What Is A Literary Polis

One of the problems I encountered this year was dealing with the assumption that literacy has been gained if one can comprehend written sentences and use the google search engine. The basis of this assumption lacks self-criticism to the degree that it is considered acceptable to "hate lists" (of the kind that are best internalised if there is to be literacy of genres, further reach of perspective) and demonstrate impatience at being indicated any idea that is not to personal taste. This assumption is not to blame if it has grown unobstructed through university education, and has a degree behind it, supporting, in this way, its existence: ironically, on paper.
But are we literate if we can read a passage and use google? Or are there different levels of literacy - to thus instill in the former assumption a degree of humility?
To follow an Aristotelian line, as put forward rather succinctly by Edith Hall in Aeon, one is to practice clearly and precisely systematic communication of the rudiments of one's ideas which may then be further developed among more advanced 'readers' through specialist, technical language. (This approach was popular in Victorian times: think, for example, of Farraday's lectures.) Following this line, it may be seen that literacy is of course developed beyond an elementary level. It may then be asked just what kind of constellation of ideas one must have to be able to follow - and then create - cartographies of complexity. Literacy in this respect may be seen as something that is never fully mastered (as universes are not mastered by single human minds), but explored with varying degrees of depth.
Hall argues that Aristotle's approach to philosophy was to make the rudiments available to the general public through his exoteric works that would draw on beliefs commonly held by the majority as their starting points. Put in the terms I am discussing here, Aristotle appealed to the public by building on its platitudes to raise the literacy of the polis. One of my pet ideas right now is about how important it is to discuss the role of a literacy that has depth-perception, as it is crucial to society for enabling a temporary distancing from oneself (where one enters into another's argument, for example) as this movement teaches that one is not the centre of the world.
This literacy will be reflected in  self-reflection (following the hermeneutic arc). The more I think about this arc, the more it seems to me bound to pedagogy, or to epistemic fluency: to achieve a high level of literacy seems bound to the ability to understand which requires some conscious knowledge of how things are learnt. So, a higher level of literacy might then require both a knowledge of a given subject and a knowledge of how knowledge is obtained or used.
I think this idea is illustrated in Shannon Cain's definition of literary citizenship (via mhpbooks). It acknowledges listening/reading,  teaching/mentoring/being mentored, and sharing - which speaks to what I wrote above. The latter reminds me of what some call the conundrum of saving a human life vs. a library - what is the more important: life or the learning?
Cain's definition of literary citizenship follows:
•    Read. A lot.
•    Subscribe to literary magazines.
•    Buy books. Review them, and publish the reviews.
•    Teach.
•    Celebrate the achievements of your colleagues. Champion their work.
•    Share your power.
•    Donate to small presses. Volunteer. Join a governing board.
•    Practice humility.
•    In workshop, be patient and kind and truthful.
•    Attend talks and conferences. Listen hard.
•    Mentor a new writer. Be mentored.
•    Be a good friend to other writers. Keep generosity in your heart.

Brush via

The Cultural Literacy of Blind Bussardes

One of the meanings of "bussard," or buzzard, is, "A curmudgeonly or cantankerous man ... a mean, greedy person" - so, potentially, one filled with stubborn ideas and opinions.
I found the word in an excerpt of Roger Ascham's "The Scholemaster". In it, he explains the benefits of consulting commonplaces and epithets, which can "induce a man into, an orderlie generall knowledge, how to referre orderlie all that he readeth, ad certa rerum Capita, and not wander in studie". Yet he also warns of the pitfalls of the same, which can occur if study only involves those platitudes, without also developing discernment through methodical reading of the complete texts representative of the best knowledge.
"Bussardes" are worse than those who, thanks to commonplaces and epithets, know something one season but forget it the next (oh, how one finds oneself in the criticism!), but are instead trenchant in the shallowness of the learning that blinds them, having long ceased the pursuit of horizons of learning and thus having nothing to teach.

The excerpt reminded me of another extract - from J. M. Coetzee's foreword to Higgins' Academic Freedom in Democratic South Africa, which takes issue with the claim that "only the full apparatus of a humanistic education can produce critical literacy" because such critical literacy can arguably be provided by ("core") courses in cultural literacy - which I think are comparable to the function of commonplace books within the rhetoric courses of yesteryear. Here's Coetzee:

Can you not simply design a pair of one­-semester courses - courses in which all undergraduates, no matter what their career track, will be required to enrol - one course to be entitled "Reading and Writing", in which students will be trained to dissect arguments and write good expository prose; and the other to be entitled "Great Ideas", in which they will be briefed on the main currents of world thought from Ancient Egypt to the present? A pair of courses like that will not require an entire faculty of humanities behind them, merely a school of critical literacy staffed with bright young instructors. Basic courses in cultural literacy are not a new idea. They have been mounted at countless American universities under the rubric of "Freshman Composition".

As an alternative to the commonplace-approach to defending the humanities, he argues, "we need free enquiry because freedom of thought is good in itself. We need institutions where teachers and students can pursue unconstrained the life of the mind because such institutions are, in ways that are difficult to pin down, good for all of us: good for the individual and good for society."

In other words, and to draw from Ascham, if learning ends in platitudes, we will be perpetuating a shallow level of knowledge that can either be forgotten or, worse, lead to blind, trenchant opinion with no appreciation or feel for, say, nuance, context, or even, say, the speciousness of argument that has produced certain thought.
Platitudes are difficult to attain and maintain (though we are helped by commonplace blogs), but to make a claim on knowledge (brave or foolish) requires further, regular dogged revision of entire key and associated texts. Such is not for the "obstinately ignorant", to quote a 1774 entry on what the proverbial use of "buzzard" means.
According to the OED, the word buzzard is used "in names of other raptors regarded as unsuitable for falconry" - so it seems that the secondary meaning is a figurative transfer of the first. Incidentally, the second entry reads: "An ignorant or stupid person. Now usu. with the weakened sense, fellow, chap". So, today's chaps can't be trained; useless and greedy? Surely education is not to cultivate those.

Magazine in background: Marie Claire Maison.

A No Know?

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

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

Brush: Lauren Harrison.

Fixity, Form, Flow

Updated - Greek librarian, poet, scholar, and critic Callimachus describes the reception of the unusually short epics he wrote: "The Telchines, who are ignorant and no friends of the Muse, grumble at my poetry, because I did not accomplish one continuous poem of many thousands of lines on . . . kings or . . . heroes, but like a child I roll forth a short tale, though the decades of my years are not few." The first translation of this fragment translated Τελχῖνες as "malignant gnomes." It is amazing how vastly some of these translations differ.
Today, that short style is described by the word epyllion, meaning a short narrative poem (mini epic). The word was apparently used once in antiquity to describe a short work by Homer. The word became a genre in the 19th century and is used to classify Ovid's Metamorphoses, also a collection of ἐπύλλια. Another genre created in modern times for what was also categorised as epic in antiquity is the 'didactic poem' of which Lucretius' Nature is one.
Sometimes I wonder at the large proportion of doctoral theses that mention Nietzsche in one way or another and question whether one day, he will be assigned to a genre that we have not classified. His work even now has been described as an attempt to bring Orphic poetry to thought or as the dialectics of provocation: the genre may be provocative poetics. Wherein the poetic is the power of language when it is refined, when it does what Gadamer expected of philosophy and art: to transform our self-understanding. According to which we see, as if for the first time.
To see in that way seems the goal of all original thinkers: to compose a random list, one may include Stanislavsky, Cobbett, O'Connor, Callimachus: "When I first placed a tablet on my knees, Lycian Apollo said to me: '...poet, feed the victim to be as fat as possible but, my friend, keep the Muse slender. This too I bid you; tread a path which carriages do not trample; do not drive your chariot upon the common tracks of others, nor along a wide road, but on unworn paths, though your course be more narrow. For we sing among those who love the shrill voice of the cicada and not the noise of the ... asses.'" Emphasis added. The path less travelled: that which is not engraved on the dumbly reproducible cliché.
Gadamer's mimesis is not an endless repetition but a reinterpretation and reworking that allow a work to become more fully what it is, always, in that way, marked by the first time. Just as Ovid's metamorphoses are a reworking of Nicander's Heteroeumena, meaning transformations. These myths, in turn, appear elsewhere.

J. B. Solodow notes that the form of Ovid's retelling of the Aeneid in Metamorphoses "implies an extreme relativity; it teaches us to be suspicious of a neatly unified story and of an ordinary narration." I have wondered if the same may be said of the other retellings in the work: this post explains its non-linear features as an answer to what history looks like.
Bakhtin has written about centripetal and centrifugal trends in literature: times when one or the other applies, and I wonder if we are still in or finishing with the centrifugal trends of which our own version of the epyllia may be a sign. Characteristic of this genre is also its mundane style and quotidian themes. One could therefore possibly assign Adler's Speedboat to this category. I would also include in it Kristeva's Étrangers. For characteristic of the epyllion is also the less well known aspects of myth. The foreigner has always been the less well known feature of myth...
But are we to leave ourselves with these narrative fragments, a philosophical bard whose mad singing was sometimes disturbed, or are we supposed to understand that in such contexts, the speaking is not to be taken literally. To look at the direction, not the pointing finger.
Gadamer, at the beginning of The Beginning of Philosophy questions beginnings, questions time, as did Aristotle. What is the point of creating linear, narrative progressions - they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Gadamer writes, "beginning and end are thus bound up with one another and cannot be separated. From where something shows itself to be a beginning and what direction it will take both depend on the goal." Many writers in the ancient world seems to have known this. S. M. Wheeler has observed that the phrases ἔτι νῦν and ἄχρι νῦν meaning 'even now' were frequently used in aetiological works. Nicander connected metamorphosis stories with the origin of religious rites, landmarks, in order to connect the past with the present. The then and now merges the fiction being told with the present fact; it is clear that there is room for recreation through retelling.

Not like today's literal narratives in which history is dead, and Vico's prediction of following Cartesian maths to the social plane would cause us to go mad with all those lines. Or is that the case. In the mean time, mad poetry has broken form; even though it seems to speak from the lines of margins, it is very real for many people. I read that people have written letters of thanks to the Nietzsche institute, explaining how much his works meant to them.
And yet I wonder about something. It is argued that the narrative fragments making up Metamorphoses may be taken to center around love. An example is the Alcyone and Ceyx story in which marital love transcends death itself. From change to transcendence. Not the haughty and sad overman of Nietzsche, all alone.
Maybe this is why to argue for a unity of thought and language, λόγος and ἔργον, as did Gadamer, one must return to the past, because such unity is hard to find before the eyes.
I am reminded of Rilke's voyage to Russia where he went to get outside of his own culture and to see afresh, behind the appearance of things, how he wrote this about things on his return, and later writing Sonnets to Orpheus (leaving aside the fact that Rilke may be seen as the crown achievement of Goethe's weltliteratur). That is a nod to the past at least in the point of departure in the title, and some themes : "the clock's steps only mime/ the ticking of a truer time"; "Mirrors: to this day, no expertise can explain the key to what you truly are" (emphasis added); his appeal in 2. 12, "Aspire to transform" together with mention of Daphne in mutation. In this poem, there is both fixity and change. All of the shorter-than-epyllia; all of the fragment poems, poems made of lines that are fragments, is resolved in the paradox of the last verse: "And though you fade from earthly sight, declare to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water say: I am."
Fixity and flow, just like in his 1908 poem "Archaic Torso" with the fixity of that statue that flows, "from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life."
Today, one rarely turns on the box without being accosted by the sight of someone trying on different clothes. What if narrative was once that fitting room, what if we have become too literal in our costuming.We have been asked by fragments (because the loudest unities are sometimes false) to look again, to change.

Brush. Magazine.

The Lamp Behind Books

It may be that I will be losing all of my precious books, the ones too expensive to ship, some of which I can still visualise, being the kind of reader who remembers the content of a book by looking at the spine. I wouldn't call myself a materialist and am not generally attached to things, but those books... The white leather one from Lugano written in French about all the jewelery of the world, significance and symbol in technicolour photos. The one I bought in Japan by Keene that turned out to be related to the kinds of books I bought at college, knowing there would be a day I would want to reread them. "Investments," I thought as I reached for the wallet. The copies I bought from the Strand when I worked there one summer, learning the language of the world, as Caxton, esq., would say. Of course the circumstances of their demise is sadder, they became hostages, &c., and I am reminded of greater values above books as I let them go and hope very much that the person charged with them reaches the freedom of soul that brings thanksgiving. Books are a small price to pay, after all, for a person's happiness, and so I realise as I type that I am willing to let them go in that very hope, that such happiness be reached by them.
After all, when I first lost things, I realised that they may be regained in so many ways. There are always libraries, and the greatest library of the internet, archive.org. I miss memory in spines, but have taken to scribbling in notebooks.
It is necessary to learn how to say goodbye in so many ways in life, and that it pains the heart is always the fortuitous sign that we have not lost it. I returned to reading The Caxtons last night, there not being enough hours in the day for me to read it through in a few sittings. I am so grateful for that book that I do not think that I can express my gratitude adequately. The nameless poetry of a youthful life is one phrase - that may describe myself.
Let us talk about maturing that not all people do at the same time if they do so at all. "Neither man nor wood," we read in The Caxtons, "comes to the uses of life til the green leaves are stripped and the sap gone. And then the uses of life transform us into strange things with other names: the tree is a tree no more - it is a gate or a ship." And then, regret over youth that is the running after mistaken values. "When such feelings as I felt then can agitate us no more: they are mistakes on the serene order of that majestic life which heaven meant for thoughtful men. Our souls should be as stars on earth, not as meteors and tortured comets." The squire continues, "How many years wasted. It would not have been so if at your age I had found out the secret of the saffron bag!" And as he instructs his son, he quotes that adage, "follow my precept not example".

Indeed, many lessons on maturity may be found in works by Victorian authors; it is clear that character was of importance. I was lucky to have had a headmaster who would assess character, too, in his monthly letters to our parents. George Henry Lewes quotes Quintilian's, Quod observatum fere  est celerius occidere festinatam maturitatem, which may be translated as soon ripe, soon rotten to explain the "matured mediocrity following the brilliant promise" of a gifted child; likewise, he writes, the child who did not do so well at school may become a genius. To be a man of the highest class, one must have both receptive and productive qualities. To this, I would add to receive knowledge even from mistakes and produce something constructive from them. During maturity, Lewes writes,"the prudent child turns out an extravagant youth; but he crystallizes once more into prudence, as he hardens with age".
Prudence is often the word into which the Greek παιδεία is rendered. Perhaps it may only be exhibited in number in stable and economically strong countries with long traditions of intellectual culture. In any case, it is a word that has a moral component, not just intellectual, an artistic component, too, one of the sympathy of the arts seeking harmonious ratios. 
It is fitting, then, given this ideal that man is to live up to - having grown out of "mistakes on the serene order of this majestic life" - that Lewes begins his work on Goethe by quoting Quintus Curtius, who speaks of whirling dust covering the landmarks by which directions were set - and in the dearth of terrestrial guide posts, travellers would lift up their eyes to the stars, "to light them on their dim and perilous way. May we not say the same of Literature? From time to  time its pathways are so obscured beneath the rubbish of the  age, that many a footsore pilgrim seeks in vain the hidden  route. In such times it may be well to imitate the Bactrians: ceasing to look upon the confusions of the day, and  turning our gaze upon the great Immortals who have gone  before, we may seek guidance from their light."

Brush.

Bearing Something

It suddenly became cold, as it is wont to. And dark. I looked out the window and saw the wind bringing a hundred bird shapes across the sky. They were not so much flying as being carried. One may dream of catching that wind, except for a lack of wings and geography defined by declensions of τολμάω; taking much to heart, bearing something difficult. I was thinking yesterday how a word like patience or endurance must be earned.
Perhaps one would never recognise an abstraction like endurance were it not for the right words outlining a space for it on the canvas of a life. Words that come with all of the bearing inherent in the word expectation. Like an enigma, they remain hidden until connected with something practically tangible that calls them into recognition. I think of how some people, regardless of background, are more receptive than others to ideas, as intimated in the Phaedrus.
In Aristotle's Rhetoric, like in the Phaedrus, it is further implied that the words of ideas ought to be those of φρόνησις, practical knowledge (e.g.), that will lead us to happiness. In the context of the hermeneutic reader's arc, where there is a circular movement between ideas and experience, our words are only as clear as we have got used to the feelings of words as they are applied to practical experience. This explains the strange experience of matronly expecting a word like endurance that takes time to get. But this does not explain why some people are barrenly and categorically decided to endure nothing.
One wonders if not everyone can read, if it is the soul that reads. Ricoeur writes it is the human function to be able to apprehend reality by distancing ourselves from it through words. Some people do not get this distance - described in Rhetoric as "a foreign air" (3.2), made possible by the metaphor, which also promotes perspicuity, how would it not, this rainbow of words stretching from earth to heaven and back down again.
I also see traces of the Phaedrus wherein rhetoric was described as a medicine, in Rhetoric: "The function of Rhetoric, then, is to deal with things about which we deliberate, but for which we have no systematic rules" (1.2.12). I wonder if I am right in drawing this comparison, or if I have taken the latter out of context. I did not reread the whole work (how many books must be reread how many times for mastery, and so very preferably in the original). Is Aristotle not saying that rhetoric is to tend to that which functions not systematically - rather like what Jowett wrote of the Phaedrus, that it is a picture, not a system? Allegory as the splint for the broken wings of the expecting soul, created anew to cater to the specifics of situation. Wings get broken a lot, if not through Herculean "temporary insanity."

I mention Hercules, and it is bold to invoke names out of prodigiously written contexts. But a professor of mine from before used to say that humanity would continue to exist so long as the possibility of retelling stories was not closed off. "Every utterance is a link in the historical chain of speech acts forming what we call human communities." The possibility to weigh in on utterances received; to retell a story in order to manifest one's agency; to understand that the words we use and ideas we combine are not ours alone but have come from the knowledge of the community to which we belong; this is speech.
It is ours to put life together in a meaningful way, to live, as Jowett writes, the good life and possibly leave the writing behind. But if one is to write it seems advisable to subscribe to Matthew Arnold's argument that we "see things for what they really are" and produce as suggested by Aristotle the "foreign air" that is the metaphor through the distance brought by the enigmatic statement, obscure because of the concealed similarity between things. A reminder of the hide and seek of the many days; when meaning veils itself behind words and laughs at the punned masquerade when the appearance of a life throws us for a loop. So it is that we have been warned not to take all things too literally.
Aristotle gives two examples of metaphoric language that are funny, to my mind. "Similarly, pirates now call themselves conveyors," is one. And the other: "I saw a man who glued bronze with fire to another," to refer to cupping, which helps circulation. So what helps articulation in the joints between words?
To gain distance from life through words... At the top of this post, I began with τολμάω which can also mean to do a thing despite a natural feeling. I wonder if that was how Hercules felt, knowing he would have to do what seemed impossible. He was helped by sympathetic deities - where sympathy means: drawing to oneself aiding influences; chords which vibrate together; the affinity of heavenly bodies; enduring with (σύν-) virtuous suffering (πάθος). Hercules had the experience of suffering, but he became ex-tolled, distanced, elevated from the burden of his troubles. Omnis sors ferendo superanda est.
Each day drawing up new rhetoric, bearing sympathy in mind, being carried by that which conveys. 

Painted brush. Grunge brush.

Words, Madness

Strange it is to be reading a text of Socrates' dialogues wherein he criticizes the inferiority of the written text to the spoken word. He says (275d): "Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say only one and the same thing."
The written word, Socrates says (275d-e), cannot defend itself and as a text available to any audience, as opposed to a speech delivered to a chosen few, it is easily taken out of context by those who do not understand: abused and reviled. Hadot writes of similar concerns other schools of ancient philosophy, whose teachings were guarded against the uninitiated, so often not written, or if so, disguised in all manner of allegory. One asks the creatures that stand in the paintings that we do have: help.
Socrates says (276b): there is much that is playful in the written word (the creatures are not to be taken literally or to carry one away) and that it is to remind us of what we know. We are to seek words "really written in a soul" by speakers who have lived justice, beauty, the good, and who have that word in themselves, talking to instruct, to germinate the word in others. Here, we cannot ask Socrates any questions. His words stand undefended, and yet we return to the start of this part of his speech: the written word is playful, to remind us of what we already know. We cannot expect all of what he says to be the right rhetorical medicine for our specific situation...
Socrates is no dogmatist, in his metaphor of the charioteer, he recognizes that there are people at various levels of development and purity, the lowest relying on direction from their opinions, not from the truth; those who try to grow but are weaker are not damned. Socrates says (277d-e): "For whether one be awake or asleep, ignorance of right and wrong and good and bad is in truth inevitably a disgrace, even if the whole mob applaud it."
The successful human charioteer, given one good horse and an ambiguous one, fights against the latter to strive towards that which is good: when reminded of beauty, the wings charioteers had before they fell from heaven begin to grow back. Man is not to take beauty literally and fall for the weakness of beautiful flesh, but see said beauty as a symbol.

Yet the star-gazing philosopher, who understands the other half of the symbol lies in heaven, is rebuked by the more terrestrial - and thence begins Socrates' discussion of madness, "which comes from god, is superior to sanity, which is of human origin" (244b on). He lists prophecy, relief from present ills to offset an ancient disease of guilt through prayer and sacrifice, poetry, and philosophy, adding these are but some of its forms. While poetry was oral, not written, it is worthwhile to note how Socrates views the poet: "by adorning countless deeds of the ancients [he] educates later generations". This segues to the metaphor of the charioteer, with a caveat (245b), "let us not be afraid on that point, and let no one disturb and frighten us by saying that the reasonable friend should be preferred to him who is in a frenzy."
What a fascinating idea in this age of the institutionalization of the "mad" who are now referred to through euphemisms. Of course, one could argue about the many differences in lifestyle apparent in Phaedrus, such as frequent mention of men with their boy lovers. But Socrates says: these are painted creatures - the task of the seeker is to find those lasting values and ideas - which cannot be agreed upon because "the whole mob" may in fact be following opinion, not truth.
Thence the reason why Socrates argues in favour of speech - the hermeneutic discourse defended in the modern age by Gadamer, so beautifully explained in Phaedrus as a natural, noble process that may bring fruit in the minds of others as well as in the mind of the speaker (re.,276b; nb., he suffered from his own daemon, so is this by way of apology, or an illustration of how familial troubles keeps some of the family sane as they avoid the mania of hubris that will be hinted at below?). In other words: we are to engage in the process of trying to figure out truth with ever more clarity: the attempt is ours, the wisdom belongs to god (misplaced passage no.).
The lover of wisdom may be rebuked by others who possess not the need to look behind the appearance of things so remain in the realm of deception. The idea that Socrates calls this pursuit of clarity "madness" is fascinating in that indeed, from the terrestrial perspective where people shove each other aside in a "frenzy" to obtain transient fame and worldly riches, it is madness: forfeiting a station on the social ladder - for what? Inner happiness, essentially invisible.

This "mad" pursuit of wisdom or the song of poetry is picked up on in texts as diverse as Kahlil Gibran's Madman; Baudelaire's "j'ai senti passer sur moi le vent de l'aile de l'imbécillité"; Dickinson's "Much madness is divinest sense" to list the first that come to mind.
Indeed, μανία can mean inspired, if usually inspired frenzy. But Socrates gives his own etymology, calling upon the mantic (μαντικός) art of seeing: mania is not shameful, he says, it denoted the noble and ancient art of prophecy. While we cannot deny that μανίη is the word used in tragedy to denote a character's unwillingness to listen to reason, or the legal attempt to do something beyond one's power, as Joel Mann points out, he also observes that this same word is used to denote those critics of doctors who do not realise that sometimes there is nothing to be done for a patient, not because the doctor is unlearned, but because the doctor knows that there is no known cure. So μανίη may also be taken to denote those who see not the limits of their knowledge: those who feel self-satisfied and the mania of hubris mentioned above. The kind of thinker who thinks they have reached wisdom, whatever the brand. 
An opposite view is that there is something beyond man that he is to strive for but which will always be larger than he is. Hymn CXXV Vāk. of the Rig Veda is about the word - that requires worship, which is only natural due to its greatness in proportion to man. It is "the gatherer-up of treasures, most thoughtful, first of those who merit worship ... through me alone all eat the food that feeds them ... I make the man I love ... a sage ... I breathe a strong breath like the ... tempest, the while I hold together all existence."
Socrates' due humility is woven throughout Phaedrus: he appologises to the gods for the previous speeches he deemed misled, and when he swears, for instance, he uses a minced oath (influenced by Cretan king Rhadamanthus?) and swears by a plane-tree, not the gods. In this "mad" universe, the painted creatures of his words are measured, even as I light a fire beneath them with my questions and watch them dance - like how Herzog imagined the  - allegorical? - caves at Chauvet.

Brush.

Greatness, Reading Life

At this time of the year ladders hang from the sky. Even if there is only one rail from which the rungs attach themselves, those great lines of clouds compel the eye to climb upwards. I have been thinking of heights, the greatness of certain lives. The protagonist in The Caxtons is advised he may measure himself against such greatness provided that he is motivated to "scorn delights, and love laborious days" - a line from John Milton's poem Lycidas, which is in part about being an artist and a human being.
The poem addresses the struggles between work and pleasure (verse six). The poet thinks through the problem of death and life and how to live, how to understand life. It is fascinating, knowing how Milton went on to leave a written legacy, to read through how he was tempted - if in passing, a passing verse, by the motivation of fame, which he goes on to dismiss.
To undertake anything seriously tempts this false idea of fame to come forward. To dismiss it far less nobly than does Milton, one might ask who dares to assess their potential so audaciously. Few are those who may be called genius. It may be dangerous to peer to those heights.
For consideration of even Milton, embalmed, in a matter of speaking, as he is in the canon, is problematic; he is disputed by some, including others who claim a place the canon (Pound, Eliot) and was not entirely lauded by Samuel Johnson. But then, the canon is but a starting point for the mind with its thoughtful text and initially dizzying baggage of historical context and criticism.
"Master the books," Augustine Caxton, Esq. advises, "do not let them master you. Read to live, do not live to read." However, the squire goes on to refer to himself as a "slave of the lamp" - there are those whose natural penchant ceaselessly seeks out the printed word, bringing to light what might otherwise be relegated to a shelf of oblivion. Key to such endeavour, I think, is memory and a degree of pertinence.

No matter the profession in question, one must question whether one has what it takes to adopt it. So writes Epictetus in the Enchiridion when he warns: be not like children, hungering after the laurel of athletes yet not able to sustain regular training. Where does this leave those of us somewhere in between "delights" and "laborious days" and the lofty heights we may aspire to?
There is a violation worse than not entirely mastering one's subject, and that is the genius mind flying off course to the sun, deranged. I think now of the Greek word ὕβρις - outrage, violation, its roots in the word hubris. The mind may be tragic, as when its criticism is over-analytical; encyclopaedism reading things into situations; attention given more to flaws than virtues; desire unbridled.
Such are the true hybrids, if we accept what Robert Baird and some dictionaries claim: that ὕβρις (violent transgression) is at the root of the word hybrid. Of those remaining, many are less hybrids than poorer creatures challenged, always, by shortcomings. We may see pedantry - Milton's "strictly meditate the thankless Muse" - as a parody of the pedant who, as teacher, is to first teach the most essential, enveloping the more difficult learning in allegory, out of the reach of the petty mind. Pedantry, in its concern over minutiae, is mostly for the genius and not the small mind that lords over or idolises. The mind is a saving force, able through explanation or introduction, to make of starved dry oats a mouth watering repast for more souls than one.
To gaze at the heights is also to notice interference by those with an overgrown critical mind, reading the wrong thing at the wrong time, not realising the vital importance of learning and work - which is to keep us alive, not just our bodies, but also our minds and the mind in the heart. Mencius writes that deeds performed without heart cause famine of the soul. Which answers Milton's question in Lycidas about whether one should frolic with the nymph or tend to homely trade and thankless muse. For most mortals, the lessons and surprise of play best be integrated into work.
To look up is to recognise one's inferior place, but also to notice that through the mercy of situation, ladders may appear; one is to make use of what one knows, hopefully knowing something, if only from the book of life, read by observing. Such was the legacy of William Cobbett, author of Rural Rides; not a university man, but the subject of books by some.

Brush.

To Be a Man in Language

(Updated, now twice, due to post being poorly written.) The curious thing about plunging into Homeric Greek is getting used to the strange syntax - I have temporarily left the secure bay of Pharr and plunged into random verse and passage on my own, to seek the raft of that which can be intuited in a language. It is more exciting, and allows the language to fall in place place in a new way. There is something to be said for renewing one's interest in study by playing in that same field.
For activities not required by me professionally, I work very slowly, imitating my preference for long distance sport. Because I work in academia, I only see my shortcomings: that is how I understand the responsibility even of the underling. I often broadcast these failings here, which is something I must change now. Today, I was directed to an old post of mine because so many people read it and I realised how it might be misinterpreted without the context of my other posts - I forget that some readers are here to make very quick judgments. 
One of the difficulties of taking on even more work in academia (i.e. to try to get at least a broad idea of related fields) is that hard to find a professor to take one on. The fact that the system today allows one to, say, write about Victorian literature without at least knowing how to transcribe Greek, if for no other reason than to translate epigrams in the incipit of books, is absurd. The level of specialisation can hurt the range of certain questions one might want to pose. This only bolsters those who are self-satisfied within their narrow field, uninterested in larger questions of meaning, and opposed to those who love the horizon.
It is a rhetorical tactic to not argue outside of the bounds of one's familiarity, but to lead the argument to the territory one knows. This tactic isn't always fair: once one knows to watch out for it, it is astounding how many 'unbeatable' arguments suddenly diminish in imposing stature. One must know what one is good at, or at least have an idea of one's path that might lead to ever greater clarity. I've heard this embarrassingly simplistically phrased as, "following one's gift: what one enjoys." I think, though I may be wrong, that I am good at seeing connections between ideas.
So I am swimming in Homeric Greek when I am not (still) reading Gadamer's Truth and Method. And since I am not on holiday somewhere, but in my flat, I reach the sea through Homer's Greek, with Tuft's Perseus as a buoy. In the Iliad book μαχη επι ταις ναυσιν, battle for the ships, Poseidon steps in to help the Greeks. The passage in English by no way stresses the element of gold that is apparent in the Greek, due to syntax:
ὠκυπέτα χρυσέῃσιν ἐθείρῃσιν κομόωντε, 25
χρυσὸν δ᾽ αὐτὸς ἔδυνε περὶ χροΐ, γέντο δ᾽ ἱμάσθλην
χρυσείην εὔτυκτον, ἑοῦ δ᾽ ἐπεβήσετο δίφρου,
In this image, I get the picture of the almost blinding effect of the wide open sea when the sun shines down and is reflected even brighter in the sea which turns into a plate or even shield of blinding gold.

So I may be learning Homeric Greek all wrong when I do this, but this is an image that I discovered for myself, that I will remember because I did the work to see it. This might not be scholarly, but it keeps my attention on days when I doubt my intelligence. There are days one plays - when one promises to check one's playing (as per a classicist's advice to check translations with those extant), when one does not take one's playing as a final product but a work in progress. 
Also, one is aware that someone has chartered these waters before, when one benevolently deigns to let oneself on an 'adventure' within that which is already known.
My point here is that sometimes, by 'playing' one might notice something valuable, so why is it so terrible to experiment in one's learning techniques - not as method, but as a way to encourage one to keep learning through the excitement of the immediacy of that experience. The post I rediscovered on this blog that I have now deleted for causing misunderstanding was about how once we have learned something, we are then required to make that language our own - this is how we learn to 'make sense' of what we learn, and not just parrot it. I shall now say at the risk of possibly deleting this later, that where I am standing, those educators who require this step in learning, e.g. asking for a summary of a text in one's own words, are in the minority.
So even where valid methodologies exist, there ought to be room for one's own adventure. In this way, the humanities never get old and one may continuously enjoy them.
To be a man is to (admit when he is wrong, and stand corrected,) be brave, be willing to fight -  i.e. protect both oneself and others from themselves. Who wants to identify with base actions. To be a man in language is to stand behind one's words and carve out a place for oneself in the Bakhtinian battleground of language. Isiah Berlin, for example, was unhappy with trends in philosophy, so became a historian of thought. He figured out how to allow his mind to grow without getting tied down by the rhetoric of apology. The beauty of academia is discourse, therefore we must sometimes fight against trends if this means attempting to keep the breadth of approach (also historically) alive: because of discourse, this must be true even if one disagrees!
While there may have been a time when the lady thinker identified literally with the clothes of the man - one of my favourite books was a French, Victorian volume, Les Femmes Aventureuses, about women taking the guise of the man to reach desired ends, there is now a trend for menswear boutiques to cater to women (viz. 'Maison Scotch'). I don't think I'm aware enough of how influenced I am by the romantic, but if there is such a thing as the heart singing its own intuitive song, the heart has also to man up if it is to have (a chance at) its day, the great golden mirror of day when new strength is gained and life brims with possibility. This, after all, is in line with Gadamer's vision that the truth is both logical and mythical.

Brush.

Stichomancy

Is there not a tension that occurs if one persists in reading, day after day, while people in the vicinity prefer to puzzle up their day differently, with talkative and tactile pieces? Surely it is the invalidation of bookish ways that provokes the prideful defense typical of the especially cosmopolitan bibliophile, so eager to brand people as "philistine."
Pesky pride: it shows that person with their head in the books was not content at failing to convey the beauty of all the contours and elevations among words. It's like true love: one can't always have a ready defense of it, it already being so much and enough, not looking to prove itself. So the wounded pride stutters: you are a philistine or pharisee if you don't see it.
Immaturity tarnishes the quest for mastery with zeal. A zeal for reading. Some people never get over it. Maybe some people need such things their whole lives because they are filling deep holes that cannot be seen. G.K. Chesterton once wrote that he didn't understand monastic life, but was sure it existed for a good reason. We are all so different, for some, abstinence comes naturally; they must find something else that is difficult. But then that is not zeal, but being in the one place that brings peace and makes sense. Zeal is jumping up and getting upset over a difference in values. Being in the right place lets things go.
Zeal is like speeding in a really fast car, believing it possible to get somewhere faster, all the while forgetting that accidents happen even on the road to mastery. The only way to hold on to clocked miles is to be sorry for the pride. This is why many who read books and travel lose the merit of distance by becoming peremptory.
"An empty mirror and your worst destructive habits, when they are held up to each other, that's when the real making begins. That's what art and crafting are. A tailor needs a torn garment to practice his expertise..."
That's Rumi, who I turned to from the uncertainty of the present, as if through stichomancy (reading passages of books, taken at hazard, technically a form of divination, but I once learned that difficult books can be read out of order, and articles read bottom to top, to be more engaging and ultimately intelligible). That's what art and crafting are.

I cut up my story again into many pieces. I let the words of the days and the years and the dreams float swingingly into a new heap.
"True seekers keep riding straight through, whereas big, lazy, self-worshipping geese unload their pack animals in a farmyard, and say, 'This is far enough.'"
Sometimes, it is enough to remember the word "seeking" to be released from any tyranny of words, thoughts, invalidation. All of the problems of this life cannot stand up to just passing through. Some find solace where they have found it since childhood days, in books. It is because of those hours of laying on the carpet beneath teak bookshelves and finding already in print one's loneliest secrets that some people feel moved to write. The idea that through sharing, a joint effort can be made to break free from the cast that would otherwise bind us.
"Be patient. Respond to every call that excites your spirit. Ignore those that make you fearful and sad, that degrade you back toward disease and death." Is excitement not in the promise of education, the humanist "liberty," ancient Greek "φιλοσοφία" - the pursuit of truth? These are the ideas that stand behind things: it is a materialist idea that casts the thing in heavy iron.
Thought and books that direct and cultivate thought are the Rousseauean canvas. And some words can clear out other words, like seek. Just like reading about history, of the mercury in the hats of yesteryear and the disease of cross-oceanic exposure, can clear the mind of worries over the current age, of unhealthy clothes and worries of disease. An integral part of life has often been constituted by these issues.
If imperfection is the beginning of art and craft, there must be relief for the writer and the reader alike. Some words are but crouching in their rows, awaiting the flight of freedom in eyes that recognise their potential. How many more choices the reader has. I wonder too how much of reading is actually stichomancy performed by memory.

Brush. Magazine.

Slick

There is something mysterious about reading, like how there can be no inroads to certain books one may wish to read; they may languish on the shelves for years, occasionally removed, always replaced barely dented. One such book for me is Chesterton's Orthodoxy. For all his criticism of Shaw on similar counts, Chesterton's prose can be just as dense in aphorisms.
What I did not expect to find was that the book is a mystical echo to my recent thoughts, picking them up, containing the answers I hadn't quite been able to formulate on my own. For example, in my last post, I wondered about ethics, as if sensitivity to the world has become scarce, but Chesterton sees the heart as present as always - rather, it's just in the wrong place. "The modern world is full of ... virtues gone mad ... because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians care only for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful."
He continues, "The eternity of materialist fatalists ... is a degraded animal who destroys himself." In that phrase are echoes of Matthew Arnold's beseeching that man be his best possible self. And now I know why I had no access to this book before: it had been too abstract for me because I lacked the knowledge that situates words like "materialist" in a very concrete context: that of, say, Tyndall's Belfast Address. It is not possible, and it is perhaps irrelevant, to be conclusive about Tyndall's beliefs (materialist, pantheist, agnostic), but in arguing that science become separated from religion, man's access to a way of knowing shifted. Is the heart in the wrong place...
When I write "religion" I am also thinking of the kind in Platonic dialogue which progresses towards the Divine through higher levels of generalisation. This can be called poetic, in terms of the symbolism that moves from the specific and particular to ever greater, and more potent, abstractions. Chesterton writes of poetry that it is "sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite." Reason, he proceeds to demonstrate, leads to madness, not poetry.
So let us consider a well-reasoned thought: Lachmann's method of textual criticism, which places ancient manuscripts in a tree, to distinguish which were the poorer copies, with mistakes. It is said that Darwin was inspired by this method in his Origin. At which point I return to Chesterton: "You may explain the order in the universe by saying that all things, even the souls of men, are leaves inevitably unfolding on an utterly unconscious tree ... the blind destiny of matter" and so shrink life to "something much more grey, narrow, and trivial than many separate aspects of it".
There is much to be said about the movement from the specific/concrete to the general/abstract. The poetic urge is the Porsche of the mind; language and symbols can slick the roads.

Tape element. Magazine.

Direction for a boat in a bottle

The difference between Diogenes and me is that while he lived in a barrel, my barrel would be filled with wine, which - in keeping with the idea of mobility - I would wheel around with me. Lest you all imagine me imbibing as I write, I shall add that I love a good hyperbole. I watched a movie recently - based on The Kite Runner - wherein the servant boy, assailed with pomegranates, takes a fruit from his assailant's hands only to press it into his very own face. None can denigrate us if we do not disparage ourselves. It is this strength of character I aspire to: how long I've marvelled at Jami's line: Whether your destiny is glory or disgrace, Purify yourself of hatred and love of self. 
And here is where the wind changes direction: such are the pontifications, but who will sweep the snow before it turns to ice?
This morning I was talking to a friend about a gem I discovered of Abbot's The Ramblings of an Idler. I had triple pleasure reading two chapters this morning: imagining him wandering land of natal significance; enjoying his love of nature; marvelling at his writing style - this very sentence is a nod to his: Nature loves the number three. She trinitates in more ways than one...
I spoke of the American tradition to return to nature, in Emersonian fashion, when dissatisfied with current affairs. How Abbot writes that failure "rouses the inborn energies" particularly if one goes: "Back to nature and sink self to its proper level." How Abbot's illustrations are taken from nature - which do not work for those modern audiences so concerned with scientific veracity that every allegory is broken by counter examples from nature: fixation with fact blinds readers from being inspired by the figurative meaning which brings a grander view.
Abbot writes that many say, "If you fail, try again" to their children - but the birds need no such instruction: the flycatcher naturally tries and tries again until it has caught its prey. But, my friend countered, what of those animals that make no effort to sustain their meals? I objected that the point of such paradoxes - and there are always paradoxes in figurative language - is that one ought know when the allegory applies, like knowing which medicine to prescribe. The same medicine can be restorative or deadly, depending on circumstance. To deny allegory is to refuse that medicine altogether. Much can be learned from nature.
"Like birds know to make nests for their young that will sway," he said. I parried, "Except for doves, whose nests are flimsy," - before realising that I had been led into a trap. So, I banished myself to my distorted image of Diogenes, with my barrel containing wine instead of wisdom.
It's a joke because I get light-headed on lofty statements like Abbot's: Our goal is a direction, not a fixed point in space. But in all seriousness, I wonder at how long it takes to practice what is preached. So I take my boat out of the bottle - and put that message in it. And post below a picture of a badge I made of "nothing" - of but doodads. Just like I hope my words here will one day come to "something".

Element.

Badge in photo made in variation of this tutorial, using cotton threads, ribbon, zipper, sequins, beads, a bit of turquoise and tiger's eye as, I later realised, wrong-coloured leaves. Or right-coloured autumn leaves?

To Pen

Maybe to write is to pretend that one knows something. But to write is to really go fishing, if one is honest. Sometimes, one will enjoy a catch, sometimes, the line will come in empty.
Oh, I have read so much in recent days, again, and I just feel that reading so much does not enlighten me, nor does it make me a better person. It ostensibly makes me a little more of an expert in the tiny, tiny field I attempt to master in my studies - but I am inclined to mimic Ruskin: "the greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way.... To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, all in one... I observe that all our young figure-painters were rendered ... blind by their knowledge of anatomy. They saw only certain muscles and bones ... but could not, on account of the very prominence in their minds of these bits of fragmentary knowledge, see the real movement, colour, rounding, or any other subtle quality of the human form."
Knowledge can blind us from seeing. I have written about this before.
Oh the terrible traps that await one if one is trying to enter into the dialogue of modern knowledge.
I have seen these traps from the perspective of the tiny country in which I now live.
The other day, a non-native predator fish was found in its rivers: the kind of predator fish that would consume all native fish and then proceed to eat the swimming children. "It is a good thing," the news reporters said, "that this fish has appeared after the swimming season - and we have the chance to exterminate it before it endangers our local life forms."
And yet how many predators face our little country, that have been put here. The kinds of predators that made religion mute in the West over a hundred years ago. The kind of predators that present themselves in the name of "equality" - of Darwinistic "right to existence" - and then, in that name, kill everything else that does not take their image. As if one were to feed a vulture, and give it extra strength to kill not only the dying, but also the living... What we need now are eyes to see what needs saving.
If we think we are being smart by being "multicultural" or etc by default, we need only think of Tyndall's Buddha. The authority of refinement is not necessarily seen by the man so sated his appetite is whet only by delicacies.That is the man titillated by piranhas, yawning in his study, not worrying about the children.
And when I read all these academic disputes, I feel so sad about humanity - and even my own limited potential to write something worthwhile after such disputes. So, I take a step back, and return to sources of art I know to be fruitful, like the polyphonous song of Sheila Chandra, and hope that all the reading I have done does not cloud my mind, and vision.

Lace brush; bird brush.

Eyes to Be Believed: Part Three

This is the last post in a series of three (part one; part two).
"If I were asked what Europe requires at this moment I should say it is men who... can think without thinking what they are expected to think, men who... are able to contemplate with fresh eyes what is going on around them. Such men... might discern remedies." Thus advises Douglas, in Goodbye To Western Culture.
Chesterton writes in Cobbett: "The chief mark of the modern man has been that he has gone through a landscape with his eyes glued to a guidebook... One man, however, happened to look up from the book and see things for himself... he could believe his eyes." It is a funny image, thinking of all the Victorians with their Baedekers - if you've ever travelled with one, you understand the temptation. But we are warned by such authors: Do not become blinded by books!
When I was reading Douglas, I was reminded of a paraphrase from Pope's Essay on Man that I found in an antique copy of the NYT: "power in a monster of so frightful mien/ As to be hated needs but to be seen/ But seen too oft, familiar with her face/ we first endure, then pity, then embrace."
The monster needs to be seen - we are not to be blind to the monster. So, what is it? In all of these texts, I find the word "tyranny". Douglas: the tyranny of law, "a dead, immovable weight" which "leaves no hope of redress, no hope of escape". This, as opposed to the tyranny of man, which is uncertain and "leaves the oppressed chances and hopes of escaping it." He writes of hustle "killing ease of soul", man's "opiate, his refuge from self". And from this, impatience, "the White Man's curse, converting him into a harassed automaton, the slave of machines and unhealthy legislation". He muses at how much time is spent circumventing regulations that shouldn't exist.
My last two posts also address loss of freedom, the problems of technology - perhaps most succinctly summed in the italicised phrase above.
The NYT article explains that the Trojan war was not waged over Helen, as we are told by Homer and Virgil, rather it was an economic war. The author urges readers to recognise power, and resulting loss of freedom, where it occurs. But this cannot happen if there is "government by newspaper" as Douglas wrote many decades ago.
And what is bidding Western Culture adieu? "The world was a great and beautiful museum once, full of beautiful things, all of different kinds. Then Europeans, growing hungry for new foods, new places to live in, new places to sell goods in, new folk to teach their religion to, went round with sticks and broke all the precious things on the shelves of the world." In other words, "we have lost the intelligence which is the basis of gentlemanly feeling". It is hard to look with eyes of compassion if one feels oppressed or harried.

The Dance of Disturbing Clarity: Part One

This is the first post in a series of three (part two; part three).
In the copy of Rumi I have (trans. Barks), a chapter called, "How the Unseen World Works" tells a South Indian story about soap. "Soap is the dirt we buy. We introduce it to the dirt we have, and the two dirts are so glad to see each other they come out and mix! They swim together... and at just the right moment, the washer lifts the cloth of our true being free of both soap and dirt. Mystical poetry and other practices may function this way, as soap that dances with what disturbs our clarity. Then at some moment they drop away and leave us clean..."
I find that many experiences I have function in the same way. Society has taught me to be mindful of appearance, fretting about "the forms of greeting people... and what we should be doing". But I often find that by sacrificing what looks successful, which we are taught to do, we are brought to beyond those boxes, and discover a wealth of lessons awaiting the person with the larger net.
I admit that I have been reading a lot these days. I started Douglas' Goodbye to Western Culture, but after an interesting conversation with a colleague yesterday about William Cobbett, found G.K. Chesterton's book on the same. I have long admired Chesterton's wise turns-of-phrase. Chesterton displaces Douglas, if temporarily, because some writers are just so good at putting things in their places.
After the dance of disturbing clarity, how beautiful it is to come to a writer who puts things in their places. Behold this statement about Cobbett: "He might have been a self-made man; but he died unfinished, trying to make something better than himself."

Surely that sentence needs dwelling on. What a noble attempt! Who can fail to like Cobbett after reading of his hunt for ideals: "It was the self-respect of the poor, which all modern industrial society has been slowly crushing to death. To find it anywhere uncrushed and uncowed was to Cobbett like the noise of a great victory in the war of the world."
It takes Chesterton to rescue Cobbett's vision from the petty squabbles of his critics. Thence the image of muddied waters: some people must turn to sufi poems for momentary disturbance. But others experience it every day, by default of where they live, or what their ideals are. That said, the lesson is not in the dance of water and soap, but in the returning things to their places afterwards: hands, soap, water.
Some people's lives may remain in the flux of washing, but if they had been washing with particular vigour and with strength of character, visionaries like Chesterton can come along and separate them out for us, so we can better see into the value of their lives. For if there's one thing I am learning, it's how enslaved one can be to expecting what is good to look a certain way. For example, a child arguing with a grandparent may not be a disrespectful child, but the only family member to cultivate relations with the angry soul. There's even a cliche on this theme: a woman falls in love with the enemy soldier.
Very few people have the clarity of vision to sort things out to where they really belong. Chesterton has never let me down. Behold the discernment in this sentence about Cobbett: "He had not the fine instinct which makes the really successful secretary-bird distinguish between the earth worms of the underworld and the silk worms of the smart set." It is on this note that I sign off. I need to soak up those words. How brilliant. And by the way, there was a link to Douglas in terms of this discernment, but to write about that would take another post.

X's; nail polish.