Everybody Goes to Them

The titular phrase is lifted from Trollope's The Way We Live Now, with its tales of illusory, new global empires, where a decadent world is infiltrated by a worse economy. What's the title got to do with that? Everybody goes to this pernicious economy. (NB. Spoilers ahead.)
As I was rereading the novel this time round, I was especially struck by the two main currents of where this new, empty world came up against classical references. These also make an interesting contrast against two "currencies" of the internet: "the use of abandoned shells" and the oldie-but-goodie "attention commons" (everyone goes to, ahem clicks on, them).
One assumes that no one wants an illusion covering over not-being-better-off. Before I analyse that deficit, I will present the classical retorts to it, as presented in The Way We Live Now.
The first and most obvious of classical references are the explicit comparisons Trollope makes between the head of the illusory empire, Melmotte, and ancient Rome. Not only did Melmotte's demise involve a toga, but the tragic role this garment was to play was presaged: when the most stable and traditional character of them all, Roger, says: "In Rome they were worshipping just such men as this Melmotte. Do you remember the man who sat upon the seats of the knights and scoured the Via Sacra with his toga, though he had been scourged from pillar to post for his villainies? I always think of that man when I hear Melmotte's name mentioned. Hoc, hoc tribuno militum!" (Citing Horace Epode 4.20: that man?! that man?! for officer!!)

The second is part of my favourite passage of the book, and which happens to include the above presage. It is an exchange between Roger and a Bishop, with the latter saying that from his pulpit-perspective, humanity is not degenerating and that Horace, who took such a view, privileged what he saw in front of him over the bigger picture. Roger argues that Horace lived during the decline of Rome, and the Bishop observes that Christ was soon to be born. Then, Roger censures the Romans and Melmotte (quoted above), and the Bishop asks if Roger is certain his accusations are well founded:

"I think I know that they are deserved."
"That is hardly doing to others as you would be done by. If the man is what you say, he will surely be found out at last, and the day of his punishment will come. Your friend in the ode probably had a bad time of it, in spite of his farms and his horses. The world perhaps is managed more justly than you think, Mr Carbury."
"My Lord, I believe you're a Radical at heart," said Roger, as he took his leave.

The Bishop's comment reminds me of Emerson's remark in "Gifts": "it is better to leave to others the office of punishing ... I can think of many parts I should prefer playing to that of the Furies".

But perhaps some readers are confused at my calling this second Trollope excerpt "classical" - here, I draw on the fact that ancient Rome and Greece contributed as much to the history of English literature as Christianity. Take this as you will. But you may also take it with the Emerson. So, returning to the main point, from "classicism" (as I define it), there is both a pessimistic view and a more optimistic one, and - spoiler alert - we find Roger, strangely, despite his 'principles', "happy" at the end of the novel, so the hardline against the mainstream ("everybody's doing it") is softened: the world is perhaps more just, after all, and the decadent, hollow economy can cede gems through decisions to change how we face things.
Speaking of 'hollow' in today's world, we might cite "abandoned shells", a phrase George W.S. Trow coined to describe how people turn to hollowed-out symbols of yesteryear as value symbols, because in the overload of information, markers are needed to select out "winners". The shells are hollow because the public has undermined the role played by editors. I read about it here.
This concept is related to "The tragedy of the Attention Commons", which brings us back to Trollope's ancient Roman portents. The phrase is taken from a Ribbon Farm article by Venkatesh Rao on a solution to this tragedy, "the web of intent". Here's a takeaway phrase that I am sure Roger and the Bishop would approve of: "Information work is still largely manual labor.  The Web of Intent is a roll-up-your-sleeves, grungy, grease-stained “fix-it” vision."
Does anyone want to fix the everyone's-doing-it empty shell? She asked, as she wrote her long-form post for her most-miniature corner of the internet.

Brush: Ewansim via DeviantArt; magazine in background Marie Claire Maison.

Beyond Myth?

Jean-François Champollion was the son of a bookseller, who by his teenage years knew Greek and Latin, and some Herbrew, Abraic, Syriac, Chaldean, Chinese, Persian, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Sanskrit. At 16, he presented a paper providing a clue to the Hieroglyphic script, based on his suggestion that Coptic was an ancient Egyptian language.
Literary critic Guy Davenport called Claude Lévi-Strauss "The Champollion of Table Manners" in an essay on the latter's The Origin of Table Manners. Davenport considers Lévi-Strauss, "the most dilligent interpreter of our time", "a reader of riddles and a rediscoverer of the primacy of human behaviour in our knowledge of the world". And the knowledge Davenport focuses on? "'It remains to be seen,' Lévi-Strauss writes at the end of this intricate study of primitive civility, 'whether man's victory over his powerlessness, when carried to a state out of all proportion to the objectives with which he was satisfied during the previous millennia of his history, will not lead back to unreason.' That is, have we moved irrevocably beyond the ethics encoded in archaic myths; and if so, where are we?"
Apparently, a similar point was also raised by Antonio Rosmini in Theodicy, of which I learned from Brandon's summary of a passage about how moral progress is not inevitable, particularly if new generations do not build on what has been learned from preceding ones. Lévi-Strauss' "out of all proportion" here means too much abstraction of concrete, particular expressions of virtue - if I may be permitted to rephrase a summary. If these expressions get lost, they have to be learned all over again, the hard way, by trial and error.
An example of particular messages that may be transmitted are those Davenport says may come to us through the power of myth: "how to marry, how to eat, how to be brave". He posits that when myth loses this power, "it becomes a narrative that does not know how to resolve itself. Everything, says the contemporary novel, comes to a bad end ... We are no wiser than man has ever been about our helplessness in nature. Our fate with love, death, despair, doubt, wealth ... is no different ... it is unanswerable to ask if we have remained human ... Our past is forgotten. We can forget it again."

Human existence is a riddle, which may be encoded in myth. To be beyond myth is to attempt to surpass the need to come to terms with humanity. Gadamer writes about this attempt at transcending conditionedness in Truth and Method, affirming that the focus on subjectivity is a distorting mirror and that history does not belong to us, we belong to it (278, there is no such thing as a point outside history from which the identity of a problem can be conceived). Also, the "overcoming of all prejudices ... will itself prove to be a prejudice." The way around this is to acknowledge one's own particularity, i.e., to know that one has a horizon: learning to look beyond what is close at hand by seeing it better, not by looking away from it (303-4). In a passage that I think beautifully explains the relevance of historical texts, he writes:

When our historical consciousness transposes itself into historical horizons, this does not entail passing into alien world unconnected in any way with our own; instead, they together constitute the one great horizon that moves from within and that, beyond the frontiers of the present, embraces the historical depths of our self-consciousness. ... Our own past and that other past toward which our historical consciousness is directed help to shape this moving horizon out of which human life always lives and which determines it as heritage and tradition.

The emphasis here being on collaboration, as man is always subject - to history. To discount or deny this subjectivity is actually to forget how to speak. To discount the story as Forster did is to deny the answers that are attempted in narrative (he called it primitive: "The more we look at the story, the less we shall find to admire ... Neanderthal man listened to stories…"). Gadamer writes, "It is not that the understanding is subsequently put into words; rather, the way understanding occurs ... is the coming-into-language of the thing itself." (370-1)
Stories and myths are this birth place, and there are myths that are as sophisticated as dialectics.

One anthology of stories on human comport that does not presume to rise above the conditions when it was written, that rather speaks to them, is Valerius Maximus' first century Memorable Deeds and Sayings, which I learned about most through Henry John Walker's introduction to his translation: "It is his very refusal to perform a historical critique of Roman ideals that makes Valerius Maxiimus such a valuable historical source for the worldview of the Romans." Indeed, Walker notes that Maximus does not claim to present an accurate description of the past (which Walker's footnotes reveal) but to provide moral guidance for their inner lives. Walker quotes Maximus' preface: "What person in his right mind would hope that he could record the course of Roman and foreign history, which has been treated by previous writers in an elegant style, and do so either with greater attention to detail or with more striking eloquence?"
We learn from Walker's footnotes that the liberties Maximus takes are quite amusing, for example, he calls Aristotle "thirsting for glory", allowing his "student" Theodectes to publish his work on rhetoric as his own, later revoking this honour - when really, Theodectes was his predecessor, and Aristotle had written a summary of his work, later referring to this summary. Perhaps this is an example of what Walker defines in the beginning as the Roman "fairness" in citing "foreigners" where they were great, yet at the same time, often portraying the same as being boastful, compulsive liars, and corruptly decadent. And as such, a portrait of the Roman world is achieved.
This may demonstrate Gadamer's point of the use of not looking away from - if not looking beyond.

This week I was musing over the number of guidebooks for behaviour that I know of from the ancient world (nb. dilettante that I am). Memorable Deeds and Sayings was one such guidebook, but another that I learned of from Lendering's AHM (which I'd like to plug) is second century Aulus Gellius' Attic Nights. It begins similarly to Maximus' work in its modest claims. In an entertaining passage on the titles of other books, he explains that his is "merely from the time and place of my winter's vigils; I thus fall as far short of all other writers in the dignity too even of my title, as I do in care and in elegance of style." He explains that his work is to furnish "a quick and easy short-cut" and "lead active and alert minds to a desire for independent learning ... or would save those who are already fully occupied with the other duties of life from an ignorance of words and things which is assuredly shameful and boorish."
Indeed, it was once boorish to be without knowledge of tradition.
But as I was typing all these things down, prepared to add to a list of books on behaviour works like the Enchiridion, it occurred to me that all of these books bear a stoic bent. Which may be just coincidence as this list is random and not reflective of a knowledge of the field - but does raise the question of who is concerned with "the riddles of mankind" and the objectives of his quondam ethics (for, ethics are often the part left unsaid in modern narrative: the unsaid being one of the features of modern prose).
What one derides as priggishness another calls the economy of action, according to which freedom, like the horizon around a person, comes with limits, e.g. the concessions a ruler must make to retain power - to return to the message that Champollion deciphered. Though it sounds like an old story, the only reason I can think of why we would find "less to admire" in it the more we look at it is if we were tired of the human experience and horizons; of having a place and speaking from it.

Book in background: Amy Butler's Midwest Modern; 

brush: fall foliage by Creature Comfrots.

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.

At the Cost of Sleeplessness

I think of Kierkegaard's sleepless man (in Fear and Trembling), the one who is hungering for answers yet is at least twice misled by the words of men who speak without knowing what they are talking about: sleeping comfortably, fearing to awaken the deep choices within man yet ridiculously proffering cheap editions of the edifying. This idea of the sleepless man ties into my recent reading of "The Ring of Gyges" (The Economy of Literature) by Marc Shell (via) addressing the value of philosophy and also responds to the sleeplessness one may suffer over the wish to learn that may be misunderstood by family.
According to Shell's reading of the myth of the ring of Gyges and of Plato, wage-earning is the tyrant's replacement for philosophy. The tyrant lacks the necessary intelligence to see the ἰδέη - though, as the perfect spy, as we shall see, he can try to kill it. According to Plato, the only currency should be wisdom and the goal of thought is to make the tyrant visible - remaining invisible through hiding himself so people think him better than he is and by making people always visible to him by spying on them (hence being the perfect spy).
When I think of the tyrant in Shell's essay, I consider both the mundanity of his behaviour (e.g. the vanity of worrying over how he is perceived and the mobbing of gossip) as well as the work done by him to cover up true meaning. This corresponds to one of Kierkegaard's thoughts in Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (ch. 10): "it lies close enough to us even though frivolity and sensuousness, worldly cleverness and godlessness wish to remain ignorant of it".

Shell also emphasizes the many references in Plato to men who divide the whole into parts like coin changers. The metaphor can be applied to what is happening today in academe. In an interview from last year, East Asian scholar Wm Theodore de Bary said: " You have a Global Core and what is, in effect, a distribution requirement that goes off in any direction you want. It doesn’t bring people together on 'core' issues. The only way I could suggest they do it is to take the courses we designed for the Core". Describing the whole being divided into parts as the poverty of moneylenders is a rich metaphor. But if we have learned anything here, we know that the desired currency is above the politics of the tyrant and the monetary greed of the sophist. That is not just a sentence but a reality for those who lose sleep over criticism that their pay does not match their credentials.
We may think of Kierkegaard's "most precious thing" (from Fear and Trembling) that again is not demonstrated by material value but the ethical responsibility and fear of a father: it is most precious precisely because of responsibility and fear. The precious is valuable only where it is metaphorically linked to morals and the agony of standing up for them. (Kierkegaard, in his retelling of the parable of Abraham, suggests that people should be given the option to turn back before making the sacrifice: he also stresses the difference between the hero and the poet, but I will save that for perhaps another time.)
The metaphor also translates into the gold of globalism that cultures "exchange" without necessarily understanding each other better. To quote Bary again, "global centers contribute to the undergraduate learning process. Students go out to commercial centers in the rest of the world, and all they get exposed to is commercialism. They’re not going to learn the culture of those countries—they’ll take what’s immediately available in the current culture. It’s just academic tourism, and it doesn’t add up to anything."
To go outside of the commercial center, one runs the risk of being criticised by family. To remain in said culture warrants even more criticism and sleeplessness - though one has a chance of reaching some kind of core, the core of a culture, the core of ἰδέη - because if there is one thing one is not, it is a tyrant. And while one may "commit to the Eternal" to deal with the pain, as Kierkegaard writes in Purity, "the wish continues to pain" for "in the wish, the wound is kept open, in order that the Eternal may heal." The questioning never ceases where the whole of life teaches but can one get used to it or does one turn back.

Book. Brush.

Wounded Beginning

To dress a wound is to watch the medicine trickle into where it is needed most. Like the course of water as it melts from snowy mount. I would like to think this is the model of goodness, maybe this is why it is said that grace may be found in abundance where the lapses are many. The homecoming celebration is derived from that empty space characterised by lack until reunion.
To apply dressing is to learn something of the patience of the organic body. What is done properly takes time and hours of vigil. Wounds are slow and point towards time.
To speak of health is to imply that there is a 'good' ideal that is maintained or sought. Yet there is much palliation passed off as healing. I remember discussing the film Good Will Hunting with a social worker who was really glad to see her profession so well portrayed and yet very disappointed by the ending: "That boy has years of work if he is to learn trust and love."
The slow road is never popular. And it is a fact that education does not always cater to this slow road. So many of the scholars of yesteryear did not hurry to become authorities (e.g. Auerbach) but today the rule is for students to gain higher degrees without the maturity of years and with little life experience. Also, some schoolchildren are rushed by the education system, coming into their thought only later. We call this: the price of social institutions and we consider school in terms of its averages more than individuals.
To be methodical does require case-by-case application: filling in the gaps either in an individual's knowledge or of the situation, which is not to say that this process is ever finished, given the course of time, organic growth, changing perspectives. We cannot occupy all perspectives at once.
Speaking of Auerbach, we may remember the humanities project of his age connected with the attempt to reconstruct the world of a text, through careful reading, erudition, intuition, and a variety of other skills in critical thinking and interpretation. It is a romantic concept, that we can ever walk in someone else's shoes. But some people feel addressed by texts, feel drawn into the conversation, like a poet who knows she is not brilliant at poetry but feels compelled to continue writing in verse. That said, there are ways by which a poet or an interpreter can be assessed: quality and range of language and thought, finesse.

'Right' or 'good' poetry, interpretation, etc, is the skill to highlight what might remain unaddressed by an audience, the ability to speak in complexity and yet convey a message that can be internalised by a public by having sympathetically spoken to what is relevant in a way that is fruitful. To write 'fruitful' today is problematic because not all marked 'fruit' is healthy. Perhaps I may speak of the sweetness that comes from work in the way that bread is broken down into sugar. Think of how hard it was for the Native Americans of yesteryear to make maple syrup. That sweet treat was therefore valued, and not guzzled mindlessly while reading (what a terrible habit to eat while doing anything; even talking may be problematic).
Ah, but not so fast, says the critic. The parenthesised observation is 'wrong' even in my own experience. There are jobs where one either eats while on the job or goes hungry, like if one works as a subeditor (there is a reason why such people exist: one's own writing needs far more time to be edited properly by one's self). So 'right' and 'wrong' are subject to change in particular situations. I therefore modify my desired standard to be 'better' and 'good' - the latter meaning not mean-spirited or deliberately harmful.
To speak of 'better' instead of 'good' is to speak in human terms. Just as to speak of a beginning that starts with a word is to speak from our perspective. Better stories are those that, on their being told, already bear fruit for re-tellings. In my opinion, better stories also combine the Horatian recipe of the delightful with the necessary, for the solely saccharine story does not leave one with necessary tools: even the sweet theme of love presents problems in practice. Maybe all good ideas actually get translated down into practice, but how could one store those good, healthy ideas if one did not create the treasure attic called abstraction, where many a thinker is wont to get lost, forgetting that ideas lose their worth when not exercised.
There is a greed even of ideas, storing more than can be used at any given time.
Therefore I take for my model here the wound, pulling into itself the dressing it needs, taking its time to heal, and in this slower way, leaving no scar but health as the trace of its existence.

Brush. Magazine.

Le Motif des Mimosas

Of all the various types selling mimosas in the market, the grandad with the single tooth sold those that looked most cared for. When I greeted him and asked what was new, he replied, nothing special, I'm just fixing up these bouquets... Each was displayed in a half-mirrored, half-translucent wrapping, bound with a purple ribbon. I sometimes wonder whether, through all time he puts into his flowers, his bouquets carry a metaphysical message, like with these, the mirror of the μιμος in its common name. I asked for one, and the grandpa earnestly held one after another up until he said, This one. The most yellow of them all. I thanked him for that solar gesture. It had been just such a crummy week, and in that exchange I vowed to try to catch on to whatever rays I might ken.
I thought of the cab driver who would buy a pile of  books with his food money, saying, "If you've only got enough money for two loaves of bread, buy a loaf of bread and a bouquet of lavender." This seems the correct economy. That no matter how short-changed a person might feel, like the imaginary descendent in Helps' Companions, suffering for not coming from a pushy family, or misunderstood, like a sentient but too sensitive friend of mine, there is to be some slack left over to wind around for there to be another row of words, another bloom or inflorescence and some tension to push towards learning.
I extract from these experiences, these summations, some threads: the weft of compassion, which shuttles past the holes in logic for the greater good of drawing in, and the warp of comprehension where these sturdy lines are capable of understanding outside the self, in the self-silent reception of listening, with intellect strained to receive the message. Except according to an old warning, pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli, not everyone is up to the task of comprehension, though it is taught in school, through reading, and any book or person not forceful enough to deliver the message on their own may need a friend to "do or say for him what he never can do or say so well, or even at all, for himself". Which is a lovely sentiment, but Helps continues, "Phoenixes and friends are creatures of the least prolific nature".
Friends, who might mediate for us, may be where we might never imagine, like the mimosa of winter, or flower-picking chthonian goddess.* The delicate (unhardened) eye has a chance to perceive them. Where people reject others for trifling, superficial reasons, like literary inclinations or lack thereof, those superficial differences may actually hide a weft of similarity to the more discerning. What is shared may be impartiality and love of truth, which can also mean a willingness to admit the darker side of any picture. A rather effective film about friends who pose as such vs. equity in its essence is Citizen Ruth. The friend is one who comes later. In fact, that friend demonstrates the superiority of the weft of compassion: to love unconditionally or to make a similar gesture is to transcend comprehension in its little details.

But the details do exist, in prolific palaver not so generous except in lessons for the one who tries both to feel and understand (many are the faults in weaving). Archbishop Whatley - appendixing himself onto Bacon through his commentary, identifies two kinds of speakers: those who speak because they want to, and those who speak because they have something to say: the latter, speaking "from fullness of the matter, and thinking only of the matter, and not themselves and the opinion that will be formed of them": speaking simply and in earnest. Whatley was responding to Bacon's essay in which he writes: "Some in their discourse desire rather commendation of wit, in being able to hold all arguments, than of judgement, in discerning what is true; as if it were a praise to know what might be said, and not what should be thought." Just as friends and phoenixes are few, so are those who engage in the process of the search for truth (i.e. the problem of equity and listening). Pro captu lectoris habent sua fata libelli. I think this article does all of that well.
This plant, enrich'd with sense and life, Pleases the widow, and the wife; With its Articulations, James Perry writes of the mimosa. It is an art form to conduct a good conversation, as Bacon demonstrates, requiring the right balance of quotation, talking, listening, asking questions, appropriate jokes, and so on. It is an art form to deal with other human beings in the best way possible.
For to turn the comprehension mirror towards the self, one sees where one may unsettle others by not having internalised the vocabulary they are comfortable with. For example, to choose to support one's point by citing a word's etymology (or loose verbal connections) is considered sloppy thinking by some who pride science over the purpose of the figure of speech, concluding that as the roots of words are haphazard, they may never bear good fruit. This is illustrated by the Latin word, busilis, and phrase, lucus a non lucendo. To use such illustrations may cause some to take offense, as if their reason had not been heard.
Of course, confusion arises in the grey areas between comprehension and analysis, a whole other warp and weft. Suffice it to say, to comprehend meaning despite taste is to allow in the message.
Like letting the sun in, it changes even the familiar ever so slightly. It can be hard sometimes, if one feels beaten down or powerless alone to leave some slack so the weft of domestic thread can wrap around for another row of words or to embroider one more inflorescence, tracing the warped articulation of those simple market flowers, so vital.

Brush. Book.

* There are three, sometimes conflated: Potnia, Persephone (Kore), and Despoina. 
Kore may have presided over the labyrinth, which is interesting to consider; 
also, Despoina means 'mistress of the house'.
Perhaps one of these goddesses is depicted here?

Still I Had to Make a Start

The title is from a series of essays written by Rabindranath Tagore, who I consulted today because I was wondering about how to balance ideals with the practical realities that face one. I was also reading the latest post on The Edithorial about how her take on 'Stoic Week' was attacked; one wonders again at how social media is so anti-dialogue. But just as one is about to lose hope in our age, one realises that at the end of Edith Hall's post is a link to her own Classics and Class project - the dialogue continues, and online. To be a strong thinker is to admit all that is stacked against one, but to make one's start.
An interesting point that Edith raises is that, if I understood correctly, it is not enough to revivify certain Stoic principles, i.e., the overall principles of one school of thought (vs. the various details when we compare the many texts of said school), because one single school necessarily delimits its view of man. I suppose this is true and marks the great attraction in Hadot's introductory books to ancient philosophy, because while he shows the differences in the schools, he also shows what they shared in common: silent contemplation; 'spiritual' mottoes (so different from the skin-deep tattooed spiritualism of today); παιδεία; apprenticeship for death; casting off the Glaucosian mud, seaweed, shells: freeing ourselves from unnecessary desire; a λόγος system, dialogue...
Hadot writes, "We have tried to reply to those who, like Friedmann, ask themselves the question: how is it possible to practice spiritual exercises in the twentieth century? We have tried to do so by recalling the existence of a highly rich and varied Western tradition. There can be no question, of course, of mechanically imitating stereotyped schemas. After all, did not Socrates and Plato urge their disciples to find the solutions they needed by themselves?" He writes we cannot afford to ignore the lessons of the past; to illustrate, Stoicism and Epicureanism may be taken to correspond to antipodes of our inner life: "tension and relaxation, duty and serenity, moral conscience and the joy of existence."
Today's philosopher is the antipode to yesterday's slave owner. So over to Tagore, wishing to 'solve' the state of the villages: "Their mental life is no longer enlivened with music and ballads and tales." I'd add, most village life is now poisoned with inverse-reality shows of argument and bestiality - many of which feature villagers departing for the ersatz fairyland of fame. The "plain and simple fare of tradition" - which if I might add do contain a dose of the beast, sometimes decontextualized and misunderstood by the father of world lit, Goethe - "constitute those organic elements with which to enrich [the villager's] mind and heart. Without them life ceases to be worth living. The sad anomaly is that our cities hardly make for social contacts in the real sense ... The rural people cannot catch our sight [of what college students depending on European scholarship to tell them about their own villages say] because we regard them as ... small people."

I have now found two visions - both written by East/West scholars of international repute - for retaining the culture and livelihood of villages that involve education and improved agriculture. Neither of these visions was ever allowed to see the light of day. One wonders how the values shifted so suddenly. Yesterday I picked up Adler's Speedboat, which I take to be a book written by what happens to a sensitive soul thrown into a culture where mores were thrown into a Bakhtinian centrifuge, one imagines just such a washing machine. One ends up with an account that is at once honest, revealing, and a little scary.
She reminds us of a time when "personalities" circled, who indeed did have personalities, as compared with today's socialites whose only talent is the Boorstinian ability to be famous for being famous. She describes (pp.81-3) how education changed in an account that made me want to both laugh and cry (departments fighting over who gets which author, blaming open admissions for any failures, inventing projects to keep enrollment high, but projects that sound rather...). As for crime: now, "the jig was never up."
In that section of the book, she shows how language began to change and fail. "'Agony' could mean anything - usually, pending indictment; physical agony in hospitals, was called discomfort ... 'Serene' and 'out of touch with reality' meant a given speaker trying to clear himself by intimating that the boss was crazy."
To make a start today I think we would need to reclaim λόγος and foster trust - as Tagore did with the villagers "to win the friendship and affection of the villagers and cultivators by taking real interest in all that concerns their live and welfare and by making a lively effort to assist them in solving their most pressing problems." Except that we see that words are tied to an "economic moment". Imagine it were a play. Resolution would come from economy for the home and not all the televised shouting among people wearing trendy clothes, manufactured, actually, by new slave labour.
To train people and enable them to return home to work in villages, to reduce the "pull of the city" which was a term we learned about in geography all those decades ago. That may sound classist, but I mean it in the sense that teaching experience shows that not everyone wants to think about society, most want to think just of their own lives. Look at how crowded the city is, people forget to be respectful and just push like the animals of beef. Yes, this is an ageless concern, but no, that is not an argument to abandon the attempt. How is it possible to be a man in the twenty-first century? I'm supposed to add woman, but to my mind, that would take away from our shared responsibility.

Brush.

Master of the House

This morning, what with the sunny hush that has descended upon this little city, with but a few car sounds reminding me of onwards, elsewhere, I decided to make a commitment to beginning this blog post honestly. Or maybe I am inspired to honesty because I saw the film My Dinner with Andre this weekend, and was struck by the part where Andre describes Grotowski giving up theatre because everyone was already performing so well in their own lives, already looking so much the stereotypical part. It may be a public service to reveal where the clay has cracked.
In the past few days, questions of livelihood and even righteous indignation seem to have found my address and have attempted to bang on my door. But to be truly hospitable is to sometimes offer such comers a big slice of silence. I do not want to let them in!
And we all know that in times of difficulty, it is best to keep one's mouth shut, as even well-wishers are tempted to dole out that sickly-sweet treacle of, everything will turn out fine - which, by the way, I believe is true, it's just that I think that particular message is a deeply personal one.
And while I began, at least in the second paragraph, with an admission, claiming to be honest, my admission is one that I do not take to heart, because experience teaches that obnoxious guests are but phantoms - from the φαντάζω family. Like ten days ago, the dentured, silver-permed woman who cleans my building couldn't help herself from squawking about how her account was overdrawn and how she needed an advance payment. This week, she announced her family was off to holiday. How much, I thought, her roller-coaster resembled my own, when I had been undecided.
But one year, I decided not to worry for a year: the question is, and is always, do we want to roll about in our misery? Or do we prefer to stand up, like a 'man?
Difficulty, never at peace, whirls around and seeks out one's address (and who knows the insidious ways in which it is procured) and huffs and puffs like in a child's tale. Tales inhabited by creatures as well as people, because, for example, to be too dogged is to be the dog.

After I watched Dinner with Andre, I wandered through other youtube links to find Q&A sessions with a yogi who I have not read up on. One video was entitled, "Why Do Desires Go Unfulfilled After Working So Hard?" One illustration the yogi gave in his answer was of a man who fell into a septic tank. Up to his shoulders in filth, he began to cry for help, but everyone said, oh, it's that fool again. So, he cried out, "Fire, fire!" but when the fire crew came, they saw there was no fire and asked indignantly who had called them. "Lower your ladder," the filthy man cried, so they did, and when they reprimanded him for calling them when there was no fire, he replied, "But if I hadn't, you wouldn't have come, to help me out," a message the yogi said demonstrated knowing the right thing to do.
But I think that sometimes the right thing to do is accepting, acceptance of oneself, and also not expecting a tit-for-tat relationship with the universe. Meaning that if one works so hard, one isn't to expect immediately visible results. In other words, I think that the question of that lecture is problematic.
This post contains a paradox. Of the attempt toward honesty, and an attempt to speak, but of the admission that silence is sometimes the best medicine. By silence, I also mean, just letting things be, letting the tension of the unresolved play its strange song. The uninvited guests will eventually leave when they see they are not being entertained: when they see they cannot entertain themselves by provoking their host.

Brush. Magazine.

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.

Health vs. Casino

Yesterday evening, I entered a casino for the first time. What struck me was the abundance of carpeting and the curious hush surrounding the tables. I have never heard that kind of silence before. But I was only there to visit its restaurant, where I sat marvelling at how much of life may remain unseen.
This became associated in my mind to what someone said later on: that the subconscious has a funny way of sneaking up on people: the stress of looking the other way in hardship can affect the organs, the lungs. Things imbalanced, disparate.
In the single body, the circulation may be interrupted: hunching over interesting work; holding breath in the face of being misunderstood - the system becomes damaged, and if it is not fixed, it becomes increasingly lopsided. In the Chinese way of things, diet, treatment, and exercise may help one regain harmony. I cannot look at such practices "askance" so it is always curious to me when people view "folk" remedies as backwards.
I tried to write earlier this week about a colleague who was frustrated by the folk medicinal advice she's been proffered here. She took offense to it, thinking it hogwash tossed out by modern science. But what of the psychological component in healing, let alone intention.
Thence, συμπάθεια: Plotinus writes of the theurgical practice of attempting to bring everything in the universe into sympathy, and to bring man in sympathy with the various forces. But is this not a universal concept - how else would one define the Navajo sandpaintings, where order is restored through signing problematic forces, and balancing them out with benevolent ideas.
There is a fantastic post about 'weird remedies and the problem of folklore', in which the author recognises the "range of choices for the early modern sufferer" (my emphasis). Other interesting work questions whether it is correct to discard sympathy as occult. 

And yet, the casino, home of l'hasard, thrives. I've already written how Zolla considered the modern man like a gambler. The gambler has a touchy relationship with the environment: there is no trust, just the tic of opportunism.
As sympathy gave way to the science that I do not mean to sound unthankful for, Darwin (E.) wrote: sun sink on suns, and systems crush... Chaos mingle all; Pope, wrote: See Mystery to Mathematics fly! In vain! They gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die ... In vain... The sable throne behold ... of Chaos old!" and then Yeats: The falcon cannot hear the falconner; things fall apart, the centre cannot hold. Chaos is where things do not have their place; sympathy is an earnest housekeeper.
A good housekeeper (manager of the home; i.e. oikos+nomos - and also not a gambler, because the livelihood depends on stewardship, not stakes) has respect for things. Not like the disdainful critic who mocks yesteryear: one wonders how such people can stand who they themselves were before they became more learned.
So when it comes to science, do we view our knowledge today as perfection set in stone, or something in progress? The Byzantine notions of akrivia and economia (i.e. variance; exactness) show that even where there are laws (i.e. nomos), they are not necessarily regarded as a fist of iron: economia allows for concessions to be made, for ultimate good.
Even a law may be malleable. We may wish to remember the incipit of Nature magazine bore Goethe's aphorisms along with Huxley's musings of the day when the discoveries of his age would seem laughable.
If we do not have sympathy for our own shortcomings, our derision is predictable, if not healthy. To cut off the primitive leg of yesteryear is to be haunted by the phantom itch - if even only in the economy of the subconscious.

Element. Magazine in background.

Scholarship is a Lifestyle

Here, I paraphrase C.W. Mills, in "On Intellectual Craftsmanship": "Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career." That essay reminds me a lot of a social worker I once knew whose only view on Freud's relevance was that studying him was mandatory in college - her life experience with people needing help, and incredibly broad reading, brought her the wisdom she felt was more rewarding for all parties. Mills ends his essay writing: "Do not allow public issues as they are officially formulated, or the troubles as they are privately felt, to determine the problems that you take up for study. Above all, do not give up your moral and political economy".
The essay is music to my ears, because I so often feel alone. Yesterday, for these reasons, I was also returning to Trilling's The Liberal Imagination. I thought to myself, reading this is like therapy - wherein the therapy is discovering that some of one's own concerns were relevant to others, too.
Henry James' view that life is so much the worse if there are no examples of artists concerned over their art; integrity in art: "there's a rudimentary intellectual honour to which we must, in the interest of civilization, at least pretend". This is met by Hicks': "But this is the purest romanticism, this writing about what ought to be rather than what is!" Scruples are outmoded.
In a footnote, we read that where religion remains, it is contorted and thus deprived of its possibility to act. "Religion nowadays has the appearance of what the ideal modern house has been called, 'a machine for living,' and seemingly one makes up one's mind to acquire and use it not with spiritual struggle but only with a growing sense of its practicability and convenience."
All these decades later, Trilling's critique remains relevant - except that we have moved so far down that road of "machines for living" that mere mention of morals is drowned out by the buzz of electric current. I feel so alone in this landscape, and as foolish as a character in the James/Hicks disagreement: there is no middle ground, there. The middle ground is where ideas can be carried over. Without it, there is only war, the enemy camp, and war is so unbecoming.
"But it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always too late for understanding, never to late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naive moralizing."
These problems may be offset by a responsible, thinking class - living scholarship. But look at what Mills wrote over half a century ago: "The academic ... is trying to carry on a serious intellectual life in a social context that often seems quite set against it. His or her prestige must make up for many of the dominant values sacrificed by choosing an academic career." Today, it would be easiest to play the scholar on one's own payroll. But what if one does not have such luxury?

Brush. Photo in background: Marie Claire Idées.

If it were a line, I would be a stickman

Often, when I write the word stick, I think of Stig of the Dump, I suppose because Stig and Barney used to go looking for sticks of firewood. We had to read Stig in primary school - and from today's vantage point, I marvel at the remanents of the '60's that infiltrated our school system: we sang Yellow Submarine as we sat in a circle, clapping our hands... And Stig - his den is made of discarded rubbish: what a social message! Just like the other song we sang: "Have you seen the old man, in the closed down market, kicking up the papers with his worn out shoes? In his eyes you see no pride, hands held loosely by his side, yesterday's papers telling yesterday's news. So how can you tell me you're lonely, say for you that the sun don't shine? Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London, I'll show you something to make you change your mind."
When I summon the social flux in those songs and stories, I find it a sharp contrast to the Cartesian 'clear and distinct' rationality, influencing Adam Smith's progressive visions which became the European economic system. As if life could be ruled by lines... Wasn't that part of the theme in Flatland?
Giambattista Vico in De Italorum Spaientia writes that to introduce geometrical method into practical life is like trying to go mad with the rules of reason, attempting to proceed by a straight line among the tortuosities of life, as though human affairs were not ruled by capriciousness, temerity, opportunity and chance.
And while we know that there are algorithms that attempt to accommodate chance, to cut the straight line out of the Platonic "Ideal" and attempt to draw it into life on earth is yet another messianic movement - of the kind that make and or break empires.
But the weight of the line is a didactic element, comfort is not an ideal, and to vilify that which causes us discomfort is like giving up on the race, half-way. It is not enough to recognise the problem. We are asked to make something of them. And if the economy, with its linear algorithms that attempt to reduce chance to a number, is in fact a fiction, we are reminded that even the line is a story, and that it is our job to illuminate the possibilities, rather than designate its actual limitations - like Randall wrote of the Romantic movement.
"Romantic idealists like Ficthe make no claim to the possession of literal truth: Kant had banished for them that illusion. What they proclaim is rather a faith, a faith that will give meaning to life. It is the claim of the idealists that science is not the literal truth either, that all renderings of experience are symbolic interpretations, that all discourse and all knowledge is a metaphor."
How much changes if, for example, we view what we have not literally, but as a gift. If we viewed even the 'difficult day' as a gift. Would we not be motivated to give back? So Barney plays with Stig, whose entire home is made from that which has been (temporarily?) tossed aside.

Clouds.

Making Home

Economy should mean the upkeep of the household - οἰκονομία, household management. This is why I was quite intrigued by a post on Apartment Therapy by a certain DianneS.: "I'm interested in the angle of homemaking as an act of rebellion ...The quiet rebellion ... was the act of individuals who chose their own experience and histories over the government's insistence that there nothing of value existed before the Revolution. 

"So how does the concept of rebellious homemaking play now in this era, scattered as we are among so many disparate but joined cultures? ... I think homemaking is practically perfect as a statement for modern rebellion against a whole host of imposed constraints."

Many times I think about how if there is no one to "make" the home, the places where we live are but abodes - not homes. I would be intrigued by such things, having lived in over twenty places on several continents in under four decades. 

          The things that can never come back, are several -

          Childhood - some forms of Hope - the Dead -

          Though Joys - like Men - may sometimes make a Journey -

          And still abide...

This is a fragment of an Emily Dickinson poem, written on the back of a coconut cake recipe. Our recluse Dickinson sent food to her neighbours - and like Rapunzel, let down, not her hair, but basketfulls of bounty. 

Such are the gestures of the home, at least in my mind, but then, I do tend to abstractions and daydreams more than is my due. This evening, I found a recipe for Emily Dickinson's Coconut Cake, and made it with the following ingredients (adapted from the recipe at the link): 1 cup whole grain flour; 1 cup white flour; 1.5 tsp baking powder; 1 cup brown sugar; a bit of vanilla sugar; 0.25 cup butter, 0.25 cup virgin coconut oil; 2 eggs; a tad over 0.5 cup milk; 1 cup coconut "flour" with enough fruit tea to make it moist. What a success.

I was thrilled by allowing my ingredient constraints and tastes to alter a recipe once used by an author who kept me company when I was a child. I felt that in some small way, I was entering history in a way I doubt my writing ever will. Cooking is an act - so much more literal, direct than writing... For, to my mind, the whole point of writing was to make a home for myself where circumstantial constraints disallowed one.

We can make a journey and still abide, but to my imagination, the home is far superior. Yet since I have never really had one, this is but conjecture. 

Watercolour dots. Bread suspended over image from Marie Claire Idees.

Meaningful, Not Just Useful: Part Two

This is the second post in a series of three (part one; part three).
The phrase comes from Julia Kristeva, who has written so many different kinds of texts with varying focuses and messages. She has argued against "the reign of appearance, pretence" of the freedom that emerged out of the 18th century, as opposed to the "mystical", "sensual" and "superessential". Such are the themes floating beneath the surface of Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre: after the climax, comes disillusionment.
Ironically, free subjectivity is threatened by a weaker freedom: rational and individualistic, and ultimately replaced with productivity, sinking the afflicted, "sometimes to the point of suicide, in the overabundance of affects that the refusal or impossibility of verbal communication keeps from other forms of elaboration..."
I was thinking about these things as I finished Chesterton's Cobbett last night: "He could no longer hope, as it had once as it had once seemed so natural to do, that the spontaneous and colloquial language that sprang so easily to his own lips would commend itself as easily to people in his own land; that there he ... would talk without an interpreter." Chesterton describes Cobbett facing "enormous questions as elementary as nursery riddles" - among which we imagine the problems described earlier in the book: busy machines alongside idle men, industrial wealth as waste, and so on.
Over and over again, I find the results of technology (a productivity) foreseen by Heidegger, what is more, Chesterton, too, was picking up on the theme of whether such advancement makes the man mute - or unheard. Kristeva's "impossibility of verbal communication". By communication, I mean the heartfelt type described so eloquently by Chesterton that is often sneered at in popular culture today as naivete.
I probably wouldn't have addressed this theme here, were it not also on Seinfeld's latest Comedians in Cars episode. Seinfeld and Quinn, in a clip perhaps decontextualised, laugh at how thousands of jobs along they waterfront are being "cleaned up" to introduce scenic jogging lanes. There are some prize-winning scenes of an ugly irony of modern displacement of the type described in Chesterton's Cobbett. Like the blood sausage bit (one of the spare parts). Nothing of what I write here are spoilers, because the delivery is priceless. But the crown on the cake comes at the end, when Quinn decides the philosophical conundrum of the day is whether it is better to be held at knife point or part of a soul crushing disneyfication.
The Seinfeld sketch began by commending Quinn and Joyner on their proficiency in the "art of hanging out". Isn't that representative of what we are sometimes missing? The relaxed state we might imagine was part of the cottage economy, when people worked from home, and where, in many cultures, they would work together, talking or singing - telling stories? "The rustic does not rely merely on the [stories] but on the tradition--that is, the truthfulness of a certain sort of people, many of whom he has known." Free subjectivity. Relaxed productivity.

Tape.

why to go to market

You know those days, when one wakes up in Erik Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1... The best thing to do is go out, to market. The moment I entered into the bustling core, past the wall of kiosk-like shops that give the impression that there is no market through the narrow way between some of them, I was accosted by too much colour: so much is in season, and for a moment, I felt overwhelmed. But, no. That is just the first impression, and first impressions are so often beguiling.
The man who comes from the same region as some of my distant ancestors waved out to me, with a huge smile, just to say hello. Further down, more generous smiles and granny farmers stuff extra carrots into my bag. I have grey hairs, but they still insist on this ritual, saying: "So you'll grow!" Who could remain impervious to such gestures?
And then, I almost bumped into a vendor and her future-priest son, at their stall.
- How are you?
- Not waving the white flag, yet!
- Ahahaha, that's so funny, that's always what I say when people ask how I am.
- Now I remember, little Goodie, that's what we called you when you came, because all you knew how to say was: "Good, good!"
- It's easy to be good if we're surrounded by good people.
- So, you're still singing the same tune!
- Why not? It's best to stick to that word, and say everything's good, and not go too much into detail, because we all know what lies beneath the surface!
- Oh, so you've reached rock bottom since we last met - I can see because you've developed a sense of humour!
Yes, it is precious interchanges like this that leave everyone feeling so much happier than they were before such dialogue.

And anyway, I was thinking about communication this morning - what it's all about, and etc. I'd read this really interesting book review over at Lapham's Quarterly, about an author who posits that it's wrong to interpret Babel as having been the source of one, original language, from which all others stem. The author explains that, before the demise, there was not one language, but many languages - and the unity was in the idea to talk to people who spoke other languages, because in such a way, one might actually learn something.
Toni Morison similarly interprets the Babel story in her Nobel Lecture, and also stresses that truth can only ever lie in diversity, not in some kind of dogmatic master narrative.
I have never understood why people would take the story of Babel literally. Why monolithic language, and not the unifying spirit of compassionate creativity? Going to market both before I knew the language and now that I know the language, I've been able to notice that the key to communication is the idea behind the words, not the words themselves. The language is accidental: what matters is whether one is communicating out of kindness or trickery, etc.
The unity before the destruction of Babel was surely the good will among men that flourishes when their priorities are straight. Good will does not judge, but seeks to exchange in order to build that which is beautiful.
It seems to me that through our imperfection, we block ourselves off from this, intentionally and unintentionally, and so the love gets fractured. One can be conflicted in so many ways, and yet be "good" in an essential way: and thus carry a tiny piece of the unifying Logos. This is why one oughtn't dismiss one's attackers: they may hold the missing piece to our puzzle.
I go to market to be reminded, on a most basic level, about the elements of communication: desire and trade. The give and take in life. The economy of life. We all know how closely linked economy is with the household: οἰκονομία - οἶκος. The truth of the interactions of trade is very basic. But - as with Babel - we can depart from this simplicity and make it all very complicated, indeed, as with the trade of but theoretical numbers.
It is the meek who inherit the earth. You can find them at the market, and they can tell you that beyond all our deep thoughts about humanity, humour saves us from ourselves.

Elements: sequins, everything else.

awe and progress

Over at Laudator Temporis Acti, a recent post declared: "For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy." Wonder - as a point of departure. Wonder, not pride. Wonder, not fantasy.
Ruskin writes: "The pride of physical science is indeed adverse, like every other pride, both to religion and truth; but the sincerity of science, so far from being hostile, is the path-maker among the mountains for the feet of those who publish peace." It is an interesting lens to measure by. How much wonder is contained within a given work?
Awe has been lost in the modern, jaded age, so chuffed to ponder the perverse. Ruskin writes that his age "seemed to love what was ugly" - which figures in, insidiously, to the Baudelaire-Burgess legacy. Surely wonder can't be held in the same breath as Conrad's oh, the horror!
Many, many thinkers blame the secularization of culture for this shift. By secularization, they also mean "consistent methodological principles," professionalization, rationalization and a shift in political economy that moved away from the household.
But while there are some wonderfully creative conversations about the economy - like those of Amartya Sen, I wonder about trying to promote a discussion of awe. One of my favourite such passages is by St. John Chrysostom: "We admire many things; the beauty of a portico, of paintings, of a youthful body. We also admire the vastness of the Ocean; fear will be added to this admiration if we perceive the abyss of the depth of the sea, and it is this fear-admiration which the Psalmist experiences in contemplating the vast and immense Ocean of God's wisdom." Gervase Mathew, in Byzantine Aesthetics, adds, "This is perhaps reminiscent of Longinus on the Sublime, 'that echo that leads to ecstasy'."

And to echo back to a more material concern, one of my college science professors would often bemoan the fact that starvation persists despite there being enough food and transportation to feed everyone. Ruskin wrote the same: claiming that later generations would hate his age despite all of the industrial advances, as it had not solved the problem of famine.
During childhood, mother would often list the number of countries the food on the table had come from (I grew up in a non-agricultural Asian metropolis, what can I say) - and this added a sense of awe to our thanksgiving. What about bringing awe back? And isn't it being brought back? People are traveling out to farms to see all the hard work that is done to grow the food we sometimes take for granted. There is a growing awe for the craftsman, often filmed in short videos, sent around the web.
Couldn't awe also heal our economy? We know οἰκονομία, or oikonomia, means "household, management" - well then, if we infuse awe into all that we partake of each day, wouldn't we "publish peace"?
That said, there is a great difference between the hope in progress that emerged in Victorian society, and the Aristotelian view of the same. In Aristotle's account of an ideal society, which he described by using literary tools he was critical of, he was trying to point out a way forwards while warning us not to take the ideal literally. I wrote about where I got that idea here.
The only time we can jump into the ideal is when we feel that awe that makes us humble, and hear "that echo that leads back to ecstasy" - a voice that is not our own. They are but moments, due to our imperfection - but they bolster us to try to prolong them within ourselves.

 Elements: needlework - minitoko; hand figure - graphics fairy.

the right words

The other day, I was looking at my bookshelf, and noting that some of the books I bought just after writing my MA have been languishing on my shelves. Their content did not bring to me what I thought they would, given their titles and authors' credentials. What had I been looking for? Some kind of answer about journey and cultural identity; something about the lived aspect of ideas.
Ultimately, I found the answers in other books, which I found serendipitously. One, for instance, caught my eye on the French Cultural Library's bookshelf, and I thought, "this looks unrelated, but I want to read it anyway," - and thus found just what I'd been looking for.
What I learned by looking at the titles on my shelves is that my concerns have remained the same through time, but that I reach and work out some of the answers in unexpected, illogical, ways.
I was also thinking about this idea yesterday, when I listened to a radio programme about John Ruskin. It is no secret that I have taken his pen name - though I wish to give it a new meaning.
Ruskin was a very complex character. I am sure that you know about his Wordsworthian writings on cottages, praising those that were "sympathetic" to their surroundings, respecting local materials. But did you know that his writings on political economy inspired Gandhi and Tolstoy? He made grandiose statements such as: "That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings; that man is richest who, having perfected the function of his life to the utmost, has always the widest helpful influence." Yet, he had a conflicted personal life, and this is a topic I am not qualified to breach.

Some words, some teaching is so easy to follow. Instead of having to borrow one idea here and there, like selecting chocolates from a box assortment, one can admire the coherence of a life well lived or clear ideals. But to achieve such craftsmanship takes time.
So does the development of larger ideas. Let us take the name of this blog, for instance. The meaning is not explicit. It is related to the Tao passage, to the concept of ex nihilo, and to Rumi's "every craftsman/ searches for what's not there/ to practice his craft." The meaning isn't clear at first glance, but that does not mean it can't be elucidated. Like the books on my shelves show me: I have been working on the same questions without always realising it, so I must press on, and trust in loving time.
What I learn from Rumi is that the repetitious questions are the threads that we bring back into the loom for the next row. "Workers rush toward some hint of emptiness, which they then start to fill. Their hope, though, is for emptiness, so don't think you must avoid it. It contains what you need! Dear soul, if you were not friends with the vast nothing inside, why would you always be casting your net into it, and waiting so patiently? This invisible ocean has given you such abundance, but still you call it 'death'."
It is up to us to know that there will be an end to all the weaving, and to try to make it beautiful. Work is not only about beginnings. Maybe some people are easier to learn from because they work towards a fixed end. Their ideals were never taken literally, but were the shining stars that guided them through the night. The journey is not about perfection, but about having forgiving ideals. Forgiving enough to stand the test of time and culture.
My internet pen pal used to write that it is arrogance to expect oneself to act perfectly. That people often judge themselves, or try to control that which is not theirs to control. These are all examples of pride. Imposing what one thinks. "Forget others and their judgements - they are not about you," someone once wrote to me. "Forget judgements about yourself. Every time you accept a judgement, you are feeding yourself emotional poison, which makes it harder to see the love."
How coherent we are is not for us to judge; all we are asked to do is to make that golden effort, and hold the intent of love in our hearts. How coherent is humility!
April is poetry month, so I will be trying to end each post with a poem. This is another by Dickinson; XXII:

I had no time to hate, because
The grave would hinder me,
And life was not so ample I
Could finish enmity.

Nor had I time to love; but since
Some industry must be,
The little toil of love, I thought,
Was large enough for me.

Elements: needlework; rose brush; newspaper.