust discoveries may be made in one's own 10-15 meter midst if one can just tune in to the perception that is called for. The perception is never of it all, but the one glance called, 'enough' and 'insightful.'

Brush. Ornaments thanks to Sweet Tidings.

Not the but a Pattern of Words

"A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past," Peacock writes in The Four Ages of Poetry, adding that if poetry is indeed cultivated, it is at the expense of an area of study more valuable to society. Thanks to a reminder of that work here, a connection may be drawn between Peacock's work and Vico's ages in New Science that I wrote of yesterday. Both of them, through their 'ages' attack the spirit of science where it impinges upon the humanities.
Brett-Smith writes that Four Ages exhibits, "illuminating criticism in epigrammatic form" if written in "mocking wit" and that Peacock distrusted contemporary verse as much as contemporary science, possibly holding those poets in disdain as his own poetry met with "calm" reception.
I think of Ages as a swan song (the kind issued by Socrates, end Phaedo) of a laudator temporis acti; moved when I read his description of the golden age of poetry - themes he returns to in his retorts to the poetry of his day. The golden age makes claims to a truth, ancestors are respected. "Tradtitional national poetry ... is brought like chaos into order and form. The interest is universal: understanding is enlarged" and involves robust passions, character, and nature; "poetry is more an art: it requires great skill in numbers," a command of language, comprehensive knowledge.
Surely his work now reads more as a prediction than incisive wit: "While the historian and philosopher are advancing in, and accelerating, the progress of knowledge, the poet is wallowing in the rubbish of departed ignorance, and raking up the ashes of dead savages to find gewgaws and rattles for the grown up babies of the age." One may cease to think of verse and instead think of the poetic that one expects from art - and recall Picasso's masks: "Je ne sais pas ce qu'est l'afrique" he said, or something like it, just as Peacock writes of, "disjointed relics of tradition and fragments of second-hand observation".
He sees such "querulous, egotistical rhapsodies" as opposite to the mind that orders: he sees the excess of passion, feeling, sentiment as possibly wasting the time of the poet and reader: plenty of older, good poems abound. To read the work of the present at the exclusion of the past is "to substitute the worse for the better." I see in these words the concern of the conscientious writer, his wit as the tool to get us to think twice. Not so much as to mock, he is that gruff friend everyone wants to have, who corrects, but corrects himself five times more.
What is more, his Ages bears some similarities (I shall briefly go out on a limb) to Schleiermacher's On Religion: both write (Peacock in his marathon sentence) of those who are charmed ... in connection with critics. Peacock: "whose minds are not awakened to the desire of valuable knowledge, and who are indifferent to anything beyond being charmed". Schleiermacher: "Wherefore, you must liken them to persons who cannot be made to feel till commentaries and imaginings on works of art are brought as medicinal charms for the deadened sense ... Show me one man to whom you have imparted power of judgment, the spirit of observation, feeling for art or morality".

Something was being lost in that age. Call that thing what you will. Peacock surmises that the "subordinacy of the ornamental ... will ... sink lower in the comparison of intellectual acquirement". Some of us can no longer understand the Latin epigraph at the start of his essay. But we could also mark the dissolution of judgment - whether because of charms and gewgaws (i.e., unreal, pretentious).
It is not enough today to say that an antidote to the modern age may lie in poetry, one must specify what kind of poetry. Peacock's poetry of the golden age has numbers in it. Coleridge would surely object that he included the science of his day in his poems - but Peacock writes of his "compound of frippery and barbarism" and that the man who knows a little has the advantage of knowing more than he who knows naught. (Science can't necessarily escape philosophy.)
But then we may consider Shelley's Defense, written in response to Ages, which Brett-Smith succinctly observes is a different type of argument altogether, making use of metaphor where Peacock uses wit. Logic is not Shelley's strong side, but his "passionate faith in poetry." And maybe between these two great minds, we get what we are missing (here). For example, in Shelley we may see the "madness" described by Socrates (of being inspired by the Muses); in Peacock, we have Socrates' detachment, as in his almost mocking epideictic oratory.
They are both valid criticisms. We could draw on Isaiah Berlin's idea in "Historical Inevitability," that "This naive craving for unity and symmetry at the expense of experience is with us still," and argue in favour of individual experience over mathematical models that wish to explain us away. We could also argue against the chaos of experience in favour of golden universals that may helpfully inform caprice, which  when left to its own devices often destroys.
Berlin argues for some among many possible tunes. A pattern, but not the pattern. Which is a rather benign direction to take. He observes, too, that the principles [scientistic] historians sometimes apply to their work are not the same they apply to their own lives. Do we not sometimes need Peacock, and sometimes need Shelley? We return to the complications of Aristotle's φρόνησις.
Aristotle writes in Poetics that the difference between history and poetry is that, "one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts."
We need new poetry because the possibilities change through time. But for it to be golden, it needs to be receptive to truth. Rilke wrote these truths need to be distilled. Peacock warns us not to waste our own time, let alone that of others. And tells us to study, first. Socrates tells us to listen, but carefully.

Brush.

What Do You Need It For?

Peace. Security a year into the future. A feeling of knowing where one stands in changing sands. Suddenly, one feels inferior to the turritopsis nutricula, a jellyfish, which after growth can revert back to its polypoid state. But these are almost all lies. And the human promise of endurance is so much more.
It may seem as if for all of life, one can but grit the teeth, already the poorer imitation of one addressing the senators, hic manebimus optime. Optime, indeed, to restore that last piece of hope, to make the best of whatever lot is cast. It is all one can do.
What does one need it for? Maybe one already has what one needs. This very post already contains sand, a jellyfish, one man's decision to stand against the Gauls. A seaside holiday and a battle all wrapped in one. It helps on cold nights to make a blanket of words, frightening just enough so one's third ear listens for the beasts, but warm enough for rest.
Eliot once wrote, "When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes."
Who is this ordinary man who may not have picked up on the red thread from all that talk of blankets. Is this the same ordinary man who cannot connect words to action? Who claims humanitarian principles but has no problem concocting poisonous broths for brethren, made from the tittle tattle of, "He did what?" That question always formed in the noxious fumes of first appearances. What a good thing this ordinary man is not a judge, oblivious as he is to any story but that which makes other people look bad.
This ordinary man also has that irritating habit of raking over the same old stories, day after day. As if life hadn't moved on, as if the weather itself hadn't indicated change. "I'm not such a bad ordinary man," this ordinary man all but says as he sets traps for the unwitting just to see them scramble. His notion of good and his action of the trap incongruous. And cold.

So distant from the disinterested blanket. Wrapping, like ancient histories, myth,shards of gossip, moralizing, and wishful thinking all into one warm embrace. Of words. And the ordinary man of discord becomes the friend of he who he has been moved to speak. We may modify the phrase culte of Henri Lacondaire to read that there is no such thing as solitary eloquence: every orator has two geniuses, his own and that of the century that he responds to.
Maybe one needed to be right, needed to appear superior or always in control. I suspect this of the ordinary man who lacks the gesture of self deprecation. But maybe one needed a hand, or the truth. Somewhere, it was repeated, recorded, and recorded again by Czeslaw Milos, that if someone is honestly right 55 per cent of the time, that's very good, and there's no use wrangling...
What did I need it for. To be free at my best in the situation, at the location, none of it to be judged by the ordinary man with his first glance, depraved, deprived of the noise of the typewriter to call him away from  petty thoughts. What did I need it for, to make the journey safely, to make it whole, in one piece:
"The day of the Ratha-yatra, the Car Festival, has arrived when He shall come out on the highway of the world, into the thick of the joys and sorrows, the mutual commerce, of the throng of men. Each of us must set to work to build such cars as we can, to take its place in the grand procession. The material of some may be of value, others cheap. Some may break down on the way, others last til the end. But the day has come at last when the cars must be set out," writes Tagore.
Update - a kind soul asked if I was being menaced. This post was not so much inspired by personal experience as the collective tales of a few good souls similarly afflicted by others' tongues, and I wondered what the need was of certain people to talk that way given the fleeting quality of this life.

Magazine. Brush.

Pizazz vs. Professional Conventionalism

Sometimes in the dead of the night, Chinese adages flood from memory: There is no wise man who is not also stupid; teachers open the door: you must enter by yourself; teach according to aptitude; he who flatters is my enemy, he who reproves is my teacher. Then, I know it is time to stop and begin to take time to look out the window at that yellow moon, so low and close, almost as if it's trying to say something. I cannot receive all of those instructive messages imparted to me, and the impulses of the dot-dash of the telegraphed life become instead the language of poetry.
It is all a person can do sometimes to make  cups of Sukku Malli Kaapi and tune in to the sea at the shore qualities of introspection when it is at rest. The self, in its natural habitat, thirsts after Simple Things and does not wish to be bothered with All the Work of Keeping Up Appearance. It is echoed in passages by Tagore on education where he writes: "We have been repeating great words, learning great truths, looking on great examples, but in return we have simply become clerks, deputy magistrates, pleaders, or physicians [who have] only applied with over-cautious precision just what they have learnt. And who shall make good the vital thing that is lost when students never become masters?"
The cat meows from outside, on the table are magnificent flowers that I got from the grandpa who I discovered last year at the market in the dead of winter, selling colourful, intriguingly unfussy bouquets of dried flowers. And I noticed this week, his is the brightest stall of all, shouting light from that dark corner of the market just like how one would imagine Joseph's technicolour coat; his one white tooth emerging from his constant smile. Who is this grandpa who handles the flowers like old friends?
Like old friends. Those are ideas that are the steam of the What is Needed in ideas. Look at how Davenport rescues poets from merely serving "as homework in state universities, where their presence usually scatters the English faculty like a truant among the Amish". What pizazz - I imagine turning in a research paper in his style, but he said it first, "Thirty years of liberal twiddling with the lines of communication has made it almost impossible to broadcast anything but received propaganda. ... It is the people who suffer from the dullness and ignorance of the press." One does not have to agree with Davenport's taste to feel the surge of life in his writing and the wish to take to the pen or keyboard and respond. Affinities ring out and songs are played; Linoel Trilling did not have to agree with all the small publications to which he contributed, but had to admire the minds of those at the helm.

Every day is our art form. It reaches out from those first morning rays that sometimes escape one if one is still asleep, but continue with the morning sounds of horns of those cars already running behind schedule, the yards being swept of last night's fallen leaves, conversations that at first sporadically then ever louder and more frequently rise up between the buildings. I wish to reach that day and in order to do so, I must grow long arms like the sun.
Not those arms bound in fear of the future but those that seek the horizon. "Delinquencies make their appearance unexpectedly, making us suspicious as to the efficacy of our own ideals. We pass through dark periods of doubt and arid reaction. But these conflicts and wave rings belong to the true aspects of reality. Living ideals can never be set into a clockwork arrangement, giving accurate account of its every second," writes Tagore. "Professional conventionalism" may rob us of the life that allows us to carry on.
The final image in my mind, one I keep coming back to, is the Egyptian basalt statue of Sekhmet at the Villa Melzi d'Eril (Bellagio, Lake Como). The statue sits on a sudden expanse of almost flat grass and faces out towards the lake. It is surrounded by English style gardens displaying exotic plants, a Moorish kiosk, Oriental pond, presents from Napoleon, relics, neoclassical monuments. But there, in the quiet expanse, is the Egyptian goddess of war, staring at the quiet waters and if I remember correctly, in the direction of Switzerland, "land of peace."
Here, her breath does not form the desert, but the other side of her personality seems particularly potent: she is also the goddess of healing. And often bears the solar disk on her head, daughter of Ra, identified with Atum whose arms I aspire towards.
If a statue could think, what thoughts would it have, staring at the boats of tourists and expensive speedboats of the Milanese, so far from home, now far from war, having been herself one of Napoleon's spoils.
It may be that the blessures of bureaucracy, of impinging "professional conventionalism" looking to stamp out the last milligram of soul we have in our fighting selves are actually calling us back to the basics. For it is a very old truth that mastery is the simple expression of complexity. I am wounded so that I return to myself. I am wounded to remember what I am fighting for. I am strengthened by my wound.

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.

Shoes and Umbrellas

"A truly new and original book would be one which made people love old truths," Vauvenargues writes, cited by Hadot who explains that "every generation must take up, from scratch, the task of learning to read and reread these 'old truths,'" through living and experiencing them. Back and forth between guiding lessons and life, understanding is refined like poetry; beyond the chatter of self, towards universals, symbols - which we may imagine rushing towards their source and fulfillment, as Ephrem the Syrian wrote.
One old (methodological) truth I think about as I write is the importance of dialogue, which draws us out of ourselves with all our posturing - so prominent today what with the manufacture of ever newer shapes required for an audience whose gloss is that of cosmetics, unrelated to the inner and sensitive organ, γλῶσσα. It is hard to know oneself in the hall of mirrors that is talking to people through these appearances - people who may grab out at the image of the person, never the person him or herself, residing deep within their temple, only reached through respect.
The well-dressed man is urged to educate himself, but what of the education of the far more unruly soul. A beautiful post over at Classics in Sarasota addressed the difficulties inherent in moderation. Thence the old truths that we are wont to return to, though the post points out that to read Aristotle is to be given only the ideal, devoid of the problems that occur when the problem is fleshed out. Listing ideals is not enough: Hadot writes of the importance of exegesis. And ideally an examination of several of the possible paths to reach one's ideals, like how to get over oneself.
To be tied to the ego can lead one into all kinds of problems, such as gorging on flattery, too often laced with poisonous intent. But the industry teaches us egotism. It teaches us a pragmatism that works against the "subjective, mutable, dynamic component" of the heart (to use Hadot's words from a different context). That inner life may wish to cry out for help as its γλῶσσα is stifled by the gloss. How some of us long to speak eloquently, how tired we are of seeing ourselves straying from our ideals, wishing always to find the dignified way back from the errors of our ways, regrettably inevitable. Like the Method actor brings the old truth, old script, to life before our eyes as if for the first time, "from scratch," the challenge of spontaneity may mean there will be sentences we would be happier never having uttered. We are told to pipe down entirely and buy a new frock; we are told new wellies will silence the existential downpour.
In Glimpses of Bengal, Tagore writes, "Alas for useful things - how necessary in practical life, how neglected in poetry! But poetry strives in vain to free us from their bondage - they will be with us always; so much so, we are told, that with the march of civilization it is poetry that will become extinct, but patent after patent will continue to be taken out for the improvement of shoes and umbrellas." Against these umbrellas, the poem of a life, rushing to truth, if without said brolly, unprepared, impractical, messy, unwilling to be put off.

Magazine. Brush.

知音

It has been so hot that even the street cats and dogs languishing wherever they were able. One can feel, through weather, that one is pushed through to another level of existence. Weather will have its way. Not so long ago, it was the holiday of Prophet Elijah, and the heat seemed to come with a moral warning: that old narrative conveys the importance of not becoming enslaved to anything - even lifestyle, as well as the reminder to learn to discern truth from artifice. According to Gadamer, this may be difficult in the case of modern art, where the line between a real work of art and ruse is fluid; we may not know whether the charm of a work is a mere trick or artistic richness.
But as the heat pounded down, I finished Truth and Method, and explained it over lunch to a friend who said offhandedly, "It always comes down to whether a person wants to understand, or not." That's a good summary of the book - in the words of someone who hadn't spent a month reading it. I think it was worth reading, though the extent to which the book comes off as a desperate apology made me depressed about academia. It is becoming clearer why the academy attracts a certain kind of (i.e. singular) thinker. Also, I see how the rare but possible postgrad freedom to choose one's own literature may become the end of said person's career. Gadamer points out that today truth plays second fiddle to methodology.
The appendix to the book contained many nuggets of the kind that convince one that Gadamer could be listened to forever, as he supplies ever new anecdotes and illustrations (in fact, it amazed me how little this work repeated ideas from his other works that I'd read). In the appendix, taking inspiration from J.S. Mills, he explains that increased reliable meteorological data and management would lead to new problems in other areas - like that of influencing the weather, and the consequent socio-economic factors to consider. This reminded me of the notion of feedback I first read about in connection with the white algae caused by overfarming seaweed.
The word feedback, if I have understood correctly, was first coined in the 19th century, to describe the mechanical process of electronic circuits. Surely the use of this word - taken from technology - to now describe, also, biological processes is further support of the argument in Truth and Method that the "theory of science" privileges immanent logic and the considers the application of (mechanical?) research results sufficient to social practice. Social practice is more complex (and emotional) than purposive rationality. The world is not a machine though some want it to be - even if it were, it would not be one we could see all the parts of at any given time. But scientismists would disagree.

A popular antidote to the language of scientism is the language of poetry. Gadamer proposes it, but so do Heidegger, Hadot, Kenneth Burke. Indeed, when I took my break today away from reading, I turned to the muses, albeit in song form, in a Taiwanese film Love in Disguise, which ostensibly promotes traditional Chinese music - and is based on that beautiful tale of the 知音 friendship between Bo Ya (a qin player) and uneducated Ziqi, who was able to discern the themes Bo Ya would play upon his instrument.
The characters 知音 come from this story and stand for a friend who is deeply appreciative of one's talents; a soul mate. But the characters individually mean know/perceive/comprehend and sound. While music - which makes sounds that can be received and appreciated so deeply - is not quite poetry, it does reach that level of purity in that, as per Gadamer, hearing is more important than seeing (one can look away, but not hear away). Gadamer writes that he who is addressed must hear whether he wants to or not.
Of course, not everyone can hear: it is possible to be deaf, in which case, one is never addressed in this way. Science, Gadamer writes, when abstracted from the linguistic nature of our experience of the world, attempts to become certain about entities by methodically organizing its knowledge of the world and condemning as heresy that knowledge that does not allow such certainty. To be willfully deaf in this way is to be faced, consequently, with biological feedback.
It comes down to whether we perceive it or not. There is the short version of existence that is selfish and controlling (fake copies that like to multiply though unworthy), and the longer, cyclical version, moving from text to person throughout the ages as something worth repeating, like the story of Ziqi.
It is like the circular effect of Theocritus' epigram X: ῾Υμῖν τοῦτο θεαὶ κεχαρισμένον ἐννέα πάσαις τὤγαλμα Ξενοκλῆς θῆκε τὸ μαρμάρινον, μουσικός: οὐχ ἑτέρως τις ἐρεῖ. σοφίῃ δ᾽ ἐπὶ τῇδε αἶνον ἔχων Μουσέων οὐκ ἐπιλανθάνεται. The Reverend J. Banks translates it as: To you this marble statue Muses nine! Xenocles placed; the harmonist whose skill No men denies: owning your aid divine, He by your aid is unforgotten still. To not be forgotten is to sing the praises of something greater than oneself and to hear what is beautiful. This is the legend of 知音 and the lesson of how to be a good friend.

Watercolour brush. Grunge brush. Magazine.

Happy Mediums

The writing mentor I had in my undergrad years encouraged us, at that young and only cockily experienced age, to write from the first person. That has proved to be one of the hardest habits to break: that, and the notion that one is to be intimate with an interlocutor if one expects sincere engagement.
Yesterday in Gadamer, I read, "the focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror."
He writes so clearly that it is possible to learn about human experience in Truth and Method. His description of Romanticism is the best I have read thus far, and in it, I found an unexpected mirror. Not through subjectivity, but the analysis of belief.
Romanticism, instead of seeking the perfectibility of reason, sought mythical consciousness reflected in a paradisaical prime state before the "fall of thought" - wherein this mythical collective conscious was as abstract as the state of perfect enlightenment and abstract knowledge. Mythical consciousness, he writes, is still knowledge - for example, it knows about divine powers, so that man does not merely tremble before them. By contrast, as per the Enlightenment, the poet - "in the old quarrel between poets and philosophers in the garb of belief in science" does not tell lies because he is incapable of saying something true but has only an aesthetic effect. Except that the Enlightenment's wish as such to overcome all prejudices turns out, itself, to be a prejudice.
What I take from this is what Gadamer argues for: the truth is in both logos and mythos. To argue for exclusivity within one or the other is to be blind to areas where they are mutually implicit. I have added this to the post on academia I wrote yesterday, and edited many times. I am beginning to see how many of my old posts were not clear on this issue, so I may be editing them, or I may leave them to show the distance I've come since starting this blog - initiated to garner conversation, which I have now achieved.
Gadamer also writes about authority, the conferral of which is not based on an abdication or subjection of reason but on an act of acknowledgement and knowledge that the authority is indeed superior. In this way, authority is bestowed, not earned. He explains how the Enlightenment denigrated authority by prejudicially viewing it diametrically opposed to reason and freedom, which he notes is the argument used against totalitarian states today.
Sometimes, we are not to insist on authorities lavishing us with personal attention: we must content ourselves with our own work by consulting the texts that authorities have left us. To truly seek growth means being patient and doing all of the work - sometimes going down the wrong path but not to be discouraged by this - with persistence and belief that we can cultivate understanding. But belief can stand some criticism.

Brush link no longer active. Book in background.

Let's Get Critical

The literary media's apology for the critic, and humanities in general, shows that we are a far cry away from the time when Lucilius wrote a satirical epigram that is as much critical as it is a work of art, which we shall come to.
In George Orwell's "Confession of a Book Reviewer" not only does he write that most books that are published should be ignored, and that books "that seem to matter" should be given very long reviews, he also writes that, "Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are." But instead a devaluation of standards evolves whereby most everything is amorphously "good"as reviewers would not be gainfully employed if they were to honestly resort to their curmudgeonly opinion that most writing is slop.
At least in this scenario, there is the professional critic, whom the masses today seem to rail against. Such antielitism was also known to the ancient Greeks, who were known to ostracise even some of their best citizens. A century ago in Russia, Pushkin wrote of the masses who rejoiced at reversed values, the high being denigrated as low, the strong being portrayed as weak, and people who rejoiced when the slightest imperfection was found in their superiors.
To be "higher" in rank or dignity is to cultivate some expertise in a field and to be ethical, the whole point being that mankind seems to get on best in civil civic units. Education was ruined when instead of presenting lessons to be learned, it asked students for their premature opinions or presented theory without epistemology. There is no place for the superior there - which is not the same thing as declaring that there is nobody to learn from. People who decry the value of standards seem to me like people who either did not have or benefit from good mentors.

The value of the artes liberales is to free one from, for example, being bound to money, to give a general education, the only possession which cannot be lost (ἀναφαίρετον κτῆμ᾽ ἐστὶ παιδεία βροτοῖς). What is more, the value of this education is often seen in dialectics, i.e. the discourse of minds that do not agree. One learns to value other opinions and perhaps enjoys the sparring - providing that one has first learned good sportsmanship. I think one of the thinker's or critic's roles is to engage, if not provide the final word on a given subject. We would be ill-advised, too, to forget the charismatic pull of the good critic: this cannot be replaced by a mob unrefined by custom.
This week, I read two articles on letter-writing etiquette and was astonished at the defiance of convention, which, it seems, is to be employed only at the risk of being misunderstood by those who have never been taught properly or gone through a learner's dictionary. That the commenters to those articles could not agree on any standards reveals that "understanding from a context" is rendered impossible, there is no context that people can agree on. This threatens the very nature of philology, history, and even the sciences, insofar as truths are to be deciphered.
This is the age of the comment, not criticism. (People say I'm too didactic, but it is the critic who strives toward such terse types of statements: the apothegm that has sifted through ideas for those that turn us away from disease.) I shall end, below, where I began: with Lucilius' epigram which reveals the poet's criticism of other writers, including criticism of a critic, all nicely contained within a few lines.
I still haven't translated it for myself, but noted quite a few differences in the various translations I consulted. Also, while Lucilius is known for using 'Grecisms' it is not entirely clear to me why his epigrams seem to be entirely in Greek.

J. W. Mackail's 1890 version seems the most popular, entitled: "Grammar, Music, Rhetoric." It reads: Pluto turns away the dead rhetorician Marcus, saying, "Let the dog Cerberus suffice us here; yet if thou needs must, declaim to Ixion and Melito the song-writer, and Tityus; for I have no worse evil than thee, till Rufus the critic comes to murder the language here."
It was that last line that drew me to the verse to begin with - but I will have to write about it another time, suffice it to say, "murder the language" are strong words, little criticism written today, even in satire, exercises such strong sentiment.
Here is a version, from 1918, by W.R. Paton, which does not end as forcefully: Pluto will not receive the rhetor Marcus when  dead, saying, " Let our one dog Cerberus be enough  here ; but if thou wilt come in at any cost, declaim to Ixion, Melito the lyric poet, and Tityus. For I  have no evil worse than thee, until the day when  Rufus the grammarian shall come here with his solecisms."
A third, 1895 translation by James Williams, rhymes: Pluto rejected at his gate The soul of Mark the advocate; "No, Cerberus my dog," quoth he, "Will make you pleasant company; But if within you needs must go, Practise on poet Melito, And you shall have, if he won't do, Tityus and Ixion too. You'll be to hell the sorest ill Of all that hell contains, until There come to us worse barbarisms When Rufus speaks his solecisms."
Mackail observes that "the rhetorician, the grammarian, and the musician are balanced, in a studied disarrangement, by Cerberus, Tityus, and Ixion." Both Ixion and Tityus were both banished and punished: Ixion tied to an ever-moving burning wheel, and Tityus stretched and tortured by vultures. Cereberus is of course the many-headed dog which guards the underworld.
I do not know how that verse would have been received. I have far more reading to do before I have an idea. But as far as criticism is concerned, reminding readers that language can be connected with death and punishment and that language can be abused, even if in a satire, are ideas that we may wont to consider anew today. This is our life! What are we doing with it, who are we listening to - such questions are evoked in Lucilius' six lines.

Brush.