Brazen Giant with Conquering Limbs

The title is from Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus", which was excerpted in Knopf's poem-a-day series in a passage from Esther Schor's Emma Lazarus. The passage reminds us of the initial mockery that greeted the monumental Liberty Enlightening the World, which bears in its title and land of origin the French ties to the New World. I think these ties highlight the problem behind contemporary claims to "world citizenship", which are levelling in their shared, "enlightened" philosophy.
While it appears that civilization has reached a philosophical ideal, I would argue: not so fast. Auerbach, in "Philology and Weltliteratur" explains a point that extends beyond literature, and which I will paraphrase for this larger context: the point of being a "world" citizen ceases to be "at once realized and destroyed" once this "world" is a standardized world that speaks a single literary language.
I got the impetus to write this post, which has been a long time coming (and will likely spill into further posts), after reading a post on this topic by a blogger I really admire. The post is nominally called "The Man from Nowhere" - but this formulation is a riposte to the Theresa May comment that, "If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere." It is important to clarify the provocation behind the post, because I am sure many will therefore question why I am taking issue with it. But I do have a point of contention: namely, world citizenship, in my understanding and experience, is less something that can be claimed than it is aspirational - read: ideal. Once it is claimed, it is levelled, beneath a "brazen giant with conquering limbs".
Tension and disagreement must remain: this is a prerequisite for "fruitful discourse", which is to be differentiated from "imposed uniformity" (I use Auerbach's terms). Plutarch's Socrates says he is a citizen of the world, wherein world is defined as comprising universal truths; but knowing Socrates' view on the attainment of truth, we should be wary of the implications of this affiliation.

It is no accident that the post on the topic of world citizenry that I took issue with was posted by a scientist (specifically, a historian of science).
Christopher Prendergast, in "The World Republic of Letters" explains that the enlightened 17th and 18th century "literary republic" - which, I'll add, often stands as the ideal of world citizenry called on to this day - comprised scientists and philosophers, and not writers and poets, which, I need to emphasize, is critical to recognize. Jebb, for example, writes in "Humanism in Education" : "there is a danger lest analogies drawn from studies conversant with different material should be pushed too far, and what is called the scientific spirit should cease to be duly tempered by aesthetic and literary judgement". Prendergast also emphasizes that these scientists of the "literary republic" were engaging in scientific dialogue, in which national characteristics were irrelevant.
That said, I don't think that co-mmunication can be possible without the existence of universals, which are what sentient human beings aspire towards. But expecting that they are a birth right or something some of us can call on from our global family legacy is presumptuous. From a cultural perspective, even natives can feel alienated from fellow natives; even those who ostensibly share the same universal beliefs can feel alienated through the manifestation of those beliefs.
It is important to distinguish ideals from reality; it is important to distinguish the universal from the standardized lest we are to be conquered by giants of our own making.

Brush: Misprinted Type.

Global Amnesia vs. Goethean Relevations

The blog Laudator Temporis Acti cited a few lines from Euripides today in a post entitled: "Transient Global Amnesia". The lines read: "What place did I leave to get here? How did I arrive?/ I cannot remember: my former state of mind has left me." I had written of my own experience of such on my other blog - but the lines reveal the state to be a predicament.
I am still busy, with troubled heart, working my way out of it - and coincidentally today read a beautiful explanation of the phrase τετιημένος ἦτορ, troubled in the heart at Sententiae Antiquae: To be troubled in the heart is essentially to be "occupied with [one's] own thoughts, living in an internal dream rather than engaging in the outside world".
The dreaming is prompted by being faced by a dreaded, constrictive future. The S.A. post ends with a suggestion of the way out from this: a heart that "grows" through "listening to the speech of other men". What speech of other men can cure the effects of global amnesia?
Firstly, it should be pointed out that not all global amnesia is self-inflicted. What of the lives of what I could call "hybrid babies" (taking the Bakhtinian word): those whose earliest and formative years were not steeped in the local? If transient globality is amenesia, what is remembering to one who never "left" to forget in the first place? Finally, what is the local to one who seeks to be a "citizen of the world"?
We know that Goethe, to some extent, popularized such concepts in more modern times. For example, in his Eckermann conversations in which he famously spoke of his idea of world literature, he said: "poetry is the universal possession of mankind, revealing itself everywhere, and at all times, in hundreds and hundreds of men." The poet is to present, "something higher and better" in a manner intelligible to a place and time (thence, Shakespeare "makes his Romans Englishmen"). There is no superficial adventurism here (we remember, "adventure" was scorned even by Barthes in his essay on "Neither ... Nor Criticism"). Goethe explicitly says the point is not to seek "unheard-of adventures" but to masterfully re-present the wisdom of the ancients. Western cultures should draw on ancient Western wisdom. This is an answer to "global amnesia".

This is also the alethia of "saying" something that "means" (I am quoting Gadamer): saying something that "serves to clarify something". The task of the modern hybrid person is to find such meaning, and I argue that the hybrid person has more at stake to find such meaning, because that meaning is the only home they will ever have. That person knows, too, like what Gadamer via Heidegger, says: "there can never be a total recovery of meaning" (emphasis added). But this is no modern idea! Hadot has done marvelous work in The Veil of Isis tracing the idea that some knowledge will always be concealed existed in various guises from antiquity until quite recently. Hybrid people feel their incompleteness: it is their τετιημένος ἦτορ. Hopefully, though, they find counsel in "the speech of other men" and, like Goethe encouraged, craft something new and "make something of a simple subject". Incidentally, I once blogged of the work of another graduate from one of my boarding schools who made something unique: Mrinalni Sarabhai, who made her culture intelligible to other cultures through dance. One wonders if she understood the needs of the foreign audience through her own early uprooting to that foreign culture, during formative years...

Book in background: Boucher's 1,000 Years of Fashion. Brush: Ewansim via DeviantART.

Ghosts Abroad

This post has been revised. 
A word possibly derived from a Medieval toponym, of the place where horses were raised that were hired out for work, hack, I think, is a word that could be applied to many people who travel today and seek to make money from their "observations" sold to any genre of publication. These people do not see the irony of living at enclave addresses or gathering at places approved by Facebook: even offbeat venues play to some tune of conformity, just like the average traveller of Victorian times would follow in the footsteps of those who wrote travelogues. Perhaps those journals are more transparent than ours that claim everything: we can ask ourselves how much of the local was experienced in the 18th century when ladies were travelling with their own baths (portable amenities today are tiny by comparison). I write as one whose childhood travels involved my mother learning and teaching us native languages and one who learned to keep balance on two planks over deep pits. The family shunned tours, once almost driving off a cliff in a rented jeep in Thailand because the map did not account for recent landslides.
We are 鬼佬; "ghost geezers" (white people), but my father joked at one of the 西貢 restaurants that his wife was the only white woman in the room. Maybe we became ghosts too well, not even seeing ourselves, silent cultural observers always looking to pass through barriers (to thought).
But sometimes it is we who block out all the wrong things: we composite narratives, like stereotype blocks, and it takes courage to discard it, so hard to give up ideas or furniture one has become comfortable with, and begin again. For example, one might feel as if the foreigner is often the target of a kind of hellish treatment and feel isolated, or resentful. Then one fine day, one might discover that even locals are exposed to this same hell, Dorothy Parker's "fresh hell."
Rather than travel in the ruts, it is necessary to be exposed, like the teeth of yesteryear. While I doubt ghosts have a need to laugh, already relieved of terrestrial gravities, the "west ocean ghost" seeks endearment through deprecatory humour.

And it is precisely the haughtiness of so many of today's travellers that is irksome. They think they can live in a place for a few months or years and know it. Stereotypes are set. This is not a new complaint, and is its own stereotype: in Innocents Abroad, Twain criticises the tourism industry that manufactured and sold history.
Still, there was a period a few decades ago marked by the eccentric traveller who never promised objective accounts but the symbiosis of whatever their extreme personalities, or specific context and character, would bring out of a place (Gore Vidal, Jan Morris' geographies-some invented, Marguerite Duras), rather like the travelogues of Montaigne, who brought descriptions of his bodily functions to a place, always him in it, no claims of mind over map, but him moving through scenes.
If "abroad" means away from home, the hearth, then perhaps this is why the ghost gets nearest to new destinations. Some aspects of a place will always remain invisible, and this is what the ghost knows, this is why the ghost is suspicious of the stereotype, preferring instead the furniture that blocks out empty spaces. A place, like a person, is always only just coming into itself, to that clearing where something can be defined, before it shifts. So the stereotype block, which looks like a means to save time, to make things easier, is only confusing things.
A passage by Antonio Rosmini reads: "Knowing where the problem lies represents an important stage on the way to the attainment of truth, which cannot be assailed in its hidden stronghold unless the fortress defending it has been inspected from all sides." The ghost can pass through these sides, but the person, stuck in the dimensions of the body, can not always maneuver that well. As Gadamer pointed out in Truth and Method, man can never attain entire objectivity precisely because he can never leave his body.
To travel receptively is to be at home with ghosts, to be one. It is only scary insofar as it is sometimes less words than white spaces.

Brushes: Pfefferminzchen at DeviantART; Lauren Harrison.

Doubt into Yellow

Here is a photo of flowers taken two days after I bought them in the market from an old lady vendor on her little stool, whose shaky hands produced my change in notes pre-folded. There was such distillation in her existence, such premeditation and simplicity that I long to see in myself. I did not recognise the yellow flowers as snapdragons, and asked their name to learn the local appellation, "little yawners". There is a great distance between a yawn and a dragon's roar (assuming dragons roar). I found myself either roaring or yawning last week, it seems I have to watch out when people start talking about education, which I see as a craft and by no means a product. I hear I will be hired again this year, which is excellent considering that my PhD dissertation has fallen into an administrative black hole and as such is yet undefended. I need to know how how to greet what we are told to see as uncertain with the zen attitude of the surfer. I used to spend hours reading about surfers, like Laird Hamilton who was raised on waves so, naturally, I might think, sought big waves. Surfers don't tend to be big on words but to watch them is to see a difference in humanity: many take the plunge, but not with equal grace. Laird surfs effortlessly, in sprezzatura, little yawner with the force of a dragon.
There is a big wave before us; we are told it is big especially by the media. Where it is not bureaucratised, it is ruled by the relative values not of sophistication, like Feyerabend's defense of 1950's China's adoption of the Yellow Emperor's Textbook of Internal Medicine ("Acupuncture, moxibustion, pulse diagnosis have led to new insights, new methods of treatment, new problems both for the Western and for the Chinese physician"), but of musical chairs where the chair one had been sitting on may suddenly be removed in the next round, if it is the volition of the games' master to remove that particular one. Whether you are an artist, a teacher, an entrepreneur, you will hear about plenty of uncertainties.
After reading a useful post by Enbrethilel I wondered about how, frankly, we might need to be wiped out before the questionning of what a healthy mind takes for granted can begin, and the words can rally forth. Her post was specifically about education, and cites a book by John Taylor Gatto in which he identifies a problem of our age as beginning, "when the young were assigned to consume, not to produce". I will posit here that part of what it takes to create (poiesis) is doubt.
A recent NYRB article on Koons explains, "where there is no doubt, there is no art." It is doubt that reduces one to the epistemology of one's ontology. This can be explained by Taoism: I found a page that does this quite well (it gives the gist): "Certitude evolves forth to DOUBT as it answers, yet DOUBT revolves back to certitude as it QUESTIONS; hence, answer within the DOUBT, yet QUESTION within the certitude." In this equation, one is just to "realise" the extremes, flow, and potential balance.

Before the Taoist's five elements theory, symbolised in five colours (black, green, red, white, yellow), there were only the two colours of yin and yang: black and white. The "Yellow Emperor" mentioned above is not only said to be the ancestor of the Chinese, dating to the third millennium BC, but is an important deity in Taoism and it was his tribe that practiced what we take as typical Chinese medicines like acupuncture. He is also said to have helped create the first Chinese calendar and his wife was said to have discovered silk: no small discovery (need one even mention the silk road). His tribe honoured the yellow earth and Yellow River, and that colour, of the five, is that which symbolises a stabilising energy, associated with rice which grows in the yellow earth and brings stability to mankind. It is also important to feng shui, which is based on the five elements theory that roughly correspond to the cosmos.
I am focusing on yellow as it is the colour one hopefully comes to, it is the centre of the bagua, if you have ever seen that octagonal trigram template used in feng shui. It is a reminder that one is to seek the balancing force; e.g., in times of increased activity, to seek a restful attitude.
The skilled surfer does not wobble and is not too stiff. To quote a page on Taoism, "REST within the activity suggests that we will feel better in all life’s activities if we bring a RESTFUL attitude to activity, or as the Tao Te Ching puts it, blunt the sharpness; untangle the knots; soften the glare;… and so on." Such is one story of the yawning snapdragons.

Background: Marie Claire Idees; Brush: Ewansim flower grunge at DeviantART.

Not Balkanization but Ignorance

"Why, in the face of such richness of notions, words, sounds, is 'Balkan' snatched from its ontological base and recreated as an abstract demon?" Maria Todorova asks in Imagining the Balkans. She explains that the term has been "completely decontextualized and paradigmatically related to a variety of problems" - first coined to refer to the "parcelization of large and viable political units" but became "a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian." Why, indeed, is the word chosen - including by the likes of Harold Bloom in The Western Canon to denote the rise of the uncivilized ideologue fracturing literary studies until they become entirely visual or oral. Such trends are manifest where I stand and I worry that my own 'no short cuts' teaching approach will leave me jobless but I disagree with the word choice; the (posing) philologist, after all, may comment in this respect.
"We are destroying all intellectual and aesthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences, in the name of social justice ... The Balkanization of literary studies is irreversible," writes Bloom. The irony here is that in some Balkan countries, the education system right up to EU talks had been protected from these literary trends: the school system was somewhat Byzantine, exposing large numbers of students not only to Classical languages but to rhetoric, philosophy, etc. Until recently, aesthetics was a mandatory freshman subject for students of philology. "The Balkanization of literary studies" could imply if the word is taken to refer to the geographical Balkans, literary studies that in some of the Balkan countries were still - as the previous sentence implies - taught as subjects of philology, together with morphology, and so on.
To ignore Bloom's misplaced abstract demon and return to what he was mourning, one may indeed wonder whether literary studies are being dissolved. At so many educational institutions, the rigor of revision and correction has been replaced by the terrible 'opinion' (δόξα) the Greek philosophers viewed with suspicion: leaving us with the Socratic criticism of common opinion used as the basis of argument where it degenerates into sophistry.
Bloom observes that "difficult pleasures" are being replaced by "pleasures universally acceptable precisely because they are easier." These "difficult pleasures" include teaching Dante - whose Divine Comedy is, interestingly, currently the subject of an online reading group, also at The Paris Review. That it may be easier to read texts in online groups only underlines Bloom's idea that reading will no longer be done at places of learning. But the institution saves people time: assessing which are the more authoritative resources and assembling them as a solid starting point.
The Spring 2014 issue of the APA' s Amphora also addressed the demise of the humanities - mentioning as a model of how to teach them Shaughnessy's Error and Expectations, which I have written about previously. She addresses the teaching of "difficult pleasures" by writing that her exploration of error is prepared to "not ignore the linguistic complexity of the task they face".

When I asked my students whether they agreed that reading should no longer be done at educational institutions but at home, they explained their negative answer by saying, "You know when you read a book and you think it was written for you? When you come to class, you find not only that other people think this too, but that they understood the book totally differently than you." My students echo Shaughnessy:  "Ideas come out of the dialogue we sustain with others and with ourselves. Without these dialogues, thoughts run dry and judgement falters." Reading may provide another form of dialogue. And for the record, my definition of literary studies includes reading and writing; rhetoric; ἔλεγχος to assist the comprehension of text and context; a focus on clarifying the difference between and facilitating thinking at an abstract/general level and concrete/specific level.
Shaughnessy is not a wishy-washy teacher of composition. She opposes counter-classrooms "that abandon procedures and objectives under the illusion that freedom is something people simply fall into after authoritarian structures crumble". Sadly, I am under the impression that such classrooms abound. I hear that students are allowed to write whatever they wish in whichever way they wish, without thought of diction, coherence, support for arguments.
John Holbo, who seems an example of a professor doing the gritty work of teaching analytical skills, wrote about teaching confused students how to make a thoughtful argument. Many of the comments would support Bloom's idea that education is under fire. I particularly enjoyed William Timberman's musing whether "we’re not almost at the point of throwing up our hands, hiding all the books and our daughters, and waiting for the madness to pass. (If it isn’t madness, but rather the birth pangs of a new cultural phoenix, than [sic] it’s not our problem.)" Some of the comments implied this demise has been brought about in part by the bias of advertisements and illogical political speeches. In Brandon's assessment of those comments, however, he notes how many commenters fell victim to the very lesson Holbo wanted to teach his students: confusing persuasion with arguments. One might add that persuasion enslaves (to the confines of the ideologue) while good reasoning frees one from being carried away by the horse of passion.
If, however, there is no support for such work on an institutional level, as suggested by the Amphora article, I do not think that we can expect to call our culture literate, where literacy includes the dispassionate and reasoned reception and delivery of written arguments. To become uncivilized in this way is not "Balkanization" but the result of uncouth Western trends. Uncouth meant 'wild, remote places' before 'lacking refinement' and stems from ἀγνώς, 'things unknown, ignoble, ignorant'. I wonder if it might not be an oxymoron to speak of an ignorant civilization. By contrast, the difficult but sophisticated way includes, as Holbo also observes, marking up even those papers awarded an A. (There is always room for further consideration; humility.) Dealing with abstract demons to maintain our integrity.

Magazine. Brush.

Skull in a Dream

When the work I had invested years of my life in was declared to have been put into administrative purgatory after having effectively been there earlier, a friend of mine kept saying that there is no such thing as degrees or status after death. I found this comment a little bit grating because as I had entrusted in those years of work I had hoped to be given the "credentia" of the credential. I was also curious, though, about my friend's concept of death because apparently I have a notion that death is earned through one's labour; a form of tithe.
I cannot speak for other people but because I grew up with the Chinese classics before the Western ones, when I realise I have questions I rush to those books for some kind of orientation. Even if that impulse is not shared (I do not wish to promote a postured universalism) I am sure I am not alone in using some texts for divination, which may in fact describe reading with the heart and not the mind.
Behold what I found on death and honours in Zhuangzi 至樂 4:
"At midnight the skull appeared to him in a dream, and said, 'What you said to me was after the fashion of an orator. All your words were about the entanglements of men in their lifetime. There are none of those things after death. Would you like to hear me, Sir, tell you about death?' 'I should,' said Zhuangzi, and the skull resumed: 'In death there are not (the distinctions of) ruler above and minister below. There are none of the phenomena of the four seasons. Tranquil and at ease, our years are those of heaven and earth. No king in his court has greater enjoyment than we have.' Zhuangzi did not believe it, and said, 'If I could get the Ruler of our Destiny to restore your body to life with its bones and flesh and skin, and to give you back your father and mother, your wife and children, and all your village acquaintances, would you wish me to do so?' The skull stared fixedly at him, knitted its brows, and said, 'How should I cast away the enjoyment of my royal court, and undertake again the toils of life among mankind?'"
In  徐無鬼 4 we are given a list of people in different professions, each doing what he is skilled at but all sad when things do not go their way. This may be contrasted with the definition of complete enjoyment in 繕性 3, which Zhuangzi also calls the "attainmnet of the aim". The aim, however, is no fancy thing, which only affect the body and not its nature, being temporary, coming and going. One is not to be motivated by the wish to pursue things and one's wish to avoid distress is not to be the cause of one's learning. Both pursuits, however, may be enjoyable if one sees them as ways of freeing oneself from anxiety. "If now the departure of what is transient takes away one's enjoyment, this view shows that what enjoyment it had given was worthless. Hence it is said, 'They who lose themselves in their pursuit of things, and lose their nature in their study of what is vulgar, must be pronounced people who turn things upside down.'"

I see the skull that appeared in the dream. It said the work is only real if it is seen as a release from anxiety. The credential is akin to the transient thing that comes and goes.
This idea is contrary to the resume culture, which I have been thinking about a lot recently - thinking without any action. Is pressure regarding credentials also a class issue? But what about circumstance: Thomas Hardy's Jude is testament to how the able but misplaced soul may fail to thrive.
"Mencius said, 'A man's advancement is effected, it may be, by others, and the stopping him is, it may be, from the efforts of others. But to advance a man or to stop his advance is really beyond the power of other men. My not finding in the prince of Lu a ruler who would confide in me, and put my counsels into practice, is from Heaven." (梁惠王下 23).
But Heaven, 下, can be an ambiguous character, highlighting the paradoxes and inconsistencies in life and literature. As I get older I find that I crave such puns that stimulate the moral imagination. Laws may be perfect but man is not - which interferes with how the law is to be 'interpreted' to man, Aristotle teaches, which is not to say that Aristotle is a moral relativist or does not maintain ideals, laws. The play around meaning, and in verbal ambiguity, can be heuristic.
下 can mean nature but it can also mean social forces, and in a context like the one above it may signal the random counterforce to the normative, which I take to mean Heaven only if this is the moment one uses the provocative 下 to inspire the 下 of order, thereby "freeing oneself of anxiety". The word 下 is used because we are to be pushed to it: the negative is hiding the positive, vice versa, or both are hidden together in the pun. We are being pushed towards a positive value because Mencius elsewhere gives us the answer to when circumstance does not go our way.
"Mencius replied, 'Honour virtue and delight in righteousness, and so you may always be perfectly satisfied. Therefore, a scholar, though poor [窮 - exhausted all resources], does not let go his righteousness; though prosperous [達 - having attained sth], he does not leave his own path. Poor and not letting righteousness go - it is thus that the scholar holds possession of himself. Prosperous and not leaving the proper path - it is thus that the expectations of the people from him are not disappointed. When the men of antiquity realized their wishes, benefits were conferred by them on the people. If they did not realize their wishes, they cultivated their personal character, and became illustrious in the world. If poor, they attended to their own virtue in solitude; if advanced to dignity, they made the whole kingdom virtuous as well.'" 盡心上 46.
In other words, one is to make the best out of what one has, whatever it is. I wrote a letter to my father this morning, musing that no matter how prudent one thought one was in their decision making as a youth, it is not possible to keep off the moment of doubt, 下 is not in one's control, yet it is not an excuse to go around sulking. Maybe the point is not in what we achieve but in character building, in making something from what we have even if it sometimes isn't much - maybe just a skull in a dream... that shows us how to paint by number the fruits of bounty.

Brush. Magazine.

马年大吉

Kung hei fat choi! For those who subscribe to Chinese astrology, 2014 is off to a galloping start. Even if we do not, we may consider the unity and integrity of the other, as Gadamer suggests in Truth and Method, and understand ourselves through understanding something other than self. In this case, we may think about the attributes of the horse: passionate, resolutely ambitious, stubborn. We may picture the horse prancing, galloping, or bucking - as it is always depicted in the paper cuts and red posters sharing the new year greeting.
Gadamer contrasts the experience of the 'encounter' with art, so often the mode of representation of the other, to the conclusions drawn through scientific method. At the threshold of this new year, I hold his sentence: reality stands in the horizon of ... still undecided possibilities. But that is not his conclusion: not everything can be fulfilled. Some paths are mutually exclusive. The drama, which may be compared to reality, is a closed circle of art. If we look to the drama we might write in the new year, we might wish to bring forth the right way of being. This is never a dead imitation of ideals, for mere repetition has never been mastery, but a mediation by the θεωροί who Gadamer describes as those who take part in the festival ... here, those who take part of the new year.
It is not enough to merely intervene in the flow of life, it is pertinent to ask how. "Only sympathy makes true understanding possible ... Through it another person is transformed." If one could but know one's bias and overcome that limitation without succumbing to arbitrariness and superficiality. Participate somewhere between the familiar and the strange. In this respect we might indeed want to channel the horse, for the horizons change for the person who is moving, as opposed to the person with no horizons, who does not see far enough so overvalues what is nearest, never assimilating into his horizon the lessons of history that never grow old, never applying those lessons, never understanding.
What is right? Not being blinded by the passions; relating to the present situation, doing the work, ever anew, of seeking out that elusive rightness, allowing the self to be addressed by a subject and bearing the responsibility of possibly not having learned enough to recognise it.

I can't resist mentioning the philosopher Chrysippus, who was called Cryxippus in gest - he being a small man and once depicted alongside a horse, disappearing alongside it. The nickname a play on the words κρύπτω, to hide, and ἵππος, horse. To argue comprehensively, he would often argue both sides of the argument.
Knowledge, Gadamer writes, means being able to judge correctly and discard the wrong, dissolving the counter instances. Through practicing argument, one learns that things may change and become their opposite as they are consistently thought through, e.g., seeking justice by adhering to it strictly though this finally proves to be the greatest injustice. While the dialectical statement that has reached contradiction is antithetical to both the hermeneutical experience and the verbal nature of the human experience of the world, dialectics in general is useful in horse-powering the interplay of Q and A and in helping thought acquire the power of testing what follows from contraries. In this way, dialectics can help reveal a totality of (truthful) meaning.
We may find this attempt in Chrysippus, who argued that evil can be good: evil, "taken with all else, has its uses" (13-14). While I do not quite agree with this view in its entirety, Plutarch certainly doesn't (14-15), his thinking does reveal a totality in which polarities have been resolved, and illustrates Gadamer's observation that to know is not enough: one requires the right circumstance in which to apply what one knows (here, the bad situation in which to apply the good).
Our reasoning may be spoiled, though, Gadamer notes, the moment we seek to evaluate ideas in terms of usefulness, as is in part the case above. Usefulness denies beauty, the value of which is self-evident, requiring no question as to what purpose it serves. In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, τέχνη is just one part; practical wisdom is about living well overall. In Politics, he writes that to always seek the useful does not make for free and exalted souls. His notion of αἴσθησις tends towards the universal even if it stems from the particular; his bigger picture is one that is both beautiful and one of resolution.
In Ethics, Aristotle uses the illustration of lovers of horses to show that man should not choose his affinities 'accidentally' but cultivate the good, which in De Anima is illustrated through the balance of passions and reason - echoing Plato's chariot allegory in Phaedrus, where one horse is passion and the other, reason. If we are to be open to new meaning this year, may we strike the balance between passion and reason and seek the beautiful and the right - which may sound old-fashioned, but Gadamer has proved in Truth and Method the sophistry of arguments that seek to deny traditional experience, which we might do better to be prejudiced in favour of, as one is to be prejudiced towards that which is more learned, that which is true.
 

Brush. Magazine.

Every Hole Evolves a Whole

Sometimes when I think about "home" it becomes the negative concept of where I am not. But I know that even if I were to go to where a certain part of me could be met, there would be other things missing. Kristeva compares foreigners to Io, who was pursued by the οἶστρος - a gadfly, but also a word used by Plato to denote irrational drives, the "gadfly of desire" - sending her across many seas. Even though Io returns to a normal life of motherhood in Egypt, if one has travelled, surely one has the opportunity to look for better stories to provide schemes for understanding.
Except that by bringing something out of its context through comparison, one risks changing a story's essence. This can happen once one has chosen to objectify something - the way of looking that makes an idea foreign by setting it apart from the familiarity of cohabitation. Hadot writes how objectification of prefabricated phrases decontextualises them, now misinterpreted and mistranslated. Yet some ideas built out of misunderstanding, "have brought about important evolutions."
The traveller wishing to be systematic about all the stories he or she collects realises what Hadot writes, that the actual progress of thought functions rationally outside the bounds of mathematical thought or Hegelian dialectics. One becomes like Lévi-Strauss. One also comes to realise the large gap between the artistic freedom of making something new and the learned respect for the sometimes elusive meaning of the original context. Hadot explains that we cannot be sure of the original meaning of γνῶθι σεαυτόν, know thyself. It is possible to wander the earth like a disinherited maiden, making a patchwork quilt of deracinated maxims. This is our home, we may say, as we put the quilt into the dowry box which indeed follows us to that next home, wherever it may be.
Thence the notion of atopia - which we next find in Hadot's "Forms of Life and Forms of Discourse." Here, atopia refers to the strangeness of the philosopher in the human world. "For such a man, daily life, as it is organised and lived by other men, must appear abnormal, like a state of madness, unconsciousness, and ignorance of reality. And nonetheless he must live this life every day, in this world in which he feels himself a stranger and in which others perceive him to be one as well. And it is precisely in this daily life that he must seek to attain that way of life which is utterly foreign to the everyday world. The result is a perpetual conflict between ... the life one should live and the customs and conventions of daily life."
There are many forms of homelessness.

And if I return to stories of travelling, instead of looking to Hermes, troublesome in that he is honoured by thieves, I will think of 孙悟空 who is himself possibly a retelling - a story taken from its context, of Hanuman from the Ramayama. He is Sun Wukong, the monkey king, who gains supernatural powers from practicing the Tao. I choose 孙悟空 because he makes a Journey to the West, accompanying a Buddhist monk to retrieve the wisdom of the sutras. His travels are based on service, and the goal of the travels is knowledge that sets us free, not material wealth.
As Hadot says: we are wont to privilege who we are over what we have. What we have is also a place. But some people hide behind the conventions of the place, never rising above it to the courage to be a friend to those who may be passing through, i.e. those who feel their transience.
Who are we? I find that a very difficult question, on par with the question I am often asked, "Why do you live here?"
So I will answer in story, and take liberties like in Lee-Hom Wang's music video 伯牙絕弦 which takes its theme from the tale of BoYa and incorporates elements of Chinese calligraphy, reminding me of the hours I would play alone imagining that art as my childhood friends were learning it. What I remember about it were the very strict and subtle rules - only the trained eye could recognise the characteristics of superior calligraphy. Knowing those rules, it was surprising to me to see calligraphy appear as it does in the video. I was also surprised at how fusion in the video is a beat that is primarily Western. Why.
My story then is a Journey to the East, I don't have 孙悟空, a monkey companion - but like Sun Wukong, I have a character who is "awakened to emptiness." I could also do without his violence. In my story, the protagonists are also travelling for spiritual wisdom. Why spiritual? Because - and here I will borrow from Hadot, the words "'psychic,' 'moral,' 'ethical,' 'intellectual,' 'of thought,' 'of the soul' - cover all the aspects of reality we want to describe." Those words do "not indicate clearly enough the imagination and sensibility play a very important role ... although intellectual factors as definition, division .. reading, investigations, and ehtorical amplification play a large role ... [as do] ... therapeutics of the passions". 'Spiritual' indicates not merely thought "but the individual's entire psychism."

My story in progress is about bringing the whole world into oneself, through sympathy, because to only see part of the world or be in part of the world is bound to make one feel empty. As Gadamer has written, even if one has experienced a new culture and context fully through hermeneutics, and assimilates it to the point of privileging it, one can never forget one's first context.
We can remember Bakhtin: hybrids emerge. Must we, even if we wish so much to respect original context, fear the hybrid? Surely, in the final analysis, there has always been much idea exchange - and then periods of assimilation and formation of tradition. When I think of "tradition" I think of Chinese calligraphy and African masks in the sense that both have very strict rules, and any innovation must be within those guidelines, never complete transformation.
I would argue that to reach such subtle lines of definition of what something "is" represents some form of transcendence. Finesse. I do not see refinement in much of the quotidian, which is not to say that it is not there, just that it is today often beneath the surface.
A holistic globe would allow for such subtleties and yet allow for the "dance of meeting from form to form" that Davenport writes of, his example being the iconographic shift of a Macedonian coin depicting the head of Hermes on one side and a winged horse on the other, morphing, from copy to copy, into the Celtic coin that forms the image on the cover of his collection of essays Every Force Evolves a Form.
Just as much as I feel tension in never quite belonging in any single place, I feel tension in my very strong penchant for the uniform (even literally) and tradition where it is most clear cut. The formula I have found to allow for free, spontaneous creative play and respect for tradition is through the hermeneutic experience which looks to first listen to the tradition and then, once one has been informed by it, look to where it relates to the present moment. One is to try very hard not to misunderstand. But this ultimately depends on whether our own experience has made us ready to receive the new information.
So in the final count, it is a problem of audiences and the "impossibility of the general audience" (Hadot). We have not always been made empty enough to hold the fullness that is life. We are sometimes impatient to understand things that we have not made ourselves worthy of, or have not completed the appropriate prerequisites to properly access.

Watercolour brush. Magazine.

Sea, Maestro

There is a recording of one of Tiegerman's performances of Chopin buried in an article about the search for master concert pianists that led the author to Cairo, and the curious maze of personalities that cluster around the 'other' often visible in the art of overseas. It is about a master with the draw of the sea.
How close we have come to a certain kind of person may make all the difference in our lives. The Greek ἐπίσταμαι refers to both knowing and standing upon - there seems, on so many levels, to be a topical aspect to learning. The place of the books. The professor's office. To stand in the same room as luminaries. Something rubs off in the contact, if not always enough. 
When I listened to the Tiegerman Chopin recording certain kinds of friends came to mind: with their signature deftness that came from neat lessons unfettered with the indeterminacy of what Gadamer calls untenable hermeneutic nihilism (when relativity, not man, reigns - man, who is to be magis, or "more" than his surroundings). That is the sign of the master, a 'greater-than' sign.
So let us return to Cairo and the article. We learn there was a time when people of all backgrounds got along; that two Muslims sat by the side of their infirm Jewish friend's bed to the very end. Edward Said, cited in the article, himself writes about this in Reflections on Exile. He describes one of Tiegerman's most promising students, a Muslim mother of four, veiled always in her burda, who never said a word in his presence: nonetheless, he points out that in Cairo, the ultra-European and ultra-Islamic conjugated, "Where such pictures have since gone I don't know, but part of their poignancy for me is that I am certain they will never recur."
But are such crossroads not also the sign of the master, magis to landmarks? Gadamer writes that something is overcome in aesthetics, if ultimately within the structure of meaning: "Our experience of the aesthetic is a mode of self-understanding. Self-understanding always occurs through understanding something other than the self and includes the unity and integrity of the other." Emphasis added.
In Said's Reflections, he writes that Tiegerman continued to live in Cairo even when things got harder because there, he felt unique, while in Israel, many were like him. But surely he meant that he had found the circle of people to whom he was relevant. One does not pick where this happens. Knowledge is also a place with its own reasons, not always apparent to us.
But if Gadamer is right about aesthetics and the other, then it would make sense if, as Said writes, many once went to Cairo for "warmth and possibilities in contrast to what was coming in Europe". Merely to stand there would be aesthetic. Something more, and meaningful.

Brush. Magazine.

At Home with Hybrids

If we are looking to find ourselves, we might come across pieces of that mosaic in the novel where, according to Bakhtin, psychological life may be expressed through inner speech. Our monologues are indicative of who we are through word choice: either 'coming together' through the centripetal, or multiplying through the struggle of the centrifugal. In the violence of the centrifugal (things fall apart), words may be "half ours, half someone else's".
In one book that I can't find at the moment, a comparison is made between those who speak in hybrids and half-breeds; the implication, clear enough. Yet is it not a mark of the sophisticated intellectual to be fluent in more than one language; rather clearly put by the skeptical Mencken: "The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong ... The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant".
I grew up in a hybrid house. The other words one may adopt into one's vocabulary may contain varying levels of dynamism and friction. It takes work. They may be taken in, as it were, through the 'stylistic hybrid' of parody, framed by the ironic quotation mark, or may be fully internalised. But for the hybrid to exist, the other words must be consciously represented, mediated, not merely presented.
I'd argue that when words aren't mediated (so are 'samples'), one is quickly misunderstood by interlocutors unfamiliar with the other references. To mediate is to bring a bridge to the scene, or to paint one in the sand to heal a wounded soul, like the Navajos did.
If I am interested in art as a mode of problem-solving, it is only because I see it as a playground in the battleground of life: good literary theory is intimate - the kind that brings compassion to figures like Nietzsche, whose provocative dialectics reveal the Sisyphean task he set to his proud intellect.

Varied bird calls attract my attention away from these words. I remember a time from before, when I would listen to the call of the Koel be answered by the animals in the near by Gardens, where silhouettes of lovers merged. A variety of monkey calls - gibbons, de brazas - were the loudest, but we'd also hear the blade-grinder shout out from below. We could say that the city is the home to hybrids, but how many people let those sounds in? Most are greedy behind their forts, vigilant against "going native" - illustrated rather beautifully here: "In Kenya in the 1940s my father, aged 19, used to take off his shoes to save them getting dusty when riding his motorbike across the open savannah. When this was reported to his family he was taken to task by his elders for 'going barefoot in public like an African'".
The same source explains, "Diplomacy requires experience and understanding of the host country, but too much experience, and one can forget who's signing the pay checks," which is a rather succinct description of the fear involved in facing the other. But for the idealist or Mencken's "civilized man," surely one is interested in looking for a 'best of' type interaction?
These views don't seem pals to power play, but make for good literature. According to Bakhtin, the novelistic hybrid is "an artistically organised system for bringing different languages in contact with one another" - along with their inherent value systems, placed in dialogic opposition. The novelist is but a good listener and inspired host to a sophisticated selection of guests.
I'd like to think that the good artist can put things back in their places. Things fall apart seems to be the cry of colonialism, where the Passage to India is left to end in doubt - an inevitable end to the insistence of Arnoldian mechanization, refusing to soften into compassion. The hybrid is the chink in the stiff wall that lets in figurae, which represent the ideals we strive for.

Retro Grunge Brush. Ancient Japan Brush. Book.

Block

This weekend, waves of birds moved in to the city, bringing their song with them, and the grass seemed to turn green over night, which was impressive. I had one of those moments of clarity, when certain ideas fall in place. Except that sometimes ideas are far harder to crystalise materially: they seem to be clearer in the mind, beyond the reach of words or even symbols.
But the ideas had to do with symbols; I was thinking of the woods of simplicity in the characters 朴 which mean simple, unadorned  - even sincere. Those characters denote certain Taoist principles related to the ideal of being an "uncarved block," sort of akin to Rousseau's tabula rasa, but implied is the latent creativity that comes with living things.
I wondered about similar words or concepts in ancient Greek, and found the word απελέκητο - uncarved, unhewn. Before shapes are impressed by force. Again, the promise: in the Odyssey, Calypso gives Odysseus an axe, the name for which is the inverse to "unsmoothed stone" - (α)σκεπαρνον: with this adze, he carves the boat that will take him away, "escaping the great bonds of woe" and the hermetic island.
With adzes, as we go places, we too, like our vessels, are chiseled at by time, our environment, the company we keep - something. The question is how 'natural' these influences are: one may think of the jardin à la française compared with a wild garden.
It is rather curious to plonk down the uncarved block in a conversation about culture. There is a Greek expression that compares the illiterate person to an uncarved block of wood. Accordingly, the educated person receives a form - which reminds me of the formation of the finishing school. This is not the Taoist ideal, though in the Tao Te Ching there is no explicit rejection of culture: culture - civilization? - is fine so long as it is serving man's higher purpose, a form of simplicity and sincerity.

These thoughts brought me to Gadamer's Truth and Method, which is a book that I cannot believe I have not read by now. In the preface he explains that understanding is a subjective relation to the history of the 'effect' of an object; man is to question effects, question the difference among contexts. The universal is applied to specific historical conditions - I'll add: bringing a carved form to what in essence is formless. The Tao is to go with the flow and not pursue tradition, culture, etc, with a mind bent to it, so deformed by it, but rather to seek the universal: the carving will follow.
This was the thinking behind my new pen name, which I decided on yesterday and wrote about here: it means 'unfinished, unpolished' - which certainly better represents the stabs in the dark I make on this blog than the pseudonym I borrowed from Ruskin, which nonetheless continues to inform my new one, in its aspiration toward the 'natural.'
Also, I am barely literate, so 'unfinished' works for me. I read this weekend that Western Civ ended in the 1970's: I agree and want to make up for that small but important increment of lost time by teaching myself Latin and Greek. But to be truly literate, one ought also know at least Sanskrit and Chinese. Words in early languages contain postcards from the past, mediated through etymological ideograms, so helpful to the critical apparatus and imagination.
It occurred to me this weekend just how much of a blockhead I am - but when I write that, I wish to soften the words by saying that in tandem with that realisation, I understood that it may be time to start cultivating the hope that comes with formlessness. The hope that through seeking one's own simple nature, one may in turn intuit nature.
Instead of dreading one's unpolished state, to put it to use: to hold it as the map of one's origin and final destination. There is no simple way to end this post, but to simply end it. These are, after all, "rough ideas."

  

Element.

Hermit-Scholar

How ideal to make peace with the unfinished; how this would afford one a girth in which to wander around on the way to getting better. "I came here to win," I heard somebody say on TV, which for reasons I cannot explain was left on as I was working. Sometimes I feel almost insulted by such an attitude, particularly now, in the light of the ugly chemical war menacing the horizon.
But time and life have so many corridors, and when I write that, I'm thinking of those in the memory, when suddenly the memory lights up like a meridian, and things one knew long before return - like returning to the summer manor and unlocking the halls to rooms that had lay still, untouched, for a long period. I am thinking of ars memoriae - method of loci, though when I write that, I can't help but think of Giordano Bruno, whose hermetic memory system was supposed to have a magical influence upon the world. If mind and world must be mediated by the trickster Hermes, I pick hermeneutics to interpret my way through the furniture of the mind: which seems sometimes to block out access to better ideas.
What is beginning to come back to me are the distilled images and inscriptions of Chinese painting - the trilogy of calligraphy, poetry, and painting: the choice of miniscule detail to comment on the world. Like the painting of the potted plant (influenced by man) with its shriveled leaves (by nature). Such are the dynamic dualisms.
Sometimes I feel at the same time that so much depends on the attempt to find the right words and distill the right images through them - that, without reference to hermetic alchemy, one could really create some kind of salve through words, even if heard only by deer. Is an audience really required? I think back to the recluse fisherman: the genuine hermit scholar who was out of work by choice, and "fished for fish, not for fame" - living the simple life not as a pretense until employment but due to a true inclination.

To work on one's thought, there must be some kind of tangential perspective, of the laudator temporis acti: benefiting from the gifts of hindsight to sharpen one's vision, which is not necessarily a criticism of the present, some people don't seem to realise that.
In this Asian model, the retired or aloof critic will also be self-deprecating. I see this model now, which has suddenly come back to me, as something I wish to emulate. I'll change my moniker to Lazybones. What's the rush, anyhow? Ruskin told to us: petrol is in no rush to get anywhere.
An intriguing scroll by Wang Meng demonstrates the dualism of "nature's creative potential" and the "ever shifting terrain of political power". In the middle of all this dynamism is a vortex of calm, a retreat. Like of the hermit-scholar. Not fishing for fame, but communing with mystery: by holding 靈芝, the auspicious fungi which is also very decorative, gentle animals come forth of their own accord. Everything around the recluse is unfinished; he may be unfinished, but in one imaginary moment of time, he holds the panacea of longevity, a talisman of luck - incidentally also connected to alchemy, as outlined by Baopuzi. 
Wang Meng signed that ink scroll, "The Yellow Crane Mountain Woodcutter"; Baopuzi is a pseudonym meaning something like "Scholar Who Keeps It Simple/ Unmoved by Worldly Desires". I'd just like to point out that Wang Meng was royalty!
Give up sainthood, renounce wisdom, And it will be a hundred times better for everyone.
Give up morality and justice, And people will do the right thing.
Give up ingenuity, renounce profit, And bandits and thieves will disappear.
If these three aren't enough,
just stay at the center of the circle
and let all things take their course. (19 and here)

Element. Magazine.

A Natural Art

I was struck by a phrase of Robery Fry's: that it is only artists who can access the aesthetics of a historical period, without being encumbered by the related "social emanations." Indeed, to look at the work of impressionists and post-impressionists is to wonder at the 'primitive' and 'foreign' transplanted influence, like the Chinese influence in Matisse or the Tahitian women and sculptures in Gauguin, or the African inspired abstractions of Brancusi. Fry writes that in the face of such art, the public may - perhaps rightly - feel that they are being submitted to an artist's caprice. It is too early, Fry said one hundred years ago, to tell whether art would be successful in its attempt to create a pure, abstract language.
As if drawing a parallel, Fry writes that ancient cave paintings are more like a language than they are paintings, due to their sytlised forms. I think he convincingly explains the modern fascination with these other ways of looking: it is the same thing we teach in class, that we are to break free from the cliche, to be able to see unencumbered by presupposition.
That said, the modern language of abstraction is only legitimate if we are more married to form than we are to content. Even stylised language is married to its form; Brancusi's form is married to lines. Neither are simplifications because one's brain has to know how to fill their forms out, to relate them back to familiar reality. This is called 'knowing how to read.' Abstract art is not a pure language of universals because it is a language, and no language is known at birth. So, many people do not speak this language.
The problem of art reveals the problems of culture. We may get so caught up in learned forms that we forget to perceive the essence - like through noein, through the senses. Herzog's subjects sense part of the meaning of Chauvet just as we may sense the meaning of our metal boxes. The computers and phones may be the stylised, abstract language to the future man.
I would argue that noein is close to creative thinking, where it is inspired (where muses, music, and the mind are combined in primordial dreams or memories of belief, seeking, and picking up the scent of understanding). Creative thinking does not have to follow the one path set out by habit or cultural practice. Is this not the essence sought by 19th century painters; was the Romantic dream not to return to an art of living naturally?

In a moment of serendipity that I admit was afforded me by an algorithm (I had bought a paperback and Amazon recommended "more by the same publisher"), I encountered the beautiful nyrb edition of Fukuoka's One-Straw Revolution, which reminds me a little of Rousseau's Emile: to prune a tree, the author writes, is like teaching children music: in our misguided pursuit of the nature that we all like but know so little about, we may degenerate our true appreciation of it. Scientists ruin their sight as they come up with a cure for short-sightedness, he continues. And while such ideas lean towards the defeatist regarding the human agency to create (which he allocates to poetry writing in winter), it brought to mind an article I read about the inventor of an alternate internet platform who committed suicide despite his genius - the reporter's comment being that mental illness is the malady of our time and often goes undetected.
"Before researchers become researchers," Fukuoka writes, "they should become philosophers. They should consider what the human goal is, what it is that humanity should create." Isn't this what we expect of artists - who fall short of our expectations? Ruskin answered these questions by asking his own in The Ethics of Dust and Queen of the Air. He wonders about colours, the meaning of myths, and the nature of world, just like Fukuoka does, though with far more flourish.
Arguably, at the turn of the 20th century, there was deep, epistemological questioning, which later led to extreme answers: in postmodernist detached art, existential and self-denying philosophies (which includes some aspects even of Buddhism, now claimed by some Westerners), and a scramble towards the safety of materialism, which includes the bid to get rich as individuals.
Fukuoka considers science from the perspective of the little man and concludes that the results of scientific research are arranged for its own convenience, not for the convenience of people with ailing diets or the farmers. I recall the tragedy among Indian farmers, forced to buy expensive GMOs, who took their lives - a point all the more excruciating when one reads in his 1970's book One-Straw that the natural way in farming had been feasible in India. "So that is how it is. You study the function of the plant's metabolism and its ability to absorb nutrients from the soil, write a book, and get a doctorate in agricultural science. But do not ask if your theory of assimilation is going to be relevant to the yield." Or quality of life.

Man, as we know well, becomes lulled by instant gratification. Who doesn't enjoy the reserve of canned chickpeas for a quick meal, summer or winter? Instincts become bewildered by caprice. Diet is changed in order to delight; the palate is the circus ring of yesteryear. "This is false," Fukuoka writes. "A fear of nature and a general sense of insecurity are often the unfortunate results." Well yes, I'd feel insecure without my chickpeas: it has become too expensive to make my own winter store. And as for a fear of nature, luckily, I am a child of Kurt Hahn, but as a city dweller, it takes me three uncomfortable days of acclimatisation when I return to nature (oh, the mosquitoes!). So we aren't free, but enslaved to something else.
The path of science endlessly divides phenomena, according to Fukuoka. "Seen as complex, the world becomes frighteningly abstract and distant." I do  not have a problem with abstraction, my livelihood and imagination depend on it. But I do have a problem if abstraction becomes the new hegemony. Fukuoka notes that science creates conditions in which it becomes necessary. Thence the "single-minded" economic model of industrial development, wherein science, self-gratifyingly, proves through its own methods the necessity of, say, scientific chemicals. He urges we consider what it means to "improve technique".
It's a fact that there are chickens with genes that allow them to get so fat that they cannot walk. To my imagination, that is worlds away from the also perverse Kobe cow, fed beer and massaged all day. An Asian sensibility is missing from the bigger, better, faster, more model of greed. When I read Fukuoka, aside from marvelling at how well he applied Lao Tzu's principle of doing nothing, I am reminded of the Chinese scholar-official (士大夫) of yesteryear, who also enjoyed "the satisfaction of living close to the source of things". There is a tradition in China of appreciating nature: describing it was part of the Imperial Examination in some dynasties. Also characteristic of this respect of nature is the long process of observing it, beautifully illustrated by watercolour scrolls: the scene cannot be observed in one glance.
A lot of 'background knowledge' is needed to see properly whatever is represented, in life, or in art. But life will always belong more to those who are living, than those who think about it. "Life is song and poetry," Fukuoka writes. The artist can take shortcuts that scholars must then - try to - explain.

Cloud Element. Magazine.

Not All Audiences

There can be such a longing for a talisman from the past or from one of its many-suitcased 'homes' now too far gone - a half tessera - to show that one belongs to other contexts outside of where one finds oneself, to ward off the occasional small-mindedness that takes years and years of practice to laugh off. There can be such a longing to have an audience with distance.
I wonder if perhaps the talisman is only gained through time; maybe it is the shape one grows into, against so many tides. To become one's own symbol. And who in the world would care if one succeeds in this? It is so counter to the mainstream that it may seem without significance. Except there is Gauguin's Noa Noa, there is also the matter of unfinished business. We might not choose our beginnings, but perhaps we each bear an enigma that can either be ignored, or pursued (I write not of the bland).
Noa Noa is a book of a journey, a recounting of the myths of yesteryear, an East meets West narrative (Tahitians "less pale" than Gauguin), personal discovery, the accommodation afforded by the locals, nature reached through symbols, and at the end, a going home. Gauguin goes home. At the cost of someone else's tears.
To be accommodated, sometimes one must travel very far away, indeed. It depends on the type of roots one was born in to and the generosity one is surrounded by. But the dimension of accommodation that is haunting me is that a locality - as a whole - is a smaller mind than the cosmopolite, a word which contains the words cosmos, world, politês - citizen. One does not want to be at the hands of the smaller judge.
Gauguin's words may be better understood at 'home', though it was not his 'native home' that had brought him into himself. The West has swallowed up so many narratives, they can live in its colonial languages. This may be, in part, why to write in them - like Tagore or Yeats - is to be scorned by one's countrymen. But such writers, like the koiné, Roman cults of assimilation, and Akbar's dynasty, were all sponges.

The sponge, which is taken as a model to be imitated, is interestingly the simplest animal on the planet. They basically have a lot of pores, and as water filters through them, they extract what they need. So perhaps its key here is circulation - a worldly symbol.
It stands for κοινός; that which is shared, common, public. But as Heraclitus famously observed, not all people can register this shared experience, because they are living as if they were asleep (95: ὁ Ἡράκλειτός φησι τοῖς ἐγρηγορόσιν ἕνα καὶ κοινὸν κόσμον εἶναι τῶν δὲ κοιμωμένων ἕκαστον εἰς ἴδιον ἀποστρέφεσθαι).
The ideal audience brings more than one context to circumstance (of a conversation, in looking at art, etc), eager for there to be good fruit behind the screen of words. Just as there is conversation, the terms in the conversation can be open to different levels of meaning. So the ideal circumstance may be most like the sponge: with the most pores to catch fecund meaning. It should have the most arrows, pointing to the most healing of exits and horizons.
Heraclitus is one who "went out in search of" himself. He saw beyond the limited horizons of his society. His words have various levels of meaning - and for all these reasons, who is the right audience for his works? While anyone with a computer today can read his fragments, will one necessarily understand them?
Comprehension may lay, in part, in the French painter's rejection of security, complacency. Only if one has given something up: one's home, a piece of darker past, something taken by sacrifice, do the eyes see. And even if one has not done this, if one listens, through the koiné, one is bound to learn of such things, through empathy. Experience is saved through listening, which opens up what Merton called "the flowering of ordinary possibilities".
The audience, and talisman, I seek is of those flowers. There is a risk that as one forms oneself in the craft that the naysayers will cut one down before one has found one's voice (to be distinguished from buzz, and the illusion of having one's say). Also, the more one has to say, the more one can get it wrong. The more there is to say, the stronger the impulse to make a connection with words and people.
Quality takes time, even if quality is garnering the audience one seeks. "Let us not be like those who wish to make the tree bear its fruit first and the flower afterward - a conjuring trick and an advertisement. We are content if the flower comes first and the fruit afterward, in due time. Such in the poetic spirit. Let us obey life ... that calls us to be poets, and we shall harvest many new fruits for which the world hungers - fruits of hope that have never been seen before."
"No one can come near the river unless he walks on his own feet. He cannot come there carried in a vehicle." This is the audience that sees seeds where there are words.

Nail polish element. Book in background.

Provide for Improvisation

To provide means to look ahead; to improvise is to compose unexpectedly - in the unforeseen. So perhaps to improvise is to live in the moment, while to provide is to nod to man's sedentary nature, to agriculture. Today, being sedentary is society's dominant pose. That is a joke.
I was talking to a friend last night about that Ricoeur quote I keep coming back to: "In order to take part in modern civilization, it is necessary at the same time to take part in scientific, technical, and political rationality, something which very often requires the pure and simple abandon of a whole cultural past ... There is the paradox: how to become modern and to return to sources".
So I am wondering about different models, and consulted Rabindranath Tagore this morning. He writes of how "great" Europe is, but warns that she is carrying her ideals to all corners of the earth yet not sacrificing her greed: "She will have to recognise perhaps ... that it is an intellectual Pharisaism to have faith only in building pyramids of systems." While he praises science, he warns the one-sided pursuit of it thrusts man's personality into the background, lowering "man's true value to the level of his own machine". But as one cannot make friends with the machine, personality finds no permanent refuge in it. "Science should come to our aid to be humanised by us at the end".
His model is not "nourishing a spirit of rejection" but "giving out of the best that we have" which is rather alike Arnold's sweetness and light. "We have not seen the great in the West because we have failed to bring out the great that we have in us and we delude ourselves into thinking that we can hide this deficiency behind borrowed feathers." The East suffers from poverty and inertia and the West from lack of peace and happiness (money is not the way to unity).
The good in science is that it can free "the culture of the soul" from the tyranny of matter, in other words, it is science that helps feed us, to free us from being slaves to hunger. I love this line: "No great country can afford to be confined to its kitchen, it must have its reception room where it can do honour to itself by inviting the world".
But if the East is fraught with poverty, as he writes, this last part is difficult. I was in a reception room today where the new director pointed out that on the wall hung a calendar that was two years old; the shelves were not filled with appropriate decor; a cheap reproduction of a luminary hung on the wall of the stately building though grey and decayed. But though crumbling, one mustn't imitate others, but do the best with what one has, however modest.
So improvisation is what we do when we must. And yet it is through improvisation that we realise that sometimes we have more than we thought we did. This morning, I was looking at these photographs where objects were "picked out of the landscape" to bring our attention to them. A caption I would write is Tagore's question: "Is this after all the right kind of household god"? Adaptation says: it can be.

 Element.

恭喜發財!

I do not have, where I live, a tray of togetherness, I also do not have anyone to exchange lai see with. But I have plenty of memories of what it means to celebrate the new year - and this year, I have been thinking about how much reliance was made on the proper geomancer, who would mediate between a family and the larger forces of the universe.
Does living in Asia make one more respectful of appropriate mediators? The refreshing but difficult thing about the West is that there are more places for direct access - the encouragement to try something 'in one's own moccasins' - but this means more getting lost. What happened to the guide?
I have been thinking a lot about Fraenkel's description of his gentle but vertiginous realisation that not all texts are of equal value; as we learn, we ought first to learn through the critical apparatus of those whose intellectual capacity and hard work may shine the light on an aspect of a topic we might otherwise miss.
One of Maxwell's books opens with the Greek inscription: λαμπάδια ἔχοντες διαδώσουσιν ἀλλήλοις ἁμιλλώμενοι τοῖς ἵπποις, which has to do with passing the torch of life on from one generation to another. But this tradition has most definitely been broken in more than one place: last night, I fell down the rabbit hole of finding all the occurrences of "rupture" in postmodern thought, though I first came to it in something I was reading by Levi-Strauss.
One of Habermas' recent texts, something about the modern European citizen, advises that Asia ought to follow the Western path towards post-metaphysical thinking, wherein science dictates moral thinking, not metaphysics. And yet. Davenport has noticed that at the dawn of "progress", man became fascinated with pre-history: the most ancient fragments, the oldest frescoes. To my mind, it is as if the rush forwards is mediated by a profound turning back, like the jejeune adult disparaging the pre-verbal state of infancy but pretending to meditate on its existence.

"Progress is a complex, self-deluding idea. It must suppose that the history of man is from some primitive condition to a civilized one, and civilization at the time of the New World's discovery was already transforming itself into a definition which uncritically included all technology while assuming that spiritual concerns were settled long before," Davenport writes.
What this means to me is the need for a creative return to a paradox Ricoeur located: "how to become modern and to return to sources; how to receive an old, dormant civilization and take part in universal civilization". So, we return to the beginning of the post: the mediator: one that has respect for the past - because too many assumptions are made by people unqualified to understand the full meaning of certain world views - too quick to slap the label "primitive" on the precious gems of humanity.
Once upon a time, Vico wrote of the ages of mankind: the age of the gods, oracular, metaphorical; the age of heroes, of metonymy, synecdoche; the age of democracy and irony. He warned that to extend Cartesian lines to the social sphere was madness - and that if humanity did so, the age-cycle would begin again.
I sometimes toy with the idea that we have forgotten how to read the world. Like this morning, when I read about rock type. The author proposed: "Literature becomes a place to visit." It is this multi-sensory experiential level that we are missing as a whole in society, when we really see. Because to see is to have some idea - or feeling? noein? - of where the little piece of experience belongs in the bigger picture, to smell it, taste it, to connect it to other experiences or information.

Levi-Strauss writes in "The Structural Study of Myth" that we are not to comprehend merely sequentially, but also through harmony: through affinities. But these affinities become chaos if not guided by ideals - and we return to Plato's Republic, where he advises against poetry: most people do not know how to interpret it. The modern illustration would be: people watch films about lechery, consistently, and wonder why their relationships aren't working: bad behaviour creeps in: it seems ok to fight within the sacred walls of home, broken by unfaithful imagination.
And we return to the idea of the mediator, or the idea that one must be worthy of democracy - so many Victorians warned us about.
At the dawn of "freedom" - the French Revolution which first wooed the Romanticists, then had them recoiling in horror, Étienne de Senancour wrote: pouvoir sans savoir est fort dangereux. If we understood knowledge as a torch - which reminds me of the MET's Marathon Stone in honour of Pheidippides, for somehow, I think of the torch as long-distance calls for help or victory - if we understood knowledge as a torch, would we not be more careful that it not get extinguished? And, like Arnold proposes in Culture and Anarchy, always be mindful of elevating our best self. This is my Chinese New Year message.

Element. Image in background: Marie Claire Idées.