Real and Fake

I had no idea about just what kind of things are being copied these days - nor about the volume of fakes circling the world in shipping containers. Learning of this reminded me of a Deleuze and Krauss passage, which I reread to find just how accurately it foreshadowed this glut of 'simulacra' clogging the ocean. Of course, they were writing to 'overthrow Plato'. But my latest approach to this theory has been to see it as sci-fi: recognising a present trend and then exaggerating it to paint that picture of what would happen if things keep going - unobstructed - along their course: theory is, then, if I may be permitted a reductionist stroke, like an oversized 1980s photograph that has been blown up (not thinking of Cortázar). Remember the novelty? A zooming in, a distortion through the oversized. Us, but not us.
Anyway, here is the passage - first with the definition of "copy" vs. "simulacrum", then the passage itself. Does it not remind you of the profusion of fakes?
After that, this week's links.

Copies are secondhand possessors, well-grounded claimants, authorized by resemblance. Simulacra are like false claimants, built on a dissimilitude, implying a perversion, an essential turning away. It is in this sense that Plato divides the domain of the image-idols in two: on the one hand the iconic copies (likenesses), on the other the phantasmatic simulacra (semblances). (...)
In the overthrow of Platonism (...) The nonhierarchical work is a condensation of coexistences, a simultaneity of events. It is the triumph of the false claimant. (...) But the false claimant cannot be said to be false in relation to a supposedly true model, any more than simulation can be termed an appearance, an illusion. Simulation is the phantasm itself, that is, the effect of the operations of the simulacrum as machinery, Dionysiac machine. It is a matter of the false as power, Pseudos, in Nietzsche's sense when he speaks of the highest power of the false. The simulacrum, in rising to the surface, causes the Same and the Like, the model and the copy, to fall under the power of the false (phantasm). It renders the notion of hierarchy impossible in relation to the idea of the order of participation, the fixity of distribution, and the determination of value. It sets up the world of nomadic distributions and consecrated anarchy. Far from being a new foundation, it swallows up all foundations, it assures a universal collapse, but as a positive and joyous event, as de-founding (effondement).
Deleuze, Gilles and Rosalind Krauss. "Plato and the Simulacrum." October, Vol. 27 (Winter, 1983), pp. 45-56

Compare the passage with: Les nouveaux mercenaires du faux - Documentaire: Les faussaires ne se contentent plus d'imiter les sacs ou les polos de marque. Ils ont infiltré l'agroalimentaire avec des mayonnaises, des sodas ou des plats cuisinés d'origine douteuse. (The blurb doesn't quite capture the craziness of the overflowing of fakes it shows.)

B/Logrolling:

Two more documentaries, the first on Linky: Des milliers de Français refusent l’arrivée de ce nouveau compteur dans leur foyer, et certains affirment même vivre un enfer depuis son installation. Tous craignent que cet appareil "intelligent" ne collecte toutes leurs données personnelles… (A more interesting point, only brought up in passing, is how the electricity infrastructure was built before we all started to use the internet and plug in dozens of 'extra' gadgets.)

The second on "anti-consos": Les « décroissants » : consommer moins pour vivre mieux  Les sociologues les appellent les « décroissants », en France ils sont de plus en plus nombreux à refuser de consommer toujours plus. Ils refusent la spirale de la société de consommation.

For Wittgenstein, Philosophy Had to Be as Complicated as the Knots it Unties Making Sense of Nonsense, From Bertrand Russell to the Existentialists

The American Aristotle Charles Sanders Peirce was a brilliant philosopher, mathematician and scientist. His polymathic work should be better known 

I also wanted to write about Jeremy Brett's onstage poise and gesture, perfected in Sherlock Holmes. The way he moves is like measured dancing. How you would dance if you were not actually dancing but wanted to use your body for expression. Of course, this is taught in drama, but Brett worked on his style for decades, as suggested by this early musical, The Merry Widow (what a voice he has!) His individual flair is so far removed from today's normcore: I hear that Smoky the Bear may get a new motto (from "Only you can prevent wildfires" to something with a collective "we").

Baring

"Life itself, which is a membership in the living world, is already an abundance," Wendell Berry writes in a lecture printed in The Way of Ignorance.
So much can take away from this abundance, such as that terrible movie screen that is also crammed with the victimising, materialistic, and ego-fuelled junk that poisons our minds, seas, and water tables. Speaking of that which is "victimising" is trauma, which "violates aspects of the person's self and world". Trauma is contagious. Among the syndromes listed as defining organizational trauma, Pat Vivian and Shana Hormann is "stress and anxiety contagion" (emphasis added). The traumatised can be better versed at multiplying destructive negativity than their vital talents.
But as a degree-bearing philologist (one who loves words), I task myself to improve articulacy (the necessary joints) to relate from the confusing temporal appearance to the abundance that is essential, and life-giving.

We are all naked to begin with - and under whatever clothes we do our social posturing in. What is essential can be reached through "baring"; through uncovering to reach the core of something.
Want has the potential to strip away, and so does trauma - if one can bear it, and hold out like an 'initiate of life': if one takes the leap of faith into that which is life-bearing. The alternative is to believe in destruction as a terminal inevitability. In that context, consider this phrase: "a smile, an inheritance, and laughter is a gift."

Who has not felt the sweet release from the gerbil-wheel of depressive thought?  A single smile, help along the trail. Life is like a thru-hike. Or, an endurance run. What I'm trying to say is that we pick our destinations. In other words, whether we accept responsibility for it or not, our actions demonstrate which destination we serve. (Yes, I am referencing Aristotelian τέλος.)

Many times, because of the glut in which we live, if we are not facing hardship, we need to impose on ourselves some form of austerity to reach the essential. This is why people choose thru-hikes. Stripping away the bells and whistles that distract us, we can better appreciate that which is already abundant in this life, like just how beautiful it is to be warmed by the sun (...after a cold night out at camp). Read about a much more compelling experience of the same, along the Altiplano Traverse, here (by Ryan "Dirtmonger" Sylva; it's his quote about the smile, above).
But other times, sickness and injury strip us down to the same result (hear one such account here). Personally, I am coming out of a summer filled with myriad traumas, with two ongoing, and feel a great need to reconfirm the kind of destination I want to be headed towards. I discovered (again - it's funny how much amnesia can occur, for weeks even, until the nervous system calms down) that one can even feel abandoned in hard times. This isn't to say that abandonment is real. But...we can make it real, if we don't watch out. Anyone who doesn't know what I am talking about should count their blessings.

While I don't have the luxury to go where I will, I run long distance (my typical run is over half a marathon, so I can get to the forest and lift up my eyes - I reference the motto of my first boarding school, from Psalm 121). As much as I would love to quit my job (which gives me more and more work, and less and less pay), I will instead endure it a little longer, to gain better eyes for the abundance that life already is.
There is nothing like being told you will get help at work and instead being given a helper who not only lacks basic training (an assistant with a degree in politics who doesn't know what rhetoric is!) but who is also resistant to learning, and then going for a 26K jaunt in nature and being bathed by tree upon tree, casting their fiery shadows upon you, and forgetting your worries in that light show... The random willow in the little park just means so much more when it weeps for you.

Saint Nikolaj Zicki is said to have valued his days of imprisonment in Dachau above all else, for it is there where a simple ray of sunlight meant the most to him.
It is interesting how someone whose life was spiritually rich also benefitted from a baring: a release from 'things'; situation. 

I hunt for the golden stag.

You may smile my friends, but I pursue the vision that eludes me.

I run across hills and dales, I wander through nameless lands, because I am hunting for the golden stag. 

You come and buy in the market and go back to your homes laden with goods, but the spell of the 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. 

(from Rabindranath Tagore, The Gardener, 69)

Image (of painting) source: Pier Fracesco Mola "Oriental Warrior" wikimediacommons.

To my adolescent imagination, when I first saw this painting in the Louvre, I thought, this is someone who's hunting for the golden stag. His eyes are lifted (Ps.121); at least, aimed for more distant goals.
He's always looked to me like a janissary, though it bewilders me (I now refer to the definition at that link) how someone who is kidnapped "willingly" does anything.

What do you expect?

It is fascinating how one can pore over a text attempting to be prescient of as many layers of meaning and contextual references as possible, and remain impervious to this same level of attention to complexity in life: for example, failing to double-check whether one has correctly understood the context, different to one's own. We could say that in life there are three coordinates to consider: the relationship of one culture to another, the relationship of culture to the individual, and the individual's relationship to another individual. There are no exams to test this comprehension, though it seems to me these were Humanistic concerns, still implied in the word "university."
Sometimes I think that there is such a thing as willful mis-comprehension, perpetuated - and isn't this interesting - by volumes of prose.
The concern about the truthfulness of writing, and whether the ability to read volume after volume produces wisdom, is addressed in the Phaedrus. Plato's Socrates is as concerned with good speaking as with good writing, which is to say that in Plato's Socratic dialogues, there is an emphasis on truth in all contexts, not just the truths uncovered by close reading.
Similarly, I imagine that in the Humanist architectural mnemonics (some call the method of loci), alongside rooms of facts about various subject matter, there were also rooms devoted to ethics and how this informs action and the pursuit of truth. This is implied in Vico's speech to university students, entitled "The Heroic Mind", whereine heroic echoes back to the Greek concepts of paideia or kalos kagathos.
But writing in this way implies that knowledge, truth, or wisdom is something that can be had or held: a territory to be appropriated by the palace in the mind. Plato's Socrates, on the other hand, is always reluctant to claim any final understanding. A more quality knowing then is - a not knowing? An approximation?
There are some who are trenchant that their work is flawless, whereas another view would be to consider work as more or less studied. Some work may be more accurate, but other work may provide inspired solutions. What is "flawless" work?

If we are talking about comprehension, I would argue that better work will involve an openness to the possibility of being wrong (hence the importance of double checking).
Perhaps openness is rare because it involves that "uncanniness" that I first thought about when reading a passage in de Chirico's Hebdomeros (that passage with the furniture in the street: something familiar in an unfamiliar context). Heraclitus writes of "expecting the unexpected" - which, the more I think about it, is a rather uncomfortable state of mind: indeterminate, yet not chaotic, because of the implied reception. 
To try to better understand what Heraclitus meant (my associations aside), yet without having spent time with the Greek - so this is an unfinished post, an unfinished idea, I have been reading various translations of fragment 18 where that phrase appears. One translation reads: "If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail."
Another translation reads: "Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find [truth], for it is hard to discover and attain." There is also this: "If you do not hope, you will not win that which is hoped for, since it is unattainable and inaccessible."
On the basis of these sentences, and as a good-enough conclusion to this post, part of the difficulty in understanding life may be in where it fails to conform to our expectations - considering, too, that in our bid to understand, even our understanding of the unexpected may still be influenced by the limits of what we conceive possible.
Some of the work I did over the holidays involved reading about Lacan's definition of psychoses, which is also connected to expectations because psychoses involve projection. So, there's also that. Lots of films being shown, but the possibility, too, of there being something far more behind that screen.

Brush: Misprinted Type.

What do you expect?

It is fascinating how one can pore over a text attempting to be prescient of as many layers of meaning and contextual references as possible, and remain impervious to this same level of attention to complexity in life: for example, failing to double-check whether one has correctly understood the context, different to one's own. We could say that in life there are three coordinates to consider: the relationship of one culture to another, the relationship of culture to the individual, and the individual's relationship to another individual. There are no exams to test this comprehension, though it seems to me these were Humanistic concerns, still implied in the word "university."
Sometimes I think that there is such a thing as willful mis-comprehension, perpetuated - and isn't this interesting - by volumes of prose.
The concern about the truthfulness of writing, and whether the ability to read volume after volume produces wisdom, is addressed in the Phaedrus. Plato's Socrates is as concerned with good speaking as with good writing, which is to say that in Plato's Socratic dialogues, there is an emphasis on truth in all contexts, not just the truths uncovered by close reading.
Similarly, I imagine that in the Humanist architectural mnemonics (some call the method of loci), alongside rooms of facts about various subject matter, there were also rooms devoted to ethics and how this informs action and the pursuit of truth. This is implied in Vico's speech to university students, entitled "The Heroic Mind", whereine heroic echoes back to the Greek concepts of paideia or kalos kagathos.
But writing in this way implies that knowledge, truth, or wisdom is something that can be had or held: a territory to be appropriated by the palace in the mind. Plato's Socrates, on the other hand, is always reluctant to claim any final understanding. A more quality knowing then is - a not knowing? An approximation?
There are some who are trenchant that their work is flawless, whereas another view would be to consider work as more or less studied. Some work may be more accurate, but other work may provide inspired solutions. What is "flawless" work?

If we are talking about comprehension, I would argue that better work will involve an openness to the possibility of being wrong (hence the importance of double checking).
Perhaps openness is rare because it involves that "uncanniness" that I first thought about when reading a passage in de Chirico's Hebdomeros (that passage with the furniture in the street: something familiar in an unfamiliar context). Heraclitus writes of "expecting the unexpected" - which, the more I think about it, is a rather uncomfortable state of mind: indeterminate, yet not chaotic, because of the implied reception. 
To try to better understand what Heraclitus meant (my associations aside), yet without having spent time with the Greek - so this is an unfinished post, an unfinished idea, I have been reading various translations of fragment 18 where that phrase appears. One translation reads: "If you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not to be reached by search or trail."
Another translation reads: "Unless you expect the unexpected you will never find [truth], for it is hard to discover and attain." There is also this: "If you do not hope, you will not win that which is hoped for, since it is unattainable and inaccessible."
On the basis of these sentences, and as a good-enough conclusion to this post, part of the difficulty in understanding life may be in where it fails to conform to our expectations - considering, too, that in our bid to understand, even our understanding of the unexpected may still be influenced by the limits of what we conceive possible.
Some of the work I did over the holidays involved reading about Lacan's definition of psychoses, which is also connected to expectations because psychoses involve projection. So, there's also that. Lots of films being shown, but the possibility, too, of there being something far more behind that screen.

Brush: Misprinted Type.

Not Images Alone

I received a card featuring a rather realistic painting of a pickle with a tiny cartoon party hat clumsily appendixed to it. This was my congratulations card for getting a PhD. Apparently, the giver thinks I am "in a pickle". I prefer to consider the card a humourous gesture, though the card's insistance on "a bigger salary" gets no laughs when one would prefer for pickles to be in the refrigerator as actual food. But it is hilarious! Imagine the T-shirt: I earned a PhD and all I got was this lousy pickle. Pfwee. (Requisite sound of party horn.)
And maybe it isn't much of a party when there are so many academic expectations some of us brine ourselves in, great narratives of achievement, like the cry of the PB (personal best) in the running world. So many sites recommend a perfect draft before the defense, others expect that what happens is not always what is wished for. Yet this fixation of bests does not trouble everyone: some are content #rehashing.
Anyway, so one wakes up one morning, next to a card of a pary-hat-wearing pickle, and wonders how one got into a relationship where food has left the pantry for the portrait! One can't live on images alone. Apparently, It's So Hard to Leave Academe: for example, years and years of teaching likely mean a network shrunk to within the academy, making it hard to network for jobs beyond it. The alma mater now leaves students only partly nourished - but if nourishment is nurtured, she is not at fault, she herself had not been cared for.
As I write this post, it is as if I am willing myself to know the end to this story. But it has taken this long for me to write a more concrete post introducing the debacle.
Luckily, as I sat down to write, I also opened up Susannah Conway's December Reflections blog prompts, and today's is also about bests, as in a "best day". In the photo below was a rainbow I thought I was going to be able to run beneath on a long run, but which turned out to be an optical illusion: I was running alongside it. The elusive rainbow following the arch of the sun transports an elusive messenger who says that the arche is the idea that underlies images. It was a pretty good day when I saw that rainbow, memorable, sometimes perhaps what evades is closer than one might think; maybe this is the test of eidos, where action proves essence needn't be idea alone.

Brush: Misprinted type.

Books

There was a period in adolescence when my growth was inhibited at one of my boarding schools, which I might illustrate best by my having received a blank stare (and more silence) by the librarian when I asked to be given a list of particularly edifying books. It was in college that I got this dream list (the point being that it contains books one has yet to discover) from one of my roommates. As I collected a few incipit thoughts before writing this post, I realised that it has been one of my life's ambitions to have a solid enough knowledge of great extant books that I would know where to look for certain ideas when the need for them arose. This probably makes me a kind of philosophical eclectic though not "woo woo" (a word I learned this week). I wonder about this difference sometimes, and think it lies in the presence of self-doubt, but also another mechanism lined with questioning: an attempted exploration that is not smoothly paved.
Exemplary of this approach, aside from Cicero and Seneca, is John Ruskin: he was classically inclined but also engaged with modernity. My favourite example of this includes where he compared the edifices built for the idol of "the goddess of [not everybody's but somebody's!] Getting-on" with the Athenian goddess of Wisdom. A pertinent illustration he gives is about how Athena's Gorgon and mantle represent the "chilling horror and sadness (turning men to stone, as it were,) of the outmost and superficial spheres of knowledge—that knowledge which separates, in bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, the heart of the full-grown man from the heart of the child. For out of imperfect knowledge spring terror, dissension, danger, and disdain; but from perfect knowledge ... strength and peace, in sign of which she is crowned with the olive spray, and bears the resistless spear." ("Traffic"). This is a good illustration of eclecticism vs. woo woo: discernment of consequences.
But I meander, and there is a set course for this post, which began with the dream list of books I got from a roommate in college. One of the books on this list was Philosophical Investigations, which I quickly acquired when I worked briefly at The Strand bookstore, where I got many other gems that I have since lost to circumstance and struggle to restore to memory.

The book is important if we are to talk about books because it demonstrates something important about words, namely, that meaning is gleaned from use, as opposed to the idea that words are essentially rooted in meaning. In some ways, Investigations is similar to Deleuze's paper on Plato and the Simulacrum, where he contrasts essence with appearance, originals with copies, model and simulacrum.
To be or feel removed from essence, does it mean that it is not there? What if the use of the word essence is consistently corrupted by the circles of people one is surrounded by? Isn't looking for essence also dangerous because in the hall of mirrors of use, there is so much deception?
If some words are symbols using iconic augmentation to gather together a hierarchy of metaphors that together constitute meaning, one may never be sure that one has pinned down their meaning during a lifetime. I am thinking now of words like love.
"We are only with the help of recent investigation beginning to penetrate the depth of meaning couched under the Athenaic symbols" Ruskin writes in "Traffic".
To use Bakhtinian words, we could say that we are talking here about centripital vs. centrifugal meanings. But now I will complicate things and say that for ecclecticism, it is not enough only to journey inwards, because of those times when one might have the word, like accord, but be lacking relevant explanation of how to realise it.
To complicate things further, the conventions of use hinder one on the quest, because knowing another essence does not release one from the obligations of Ps and Qs.
Which is a funny phrase to use now, in today's age, because, ostensibly, standards are being obliterated and the law of use, which can turn into relativity, is supreme. And where there is no essence, there will be no coherent wholes.

Which brings this post to its final note: fragmented fiction. Jazz critic and music historian Ted Gioia has gathered some interesting comments on the form. And who better to understand fragmented literature than one versed in jazz? We note here that the secret to jazz is in the standard, and the beauty of solos to return to a melody/rhythm with the rest of the band. But we may prefer to reflect on the solo and the fact that the melody is, after all, cut up.
Once upon a time, during the summers at the backwater boarding school I attended, I used to sneak into a jazz club between sets, when non-conoisseurs would have abandonned their expensive tables. It sounds hackneyed to say that the music spoke to aspects of my experience. So I'll write that it was for me a tiny hall of mirrors of use. We want to see ourselves, our surroundings, reflected back at us: "[our] railroad mounds, prolonged masses of Acropolis; [our] railroad stations, vaster than the Parthenon, and innumerable; [our] chimneys, how much more mighty and costly than cathedral spires! [our] harbour-piers; [our] warehouses; [our] exchanges!—all these are built to [our] great Goddess of 'Getting-on;'" ("Traffic"). New things keep getting added to this list, so imagine how long it will take to tire of those complex fragments, before they become puzzle pieces.
Adding to the complication of fragments is that they masquerade as holistic wisdom. One of my favourite parts of Gioia's "Fractious Fiction" is where he talks about Wittgenstein's Tractatus: "If fragmentation were more than just a game storytellers played and could actually stake a claim for its superior grasp of reality, then Wittgenstein was the prophet and systematizer who provided a philosophy to complement the fractured narratives of the postmodern novelists."
What is at stake is a grasp of reality. Even essence has a stake in it, though it moves beneath its surface. Lives can be lost due to a single poor interpretation.
While eclecticists value use (i. e. concrete example), they also value books for pointing to something that cannot always be readily seen. And as it is impossible, and superficial, to inhabit the invisible (i.e. abstract essence), the point here has to do with harmonising (i. e. the golden mean). Where the use that surrounds us will be limited whether because of epoch, social status, circumstance, books can extend beyond. Except, because things are complex, some books curtail. More important than books is the reader. This post was written in response to today's prompt for an August Break.

Book in background: Francois Boucher's 10,000 Years of Fashion. 

Brush: foliage by Creature Comforts.

Basilisk

Charles M. Skinner writes that basil, thought by some in the ancient world to be a poison though by others to be a cure (egs.), is belived in India to be a token by which admittance to heaven is gained. He adds that the Greek goddess of poverty, Penia (who was seduced by a drunk god of resourcefulness, Porus, to create love, Eros, according to Socrates in Plato's Symposium, 203) was often depicted as holding a sprig of basil in her hand (I was unable to find even one image). The alternate meanings of the Greek word for basil range from much that is regal and columned halls to messengers. It is strange that a word with so many sumptuous connotations was, where it refers to the plant, associated with poverty, and could further indicate something lethal. The plant is said to have been cursed at. Skinner suggests that it may be related to the basilisk, "a fabulous creature that could kill with a look".
My favourite description of the basilisk in the (wikipedia) link above is Pliny the Elder's description of how the only way to kill it was by having a weasel fight it, itself dying "in this struggle of nature against its own self".
The oppositions involved in these associations and myths bring to mind a passage in Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World about "The Lucky Find", wherein the person being struck by accident need not see it as chaos or even cosmos (thence the oppositions) so long as "craft" or "technical skill" is applied to the accident in a way that is fruitful (dumb luck leads to no change, and often to loss). "With smart luck, the mind is prepared for what it isn't prepared for. It has a kind of openness, holding its ideas lightly, and willing to have them exposed to impurity and the unintended." Like in the Socratic tale: resourceless Poverty gets the chance to bed Resource!
But writing all this suggests a certain kind of knowing that, while ostensibly had, goes missing in practice. It grates my nerves. Except when there's an accident needing help.

My absence from the blog was in part due to temporary burnout I experienced at the uncertainties of teaching higher ed. So much is unclear, there is more work, and budgets are being slashed, which is to say that some of us are keeping fingers crossed lest Penia get too close. But such a sentence deserves no pity, for many of us deliberately took pay cuts to work in education to begin with; what is yet another cutback, and should one not be smart enough to manage?
Here, I shall leap into fancy, be warned. I think it is only when between a rock and a hard place that one has the liberty to float about in high-falooting philosophy, which I am about to do. For example, I can now say, like a Stoic, perhaps I would like a holiday but what is a holiday compared with strolling the palace of the somewhat educated mind?
In penury (one hyperbolizes, for effect), the regal chambers of ideas become potent. In the Socratic tale, it is possible to conceive even if one is devoid of resources. It is a question of waiting, while calling on Endurance, Hope, Phantasy, etc., until circumstance leads to greener pastures and the relevance of different currencies. That's really the best I can do for this post and for myself at this time. I had wanted to write a post for some time now, but was given the final impetus by a post at Dancing Beastie ("Seasonal living in a Scottish Castle") about an August Break, according to which today's topic is Art.
Below is part of a picture I recently painted, the first one in decades and before I figured out how to mix more nuanced colour, photographed in the wrong direction and accidentally, next to some basil.
 

Brush: Favourites by Egg9700 at DeviantART.

Facts of Fiction

It struck me as strange the other day when I realised how much argument has to go in to defending certain modern works as specific genres, when in the past, much liberty was taken in applying Aristotle's work on dramatic theory, Poetics, to literary theory as a whole. After all, though, the work seems to privilege meaning, if we take 1451b into consideration, where Aristotle calls poetry more "scientific and serious than history" because it illustrates what could be, i.e. what is possible through types, rather than what merely was. Hadot, in "Physique et poésie dans le Timée de Platon", finds a connection between this later statement and the creation myth in Plato's Timaeus, which is also a could - of the Best - placed over the was - of Necessity. Vis-a-vis this problem of "genre", Gadamer writes in Truth and Method that the main distinction between poetic and scientific (i.e. scholarly) prose is "the distinctions between the claims to truth that each makes". He continues: "It is not mere chance that the concept of literature embraces not only works of literary art but everything passed down in writing."
To look at art in terms of truth claims makes genre merely one form of vessel chosen over another to reach another shore - providing they are popular enough to work, which I add because it seems to me myth, for example, is not particularly popular at this time (which is not to say they do not subscribe to them; also, the winds of culture have blown on different courses since David Strauss, once admired by Nietzsche, among others). John Herman Randall describes mythologies as the consideration that moral adventure, artistic activity, and participation in the class struggle are the most important things in the world. (It is noted, though, that he wrote this in connection with romantic idealism.) Myth, in this respect, is a serious genre, though playful for the make-believe, and so is perhaps too light for this heavily jaded age.

This evening, I watched the end of Three Faces of a Woman, starring the Persian Princess Soraya, which led me to watch the last interview with the Shah of Iran, briefly educated at a Swiss boarding school I once went to during summer, and remembered some things that suggested to me that a world can shrink, but never go away, entirely. As for me, these days I live in a relatively impoverished place, where some people would curiously spend their last money to dance the tango or merengue. And this latter point illustrates the penultimate point in this post: the wish, among some, to belong to something greater, maybe I could add, to something with flair, too. This sentiment is rather like what is suggested in the pop song, "Je veux pleurer comme Soraya". She had a rose named in her honour (a grimpant tea-rose, in 1955 or 1960). It seems the rose, grown for l'impératrice by Francois Meilland, is not trademarked. Could or was?
Ultimately, though, and moving on, whether a hero is written or lived, and whichever comes first if ever, it seems a lot of imagination or vision is required to dream up an alternative in the face of the harsh Necessity that is sometimes called reality. Hadot writes that one such vision is given to us, as a choice (between Best and Necessary) in the Timaeus. What I find fascinating about that dialogue compared with a generalisation of the work of romantic idealists (both serious about best possible visions) is that the former, while idealistic, is also critical.

Book in background: Boucher's 20,000 Years of Fashion;

brush: ewansim at DeviantART.

Can you see what you are now looking for?

The title comes from The Sophist, 229.  It is a phrase that deserves consideration: we cannot find what we are looking for if the image is not fixed in some way.  Fully influenced by the ideas in The Sophist, I might add that if what one is looking for is not fixed, one is constantly looking for something new.
It is a very fascinating dialogue, not least because it also stresses the importance that one "take courage" in thinking (242).  This advice, here given by The Stranger, is often given in Plato's other dialogues by Socrates.  In this particular context, courage means reconsidering what I will describe as dogma.  I would like to point out that any school of thought has its dogma: the difference among such schools being which of them is willing to reevaluate their own beginnings, as is stated in Cratylus (436): "Everyone must therefore give great care and great attention to the beginning of any undertaking to see whether his foundation is right or not."
Also, the school of thought represented by Plato is respectful of all great thinker-predecessors, regardless of whether their thoughts are conceded to: in Sophist (243) The Stranger says it is harsh and improper to impute famous men of old to falsehood.  In this way, a new conclusion is reached that is somewhat of a compromise: not-being is admitted, except it is modified as not the opposite to being but just different from it (257); the attempt to separate everything from everything else is taken to show the thinker is uncultivated (259).  As stated in The Statesman, measurement is not only to be made through the relativity between greater and less but also in terms of the mean (284): in other words, and to sum up this paragraph, classification is all-inclusive while having standards.  And we are taught today that that is a contradiction! Cross-questioning is presented as "the greatest purification" (230): ideas are to be questionned.
Speaking of today, we may know of the "tremendous battle" between materialists and those who believe in the existence of ideas in the mind: between those who break truth into moving fragments calling them not existence, "violently dragging down everything into matter," and those who believe in ideas (quotes from Sophist, 246).  We see this conflict openly in the 19th century: this same battle is cited in J.C. Maxwell's poem entitled, "British Association, 1874" from which I will quote just these lines:

From nothing comes nothing, they told us, nought happens by chance, but by fate;  There is nothing but atoms and void, all else is mere whims out of date!  Then why should a man curry favour with beings who cannot exist, To compass some petty promotion in nebulous kingdoms of mist?  But not by the rays of the sun, nor the glittering shafts of the day,  Must the fear of the gods be dispelled, but by words, and their wonderful play.

Through word play, we are told in The Sophist, the sophist hides "himself in a place we cannot explore" (239). He is depicted as an imitator akin to a juggler and other such entertainers.  "Look sharp, then, it is now our business not to let the beast get away again, for we have almost got him into a kind of encircling net of the devices we employ in arguments about such subjects, so that he will not now escape to the next thing" (235). "If the sophist tries to take cover in any of the various sections of imitative art, we must follow him always" (235). At 240 we learn that the sophist feigns ignorance and only questions what is deduced by words.  Thence, the sophist - in word play taking on new lines of thought - becomes "many headed".  They are beasts because what if they imitate the figure of justice and virtue and have no knowledge of it but just a sort of opinion (267).  This talk may remind one of the minotaur in the labyrinth.
It is a battle, one is to have courage and to be willing to even question what one holds in veneration (I choose this word knowing that some dislike it, but considering that it exists even where it is claimed not to).
The sophist "runs away into the darkness of non-being, feeling his way in it by practice" i.e. through empiricism, "and it is hard to discern because of the nature of the dark place", as opposed to the philosopher who is devoted, through reason (not empiricism) "to the idea of being difficult to see because of the brilliant light of the place: the eyes of the soul of the multitude are not strong enough to endure the sight of the divine" (254).
I would like to illustrate this idea through the example of a "real" friend as opposed to the fair weather version.  Some people are very adept at disappearing when trouble is at hand.  The real friend will retain the image of the friend in trouble and remind the friend of their potential until they have mastered their circumstances.  Or, to put it another way, the real friend who is friend to themselves does not believe in the terrible appearance of a "bad" circumstance and speak poorly of it and magnify it until it becomes more terrible like in a soap opera ("for tales and falsehoods are most at home there, in the tragic life" i.e. in the life portrayed in tragedy, Cratylus 408), rather, this friend retains the image of goodness and does not:

complainingly point them out and inveigh against them, in order that their own neglect of them may not be denounced by their neighbors, who might otherwise reproach them for being so neglectful; and hence they multiply [346b] their complaints and add voluntary to unavoidable feuds. But good men ... conceal the trouble and constrain themselves to praise, and if they have any reason to be angered against their parents or country for some wrong done to them they pacify and conciliate their feelings, compelling themselves to love and praise their own people. Protagoras (346)

The eyes of the soul must be strong to perceive this.  It takes courage and I do not know that I have always seen what I was looking for.

Magazine: Marie Claire Maison.  Brush: lace by webgoddess at DeviantART.

Discovering Love and Not Sinning Against Mythology

I have been reading Plato's Socratic dialogues along with Brandon over at Siris and reread Phaedrus last night; posts in which I have written about this dialogue before are, in order of focus, Words, Madness; Bearing Something; Birds and Words; Myriad Creatures; Tzitzikas; here; here; here; here; recently here. Below I will try to address what has stood out to me this time but for a better review and summary please see Brandon's posts 1, 2, 3, 4 (which I have to get to but take it on past experience that the posts are thorough).
Socrates invokes the muses when he delivers his speeches - the first time to "make his friend [that of Phaedrus, Lysias] seem wiser still" though during it concedes that "perhaps the attack [of Lysias, that he is also taking as his theme] may be diverted ... that ... is in the hands of God" 238d. And while he begins orderly enough, beginning almost immediately with a definition, which he later explains as crucial to good rhetoric, he stops himself, for he is "speaking in hexameters not mere dithyrambics though finding fault with the lover" so wonders what kind of speech would praise the non-lover (Lysias' subject, 241). He quotes Ibycus, "I was distressed lest I be buying honour among men by sinning against the gods" (again, the theme of his speech was not of his own invention; he was implored to give it by Phaedrus who swore by a plane tree). Socrates then criticises the kind of speaker who puts "on airs as though they amounted to something" to cheat mere manikins (243a). Of relevance to a recent post, he notes that some "have sinned in matters of mythology" - the example of sin here being speaking against love though love is a god.
Then comes the bit about madness: "the greatest blessings come to us through madness when it is sent as a gift from the gods" (which is handy consolation for a bad day?) This is compared to sanity of human origin. This bit is followed by that of the soul compared to the "composite nature of a pair of winged horses [one good and one bad] and a charioteer" (246a). The part I was most interested this time here was the illustration of those souls "yearning for the upper region but unable to reach it ... trampling upon and colliding with one another, each striving to pass its neighbour" (248 a-b). This, it seems to me, is so much like life where even among the "good" there can be much pushing, shoving, righteous indignation, vicious competition, petty judgmentalism. It is reminiscent of Thucydides' "enmity which equals foster toward one another" (here) not to mention the fantastic comparison to the horrors of the chariot race. Also interesting is that because of the injuries sustained from such racing, people come away without a view of reality and "feed upon opinion".

This is all important because it illustrates the understanding of memory: for one is to employ such memories of what the soul beheld when journeying through God in order to become perfect (249c). The price of this is to be rebuked by the vulgar, "who consider him mad and do not know that he is inspired" by madness, the mad like "a bird gazes upward and neglects the things below" (249d). To partake in such madness is to be called the lover. (I think he is also, secondarily, commenting on the practice of the erastes-eromenos [explained under Remarks], and saying that the best such relationship is never consummated physically, though apparently this was allowed within certain guidelines?)
Memory is also important because in "the earthly copies of justice and temperance and the other ideas which are previous to souls there is no light, but only a few, approaching the images through the darkling organs of sense, behold in them the nature of that which they imitate" (250b). I think this is also good counter support for those arguments positing that there is no reason to try to be good and honest because the world is unjust. Memory is to help one keep to the good - which is why later when Socrates says the only good reason for writing is to function as a reminder particularly in old age and to form a good diversion instead of attending banquets (276). In other words, one is always to keep the good in mind: "a man of sense should surely practice to please not his fellow slaves, except as a secondary consideration, but his good and noble masters" (274a).
This may be the key point uniting this who dialogue particularly when viewed in terms of Socrates' later prayer (257 a-b) where he addresses love by saying: "do not in anger take from me the art of love which thou didst give me, and deprive me of sight". This goes back to two illustrations (at 243a) including one of Homer, who did not know why he went blind (he had insulted love).

There is a great bit on rhetoric, that boils down to the importance of addressing the truth which is particularly relevant when "doubtful things" are discussed, for they can more easily lead to deception (260-end; 260-3). Also opposed to truth, in addition to deceit, is "probability" which is often used to convince (272). The art of rhetoric is compared to that of healing: one must know to whom one is speaking, when, and how much one administers (268-70). [What an art - there is always something new to learn.]
With regard to the lack of clarity surrounding "doubtful things" it is noted that "he who knows the truth is always best able to discover likenesses". This seems connected to what Socrates thinks about invention, saying at the beginning of the dialogue that "arguments which are not inevitable and are hard to discover, the invention deserves praise as well as the argument" (236a, emphasis added twice) - after all, Socrates is inventing the whole way through particularly in his second speech with so many invocations: to Love, to the Muses... Related to invention are references to water, including: that the ignorant (who Socrates first claims to be) is "filled through the ears like a pitcher" (235c-d) and cannot remember sources of where something was heard - but after Socrates adapts the premise of Lysias' speech and finds it offensive, he wants to "wash the brine from my ears with the water of a sweet discourse" (243d).
The problem with writing (less of a chance to wash out the printed words on a page with a large print run or on the internet) is that it is possible to read things without instruction (puts far more elegantly than what I wrote yesterday) and because the printed word "has no power to protect itself" nor can it argue back to the reader in the case that it is misunderstood when read 275a-b.
Reading creates deception because people can appear to know more than they do and this is proved by the fact that they are not easy to get along with: were they truly wise, and not just appearing so, it would be very easy to interact with them (I am paraphrasing 275 a-b, which I love). Also, young people are chided for considering it more important where someone comes from and who they are than whether their words are true or not (275b-c): deception is also caused by misplaced priorities. In this vain is Socrates' closing prayer, wishing the gods grant him beauty of soul and that he consider himself rich for wisdom and only have enough wealth as his self-restraint might endure (279b-c). Priorities need to be checked all the time for love is hard to discover.

Magazine: Marie Claire Maison; Brush: Ewansim's tape at DeviantART.

Something Named. An Imitation

When I was younger, I experimented in the extreme of expecting much of names, like love and goodness, which I invested with ideal meaning until I began to see (does one ever finish seeing this) how steeply the ideal drops off from word into practice. Among those around me, I can see other illustrations of word-investment: some are vociferously atheist while others are ultra religious and often there is a need for these various factions to make their ideals into unwitting darts targeting those who do not subscribe to their same verbal understanding. As I had tried taking a fixed view of some words myself, any criticism here is of myself: for thinking that one can have the names for things. I do not think we own those names.
Today, I would explain our relationship to knowing things as Taoist: intuited when not controlled. I ask myself at this time: do you want meaning, or do you want to attain the illusion of control?
To be the guest-friend may also mean to be released from strict social norms: the name of the guest is not revealed after the first meal, but then, this is not any guest but one who was led in to the palace by a goddess and one who has waited for signs that he is among friends before he reveals his name. For it is posited that he learned the hard way (viz. Susan B. Levin's reading of the Polyphemus encounter) not to reveal his name lest it be used as a means to curse him. This is a very different social approach than the LinkedIn here is my life laid out for your scrutinising pleasure (I feel too embarrassed to look at my friends' profiles: if it's important, they will email me is my view - I further wonder at the difference between being present on such a platform and actually using it and how much illusion is trapped in the naming of what we do).
From Odysseus we see there may be vital reasons as to why the name may be willfully obscured. In this way, there is something to be learned from the geomancer, wherein the time when something appears is as important as the thing itself. It may be a contemporary Western conceit that the name can be pinned into a box like a butterfly. The great natural historian Agassiz wrote, after all, that there is a superiority in perceiving the similarities among facts over finding the fact.
And these names are flying around: it is the same metaphor we see in the Theaetetus (197 on), which concedes that in that context: at that time, and with those words, the attempt to figure out knowledge was "wind-eggs". Yet we are left, from that dialogue, with the ideas that intertwining ideas (202b) and noting their differences ("assign things to the right imprints" 195a - crucial for there to be recognition 193c) are exercises of particular importance in naming, that the combination assists the approach to the winged things we seek to name and know.

The dialogue also leaves us with the sense of the malleability and fallibility of that which we think we know. My favourite passage illustrating this begins in 201a: "you have a whole profession which declares that true opinion is not knowledge ... The profession of those who are greatest in wisdom, who are called orators and lawyers; for they persuade men by the art which they possess, not teaching them, but making them have whatever opinion they like. Or do you think there are any teachers so clever as to be able ... satisfactorily to teach the judges the truth about what happened to people who have been robbed of their money ... when there were no eyewitnesses?"
As a true pedagogue, Socrates puts a lot of direct and indirect emphasis on one's own assimilation of the subject matter at hand. It is said, possibly sarcastically, to be advantageous for the person seeking to assimilate to have a soul like wax - not like stone, not infected by earth; wax being κηρός, a word similar to that of heart, κέαρ or κῆρ (fn). But the sarcasm is surely limited to the dilettantism of resting the mind on literary references: for established in this part of the dialgoue is the importance of being able to recognise - to match imprints. It also corresponds to truth being compared to smoothness, and falsity to roughness, in the always-moving speech represented by Pan (Crat. 408c). It is noted that this speech brings as much truth as falsehood, and that falsehood is not only rough but conducive to the tragic life.
Comparison, more apparent to the smooth, may help ascertain the elements beneath it or at least circumvent them in a way - for the essential nature of a thing is not always imitated by letters and syllables (Crat. 423e) the very possibility of which may sound ridiculous though worth considering (Crat. 425d).
We can't understand everything, but which birds are ours? They may or may not be in a name because ποταμοῖσι τοῖσιν αὐτοῖσιν ἐμϐαίνουσιν, ἕτερα καὶ ἕτερα ὕδατα ἐπιρρεῖ - which appears in Socrates' other discussion of knowledge and naming in the Cratylus (402a and 401c). This section brings this post full circle because it is connected to the names that men give to gods: different names- yet illustrative of the same principles, providing one looks for that imprint, in the first instance of water (402b on). In the dialogue Socrates explains the ideas behind the names of the gods - a favourite passage of 19th century German philologists. There are instances, after all, where names correspond to their elements (422a).

As man turns around and around to capture the nature of things, he gains the illusion that things are moving which is implied in words like wisdom itself, implying a motion, the generation of contemplation, comparable to the soul, named νόησις (411b also 463e). Intelligence may be a "reckoning together" - which again is more of a being with than a having, particularly since that which is never in the same state can hardly be anything (439 e).
The moral of the story is that "no man of sense" ought "put himself and his soul under the control of names" (440c). In other words, we are not to take the names for granted (belief, atheism, justice, injustice) but to think them through. We might discover some underlying elements that may lead to difference becoming the same. For example, how unjust is injustice done to a man who has been in his life unjust? I am presently rather fascinated by this idea.
Finally, particularly in Cratylus 429-30, Socrates says that some painters are better than others and that as a name is an imitation just as a picture is, some names are better than others. I couldn't help draw a parallel between that bit in Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies (lecture three) where he writes about how irresolute people are to say to those who are not such good painters "though you had fine motives, strong enough to make you burn yourself in a slow fire, if only first you could paint a picture, you can't paint one" yet ought to champion with that much more decisiveness those with talent to make something of said talent. Instead, both artists and audience, instead of being encouraged to align wisdom and rightness to an understanding of the ends of life, are "all plunged as in a languid dream - our heart fat, and our eyes heavy, and our ears closed, lest the inspiration of hand or voice should reach us - lest we should see with our eyes, and understand with our hearts". 
True to Socrates' distrust of words, he says, "art must not be talked about. The fact that there is talk about it at all, signifies that it is ill done, or cannot be done ... The moment a man can really do his work ... All words become idle to him - all theories." One cannot be carried up an Alp by talking, he says, but one may be guided up it, step by step. He contrasts the shapeshifting interests, like pride and lust, to beauty as an ideal that is beyond movement (as does Socrates). 
I think that the better word portrait is one that inspires the person to be more charitable to others, more aware of self, more loving of life with syllables and smaller elements like wild birds and winged things.

Brush.

Some Affinities

Updated - Here is what I have been trying to say in posts I am now editing over in a Balzacian twist (Jowett also writes that Plato may have progressively edited his works, too; I have reverted my previous posts to draft). I hope you will forgive my caprice on this blog, and trust I am always trying to present here my best, even if I am bound to fall short.
I think Plato in the Republic is making an educator's joke at the difficulties of the idea of educating all people (ha ha, modern world), when it is a fact that we humans seem happier to recycle untrue stories about our neighbours and take those appearances at face value without developing the skill of assessing the underlying motives, which may be ideas that had not occurred to our limited idea of man. When I write limited, I am not thinking about lofty metaphysical-type ideas, but, say, the simple ability to be inspired by a short exchange with a neighbour that ends with a smile. Some would say to such an exchange: What were you trying to get out of it? But there may be no interest, except for the exchange of ideas, to reach those that are not one's own, and perhaps a smile.
Plato seems to be saying something about the misinterpretations that might be diffused by people who are exposed to complex ideas before they understand that along with understanding comes much deception. We are to learn to "eliminate the trivial and the false from our idea of humanity; to abstract from the best sources". Those sources are those that present human life at its best: "bravery and endurance in time of war, good counsel and fidelity in time of peace; at all times courage for individual achievement, coupled with reverence and an instinctive feeling that communal interests are supreme". Knowing the good makes it easier to identify the trivial and the false, which is complicated because sometimes ail before we recognise salubrity. The complexity tests the affinities guiding our interpretation.
There are virtues regarded as common across culture - and time. Gadamer in Truth and Method writes that "the greatest achievements in the human sciences almost never become outdated". Bravery, patience, wisdom, fidelity, community are always vital elements to humanity.
It is because man is sometimes superficial, uncritical of his motives or understanding, that Plato thought art ought portray only that which is virtuous. And the classical view of art is that it is to fill in where nature falls short, to depict the ideals that are not always realised in the situation around us.

According to Plato, we are not meant to conduct ourselves as jellyfish, directed by the flow of circumstantial current, but reign superior through our (rational) ability to measure and weigh, to train sympathy through habit in order to be happy. Aristotle concurs x.6: the same primitive joys of the rich man are available to slaves (bodily pleasure) but no one would say the slaves are happy: happiness lies in other things - like virtue. Plato illustrates virtue through the illustration of the man who has lost a son and mourns more in private than in public because of the laws of decorum that instruct that nothing is gained by ceding to impatience: grief may blind a man from seeing how to apply the "healing art" instead of wasting time crying like a child. In that (harsh) illustration we see that the point of experience, and of stories, is to learn to look for what is best: what can be put to best use out of what we have - not what we do not have. Both pleasure and pain are not how they might first appear.
It has become a literary trope since Tolstoy to say that man is divided from man, and made particular, through that which he is lacking (through his sadness) and not through what he possesses (happiness). What has made man love what he has not in this modern age?
In Paul Hazard's Crisis of the European Subject are many answers to this question, but I will extract his reading of Don Quixote, II, where he and Sancho meet a Knight who lives within his means, is content with routine, friends, freedom within limits, humbly sharing what he has, making peace, and living according to the recipe of concordance of heart, mind, and senses. "But times change, and fashions with them. That precious recipe of his won't count for much with the next generation, and, when his grandsons arrive ... they will regard [him] as a very out-of-date old gentleman ... No more, for them, out of that spell of calm, when a man might go about his lawful occasions with a tranquil mind. Giving vent at last to desires so long repressed, off they will hie them, up and down the world, looking for trouble."
In response to all of the resulting cultural relativity (seen not only in travel but in the museum), Gadamer offers the antidote of mortality. It is also mortality that Plato offers as one of his antidotes to wandering thought in the Republic.

It may be that our age is too far gone to understand the "measure" and "limits" of mortality. Classicist Edith Hamilton apparently said in an interview I cannot find, that "life had become too far complex since the age of Pericles to recapture ... the calm lucidity of the Greek mind, which convinced the great thinkers of Athens of their mastery of truth and enlightenment". She called their thinking "simple directness". But if Gadamer is correct, if my affinities are justified, their lessons are timeless. Gadamer writes that "Classical means the duration of a work's power to speak directly."
Who does not relate to the depiction of the ugly sea monster in Plato's Republic, Glaucus, disfigured by his own imperfection - yet still a figure of hope because, as Socrates says, we are saved through our affinities: we may be saved if we love the beautiful and the wise, categories that do not change with time.
But change with the particulars of unhappy perspective, as Tolstoy taught. Hazard writes: "Fundamental concepts, such as Property, Freedom, Justice and so on, were brought under discussion again as a result of the conditions they were seen to operate in far-off countries, in the first place because, instead of all differences being referred to one universal archetype, the emphasis was now on the particular, the irreducible, the individual; in the second" empiricism. In the humanities, however, empiricism can be subjective. In the humanities, where Plato remains, cast out of science, we are taught that to lack proof does not an untruth make, and are shown, in this context, the saving grace of argument. Since the Theogony, we have seen that with truth comes much untruth - and have been so warned ... to use our words and the power of our attention carefully.
We are not so alone as we might think we are sometimes. This is what I want to say. Sometimes there are strings of days when I feel cast out from this world and terribly alone, and suddenly, most unexpectedly, I chat to a neighbour, and am reminded that we are each hauling our own individual set of problems - universal in that we each have them. If I am an opportunist, it is in this sense of communication, to share something, so much the better if crowned with a smile, the crown being the release.

Brush. Book.

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.