Here or Nowhere

The title is from Horace's Epistulae (1.17). It is a contested poem - Fraenkel thought it entirely ought of character for Horace, calling it "upsetting". It is definitely jolting; perhaps it is better to avoid any final conclusions. What I will share here is my understanding of it in recent times.
There are so many things I like about this poem, not least how it begins by the offering of teaching from one who yet "has much to learn". I like how this can be seen to compliment Seneca's disendo discimus - and other approaches to pedagogy that I am writing about in my book.
What is so shocking about the poem is that Horace criticises Diogenes' refusal to interact with the rich as being a form of excess: showing Aristippus as superior, for he can wear rags, as does Diogenes, albeit if circumstance requires, but he can also wear fine garb and eat fine meals. So the poem can be seen to promote parasitism (dining at the expense of the rich) over genuine friendship as the nature of the relations in this poem that are advised are of a purely worldly nature.
Stephanie McCarter's very enjoyable Horace Between Freedom and Slavery suggests that Horace in some of these epistles is the concept of the Aristotelian golden mean, which she writes goes

back to Hesiod. Wilson defines the term as 'the area between too much and too little' and as the 'opposite of excess' ... Aristippus has captured both the adaptability and the moderation that ought to be exercised in every situation.

In 1.17, "Aristippus offers a way of accommodating one's longings for public life and friendship with the great without sacrificing one's independence or consistency of character." This reminds me of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, where the Flyte mother discusses how wealth is not incompatible with the sacred (112-113).

I will be discussing this passage and these citations in my book. But what I want to write about here is the tension between friendship with the great/all the people who one can find in the world and contemplative withdrawal (the critics who do not like 1.17 feel Horace's allegiance to lie exclusively in the latter). Is Horace being sarcastic in the second part of this epistle as some say? Attacking the pursuit of profit? Or is amicitia with great men a test of virtue and modesty?
These are questions that are most relatable, and may represent tension felt from adolescence onwards: does one have a sarcastic relation to the world made by les gens du monde - and so is it the life well-lived to withdraw entirely? Or is it not necessary, foremost for oneself, one's own well-being, to be part of this potentially superficial world? To enter it, it is suggested, is a test.
The phrase "here or nowhere", where it appears in the epistle, becomes a symbol of the acceptance of the validity of participation. Because of this, I use it as my chat app motto: it is the admission that an outer face - while exposed to intricate traps (that even Diogenes could fall into, with his performance art exaggerations performed publicly) - is necessary for the holistic life.
This corresponds with Emerson's thought in "Self Reliance": "It is easy in the world to live after the  world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst  of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
It can be seen that this tension is a timeless concern, but its implications and the shape of the trials associated with worldly life in this time in history are (as always) particular and do need especial thought and discernment (to say the least).
This is a tension that I have tried to bring forth (cf. maieutics) in my classes, in one way or another, over the years. Admission of whatever the topics of the moment are is integral to my courses, which are therefore always changing (they also change to attempt to cater to students' needs). But these aspects of the course are never the whole course, just a part of it.
And to that end, some of the links in this week's B/Logrolling section will likely end up being addressed in class (I am still finalising the syllabus).

B/Logrolling

A Letter From Hong Kong: I admit that from my distance, I did not immediately understand all of the angles of this situation, and this short piece is the best that I have seen. This passage in particular gives pause for thought:

Nor, sadly, can Hong Kong youth expect solidarity from the most militant of Western university students and faculty. They lost their taste for freedom years ago. Israel is apparently a bigger offense to their sensibilities than Communist China (or Iran). In all significant respects, these Westerners are the opposite of the young people I know. While Hong Kong students detest Communism, many of their Western counterparts embrace Marxism. While Western post-colonialists deride Western civilization, Hong Kongers wish they could have more of it. When Hong Kong students talk of a safe-space they mean a shelter from tear-gas and rubber bullets, not a refuge from offensive words. A trigger warning is not a professor’s presage of a painting by Goya; it is the sound of a revolver shot discharged skywards in the Causeway Bay night.

The site of Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants, with links to other articles he has written

Privacy is Power by Carissa Véliz (edited by Nigel Warburton - I am quickly becoming a fan, though have followed him for quite some time as he produces Philosophy Bytes, which has had quite a few good programs, some of which, back in the day, I used in my classes)

Who I'd like to have over at a dinner party (I have not introduced the concept for this section of B/Logrolling very well: what I mean to do here is to introduce 'content producers' [for lack of better name] whose sites are not on my static, standalone B/Logroll page):
Tim Hurst, host of WFMU's Techtonic podcast

Brush

Authorial Voice

This will probably sound odd. But I feel like I need some kind of dialogical therapy on my authorial voice.
As I was going through my notebook to see if I had once written about dialogical therapy (because I do not know what it is, but it sounds helpful in a Bakhtinian type of way: 'let's get all of the various perspectives out on paper' and not tainted with specific context like the 'talking cure' is), I came across an apposite note - and nothing on dialogical therapy. The note read: "Health - mental and physical - strangely not prioritised."
What happened to my voice?
How do I restore it back to health?
First, the diagnosis. I discovered something was wrong when I was trying to write my ideas, which are quite clear, but which could not be formulated in text because of decorum, which rhetoric recognises as structuring pedagogy and procedures of the discipline and governing the overall uses of language. In communicating, and communicating about communication on learning how to learn, the ideas must (obviously) be submitted to dictates of decorum. But how to get it right?
Then, I discovered another depth of the problem through comparison when I read the work of a very clear and authoritative-sounding writer who had assembled such a similar network of ideas as those I am working on, except her voice sounded like it was coming from a place of expensive good social dinners, which is definitely where I am coming from as I continue to make vegetarian pozole without the hominy and vegetables, which is to say, I continue to make chili - noted here for the recipe recommendation (which is to say, the acidic-hot 'sauce' added to the cooked beans towards the end).

Every time I begin to write, I look around to see if the enemy is approaching. I deploy theory like so many soldiers and leave a mess on the field. Or, I allow for Rothkoian approach and allow myself to paint the associations as they occur to me, but then remember I need to publish for academic reasons and drown that flight in declamation.
That's the melodrama - but if this were therapy, the emotions be brought out to play like children so as to have the opportunity to help them grow - so this type of story goes.
I am finishing off a paper that must be turned in today, but feel so strongly that so much academic writing (mine, in this case) suffers from the Midas touch, rendering the ideas it grasps 'unactionable' by pinning them down in respective bell jars, stripped from their vital context, smothered by the arcane which is necessary to respect a lot of complexity in a small space. Also, this language is so obviously not my own - with figurative like spoken languages, I am a fluent reader, not speaker, prioritizing the never finished work of comprehension. So I ask: is there a purpose for one who can listen but who is less able to speak?
Not all scholars (note: I am only an aspiring one) calcify and smother; just the majority. It is therefore a gift to do the academic job of delimiting a subject holistically: like choosing for the delimiting a statue whose finger happens to be pointing beyond the discourse.
Because I am pressed for time, which is to say, because it takes me so much time to write so little (or, sometimes, nothing), I will end this post with the B/Logroll links I prepared. I've decided to add a new feature to the series: ending by listing a blog or text whose author I'd like to have dinner conversation with.

B/Logrolling

Simon Sinek, "Most Leaders Don’t Even Know the Game They’re Playing In" (YouTube) seems to sum up the gist of his work in 30 minutes - with a very helpful section on how to relate to an emergent type of youth (insofar as one can speak of types...)

A Paris Review article on Fra Angelico that criss-crosses from the globe trotting associative to a silent monastery - also, made me think of how the enjoyment of Catholic religious art requires an understanding of history to be fully appreciated, as opposed to the Orthodox icon

The Community of Inquiry: Insights for Public Administration from Jane Addams, John Dewey and Charles S. Peirce (PDF) diss. by Patricia M. Shields which has a nifty section where the community of inquiry takes the form of an actual map: the graphic facts of a city assembled in Maps and Papers (Holbrook 1895) mapping out local evidence of problems for a community practise of politics. I like how this work could parallel nicely with CoPs, explained below.
I will make a note here on contemporary pedagogy: little of it - except nominally, occasionally - does the work to relate its approaches back to the tradition/trends it emerged from. Lave and Wegner popularised the so-called Community of Practice (CoP), which, by the way this term is cited in so much recent work, would appear to be an entirely contemporary phenomenon. But there's even a passage in Plato's Phaedrus that encapsulates something of CoP.
It is true that the genesis of CoP emerged from Lave's anthropological work - and out of the CoP of an IBM think tank if I remember correctly, but we know that ideas can surface in different environments at around the same time - Thony has written about this in the history of science.
But the uncanny similarities to Peirce/Dewey's approach combined with how CoP is being used in pedagogy makes these historical connections relevant. To illustrate, CoP was not just plunked down on a 'panopticon-style' classroom, but coherently fit with the constructivism that emerged through Dewey, who was influenced by Peirce's work on inquiry.

Dinner conversation I'd like to have with the author of this blog.

Amateur Scholarship

I was initially going to write a very short post pointing out the similarities in two extracts on the 'views of the universe' and the ideal orientation of man's mind within it. It turns out the underlying theme of the dispassionate took on a new dimension, and warranted a longer post, once I looked into the author of one of the extracts cited.
Does that ever happen to you, where you look for something you know you know, but you want to see it in a text, and googling for that knowledge leads you to a brand new source, and by extension, new ideas?
Before embarking on the theme of disinterested scholarship, I will begin with my original topic, which is now an apt preamble.
Behold, after the image, how both the extract by a 17th century Japanese sword-saint on the Way and the extract on Egyptian mythology, specifically about Horus' eye once recovered from its injury by Seth, are founded upon a knowing that surpasses man's knowledge yet is also connected to things that exist/ a physical, material consciousness:

What is called the spirit of the void is where there is nothing. It is not included in  man's knowledge. Of course the void is nothingness. By knowing things that exist, you  can know that which does not exist. That is the void.   People in this world look at things mistakenly, and think that what they do not  understand must be the void. This is not the true void. It is bewilderment. ... Until you realise the true Way, whether in Buddhism or in common sense, you may think that things are correct and in order. However, if we look at things objectively, from the viewpoint of laws of the world, we see various doctrines departing from the true Way. Know well this spirit, and with forthrightness as the foundation and the true spirit as the Way. Enact strategy broadly, correctly and openly. Then you will come to think of things in a wide sense and, taking the void as the Way, you will see the Way as void. In the void is virtue, and no evil. via

And:

... Seth is said to “steal or injure” the Wadjat  𓂀, because sensorial and fractioned consciousness (solar vision) inhibits the perception of universals, archetypes, or Ideas which is “lunar vision”. To regain the Lunar Eye or Wedjat   means that one regains a cognitive power, and the power which allows this “recomposition” of the Eye of Horus is Toth. … The loss of the left eye   Wedjat  𓂀 in the Egyptian mythology symbolizes a loss of vision, but more specifically a loss of holistic  or  holy vision   which allows for the reunion or  reconciliation of two  opposites in Unity .… Seth has the eye or vision in his grasp until Horus is able to recover it through the power of Toth . ... We cannot fail to point out how important it is that Toth: the  neter representing God’s Intelligence, is the one that allows for   the reconciliation of the reciprocal powers of Horus and Seth . This is not something that Man can achieve by himself, for as an image of the Supreme Being, the “gods” or neteru are the cosmic functions living in him, and to control them he must return to his innermost Origin and Unity.…In as far as the psychic or mental order of the Eye of Horus, it is demanded that one achieve the equilibrium of vision wherein one does not deny all metaphysical and divine qualities of the universe by an excess of analytical and sensorial (solar) consciousness, nor does one deny the manifest reality of the physical or material consciousness by total holistic idealism (which is excess of lunar consciousness). via

The latter appears (through superficial googling; my apologies if I am wrong) to have been written by an amateur Egyptologist, Christian Irigaray. The text seems to be a chapter in a book - which, considering no apparent professional involvement, betrays that it is a labor of love. The author's internet presence is made up by a series of related papers and an active Goodreads page - so part of the map of the intellectual activity that has gone into the amateur work is visible.
We live in an age of institutional "scholarship" that is obsessed with peer review - a direct outcome of the outmoded organizational principles that rule university, such as its hyper insistance on various forms of quality control (e.g. "publish or perish"; time-sucking administrative obligations; unpaid editing or writing work that is not necessarily related to one's area of expertise or teaching) that stifles the actual jobs that one is officially responsible for. What is more, the quality even despite this quality control is suspect. My experience is that articles in recent decades reveal how comparatively little their authors seem to be reading (where possible, I look for older articles on a subject which often contain a surfeit of sources). So, these institutional systems are not only outmoded but also ineffective.
I write outmoded because in this century's sequel to time and motion management that is  characterized by managers, managers of managers, and consultants, there is actually quite a lot of stellar (popular) work on what kind of leadership and organizational principles work most effectively in the long term. Spoiler: they are not focused on quality control. One model that I have heard mentioned by three independent 'leaders of leaders' (and Harvard's Good Project) stresses the importance of alignment of mission or purpose. The mission is to be negotiated on a local level, the larger mission being clearly connected to each individual's mission.
A labor of love is bound to be connected to a mission. Also: it has the power to be free range. Publish or perish "scholarship" is more likely to resemble the force-fed sickly chick of mass production, caged in, existing on an unnatural schedule.
This is not to say that I do not believe in university. There is a lot to be said in favor of much of the convention behind respective disciplines. Also, universities should be places where expert knowledge keeps getting passed down, so also increases. Also advantageous is being exposed in real life to the people thinking intelligent ideas: one can see how they live, how they move through space and information &c., and that can be another kind of important instruction. Universities are supposed to be disinterested places of learning, so with greater creative, liberal agency. Etc.
But where the writing is forced, how can university education expect to survive?

Coda

We are so quick to discount mythology or lessons from other arts. But, as our author above who may be an amateur scholar pointed out so niftily, Aristotle had rejected Egyptian mythology because, unlike Plato, he had not been educated in it. My elaboration would explicitly state that these sources still convey lessons that could stand to be repeated and internalized by everyone. One such lesson is contained in the passages above: the more accurate understandings are those that are holistic, and good (this latter word is not as problematic as it seems: the sword-saint in another work writes that good reveals itself if one is committed to living according to it; dedication makes up for lack of understanding and knowledge). Vico argued about the importance of both particularly in connection with university education, but how much of university work today upholds these points?

Brushes: link 404s but tape brush by Pfefferminzchen; Horus eye png.

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

Chameleons with Feelings

Part of the problem being that we cannot step outside of ourselves and see where we are going in life, to avert mistakes, or to hold the course to where the weather is clement. What is the way, one may be wont to ask, particularly if one has been, as Horace advised writers, hurried into the middle of things (festinat et in media res). Thomas Carlyle has invoked Horace's counsel, writing, "rush forward and fear nothing" - which rather brings to mind the message Nike hides in some of its running clothes: "run fast, live fearless." Except Carlyle meant action, not speed. "Be not too careful for a subject; take the one you feel most interest in", he writes to an essayist. And if we are, to some extent, the authors of our lives, perhaps affinity, with its filmish Fin implying boundaries between here and there, is a good place to start.
In the Tao Te Ching (1), we are advised to not have desires if we are to see the Way, yet to have desires to see its manifestations - which Legge translates as "its outer fringe."
I understand this to mean that there is no formula for a life, because life itself is beyond definition. In (32) we learn, in both Legge's and Lau's translations: "Only when it is cut are there names. As soon as there are names one ought to know that it is time to stop" so that one might be "free from all risk of failure and error".
I was thinking about that when I listened to social psychologist Ellen Langer, talking about the impossibility of breaking free from the names or labels people construct for each other, and how freeing it is when a single person puts into practice the platitude that there is more than one way of looking at things (and thereby people) and realises that one way of defining a person ruins the definer's view of said person: for example, a rigid person can instead be seen as a stable person. In other words, (in John Conley's description of Madeleine de Scudéry's views), prejudice can be mistaken for knowledge. Names are like photographs: accurate for one second, but not necessarily in terms of the larger picture.
 

Today as I was running, I could no longer listen to contemporary music and had been overjoyed when I discovered that I could take the France Musique programme I was listening to on the road: rather aptly called "Le Passage de Midi". The four-part programme on the kiss is exquisitely curated, and possibly not coincidentally brings to mind the heightened sensibility of the précieuses. I found myself listening to a description of Scudéry's novelistic "Carte de Tendre" or, "Map of the Country of Tenderness" as the prolific Victorian French and English literary critic George Saintsbury translates it: a map of the territory suitors traverse to find their way to love: routes leading through the villages of letters and trinkets, or through villages of patience and faithfulness - hopefully never straying into the Lake of Indifference. A metaphysical map! One thinks of Dante's voyage.
Scudéry wrote of this map in her novel Clélie, a roman à clef in which important personages of the day were disguised in classical roles, not quite as long as her other novel Artamène, with over 2 million words.
Scudéry, like Giambattista Vico later, expressed philosophical differences with Descartes for his overestimation of reason. She even wrote The History of Two Chameleons to disprove his theory that animals were soulless machines. John Conley, in his SEP article on her notes that her interpretation of the world was not only empirical but also "sympathetic" and "aesthetic": she attributes emotions to her chameleons and notes the beauty of their motions and skin.
What does she say in response to the Delphic maxim γνῶθι σεαυτόν? That the "noetic agent" can reach such knowledge only if it can reveal the need for moral conversion. One thinks back to the chameleon, and the changing names of the Way. Except this is no relativism: there is a map, and if not drawn exclusively according to Cartesian introspection, it does have borders delineated by virtue and vice.
To have desire and yet to relinquish it (as per Tao 1): rather like Scudéry's topography of the inclined suitor that can traverse villages, but is surrounded by the dangerous sea of passion, uncharted at the fringes, dipping off into the unknown. "The way is to the world as the River and Sea are to rivulets and streams." "Knowing when to stop one can be free from danger." (Tao 32)

Postscript: Saintsbury's commentary on Clélie is most charming. He writes in his History of the French Novel that he could expand the outline of that novel "(and the process would not be very painful to me) into an abstract as long as that of Cyrus; but 'It Cannot Be.'" He ends the section on the novel writing, "If I were sent to twelve months’ imprisonment of a mild description, and allowed to choose a library, I should include in it  … Clélie … By reading slowly and ‘savouring’ the process, I should imagine that, with one’s memories of other things, they might be able to last for a year. And it would be one of the best kind of fallows for the brain."
Affinities...
Scudéry herself writes, "We are born with the inclinations which heaven was pleased to give us, but we enter into the possession of praise or blame only at the moment we begin to act through reason. Up to this point, nothing is truly up to us; after that point, we are responsible for everything we do, whether good or evil. Therefore, it is up to us to see what inclinations we should follow and those we should change. Having known the true path of glory and virtue, we should walk in it despite all the repugnance we might find within ourselves."
Desire with detachment?

Brush: Misprinted type.

My Charlatan, Your Writer?

I have recently come to enjoy the apposition, particularly if separated by punctuation - and have Anne Carson's "The Life of Towns" to thank for this. If there are two people standing side by side, in a portrait, this does not necessarily mean they have been equated, even if something has been unified within the artifice of the frame. As one may be standing next to any manner of thing or person today, one may find the application of the frame quite amusing. But I digress. One apposition in this post will again be: Plato's Socratic dialogue, Protagoras, which I am still thinking about.
The section of the Protagoras I am specifically interested in is the end, when Socrates says: "I like the Prometheus of your fable ... I take Promethean thought continually for my own life when I am occupied with all these questions" (361d) because it turns out the Protagoras reference reappears in the work by a later sophist, Aelius Aristedes, titled "To Plato, In Defense of Oratory".
The Prometheus of Protagoras' fable saves man from Epimetheus' lack of wisdom in squandering all the "stock of properties" or "equipment" (from Lamb's translation) on animals, not leaving enough for man (320d-321c). Prometheus comes to find man, "naked, unshod, unbedded, unarmed; and already the destined day was come, whereon man like the rest should emerge from earth to light." It was Prometheus who sought the preservation of man and stole fire from Hepheastus and wisdom from Athena - being unable to steal civic wisdom, as this was found in the dwelling-place of Zeus (the two other gifts being in the buildings belonging to the respective gods; 321c-e).
We note that Plato writes: "Prometheus, through Epimetheus' fault, later on ... stood his trial for death", which seems to foreshadow Socrates' own death, which was also in part due to civic law, which Socrates respected and so drank the poison. We know Socrates respected the law because of what he said in the Crito: one is "to suffer, if [one's country] commands you to suffer, in silence, and if she orders you to be scourged or imprisoned or if she leads you to war to be wounded or slain, her will is to be done, and this is right, and you must not give way or draw back or leave your post, but ... everywhere,  you must do whatever the state, your country, commands, or must show her by persuasion what is really right" (51b-c).

We note Plato's words, that Prometheus stood trial for a fault not his own. It is the fault in the civic arts, and is curiously linked to persuasion, which is the immediate domain of the sophists, as opposed to the more distant and lofty attempt to reach truth by philosophers through dialectics, discourse. We note Socrates saying, "I take Promethean thought continually for my own life when I am occupied with all these questions" - questions of whether virtue can be taught. If it could be taught, wouldn't justice always be what is right? In which case, Socrates would not have stood trial.
The Protagoras ends with Socrates saying to the sophist that he would like to reconsider the issue: "lest perchance your Epimetheus beguile and trip us up in our investigation [361d] as he overlooked us in your account of his distribution". It seems also a play on words, because Epimetheus means afterthought; Prometheus, forethought. The Epimetheus tale tripped them up because it was used by Protagoras to illustrate that all men could be taught justice - which in the tale was not brought by Prometheus, who could not steal it, but by Hermes, who asked Zeus whether he should give it to some men or to all, "'To all,' replied Zeus" (322d).

This tale was retold by Aelius Aristedes in "To Plato, In Defense of Oratory". In his telling, Hermes does not "divide oratory as if it were a distribution of the festival fund, so that all in turn might share it ... but to select the best ... and to hand the gift to them, so that ... they could save themselves and others." Although like in the Protagoras, this gift brings organization to cities and political science, here, as seen from the quotation, it was given but to a few. What a clever answer to Plato, except that, like Plato's criticism in Gorgias, speech is presented as omnipotent: Aristides writes, "from that time [of being given oratory man] has had the power to use the things on earth as he wishes, making reason his shield". Though he does write that through this gift, man "brought thank offerings to the gods, the initial ones being the first fruits of their speeches, in which, reason proves, even now the gods much delight, because first from that source they came to recognize the gods."
An article about sophists by George Duke at the IED distinguishes philosophy from sophistry through "the mercenary character of the sophists and their overestimation of the power of speech". The mercenary, "subordinating the pursuit of truth to worldly success", is contrasted with the full-time and passionate pursuit of wisdom. "The philosopher, then, considers rational speech as oriented by a genuine understanding of being or nature. ... The sophist uses the power of persuasive speech to construct or create images of the world and is thus a kind of ‘enchanter’ and imitator." Words are so important because actions, for the philosopher, are to be consistent with them, and "emanate" from life experience. Duke nonetheless suggests that the difference between sophistry and philosophy is less methodological and theoretical than an "ethical orientation" in which "the sophist is likely to lead to a certain kind of philosophising ... which attempts to master nature... rather than understand it as it is" viewing knowledge as a finished product, transmittable to all. He concludes that the philosopher differs from the sophist, "in terms of the choice for a way of life that is oriented by the pursuit of knowledge as a good in itself while remaining cognisant of the necessarily provisional nature of this pursuit".

Now that I have recognized that even today there is criticism of academic sophistry or charlatanism, I am noticing it everywhere, and not just in the obvious places. There seems to be no middle ground, both sides arguing that their side is not understood wherever it is criticised. Refraining from comment on the most recent example of criticism, I shall focus on Dalrymple's assessment of Žižek because of the conclusion he draws, which parallels a helpfully conciliatory point made by Duke, namely, that the sophists made genuine contributions to philosophy. Dalrymple writes, "I am not against charlatans; I even admire them if they are amiable, as of course the vast majority of them are (an unamiable charlatan is almost an oxymoron)", and concludes that life without charlatans would be rather dull. I would like to suggest that without the sophists, many of Plato's dialogues would not exist. There is something to be said about apposition...
But I will conclude by writing about writing - because when I wrote that I see criticism of sophistry everywhere, I meant that I even found it in a 1923 essay, echoing views still circulating today, by F. L. Pattee called, "The Present Stage of the Short Story" (which, we note, predates even Woolf's A Room of One's Own, which laid out the impractical nature of creative writing). "At least one college professor of literature has proved the value of his short-story course by cold figures: a given number in his last class had a given number of stories accepted by the magazines within six months with a total cash return of a given number of dollars. From this known data it was easy to compute ... the approximate cash value of a first story" etc. "Short-story writing is therefore ... a handwork vocation to be acquired by  mere ... mastery of technique. Moreover, it is taught ... as a newly discovered literary form ... Why study Milton and Matthew Arnold when one can take a literary course breathing the very life of one's own day? Read O. Henry and ... learn the rules ... with words to market 'worth ten cents per.'" It sounds like sophistry - but sophists had some good ideas.
As a final aside on writing, the Aristides link went Livius.org, authored by Jona Lendering. If you have not yet seen his AHM, do take a look at the recent posts, and consider donating to the kickstarter campaign for the magazine.

Magazine in background: Marie Claire Idees. Brush: pastel from pugly pixel.

Science and Writing

"The place scientific writing might claim among the corpus of imaginative writing zoned off as literature by unstable rules for admission and rejection is a strong one, allowing for inevitable airs of condescension from the protectors of letters," writes Guy Davenport in Geography of the Imagination. I was thinking about this last week as I read through writing by Einstein, Russell—even Edison's diaries. There is a practical side to their works, like Russell writing that he would disagree with philosophers who think that words should not be connected with facts but remain in a pure, autonomous world. This pragmatism is often reflected in some acknowledgement of the golden mean, as in Russell writing: “I am convinced that intelligence, patience, and eloquence can, sooner or later, lead the human race out of its self imposed tortures provided it does not exterminate itself meanwhile.” 
Davenport's interest in concrete scientific writing is in its verbal precision, which he says goes disregarded due to a current "delinquency" among teachers and students who dismiss this literary quality as "scientific jargon". 
Verbal precision means having seen something to begin with, and to see is to avoid generalisations and approach the specific; to look at something until its qualities become apparent. We learn from Davenport that some people call this being "scientific." Which is perhaps fair, because this was implied in much Victorian literature, including George Eliot's Middlemarch, in which seeing with precision is associated with science:

Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader's match-making will show a play of minute causes...

This "microscopic" viewing has its precedent, say in Lucretius in The Nature of Things, who sees not through a microscope but through inference:  "Yet no one saw how sank the moisture in, / Nor how by heat off-driven. Thus we know, / That moisture is dispersed about in bits / Too small for eyes to see."
Interestingly, both Middlemarch and Nature point to mysterious things, too, the seeing penetrates through lives to death and returns in narrative.

But there is more to reading scientific prose: it also points to achievement. Both the achievement of seeing something through to a given result (the discovery of a new law or its application) and achievement on a more general level.
One excerpt I have returned to has made it to the wikipedia page of the scientist Jovan Cvijic, who many may know from his role in the Paris Peace Conference. He writes in The Forming of Science Workers:

You should get used to constant thinking about a problem, work, profession until you find a solution. There are bright moments, especially bright nights, which are rare; where you can find an answer to a question or come up with a research plan. That time of spiritual lucidity and creativity should be put to use, and not thinking about rest according to that ordinary human, oriental laziness. That does not hurt the body, and if does hurt, the body exists in order to be spent properly.

Writing teachers expend great effort trying to impart to students that seeing is a way of life if a writer is to have a store of original observation to draw from, but the excerpt above expresses this idea so tidily. Generally speaking, scientists value "simple language"—and there are many who write in this language.
One scientist very cleanly wrote about the similarities between science and poetry: both seeking the "essence" of things, the group of facts that despite disparities is shown to be similar to something else, and how this similarity informs the facts in that group, revealing a discovery. He writes that while poetry then proceeds to dress up this essence to make it more impressive, science pursues the truth. Yet poetry can also discover truth, he argues, citing Lucretius' work as a precursor to Einstein's discovery of the interdependency of time and space.
It may be that scientific writing and literature are more similar than dissimilar, and that by considering scientific writing even as a non scientist, one may learn a useful lesson in precision and how to see. But to end this post on a grain of salt form the sea, here's Edison applying his powers of observation: "Fish seem to be rather conservative around this bay, one seldom catches enough to form the fundamental basis for a lie.  ... Everybody lost patience at the stupidity of the fish in not coming forward promptly to be murdered." 

Brush: Pugly Pixel.

Experiments in Change

In 1968, Leonard Nimoy in his eponymous album Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock's Music from Outer Space, changed a line at the end of Max Ehrmann's "Desiderata" from "Be Cheerful" to "Be Careful."  What an apt amendment to the text to reflect the change of man as he reaches beyond the atmosphere of childhood.  Caution is certainly learned through expectations that are molded through experience, though the latter is often a source of fear and as people get older, they become more fearful than disinterestedly cautious.  A friend once wrote that the young ought not be dismissed because they are less full of fear and that precisely because of that they are important to us. The thought could be extended to say that the young seem freer to experiment; the truth being that we can all continue to experiment so long as we are alive but few of us want to bother with the oblique glances of the Joneses.  Experimentation can be rather necessary, particularly if one finds oneself in a situation in which one's hands are tied.
Consider this ever-frequent scenario where one may even take on a mercy job with a deadline and not be sent the material, like copy, in a timely fashion.  Linguistic and copyright standards are further infringed by the speed and thoughtlessness of a certain kind of communication that began with the facsimile, which means make similar; it's other appellation, telecopying, seems the harbinger of today's activities that take the prefix 're', e.g. retweet.
Instead of becoming angry at irresponsible people who are not entirely honest and disregard one's requests to honour terms of work, one might wish to read about the state of the industry.  A gem of a resource for anyone working with the printed word is "For Editors" at writersandeditors.com.  Among the links posted there and repeated several times down the page is the once-popular aphorism, "Cost. Quality. Speed. Pick any two."  Good work takes time, so what if one has no time?  I propose that out of such unhappy situations, one merely claim to those who question one's poor output that the job was one's very own Persian carpet, and that one has a collection of such (to reference the practice in the weaving those carpets to intentionally leave or make a mistake).
Much can be said about the need as a professional to refuse any work that will not let one's talents shine through in order to establish a good reputation.  But it is becoming a platitude among some today that to stand in such a light is a privilege because where most people are standing, economic necessity is the star of the play and its curtains for them.
Silly word play is one thing but it is another to recognise the number of advocates for relaxing rules (e.g. retiring restrictive relative clause distinctions); some such advocates are esteemed editors, such as John E. McIntyre, whose now pens a Baltimore Sun column, You Don't Say.  Rules change and are therefore not to be reverenced but regarded.  It seems curmudgeons, of which I am sometimes one in my professional life (this blog is recreation), need to get with the program.

In general, experimenting allows for more leeway in getting the strange combination of components to a life in harmony.  We do not all learn at the same time; one may admire Victorian polymaths but this admiration cannot form one's foot to fit that crystal shoe.  The crystal may always have been, anyway, not so much in that which one knows, per se, but how willing one is to engage with those multiple aspects of life that have something to teach.  The experimenter becomes excited by a problem, wondering what on earth all that ugliness will have to impart.
Bertrand Russell in The Conquest of Happiness recommends that one think through all the terrible consequences one can foresee in one's worries until one eventually becomes bored by those thoughts and therefore entirely uninterested when such worries recur.  He generously shares anecdotes from his own life when he was not at his best, such as his early lectures, which incidentally helped him develop a technique of invention that involved thinking deeply about a subject, not thinking about it at all for some time, and then returning to write a lecture about it; the ideas would fall into place and the only time he made any changes was when the idea was not clearly expressed.  He admits to having come to the wrong conclusions about some things, and it would be hard not to notice that even in that book is support for ideas that have since fallen out of fashion.  But such is dwarfed by his acclaim in other areas, for his having, generally speaking, a great mind.  Russell also reminds readers to put their own lives in perspective: no one is the centre of the universe, in fact, everyone is almost incredibly minute.
One can truly feel like a speck of sand and feel bound to circumstance not of one's own design; despite all one's work, one realises that one depends on waves if one is to get out to sea; one may reach a moment when it seems futile to impose one's will on that landscape.  Things will not be the way one wants them to be, expensive mistakes can be made, deceitful people encountered, one may even stagnate for years and be tempted to believe such is deserved, but the impositions are also those restrictions that the imagination sometimes loves like ivy takes to wood lattice; expensive mistakes (that may cost time) are easy to remember; deceitful people are cause for the stories of most panache; stagnation is an illusion so long as one is aging and also there is a beauty in the slow life if one can train oneself to see it.  I will never forget as one of those small children sent to summer school going to an office to drop one activity in favour of another and thinking the organizer had little time so immediately made my request.  "And good morning?" he asked, and I burned with embarrassment.  All these Persian carpets!  Good morning, world.

Brush: Galaxy by GIMP.

Middlemarch and Science

A while back, I mentioned I would do a post on the science in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Sadly, I read the book online, as many of us have to do for whatever reasons, and I now find the pagination of my notes no longer corresponds to the versions of the book I have bookmarked - which is to say, some of the notes are missing. This incomplete post will be but a casual assembly of passages about observation, related scientific claims on knowledge and the shortcomings therein due to the fallibility of the human medium; some examples of science used as metaphor; what science is contrasted with and two little notes about morals and narrative.
The conflation of science with the less empirically clear human subject is most obviously illustrated in the figures of doctors, of whom there are quite a few in the novel: ranging from those with little knowledge but with the tact of what to say to their patients to the ambitious and educated newcomer, Lydgate. Science, particularly through him, is shown to be up against a society that checks scientific zeal by promoting the unqualified or stymieing the advance of an impartial practice with local personal histories (106). Society in this novel is often symbolised by furniture - such as the kind Lydgate feels compelled to purchase to show his birth and to satisfy his spoiled wife, but also in offhand comments, such as, owning the 'right' furniture allows one to cultivate extreme opinions (256).
At the same time, science penetrates the language of the novel, forming part of many a metaphor. Love has symptoms (85) and is the also name of "many wonderful mixtures in the world" (221); the "hidden soul" is to be "interpreted" (117); mistakes can work at a man "like a recognised chronic disease" (437).
The theme of "watching keenly" (68) is applied throughout the novel, a paean to observation. In this way, invention which is the "eye of research" is described most scientifically as the "minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish" (120). Men are observed as if they were animals in the wild or natural phenomena, and it is noted, for example, that to see a man for the first time in his home is to recognise his "changed aspect" (123), just as the way one sees a person is not the same during courtship as it is through close companionship (143). Like the biologist reaches understanding through his observation through a microscope lens, the struggle to gain resolve through vision gains communicating power (274). It is close observation that reveals to the narrator that "controlled self-consciousness of manner ... is the  expensive substitute for simplicity" (319).

At the same time, attentive watching is not always possible for the fallible human. I will cite in full my favourite passage illustrating this point (which I cited here before):

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all  ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the  squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the  other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well  wadded with stupidity.  However, Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to  state the cause she could only have done so in some such general  words as I have already used: to have been driven to be more particular would have been like trying to give a history of the lights and shadows; angered by syllables from lips of near observer (143).

Other problems with humans include their quickness to imagine more than fact (147); ability to go to lengths in things without anything coming of it (203); seeking justification instead of knowledge (242); prejudices. "Prejudices,  like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle —  solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as  the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness" (321). Equally as harmful is the ego:

It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your  candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent (194)

Sight is also blurred where characters do not account for the multiple dimensions of the human character and human life (it is not only about scientific experiment in laboratories). Human weakness and failure (such as checked ambition) is derogatorily relegated to Troubadour poetry (105). The complexities of science are given more serious attention than those of love, which Lydgate foolishly thinks he had already learned about through literature and male conversation (119).
 

By contrast, Eliot depicts knowledge as "filling the vast spaces planked out of ... sight by ... worldly ignorance" (104). Just like metaphors, this knowledge is to be far-reaching, pervasive, "like gas light; learning whole and parts" (107). Dorothea's consciousness is depicted as "reaching forward ... towards the fullest truth, the least partial good" (149 - vs. anger and despondency). Miscellaneousness is presented as making the mind "flexible with constant comparison" at least in one character, who was saved from, "seeing the world's ages as a set of box-like partitions without vital connection" (156).
Thus it is still possible in this novel that is so much about science to nonetheless breach classical topics such as goodness, described as being "of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy" (237). On a side note: surely this is why Socrates was so interested in discoursing with youth: to attempt to help them protect this goodness that is harder to call upon later in life if allowed to lie dormant. Similarly, Eliot writes in defense of exploring "low" topics - which we also see in Dickens' novels given primacy (e.g. in the fuming, oily, noisy trains). Eliot's apology is one to do with narrative: a narrative which we have seen is further encompassing than the restraints of science, restrained by the narrowness of man:

PARABLES whatever has  been or is to be narrated by me about low people, may be ennobled  by being considered a parable ; so that if any bad habits and ugly  consequences are brought into view, the reader may have the relief of  regarding them as not more than figuratively ungenteel, and may feel  himself virtually in company with persons of some style (251).

Regarding what we said about the furniture of society at the beginning, and knowing that the scientific 'project' runs throughout the book if also revealing its shortcomings, the offhand remark that ugly furniture may be dignified by being lifted into the serene light of science (194) is worth meditating on in terms of the 'project' of some modern art and what it loses without the parable and by not addressing the high/low duality.

Magazine in background: Marie Claire Maison. 
Brush: Lace by webgoddess at DeviantART.

心

I dream in dragons, which I took to in my heart or was it mind - this 心 that can also stand for nervous and spirit. But these were not any dragons, but literary ones and not from stories but where the dragon is symbol for the embellishment of the written word: carved and engraved like so many jade creatures of the heavens (in the East, the dragon is auspicious).
This is a faraway preamble to 文心雕龍, the fifth century Chinese book on literature, translated in English as The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, which is not quite the same as the alternative: The Heart of Literature and the Carving of the same. For the book also argues for a kind of writing which is not entirely produced by the logical mind. For example, a writer is to let inspiration flow according to the Way-wherein things issue forth from nothingness. This may bring associations of ex-nihilo wherein man is the microcosm enacting an aspect of creation, in an example of what Robert Neville calls "parallel sensitivities". And in the adaptation of nothing, to return to the Tao Te Ching, we might think of sensitivities in a different way, the sensitive perception of sympathies, which is not necessarily a rational recognition    but a natural one. The author of 文心雕龍, Liu Xie, argues in this way that the writer is to be true to his or her personality.
The recognition of similarity, or parallelism, is to emerge from within if it is to be natural. We could say that in this way, the writer is to feel and think for his or herself, seeing connections where others might not. The parallelism could be described as figures of speech as much as of thought-and as the former are released from their literal confines, they require imagination to be formed, so we may now argue about where the imagination resides, is it found in the mind? What is inspiration? I put it in 心. It has to be, at least in Taoism, somewhere outside of the rational mind: the Way is had only when it is not grasped.
After Liu Xie writes of parallelism (ch. 35), he addresses polysemy and multivalence (ch. 40), which he describes as the "hidden beauties" of a text, "comprehended indirectly through secret overtones, which unobtrusively reveal hidden brilliance ...  such that common readers will have unlimited responses, and connoisseurs will never grow tired of it." The well-written text resonates.

Yet for such hidden correspondences and parallels to emerge, it happens that the dragon is also carved by a rational hand. The character 文 itself first meant "natural beauty", then the Confucian understanding of "culture", and finally "literature". This etymology is indicative of the traditional set of opposites thought to form literature: literature itself is opposed to raw material; sentiment to the decorative; reality in a work to its embellishment; tradition to what is new (etc. - it is noted that while the writer is invited to novelty s/he is warned that newness without reliance on tradition is but trend). In fact, parallelism itself reflects cosmic order as all natural things have their own parallels. Written examples emerged first spontaneously, later occurring more logically, with comparison and contrast its best type.
By way of summary, one might wish to speak of what is at the heart of literature here. "Parallel sensitivities" between natural and written beauty.
In this way, 文心雕龍 supports at once an ordered universe or may be compared to Lucretius' Nature, depending on who is writing and when. In this way, too, it is possible for some to assemble books to review under the header reading is not always good for us - with the tagline: "Somewhere along the line, an orthodoxy hardened: ... reading ... will make you healthier, stronger, kinder. But is that true?" - while others work for low pay, after prior and diametrical work experience, due to their passion for books as particularly promising for those who wish to call themselves literate. It is why, according to said review, one reviewed book's author can dismiss Middlemarch as "a melancholy dissection of the resignations that attend middle age, the paths untrodden and the choices unmade" [may be quoted out of context] while others might see it as the literary paean to science, wherein the life is taken to microscope for some moments. What does the data say? That the modern-day Theresa may be unseen except for her reflecting light in the faces that surround her: that is the modern spiritual trial, to keep some kind of inspiration to persist despite all the pessimism and uncertainty.
In any case, if one is to craft words as dragons, that fertile beast, according to 文心雕龍, there is to be balance to all oppositions. Heart and mind. 心.
(I first blogged about 心 here.)

Brush. Magazine.

Ringing Rocks

That you can go the length without anything coming of it - these words are associated with the tragically drawn scholar figure, Casaubon, in George Eliot's Middlemarch, to which I will soon devote a post. And that theme keeps recurring like so many hollow shudders in the different muted mirrored views of the various folk around him.
Can we say the same about the artistic endeavour? I think somehow that it is safer, because the artist may always defend himself by saying that he is following his own vision. In proper scholarly work it is hardly justifiable to go one's way without checking what others, and now we consider others in other countries, have said before. Except - if we accept George Eliot's implication in Middlemarch that the scientific in the humanities is the ability to see comparisons, it is perhaps not enough to have the dry logical map.  Comparison furnishes relevance; it is what kind literature teachers show of seemingly distant novels and insightful history teachers reveal of different ages and mores: all part of the ongoing story of what we're doing here, how we're making do with what we have, which also includes, to quote a book title, wishes, lies, and dreams.
Going the length with something coming of it may mean nothing more than engaging given material and not abstracting out of it. William Carlos Williams' no ideas but in things. Just like Rilke's poems after his trip to Russia with Andreas-Salomé: all of that spirituality (the "fourth dimension" of the "Slavic soul" that he saw precisely because he sought the inner intuition) began to get concentrated into things in The Book of Pictures and later Dinggedichte, which is rather like how Kandinsky saw the icon as a way to see pictures not just as a flat surface. Icons, described by Julia Kristeva as not revealed in the gaze alone, but affecting the entire affectivity by inscribing, not manifesting, divine presence. Like a promissory note? So it is that by extension any thing may be seen as the concentration of ideas, some better than others. To go the length is to search for the thing that resonates. Perhaps one will not find it. It hides. Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ.

But I feel bold despite that hollow shudder in Middlemarch that is the memento mori for the thinking mind. Socrates comes to the saddened thinker wondering at their fate: at all of the work which may have been the wrong work. He says two things in the Phaedrus that may give direction. One is his answer to Phaedrus' question of whether he believes in the myth said to have taken place near by, when he says that he accepts the customary belief about them because the more scientific explanations "very clever and laborious and not altogether enviable" used to explain the myth away require much time for leisure which he does not have, for he has yet to follow the Delphic inscription and know himself (229c-230a). He has demarcated for himself his line of study and in this way seems quite contemporary.
It is less contemporary, however, to keep connecting the self to one's inquiry - but this is what promises relevance: for in this way one is bound to be relevant to at least one. And this is also what often seems missing from contemporary scholarship: not the I of pride but the I of human limitation, like Auerbach ending Mimesis by explaining that there were no notes because he had written his work where he had no access to adequate libraries and literature - yet had he been able to access myriad related works "I might never have reached the point of writing". In other words, he writes that the book was produced in part by a situation, his situation (for how many minds could write that book - and without the relevant literature?)

Socrates also presents the doubting thinker with the comparison between being in one's right mind and madness. It is the latter that he connects to love, poetry, and a philosophy of happiness often referred to as the tenets necessary for the good life. Socrates says, "he who without the divine madness comes to the doors of the Muses, confident that he will be a good poet by art, meets with no success, and the poetry of the sane man vanishes into nothingness before that of the inspired madmen." (245a)
It is the suggestion of inspiration that is so concretely described by reference to the Muses, also this larger tradition of inspiration as being a visitation. Rilke hearing a voice in the wind in Trieste giving way to The Duino Elegies. Socrates drawing on the crickets in the Phaedrus. To listen - for what? The mad idea, the one that at first might not make any sense. Like how people who think they are moving away from their dream actually end up getting closer to it. Has the pursuit called you?
I had an answer to that question a few times before. Despite that, there are times when it seems I, or anyone else, could be Mr. Casaubon so long as we have not met with tenure or have not made our name in any number of ways. Judging by the ending, Woody Allen's Rome with Love seems to be about how even the person who has made a name struggles to retain their relevance. Anyone might be Casaubon. 
Again and again one might but have to listen for that song and seek some degree of humility, as per the finishing lines of Pindar's first Olympian ode: "For me the Muse tends her mightiest shaft of courage. Some men are great in one thing, others in another; but the peak of the farthest limit is for kings. Do not look beyond that."
And for the times of subjection, Rilke writes of the soul that "carries something like a secret playroom" generating endless and individual freedom despite "crushing conditions". The canvas is either blank or when it is painted, behind it may be that secret playroom suggesting the next painting. It is my opinion that the antidote to the Casaubon syndrome is seeking the relevance of a given matter, humility before it, and allowing ideas to come forth, no matter how mad or seemingly unrelated at first glance. The latter is one of the rules of creation, which is not the same as mindful emending, which may follow if there is something of quality to emend: the secret of things that resonate with one's rocky core, not hardened through obstinacy as to not be lithophonic furniture.  

Brush. Image on tablet.

Play It Out

At the intersection of three texts I have been reading in the past few days, a clearing has emerged for the incongruity in life - through Baudelaire's "Modernity," Robert Coles' The Call of Stories, and Lucian's The Double Indictment (via). The latter is a Menippean satire - a genre Bakhtin connects to the carnivalesque and polyphony and addresses philosophical and contemporary questions, fantastically, madly. I wish to borrow from the form, to write a glimpse into some of the absurdities of this age. I was given a crystal egg once, and the world would be shrunk and distorted within it, while it released light through its other angles. What is the image of a life, those inversions, or all that light.
Cast: Thumosius, Logosius, An Ad., Dr. Coles, Baudelaire, Silence, Bob Dylan, Gardener, Virtue
1.
Thum: Ah! You tell me that I have been plagiarising when I repeat others' words before I have crafted them into my own. I was only repeating them to myself in a non-academic setting. Hypocrites! Did you think the author could trademark the idea, the perceptions nascent in us all? Truth belongs to none, it belongs to all, for the moment it is mentioned, we see we knew it all along, though some deny it. I will take your words if they are of any use, and I will begin to internalise them.
Baud: Take, my austere poet in studious moods, to the Muse not to others' formulations, listen to Pan, and yes, he was given versified speech in Theocritus' Sicilian paradise, but repeat not those words but the song you imagine as you picture him.
2.
Log: It is not enough. Inspiration is not enough, it requires an education.
Bob: You’ve gone to the finest school all right, But you know you only used to get juiced in it, And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street, And now you find out you’re gonna have to get used to it.
Ad: Make it in life by entrancing them with your eyelashes. 5xbigger. You need manga eyelashes. 5xbetter. Your eyes will not be the same. Your eyes must not be the same. You and your eyelashes - longer than anyone's.
Baud: Everything that is 'material' mirrors the spiritual reality from which it derives.
Virt: My emotions are not the mascaraed lyre. I wish for man to shine past artifice. I wish to speak in resonances, increase the amplitude of the different phases of good, tune everything else into my good music.
3.
Sil: ---. (It sounds ancient.)

4.
Baud: Virtue, can you hear me? I address you now, remove those awful wax earplugs. The man of today wears noise cancelling headphones, which he also uses in airports.
Ad: Fly the friendly skies. Fine print: we are not responsible in the eventuality of war.
Thum: It is easy for the head to be in the clouds. I wish to speak rationally though it is not in my nature, still I feel, I intuit. Here is the fortune cookie message of me as mantis in the length of a tweet. It is not enough to hear the words if one can hear them. We need the application of interpreters as much as doctors. It pains me to keep up with the age. I am out of breath. My heart pounds, but not for the man in the lab coat but the science in the man. Once upon a time, I looked much at the stars and Discoursed. I was a student then and I think I was smarter then but now I am fighting to keep time.
Bob: Gather 'round people, Wherever you roam,  And admit that the waters,  Around you have grown.
Virt: I cannot find myself in the media.
Thum: I'm calling a doctor.
5.
Dr. Coles: I've been here all along. You spoke of students: they are the test of any lesson that takes itself seriously. Who is the teacher, then? Whose is the lesson? I agree with you Thumosius that truth cannot, in essence, be monopolised, rather is only more precisely or confusedly stated. My student doctors who I learn from have said that the people in greatest need were hanging on for dear life to some words as if unction.
Gard: I heard that man say life. It's whad I try to give seeds, whad I see that people have no time for. Lemme try to 'splain, though I ain't been'a school and words 'nt my friends. The plants 're my friends, I talk to them some, I talk 'n talk and they grow 'n grow, but when's the last time you saw your neighbour talk to them neighbour? When's the last time you saw them take it slow? Heh, they think an apple goes automatic innna store ev'ry time they wanna eat one. Those apples take time to grow. They don't grow in stores, they don't grow on d'mand like teevee. Even if'eh did, I'm no fool'a understand that'd wreck a man's mind. He needs'a see thin's take it slow, teachin' like.

6.
Baud: He began by being an observer of life, and only later set himself the means of expressing it. This was natural for the gardener but so unnatural for the city man.
Ad: Get more for your money.
Baud: Ah! An advertisement! It is the right and privilege of my circumstance! I am going to distill it in my art.
Ad: Jingos aside, I used art before it could use me.
Baud: You have seeped yourself too thoroughly into an algorithm and lost all memory of the present. You have renounced all rights and privileges offered by circumstance, and are damned to perpetuate the falsities of the ungiving.
7.
Virt: Art does not happen without me. The ad is but a copy of a copy - and it calls itself art! It has but assumed the garb of the Surreal and Dada. You empty dress. And yet you stand so proud with your dollar signs. The mysterious element of beauty of an age - it is me! I cannot be stored, like a mummy, or like perfume, you must search for me always anew, every day, being careful along the way not to slip into the abyss, the lack of me, or my extreme.
Dr. Coles: Virtue, you are hard to grasp and not popular among university faculty. Or ambitious students. And yet to practice you, like suppressing the urge to cut office hours short to get rid of that haughty, insistent energy of certain youths, brings rich anecdotes. One student said: "Novelists have not given us the answers, but they've told us that any day an answer might arrive - and that how we spend that day will help shape how that answer we're going to find." Virtue, he could have been talking about how to prepare for you.

8.
Thum: We are speaking as if we could focus on one goal only in the multiplicity of days and all their moods and meanings. Virtue stands behind the screen, while on it, things chance to amplify the noble. Except there are forms that are muddled or become muddled by becoming one with emptiness, which is not fulfilling, but has tormented the plot of novels that then became exciting. I feel this like one feels the swell in the ocean. I think sometimes I am blind and just feeling my way out of these words, this confusion, into a clearing. But again and again I am tested, every day, every moment. It is possible to say wrong words when I really mean to gloss over others' wrong words, and relieve them, keeping only those I want to use or collect like Mementos.
Dr. Coles: Books teach us that we are not alone in this life experience.
Gard: Books! I've loved, cried, laughed, had child'n, watched the times'a year, and last year's bugs, an' in fall, that one night when I heard the cuckoo sin'in' an' smelled the leaves, those gold lines of sun on my fields - I don't need no books to be alive.
Baud: You may be art, man of the cultivated vegetation. I was out looking for symbols today. They are always changing.
9.
Log: I say. These people really need to be clearer, and fully develop an idea before darting off to the next.
Thum: The heart wishes to play mad mantis and leave empty spaces for the readers to enjoy their own flight of thought.
Log: You are so irresponsibly contemporary. Are you even thinking through what you are saying?
Baud: Each man carries upon his back an enormous Chimera.
Log: The mind is to be applied to what it can solve. If mystery exists, we must weigh it.
Thum: I do not know the meaning of the individual life and miss myself from my school days. Is it enough to read what you want to and write what you want to for an audience of three, or -
Ad: Earn more. Call now.
Baud: I grow rich in the Ideal. Only it can be packaged in myriad ways to be pieced together.

Brush.