11:2,3 The precision of numbers here certainly tempts one to figure out exactly what it means. I recall the religion of my upbringing managing to make it all about them and how awesome they were to have the only possible interpretation of anything ever.
11:4-6 Again, far too specific to resist prying just a little. The whole vision has the flavour of a dream that one remembers in vivid detail. Just two nights ago I awoke with the lyrics and melody of an entirely original song still lingering in my mind. What did it mean? And what did it mean that a man named Iain rode toward me on a blue ATV, and wanted to take pictures of me on the beach while I did a headstand? The vibrancy, clarity, and specificity of this dream beg for interpretation . . . as do John's.
11:7-9 And as tempting as it is to leave it there, to assume that John's vision meant no more or less than my own, I can't resist sampling some modern interpretations of it--much as I would if I were reading Blake or Coleridge. No doubt the things these men saw were only preternaturally vivid altered states, and not divinely inspired visions of the future. Still, what if?
A trip down the rabbit hole reveals a lack of scholarly agreement on the topic of the 1260 days, as well as the identities of the two witnesses. Many seem to feel that the latter represents a time of papal rule, starting in the time of Justinian. But though the beginning of such a period can be supported, it seems a stretch to say that the time of papal authority ended, well, ever. Likewise, there is a general consensus that the most likely identities of these witnesses are Moses and Elijah, but such an interpretation seems meaningless. Are those two meant to return in some way, or is this a reflection of past events after all? I even went so far as to choke down the bile and review the propaganda with which I was raised. It remains as I remembered: "We are the two witnesses, cause we are awesome and right about everything."
I am reminded again about my particularly vivid dream from the other night. Taken as a whole, it is all fairly inscrutable. But the individual elements, the source of each of those is readily identified. I did indeed know a fellow named Iain. And the scene of the dream too, although unconnected with that fellow in reality, was also a real place that I remember. In fact, everything in the dream came from my real experience, or something close to it. It is merely the juxtaposition that muddles them. Is it such a stretch to suppose that John, in a dreaming or otherwise altered state, mashed the time period that he likely knew well from Daniel up with other, unrelated but similarly flavoured elements? This is very much how dreams work.
11:13 And John would have also had memories of Earthquakes in Jerusalem during his lifetime (33 AD).
11:15-18 This verse presents problems for all of the literal interpretations of the 1260 days (years, according to Daniel's rules). After the time period in question, the two witnesses are called to heaven and the Messiah takes possession of the "Kingdom of the world". At which point, the wrath of God comes, the time for judging begins, and rewards are doled out to all who fear His name. If this happened at the end of the 1260 days, either in 1798 or at some other time supposed by scholars, it is remarkable that the subsequent events went without notice.
12:5 This is perhaps the most significant event that John has recorded yet. The woman giving birth! Clearly of divine origin, she is an underscrutinized figure. I am reminded of interpretations that this woman (conflated with similar figures elsewhere in the Bible) is actually The Holy Spirit, or the Wisdom of God. The child she bears is irresistibly Christ-like. The problem with all of the interpretations that spring from that is one of timing. Is this divine birth after the second woe or Ch. 11? If so, whom could it possibly be? And what is meant by the period of exile for this woman and her child, also conveniently 1260 days?
A lot of these problems stem from the assumption that John is seeing these events unfold in linear time. Such a viewpoint is not only difficult here, but also in 8:4 and 9:11, to name just a few that have jumped out on this reading. But it is not by any means the only interpretation of time. Boethius, and all who drew from him, work from the assumption that time, when seen from divine eyes, is not linear, but simultaneous. If one adopts such a perspective, a Tralfamadorian reading of The Revelation so to speak, a lot of these difficulties fall away, and it's rather more easy to believe that John was not just dreaming.
12:13-18 Which reinvests the reader in the fate and identity of this woman. Her battles seem to be every bit as relevant as those of her son, even though they be unseen or metaphorical.
13:2 Approaching these visions from a Boethian perspective ertainly opens up some possibilities. The assumption in most exegesis that I have found is that this beast is a different one than Daniel saw in his Ch 7. Surely, since John's vision is taking place centuries after Daniel's, and presumably after the fulfillment of the latter, we are seeing a separate, still future event. But time in visions and in spirit does not necessarily work that way. There is nothing to prevent us from wondering if this beast is the same as Daniel's fourth beast, and whether John's attention wasn't simply grabbed by different details than Daniel was. it's the same instinct that prompts us to wonder whether John's vision in Rev. 4 isn't simply Ezekiel 1 seen from above. The blind men all touch the elephant in differen tplaces. To one, it is much like a wall. To another, like a sword. And to a third, it is a beast with seven heads and ten horns.
13:5-9 And if we take the assumption that this beast is indeed the same as Daniel's, this is a pretty accurate description of what awaited the "saints" after John's death.
13:11-14 But here John is seeing something that Daniel did not seem to. What arose after, propped up, and gave breath to the Roman empire after its nearly mortal blow? Surely the papacy is a strong contender. Strictly speaking from chronology, the Byzantine empire is also a strong candidate.
13:17 Which interpretation would mean that the symbol in question is actually the cross . . . I can't imagine that interpretation getting much traction though.
13:18 The most interesting and underanalyzed aspect of this verse is the fact that the number of the beast is "the number of a person". What could this mean? Is it an ordinal number? The 666th of something? Or some play on words, a person named Sextus or some such? Among Eastern Emperors, there was a VI of Constantine, John, Leo, and Michael. None of them seem to have been particularly significant though. When I get to those rulers in Gibbon's Decline and Fall, maybe more will be clear. At any rate, the mark of the beast is not its number, as is commonly thought. The number is in some way tied to the name.
A lot of people, and most scholars, seem to get tied up in conflating the identity of this beast with the Antichrist, assigning the latter a prominence in the scriptures that is unearned. There is nothing to tie the two entities together, and nothing particularly identifies the Antichrist as a literal figure. Conversely, the Bible has a well-established pattern of using beasts to represent, not individuals, but entire empires. John's two-headed beast, if one is consistent, and the name/number/mark that goes with it, seem unlikely to be that of a single person.
14:1 A prime example of how John's visions operate very much like dreams.
14:4 If these 144,000 are to be taken as a literal group of people, with a literal number, then it seems inconsistent to suppose that they are anything other than literal virgins.
14:6 I had never before stopped to suppose exactly what "midheaven" means, assuming that it just meant "in midair". But the Greek here is literally in the middle of heaven, not air or sky, and occurs only in Revelation. Having no concept of atmosphere, outer space, or anything beyond the literal sky, one must wonder exactly what John saw here. An actual celestial realm, separate from full heaven? What did it look like? How did he know what he was seeing?
14:8 Here is our clearest argument yet for a Boethian approach to this vision (and others?). Babylon the Great has not even been introduced yet, let alone the scene of her demise described.
14:10 This torture by fire and sulphur is used, I would imagine, to support an idea of hellfire. But it is worth noting here that it is "in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb" that it seems to take place--in the same heaven as the rest of the chapter.
14:13 It's been a while since we heard from the Spirit in this book: not since chapter 3, and even then the words of the Spirit were second hand, conveyed by "one like the Son of Man". In that former passage, it would have been easy to interpret it as a metaphorical or impersonal force, perhaps one of the seven that he held in his hand. Here it is definitely given a persona, though, and agency.
14:14 Speaking of whom, here again is "one like a Son of Man". Is it his voice that we heard in the previous verse, and by extension, was he referring to his own words in 2-3?
14:18 It's tempting to take the definite article here as a doorway into some metaphysical explication of the duties of various angels. The idea that there is one angel in charge of fire certainly predicates some very polytheistic questions. But the Greek here has no definite article, even though such is common in Greek--merely a relative pronoun.
15:1 I've lost track. Which scroll, trumpet, and woe are we on? Is this the third woe? All of these marker seem a lot fuzzier than one could be led to believe by reading exegesis of them.
15:5 This is the only mention that I can remember of "The temple of the tent of witness". Traditional interpretation has heaven itself as being the prototypical temple of God, not merely its location. Is this a separate temple? One devoted to a special purpose? If so, for what is it the archetype?
16:1 An argument could be made based on this verse that it is the Most Holy of the tabernacle and subsequently of Solomon's Temple, the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant, and by extension of the Divine presence.
16:4 Is "The angel of the waters" merely the angel who poured the bowl into them, or is it a more managerial position? It would not be the first time that such positions have been hinted at in this book, on both sides of the divine rivalry.
16:7 Which altar? From back in 6:9? Or is this the actual voice of the altar, not merely of those sacrificed on it? What would that even mean?
16:8 All of these plagues so far seem terribly modern. The pollution, disease, rising temperatures, vanishing marine life . . . one prone to apocalyptic thinking might have a lot of fun with these verses.
16:10 But this verse is a little more specific and a lot more obscure. If one sees a nation suddenly plunged into darkness, not only will we have identified the "beast", but also the end chronology.
16:12 After which one would expect China to invade Iraq, I suppose.
16:16 One of my favorite misinterpretations of scripture. Armageddon is not an event; it is a place.
16:19 Referent failure! The last great city mentioned was heavenly Jerusalem. Surely it is not being referred to here. If one acts under the assumption that John meant for his vision to be understood, then his omission of identifying details means he expected his readers to be able to know what he meant by "the great city", arguing for either literal Jerusalem or Rome. But John clearly does not give a withered fig if his audience is as confused as he must be.
16:20 Another very modern, or near future, sign.
Sunday, August 21, 2016
Saturday, August 20, 2016
Haruki Murakami: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
I have some good news, and I have some bad news. And they are the same news, as they always are. During a moment of weakness in Sofia, Bulgaria, i made the mistake of letting my guard down and trusting the general good intentions of people. I was rewarded with a stolen phone, and a bruised ego. This cast a shadow over the rest of my European tour, and I suppose that's the bad news. But the books I was reading, the online games with which I spent too many hours, and the constant flow of communication I used to numb my foolish brain disappeared with it. That was the good news. I suddenly had nothing but my thoughts to entertain me, and had to hunt down a few real books to keep that from driving me crazy. I read five books in the final week of my trip, and each in its own way was exactly what I needed.
The good news and the bad news, in Literature as in everything, are the same news. Books are often like tarot cards, not saying anything themselves--try though they might--but merely providing the vocabulary necessary for us to think about that which we already knew. And so it is that what I take away from a given book is what I needed to receive from it (that's the good news), which may or may not have anything to do with what the book was really about (the bad news). Books--and art, music, film, relationships, the whole spectrum of human experience--are powerless in the hands of the creator, and omniscient in the hands of the reader. To say that they are as colorless as the title character of this book is an example of the liberty that one may and must take as a reader. Murakami's meaning clearly has nothing to do with readership, literature, and interpretation. But that is the thought that I went into the book with so that is the meaning I found.
And the characters in the book were manifestly not meant as allegories for people in my own life. Even forced into those roles, they served only imperfectly. None who know me would describe me as colorless, and yet I am. I have very little identity of my own, and the colors people see in me are more often than not their own color, amplified and reflected. I am not an empty vessel, tormented by a confusion about my own identity, but as I became Tazaki, I also wore this part of him. And the answers that satisfied him also satisfied me, until I put the book down, and again became myself.
The good news and the bad news, in Literature as in everything, are the same news. Books are often like tarot cards, not saying anything themselves--try though they might--but merely providing the vocabulary necessary for us to think about that which we already knew. And so it is that what I take away from a given book is what I needed to receive from it (that's the good news), which may or may not have anything to do with what the book was really about (the bad news). Books--and art, music, film, relationships, the whole spectrum of human experience--are powerless in the hands of the creator, and omniscient in the hands of the reader. To say that they are as colorless as the title character of this book is an example of the liberty that one may and must take as a reader. Murakami's meaning clearly has nothing to do with readership, literature, and interpretation. But that is the thought that I went into the book with so that is the meaning I found.
And the characters in the book were manifestly not meant as allegories for people in my own life. Even forced into those roles, they served only imperfectly. None who know me would describe me as colorless, and yet I am. I have very little identity of my own, and the colors people see in me are more often than not their own color, amplified and reflected. I am not an empty vessel, tormented by a confusion about my own identity, but as I became Tazaki, I also wore this part of him. And the answers that satisfied him also satisfied me, until I put the book down, and again became myself.
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Umberto Eco: Numero Zero
Much like with The Name of the Rose, I feel like I must be missing something here. Eco is widely regarded as a great writer, perhaps one of the greatest, and has legions of devoted fans. What are they seeing that I am not? Very nearly half of this book was themeless, plotless recountings of historical events, most of which seem to be invented, but were not. The general impression is that Eco embarked on a long line of research, discovered the potential for a conspiracy theory, and shoehorned it into a detective novel. Perhaps Italian audiences, being more familiar with the names dropped in huge piles on every page, were more receptive to or interested in these sort of speculations. Perhaps the whole novel is really a cover for Eco's theory that Mussolini's death did not occur as in the textbooks. But the entire plot he concocted as a setting for the plot he thought he uncovered was bald and superficial, offering nothing particularly inventive or engaging.
With the exception of a few character points that I found applicable to my life. The character of Maia is described as constantly jumping trains of thought, and scarcely noticing that others had a hard time following her. I have known, and was borne by, such people. This was a nice way of capturing their essence. And the protagonist may well have been me when he observes that only losers know very much. How simultaneously true and depressing.
With the exception of a few character points that I found applicable to my life. The character of Maia is described as constantly jumping trains of thought, and scarcely noticing that others had a hard time following her. I have known, and was borne by, such people. This was a nice way of capturing their essence. And the protagonist may well have been me when he observes that only losers know very much. How simultaneously true and depressing.
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Ursula LeGuin: Changing Planes
This is not a book that bears up to deep scrutiny. It begs to be read, not at a desk with a notebook at hand, but in the very place where it was inspired and set: the misery, irritation, and suffering of an airport.
I have always hated airports. Everything about them seems designed to inspire contempt, and the moment a human enters one of these infernal portals, she or he is primed with a hatred for fellow travelers and becomes by virtue of that disgust a perfect target for the glowering disdain of all the similarly affected pilgrims around.
While the conceit of the book is inspired, the book itself is not particularly so. Each of the stories told here was worth telling, but perhaps some of them were worth telling at greater length. None of them were long enough to have said anything, and merely glanced at rather heady and poignant questions: to what extent are each of us an individual? Do our traditions serve or enslave us? What is the nature of language?
But it only paused long enough at each moment to ask the question, never long enough for an answer to be an option. And perhaps that was for the best. Who wants to read the Critique of Pure Reason while enduring the misery we call air travel? Certainly not I. I'm glad I read this on the way to Brussels instead.
I have always hated airports. Everything about them seems designed to inspire contempt, and the moment a human enters one of these infernal portals, she or he is primed with a hatred for fellow travelers and becomes by virtue of that disgust a perfect target for the glowering disdain of all the similarly affected pilgrims around.
While the conceit of the book is inspired, the book itself is not particularly so. Each of the stories told here was worth telling, but perhaps some of them were worth telling at greater length. None of them were long enough to have said anything, and merely glanced at rather heady and poignant questions: to what extent are each of us an individual? Do our traditions serve or enslave us? What is the nature of language?
But it only paused long enough at each moment to ask the question, never long enough for an answer to be an option. And perhaps that was for the best. Who wants to read the Critique of Pure Reason while enduring the misery we call air travel? Certainly not I. I'm glad I read this on the way to Brussels instead.
Sunday, August 14, 2016
Vincent Van Gogh: Peach Tree in Blossom
It's likely a surprise to no one that I approach Art much as I approach Literature. Books and paintings can be merely appreciated: viewed or read, judged as pleasing or not, and then set aside. But Art and Literature offer a deeper pleasure: that of being understood. Works that deserve to be included in these capitalized categories are very much like stacks of old transparencies, such as one used to find in the middle of encyclopedias, each system of the human body printed on a separate plate, and then bound together as a unit. One could certainly look at the stack and see the marvelous, complicated unity of the system, but what sort of barbarian would stop there? Who could resist lifting away the topmost plate and seeing what lie underneath?
The trick is to find the loose corners, the passages that don't seem to fit with the rest of the work, the words that an author uses more or differently than she or he might have, Coleridge's eyes, Eliot's Iphigenia, and in this case, Van Gogh's shadows. I wrote years ago about Van Gogh's curious affinity for Bunyan, and how that author was a loose edge that allowed one to lift a layer of the artist's work and see a bit of what was underneath. The gist is that Van Gogh seemed to see himself in Christian, the eponymous pilgrim, and many of his paintings can be seen as an allegorical journey. I was quite pleased with this analysis at the time, but had merely lifted up the first layer.
As I walked through the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, I was not even looking for a new analysis. I didn't expect to find any dogeared corners, any loose edges begging to be lifted up, but I found one, and it is this painting. I walked past the rows of haystacks, the sunflowers, the Dutch working class who were turning into the potatoes they ate, but was stopped in my tracks when I came to "Peach Tree in Blossom". Something was not right about it. It didn't make sense, and I stared at it for some minutes trying to put my eye on exactly what was different about it. Wasn't it just like all the others? But no, it was all wrong. The shadows were all wrong.
Where is the light source in this picture? It seems to be a low sun off canvas to the left. The tree in the back is casting a long shadow on the fence, and the palette is that of near sunset. But the tree in the front. Its shadow is cast directly underneath. Was this a mistake? Where is this other light source? And why does it not catch the tree in the background? And the tree itself is uniformly lit. Seemingly from the front.
An impressionist would never have done this. Monet et al were fastidiously faithful to the light they saw. But Van Gogh was creating an expression, not an impression. This was not the light he saw; it's manifestly impossible for the shadows to have been cast in this way. And it is not as though he was incapable of or averse to capturing realistic shade.
What is the difference between these two sunflower still lifes?
The former, by Monet, has a clear light source and casts a shadow. The latter is manifestly impossible. There is light in the picture, as seen from the reflection on the vase, but it has two strange features: it is cast from directly in front of the painting, and its shadows do not follow the laws of nature. This was not a light he saw; it was a light that lived only in the mind of the painter.
Once attuned to this inconsistency, one sees it everywhere. I noticed it again at the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin in "Le Moulin de la Galette":
The shadows here are all over the place. In fact, there is only one possible source for the light in this painting, and again it is directly in front of the canvas. The figures on the left are casting a shadow to the right. Those on the right are the opposite. And the figure in the rough center is casting a shadow directly underneath or behind. The light is coming from behind the artist, and by extension, the viewer.
Or is it? Such a mental placement works for "Le Moulin", but it can't account for "Sunflowers" or "Peach Tree". There is no literal light source that would behave that way. The light in these paintings cannot be literal. And what about when Van Gogh tries to capture an actual light? Say, a candle?
This candle casts no shadow! Such a thing is possible because this is not a painting of a candle. It is an allegorical portrait of Gaugin. An artist. A light without a shadow. The light in Van Gogh's paintings is not coming from behind him. It is him. No wonder that the only realistic shadows he painted were on his own face. And when you look at a Van Gogh, you necessarily adopt his perspective. You see what he saw, and you know what he knew: that the light is not coming from behind you; it is you. You are the light in Van Gogh's paintings. You are the traveler. You are the pilgrim. You are the candle, as much as he was, and the shadows you cast are bizarre, irregular, and unreal.
Kurt Vonnegut: Galapagos
Usually when a one realizes how a trick is done, the magician's spell is broken. Not so with Vonnegut. I have read enough of his work that a pattern has become clear: each book succeeds on the deft juggling of three tricks. Each of his maneuvers is a staple of writers everywhere; none of them is unique to this writer. But a combination of his refusal to repeat himself--never executing any of his moves in the same way twice, a wildly creative imagination, and a fearless willingness to take seemingly absurd premises to a satisfactory conclusion, causes each of his books to come out as a fully realized, unique philoso-literary tapestry that is part of a greater multiptych.
Trick one: An amusing orthographic or lexical innovation. In Galapagos, this is manifest as an asterisk before the name of characters who are about to die. Because why not? The asterisk in Breakfast of Champions was used in the same way to entirely different, rather more intestinal ends.
Trick two: A driving structural conceit. In Galapagos: the story is gradually revealed to have been written by the ghost of a dock worker. In the air. With his immaterial finger. See also: the memoir conceit of Bluebeard, the novel within a novel of Champions, etc.
Trick three, which is not really a trick: A brilliant and insightful kernel of truth about the way Vonnegut sees the world and existence, and which invariably happens to be something this reader wanted or needed to hear. In Galapagos, the central idea is that everything bad that ever happened is because of our big, dumb, human brains and our need to do something with them. How true! Even now, I can be seen wondering about what this book means and how to analyze it, instead of glorying in its humor and aphorism. And as soon as I hit publish, no doubt I am going to start using all my extra brain on the problem of what I should do with my life, what is my purpose for existing, and what on earth I mean by "I" anyway. How silly these big brains of ours are! How unnecessary and troublesome! Who can doubt that it would be better swim all day, rut in the sand without wonder, and then fart wetly to the unanimous laughter of our peers?
Trick one: An amusing orthographic or lexical innovation. In Galapagos, this is manifest as an asterisk before the name of characters who are about to die. Because why not? The asterisk in Breakfast of Champions was used in the same way to entirely different, rather more intestinal ends.
Trick two: A driving structural conceit. In Galapagos: the story is gradually revealed to have been written by the ghost of a dock worker. In the air. With his immaterial finger. See also: the memoir conceit of Bluebeard, the novel within a novel of Champions, etc.
Trick three, which is not really a trick: A brilliant and insightful kernel of truth about the way Vonnegut sees the world and existence, and which invariably happens to be something this reader wanted or needed to hear. In Galapagos, the central idea is that everything bad that ever happened is because of our big, dumb, human brains and our need to do something with them. How true! Even now, I can be seen wondering about what this book means and how to analyze it, instead of glorying in its humor and aphorism. And as soon as I hit publish, no doubt I am going to start using all my extra brain on the problem of what I should do with my life, what is my purpose for existing, and what on earth I mean by "I" anyway. How silly these big brains of ours are! How unnecessary and troublesome! Who can doubt that it would be better swim all day, rut in the sand without wonder, and then fart wetly to the unanimous laughter of our peers?
Friday, August 12, 2016
Dante Alighieri: The New Life
This brief volume didn't offer me a lot of literary pleasures in and of itself. The type of love Dante enshrines here is of dubious character, for one thing. I have, once or twice, felt the sort of overpowering obsession, the worshipful adoration that he tries to capture. The object of such love very nearly seems like a gift from heaven; he can do no wrong, is free from flaws, and light seems to radiate from his very face. But I have an advantage over Dante: those whom I have seen in such a light didn't die before I learned the truth.
Dante calls this experience "love", but he does so seemingly without consciousness of the blurriness of that word. It is a cliche, but nonetheless a useful one, to draw attention to the fact that "I love pizza" and "I love Pablo" are referring to two very different things. Any objective observer, or even a compromised one who knows of what ze speaks, will recognize in Dante's rapture something much more closely resembling the former than the latter.
Too often, we say, feel, or think that we love something, when in fact we merely desire it. Did Dante love Beatrice? How could he have? They scarcely met. This is not to say that his feelings for her were not real, or that they were not as powerful as he describes, simply that he has misidentified them. I, for my part, love sushi in the sense that I desire it. I love Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, in the sense that I can never seem to get enough of them. I have even told myself, in the literal sense of the thought arising in my mind unbidden, that I love Pablo. This too turned out to be more accurately called desire.
Which begs the question "what is love?" The answer to that question is beyond both the scope of this reaction, and perhaps beyond my capacity to write about in any medium. But I feel confident in my assessment that it is equally far from Dante's capacity to have written at the time of The New Life.
Dante calls this experience "love", but he does so seemingly without consciousness of the blurriness of that word. It is a cliche, but nonetheless a useful one, to draw attention to the fact that "I love pizza" and "I love Pablo" are referring to two very different things. Any objective observer, or even a compromised one who knows of what ze speaks, will recognize in Dante's rapture something much more closely resembling the former than the latter.
Too often, we say, feel, or think that we love something, when in fact we merely desire it. Did Dante love Beatrice? How could he have? They scarcely met. This is not to say that his feelings for her were not real, or that they were not as powerful as he describes, simply that he has misidentified them. I, for my part, love sushi in the sense that I desire it. I love Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, in the sense that I can never seem to get enough of them. I have even told myself, in the literal sense of the thought arising in my mind unbidden, that I love Pablo. This too turned out to be more accurately called desire.
Which begs the question "what is love?" The answer to that question is beyond both the scope of this reaction, and perhaps beyond my capacity to write about in any medium. But I feel confident in my assessment that it is equally far from Dante's capacity to have written at the time of The New Life.
Wednesday, July 20, 2016
The Revelation of John II
6:1 Here we come to one of the most memorable sections of the book, and the one I least hope to be able to interpret.
6:2 It is worth mentioning how little the reality of John's vision overlaps with the popular memory of it. The four horsemen are commonly thought of as Death, War, Plague, and Famine, but this first rider is none of those.
6:7 This verse doesn't even match up with my memory of it. I had mistakenly remembered Death as the one who follows and swallows up the victims of the preceding four, but it is rather Hades; the grave.
6:8 That these four horsemen are summoned by the living creatures (seraphs?) themselves seems important. They are not destructive forces against which the angels fight, but rather agents of the angels themselves. And that first horse. Freed from the interpretation of my youth, namely that this horseman was the enthroned Christ, I find myself gravitating tot he interpretation that it is rather government itself, the misbegotten instinct of mankind to rule and to conquer, in the wake of which comes war, famine, death, and the grave by turns.
6:9 This fifth seal does not summon anything at all. It is not causative, if indeed the first four were. Rather it is a revealing of knowledge to John. The symbolism of a scroll being opened lends itself to an interpretation that these are not events being announced, but knowledge.
6:12 Although the events of the sixth seal seem to be more causative, there is nothing in the language to suggest that the opening of the seal is the catalyst for the celestial events that follow it.
7:1 Is this more information held beneath the sixth seal, or have we moved on?
7:2 A little research seems to be in order. Is the word translated "seal" here the same as in ch. 6? It is indeed.
7:6 Not sure what to make of the fact that Manasseh has replaced Dan in the twelve tribes.
7:9 The relationship between these two groups, the 144,000 and the great multitude, is unclear here. The interpretation of my youth is hard to overlook here.
8:1 How is John able to judge time in the midst of this vision?
8:2 If the vision is to be taken as a prophecy, rather than an explanation, then both of the above groups are "before the throne" among the angels before the opening of the seventh seal.
8:13 This eagle is another character that I don't recall. Of what nation or ruler could it be a symbol? Or is it a seraph, turned so that John can only see one of its faces?
8:4 Insofar as those with the seal in 7:2 are still on the Earth, we may assume that either their presence before the throne earlier is metaphorical, or the events related here are non-linear. But the fact that the great multitude of 7:9 are either conflated with that group, or subject to the effects of the fifth trumpet is troubling.
9:11 Abaddon, one of the only angels named in the Bible, is described in 9:1 as a "star that had fallen from heaven to earth". Does this mark him as a fallen angel? Even though the description of that fall will take place later in the vision?
9:19 The escalation is clear. The locusts are tortuous, but not fatal. The lion headed cavalry, triply fatal.
10:4 But what is the third woe/seventh trumpet? Is this interlude for dramatic effect? What did the seven thunders say?
10:7 "The mystery of God will be fulfilled" is a fascinating turn of phrase. This seventh trumpet that we are anticipating is the culmination of every last thing the prophets have written, and the culmination of the divinity itself.
6:2 It is worth mentioning how little the reality of John's vision overlaps with the popular memory of it. The four horsemen are commonly thought of as Death, War, Plague, and Famine, but this first rider is none of those.
6:7 This verse doesn't even match up with my memory of it. I had mistakenly remembered Death as the one who follows and swallows up the victims of the preceding four, but it is rather Hades; the grave.
6:8 That these four horsemen are summoned by the living creatures (seraphs?) themselves seems important. They are not destructive forces against which the angels fight, but rather agents of the angels themselves. And that first horse. Freed from the interpretation of my youth, namely that this horseman was the enthroned Christ, I find myself gravitating tot he interpretation that it is rather government itself, the misbegotten instinct of mankind to rule and to conquer, in the wake of which comes war, famine, death, and the grave by turns.
6:9 This fifth seal does not summon anything at all. It is not causative, if indeed the first four were. Rather it is a revealing of knowledge to John. The symbolism of a scroll being opened lends itself to an interpretation that these are not events being announced, but knowledge.
6:12 Although the events of the sixth seal seem to be more causative, there is nothing in the language to suggest that the opening of the seal is the catalyst for the celestial events that follow it.
7:1 Is this more information held beneath the sixth seal, or have we moved on?
7:2 A little research seems to be in order. Is the word translated "seal" here the same as in ch. 6? It is indeed.
7:6 Not sure what to make of the fact that Manasseh has replaced Dan in the twelve tribes.
7:9 The relationship between these two groups, the 144,000 and the great multitude, is unclear here. The interpretation of my youth is hard to overlook here.
8:1 How is John able to judge time in the midst of this vision?
8:2 If the vision is to be taken as a prophecy, rather than an explanation, then both of the above groups are "before the throne" among the angels before the opening of the seventh seal.
8:13 This eagle is another character that I don't recall. Of what nation or ruler could it be a symbol? Or is it a seraph, turned so that John can only see one of its faces?
8:4 Insofar as those with the seal in 7:2 are still on the Earth, we may assume that either their presence before the throne earlier is metaphorical, or the events related here are non-linear. But the fact that the great multitude of 7:9 are either conflated with that group, or subject to the effects of the fifth trumpet is troubling.
9:11 Abaddon, one of the only angels named in the Bible, is described in 9:1 as a "star that had fallen from heaven to earth". Does this mark him as a fallen angel? Even though the description of that fall will take place later in the vision?
9:19 The escalation is clear. The locusts are tortuous, but not fatal. The lion headed cavalry, triply fatal.
10:4 But what is the third woe/seventh trumpet? Is this interlude for dramatic effect? What did the seven thunders say?
10:7 "The mystery of God will be fulfilled" is a fascinating turn of phrase. This seventh trumpet that we are anticipating is the culmination of every last thing the prophets have written, and the culmination of the divinity itself.
Tuesday, July 19, 2016
From Here to Eternity
I don't think it would be possible to make this film today. We have talented enough actors, writers, and cinematographers. All of those elements of the film, while executed with a marksmanlike honesty and clarity, could be reproduced today by drawing on the wide pool of talent that exists in filmmaking today. But what we also have today are a set of expectations for our movies, books and television shows from which this film was either free, or willing to break free. Modern audiences, writers, and executives expect, for one thing, at least somebody to be happy at the end of the story. If for some reason the whole point of the movie is to be as bleak and desperate as possible, it is incumbent upon the film to announce itself as art, through stylistic choices if nothing else. And even those media which end badly for all involved cater to our collective cathartic sentiment by making sure the road to despair was littered with bad choices or character flaws.
But such was not the case for Eternity. It is said of Burt Lancaster's character at one point that he's a man who will "draw himself a line he thinks fair, and he won't come over it." This is equally true of all the five main characters in the movie. They are suffused with very American virtues:grit, fortitude, determination, and unbreakable will. They face their relationships and circumstances with grave honor, but without the fanfare that would normally accompany such. And they all suffer for it.
These two elements, the unashamededness and the matter-of-factness of the movie remind one of a Hemingway novel. The movie did not hesitate to place the audience in the arms of adulterers, but neither did it congratulate itself for this choice. It simply invited us to watch the simple, universal sadnesses of these five, and in doing so to remember our own.
But such was not the case for Eternity. It is said of Burt Lancaster's character at one point that he's a man who will "draw himself a line he thinks fair, and he won't come over it." This is equally true of all the five main characters in the movie. They are suffused with very American virtues:grit, fortitude, determination, and unbreakable will. They face their relationships and circumstances with grave honor, but without the fanfare that would normally accompany such. And they all suffer for it.
These two elements, the unashamededness and the matter-of-factness of the movie remind one of a Hemingway novel. The movie did not hesitate to place the audience in the arms of adulterers, but neither did it congratulate itself for this choice. It simply invited us to watch the simple, universal sadnesses of these five, and in doing so to remember our own.
Monday, July 18, 2016
Yevgeny Zamyatin: We
There are so many directions from which to approach this book. The most obvious one is to treat it as the precursor to the more well known examples of the genre: 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, Brave New World, et al. In fact, so much do these latter works owe to We that one cannot read it without becoming aware that it alone made these other books possible.
As is so often true of seminal works with no forebearer, one could just as easily look at what is wrong with it. It is sloppy in places, especially when the author sees fit to deliver on his promise of a plot. Plenty of passages feel like missed opportunities, connecting to the larger tapestry just enough to make a literary snob like this reader wish for a little tidier weaving.
But I'm sure all of these essays have been written already, and by more knowledgeable scholars than me. I did notice a point that is so subtle that perhaps it has escaped other eyes, however. The narrator, mathematician that he is, often phrases his internal conflict as the task of removing the irrational number √-1 from himself. Anyone who has taken high school algebra recognizes this as the formula for the number i, which opens these passages up to a fascinating set of questions. I is /am indeed the most irrational of numbers/beings. What is/am I? Philosophers have never come up with an answer that satisfies. Is it even possible to remove that most irrational--and potentially destructive--element, the ego, from ourselves? Would it result in more or less happiness? What would need to be sacrificed? All of this ties in nicely with the themes of the book, and Zamyatin, freed from the requirement of proof, offers his answers rather more clearly than Descartes could.
But the most fascinating aspect of this question is that, in spite of its seamless blending into the overall themes of the text, and the almost precious cleverness that it elicits from the reader, it is unlikely if not impossible that it has any real place in the text. We was written in Russian, and only translated later into English. For all of the layered meanings and probing questions that i and the obvious corollary evoke in English, in Russian it is just another letter. The first person pronoun in Russian is not I but я. To what extent, then, do all of these fascinating interpretations have any place in the discussion? If the author did not mean for them to be there, do they exist? Are they part of the text? Or do they belong only to the reader--specifically the English-speaking reader? This is a marvelous window into the very question of textuality that divides literary theorists even as recently as a book I finished this week (Scholes' Textual Power). It's a very concrete example of a very elusive question. For me, this book is mine now, not Zamyatin's. He can participate in the reading with me, but only as an equal partner. Maybe he would be as pleased by his unintended(?) cleverness as I am.
As is so often true of seminal works with no forebearer, one could just as easily look at what is wrong with it. It is sloppy in places, especially when the author sees fit to deliver on his promise of a plot. Plenty of passages feel like missed opportunities, connecting to the larger tapestry just enough to make a literary snob like this reader wish for a little tidier weaving.
But I'm sure all of these essays have been written already, and by more knowledgeable scholars than me. I did notice a point that is so subtle that perhaps it has escaped other eyes, however. The narrator, mathematician that he is, often phrases his internal conflict as the task of removing the irrational number √-1 from himself. Anyone who has taken high school algebra recognizes this as the formula for the number i, which opens these passages up to a fascinating set of questions. I is /am indeed the most irrational of numbers/beings. What is/am I? Philosophers have never come up with an answer that satisfies. Is it even possible to remove that most irrational--and potentially destructive--element, the ego, from ourselves? Would it result in more or less happiness? What would need to be sacrificed? All of this ties in nicely with the themes of the book, and Zamyatin, freed from the requirement of proof, offers his answers rather more clearly than Descartes could.
But the most fascinating aspect of this question is that, in spite of its seamless blending into the overall themes of the text, and the almost precious cleverness that it elicits from the reader, it is unlikely if not impossible that it has any real place in the text. We was written in Russian, and only translated later into English. For all of the layered meanings and probing questions that i and the obvious corollary evoke in English, in Russian it is just another letter. The first person pronoun in Russian is not I but я. To what extent, then, do all of these fascinating interpretations have any place in the discussion? If the author did not mean for them to be there, do they exist? Are they part of the text? Or do they belong only to the reader--specifically the English-speaking reader? This is a marvelous window into the very question of textuality that divides literary theorists even as recently as a book I finished this week (Scholes' Textual Power). It's a very concrete example of a very elusive question. For me, this book is mine now, not Zamyatin's. He can participate in the reading with me, but only as an equal partner. Maybe he would be as pleased by his unintended(?) cleverness as I am.
Monday, July 11, 2016
Robert Scholes: Textual Power
Oh, academia.
During my years teaching public school in America, I came to the classroom with a very clear set of goals for the students.
And so for the first half of this book, I was pumping my fist in the air with Scholes. "We have an endless web here, of growth, and change, and interaction, learning and forgetting, dialogue and dialectic. Our task as teachers is to introduce students to this web, to make it real and visible for them, insofar as we can, and to encourage them to cast their own strands of thought and text into this network . . ." he urges (21). "Right on, brother!" I concurred. "We move from a submission to textual authority in reading, through a sharing of textual power in interpretation, toward an asssertion of power through opposition in criticism" he advocates (39). "Preach! Testify!" I responded. "We neither capture nor create the world with our texts, but interact with it" (112). "Amen! Come lord Chaucer!"
It is unclear at exactly what point he lost me. His transition from the argument for teaching students of literature to construct a web of understanding and connect it to the existing web where they can, to a specific assault on certain of his contemporaries is so subtle and gradual that I am at a loss to give it a page number. If this were a thesis and I his advising professor, I would stop him around chapter seven and guide him back in the direction of actual teaching practice. For lack of such a guiding hand, Scholes tears off in a direction that is guilty of some of the sins against which he rails. His invective against Stanley Fish is positioned at the apex of the book, in a way that would lead a reader to believe that such an assault was the primary reason for the book's existence. His takedown is thorough and decisive, and one would have hoped that he returned at the last to the question of what this means for teachers. He never does. The result is that he spins a beautiful web of pedagogy, at once subversive and practical, then departs that web for another. He does this seemingly with the intention of connecting the two into one great tapestry, but gets entangled in academic point-counterpoint, and dies there, covered in sticky, silken arguments.
During my years teaching public school in America, I came to the classroom with a very clear set of goals for the students.
- For them to read, watch, and listen to some interesting things, and have something interesting to say or write about them.
- For them to walk away with a definition of literature that includes more than just old books.
And so for the first half of this book, I was pumping my fist in the air with Scholes. "We have an endless web here, of growth, and change, and interaction, learning and forgetting, dialogue and dialectic. Our task as teachers is to introduce students to this web, to make it real and visible for them, insofar as we can, and to encourage them to cast their own strands of thought and text into this network . . ." he urges (21). "Right on, brother!" I concurred. "We move from a submission to textual authority in reading, through a sharing of textual power in interpretation, toward an asssertion of power through opposition in criticism" he advocates (39). "Preach! Testify!" I responded. "We neither capture nor create the world with our texts, but interact with it" (112). "Amen! Come lord Chaucer!"
It is unclear at exactly what point he lost me. His transition from the argument for teaching students of literature to construct a web of understanding and connect it to the existing web where they can, to a specific assault on certain of his contemporaries is so subtle and gradual that I am at a loss to give it a page number. If this were a thesis and I his advising professor, I would stop him around chapter seven and guide him back in the direction of actual teaching practice. For lack of such a guiding hand, Scholes tears off in a direction that is guilty of some of the sins against which he rails. His invective against Stanley Fish is positioned at the apex of the book, in a way that would lead a reader to believe that such an assault was the primary reason for the book's existence. His takedown is thorough and decisive, and one would have hoped that he returned at the last to the question of what this means for teachers. He never does. The result is that he spins a beautiful web of pedagogy, at once subversive and practical, then departs that web for another. He does this seemingly with the intention of connecting the two into one great tapestry, but gets entangled in academic point-counterpoint, and dies there, covered in sticky, silken arguments.
Saturday, July 09, 2016
Intolerance
I'm struggling to come up with a suitable metaphor for D.W. Griffith. Was he the Brian Singer or Michael Bay of his time? He certainly had their gift for pandering, for filling a slapdash script with car chases, tits, and explosions. Or is he more analogous to Brett Ratner and James Cameron, with an ego big enough to actually stamp his initials on the narration slides, and infuse this mess with a pedantic air that convinces one he thought it was a public service?
At any rate, it's clear that Griffith's gifts did not lie in scriptwriting, and this heavy-handed attempt to make Literature recoils from the mirror when seen in that light. His titular subject is seemingly chosen at random, although no doubt influenced by the public's reaction to his earlier travesty, Birth of a Nation. Of the four stories chosen to illustrate his subject, only one of them is even remotely relevant, and even that of the Bartholomew's Day Massacre was likely recommended by its picturesque potential, rather than its thematic relevance.
I came to this film with an analytical eye, primed by name recognition, purported significance, and thematic potential to see layers of meaning in the film, carefully woven narrative threads, resonant confluences of character and plot. I spent far too much mental effort trying to decipher the patterns hidden in the color washes he used for the various themes. Were the green overlays meant to invoke jealousy? The purple ones lust? But there was no pattern, neither in color nor in anything else.
If I had not come prepared to take the film seriously, I might have enjoyed it. The sound stages are fit out in regalia that would still be impressive today. No expense was spared, and one staggers to imagine how he convinced backers to put up 2.5 million in 1916 dollars. A modern viewer can also find much to amuse in the laughable deaths of main characters, filmed seemingly in one take with 19th century stage props. If I had brought as much mental effort to the viewing as I do to that of an X-Men movie, all of which are guilty in smaller portion of the same sins, I might have simply forgotten about it. But I came to it with the mistaken hope that it might be good--as much a mistake as doing the same with any of the aforementioned modern directors.
At any rate, it's clear that Griffith's gifts did not lie in scriptwriting, and this heavy-handed attempt to make Literature recoils from the mirror when seen in that light. His titular subject is seemingly chosen at random, although no doubt influenced by the public's reaction to his earlier travesty, Birth of a Nation. Of the four stories chosen to illustrate his subject, only one of them is even remotely relevant, and even that of the Bartholomew's Day Massacre was likely recommended by its picturesque potential, rather than its thematic relevance.
I came to this film with an analytical eye, primed by name recognition, purported significance, and thematic potential to see layers of meaning in the film, carefully woven narrative threads, resonant confluences of character and plot. I spent far too much mental effort trying to decipher the patterns hidden in the color washes he used for the various themes. Were the green overlays meant to invoke jealousy? The purple ones lust? But there was no pattern, neither in color nor in anything else.
If I had not come prepared to take the film seriously, I might have enjoyed it. The sound stages are fit out in regalia that would still be impressive today. No expense was spared, and one staggers to imagine how he convinced backers to put up 2.5 million in 1916 dollars. A modern viewer can also find much to amuse in the laughable deaths of main characters, filmed seemingly in one take with 19th century stage props. If I had brought as much mental effort to the viewing as I do to that of an X-Men movie, all of which are guilty in smaller portion of the same sins, I might have simply forgotten about it. But I came to it with the mistaken hope that it might be good--as much a mistake as doing the same with any of the aforementioned modern directors.
Monday, June 06, 2016
Gabby Ruiz: Juliet Takes a Breath
I should have read this without having should to have had. I can't even remember the last book I read for pleasure, without a list or a promise or a book club to drive me to finish it. But if I was the sort of person who read things he didn't feel he had to (namely, other than cripplingly lazy), this would have been on the list anyway.
It's a good, if flawed book. I tried to give it the Literature treatment, highlighting passages that I thought would have thematic significance later, but it simply didn't hold up to that sort of analysis. Nonetheless, I didn't put it down and read it straight through. It charmingly weaves a braid of coming of age, queer theory, and racial thinkpiece filled with appealing characters that can be forgiven for seeming overly broad in light of the fact that they are based on real people who, in all likelihood, are actually caricatures of themselves.
This book wasn't written for me at any angle. I am neither trying to find where I fit in the world racially, coming to terms with the mechanisms of my own body, nor experiencing the first flutters of love and sexual desire. There wasn't a single face in the book I could wear, but I still found it revealing. The title character learns early what I wish I had learned at all: that your identity is never going to be explained to you, and that you must take pieces of what works for you from knowledgeable people you trust, and fill in the gaps with what they could never offer.
It's a good, if flawed book. I tried to give it the Literature treatment, highlighting passages that I thought would have thematic significance later, but it simply didn't hold up to that sort of analysis. Nonetheless, I didn't put it down and read it straight through. It charmingly weaves a braid of coming of age, queer theory, and racial thinkpiece filled with appealing characters that can be forgiven for seeming overly broad in light of the fact that they are based on real people who, in all likelihood, are actually caricatures of themselves.
This book wasn't written for me at any angle. I am neither trying to find where I fit in the world racially, coming to terms with the mechanisms of my own body, nor experiencing the first flutters of love and sexual desire. There wasn't a single face in the book I could wear, but I still found it revealing. The title character learns early what I wish I had learned at all: that your identity is never going to be explained to you, and that you must take pieces of what works for you from knowledgeable people you trust, and fill in the gaps with what they could never offer.
Friday, June 03, 2016
Benedetto Croce: The Essence of Aesthetic
That the author should endeavor such a task as to define art in one word is remarkable enough. That he very nearly succeeds is nothing short of formative.
Croce's proposal that art can be defined simply as "intuition" is the sort of seductive aphorism that I am surprised doesn't get tossed around more than the similarly catchy and vague "The act of you looking is art". It bears up to casual conversation, and is suitable to be dropped as a one-liner over a glass of Malbec, but not a glass of absinthe. Intuition is a word, and as such is at mercy to all the linguistic traps that Wittgenstein proposed, the more so insofar as Croce proposed it in his native Italian. It is suffused with layers of meaning and interpretation, many of which are unique to the individual speaker of listener, and the idea of art as intuition requires as much translation, explication, and defense as one would expect. What is remarkable about Croce is not, therefore, that he has chosen a word that is more or less acceptable to represent something that seemingly defies representation. Rather, it is that the idea behind his choice is so incisive and universal that it untangles not only the conundrum at hand, but does so in a way that reveals underlying truths much deeper than he may have intended to probe. The Gordian knot he cuts is revealed to have been holding up the curtain of perception that obscures reality, and which so many mistake for reality itself.
Hans Gombrich's excellent treatment of The Story of Art is one that I, rightly or not, recall as framing art as the constant swing of a pendulum between what is seen and what is known, between perception and thought, idea and reality. Croce denies the existence of this pendulum, and in fact begins his argument with a denial of anything historical, moral, technical, or scientific in the nature of art. Those who phrase art in terms of its purpose, its rightful execution, or its place in society are mistaking the reflection of the moon for the moon itself, the frame for the picture. Art is not a dialectic between two things, Croce determines, not the swinging of a pendulum, but the thesis of the two, the moment when the pendulum suddenly comes to rest.
Although the word intuition itself if not helpful in the task that Croce has set for it, his exponence of it most certainly is. There are those that insist art is an act of beauty, a product--be it poem, song, or image--that exists in and of itself. Accordingly, any question of meaning or purpose has no place in the conversation. On the other hand are those that say the mere beauty of an object is not enough to qualify it as art. These latter are constantly asking what it "means" (a nauseating question, to be sure) and finding no deeper purpose behind a work, consign it to the merely pleasing, rather than artistic. Croce reveals this argument to be a foolish one, but, like so many foolish questions, one that inadvertently reveals the truth behind it. Art is neither product nor process, image nor idea, but rather the perfect union of the two in one moment. A moment of true art is not a song, poem, or image that perfectly expresses a moment of the soul; nor is it a philosophical truth somehow given form. It is both of these things and neither: an unreal reality. For Croce, art is the moment when it is not necessary to "promote mysterious nuptials between sign and image", but when the image itself is the sign (52). The signifier of art cannot be divorced from its signified, any more than a word can be divorced from its meaning. Both exist simultaneously in the sign, and to say that one does not gain supremacy over the other is to miss the point. Rather, both cease to exist, and language, or art, is born. Anything that can be called Art is the marriage of the real and the unreal, the seen and the unseen, the perceived and the conceived, a lyrical intuition of a state of the soul.
No doubt my interpretation of Croce's meaning is heavily colored by my own thinking. His language is often obscure, and he frequently takes for granted that of which I have no knowledge. Combined with the obvious dangers of translation (although Italian is less opaque to English than some languages), and it may well be that Croce would give me a good slap for misunderstanding him so thoroughly. Nonetheless, dead as he is, I shall add this volume to the growing, internal works cited page that appendices my continuing search for the nacheinander and the nebeneinander, the unreal reality of life.
Croce's proposal that art can be defined simply as "intuition" is the sort of seductive aphorism that I am surprised doesn't get tossed around more than the similarly catchy and vague "The act of you looking is art". It bears up to casual conversation, and is suitable to be dropped as a one-liner over a glass of Malbec, but not a glass of absinthe. Intuition is a word, and as such is at mercy to all the linguistic traps that Wittgenstein proposed, the more so insofar as Croce proposed it in his native Italian. It is suffused with layers of meaning and interpretation, many of which are unique to the individual speaker of listener, and the idea of art as intuition requires as much translation, explication, and defense as one would expect. What is remarkable about Croce is not, therefore, that he has chosen a word that is more or less acceptable to represent something that seemingly defies representation. Rather, it is that the idea behind his choice is so incisive and universal that it untangles not only the conundrum at hand, but does so in a way that reveals underlying truths much deeper than he may have intended to probe. The Gordian knot he cuts is revealed to have been holding up the curtain of perception that obscures reality, and which so many mistake for reality itself.
Hans Gombrich's excellent treatment of The Story of Art is one that I, rightly or not, recall as framing art as the constant swing of a pendulum between what is seen and what is known, between perception and thought, idea and reality. Croce denies the existence of this pendulum, and in fact begins his argument with a denial of anything historical, moral, technical, or scientific in the nature of art. Those who phrase art in terms of its purpose, its rightful execution, or its place in society are mistaking the reflection of the moon for the moon itself, the frame for the picture. Art is not a dialectic between two things, Croce determines, not the swinging of a pendulum, but the thesis of the two, the moment when the pendulum suddenly comes to rest.
Although the word intuition itself if not helpful in the task that Croce has set for it, his exponence of it most certainly is. There are those that insist art is an act of beauty, a product--be it poem, song, or image--that exists in and of itself. Accordingly, any question of meaning or purpose has no place in the conversation. On the other hand are those that say the mere beauty of an object is not enough to qualify it as art. These latter are constantly asking what it "means" (a nauseating question, to be sure) and finding no deeper purpose behind a work, consign it to the merely pleasing, rather than artistic. Croce reveals this argument to be a foolish one, but, like so many foolish questions, one that inadvertently reveals the truth behind it. Art is neither product nor process, image nor idea, but rather the perfect union of the two in one moment. A moment of true art is not a song, poem, or image that perfectly expresses a moment of the soul; nor is it a philosophical truth somehow given form. It is both of these things and neither: an unreal reality. For Croce, art is the moment when it is not necessary to "promote mysterious nuptials between sign and image", but when the image itself is the sign (52). The signifier of art cannot be divorced from its signified, any more than a word can be divorced from its meaning. Both exist simultaneously in the sign, and to say that one does not gain supremacy over the other is to miss the point. Rather, both cease to exist, and language, or art, is born. Anything that can be called Art is the marriage of the real and the unreal, the seen and the unseen, the perceived and the conceived, a lyrical intuition of a state of the soul.
No doubt my interpretation of Croce's meaning is heavily colored by my own thinking. His language is often obscure, and he frequently takes for granted that of which I have no knowledge. Combined with the obvious dangers of translation (although Italian is less opaque to English than some languages), and it may well be that Croce would give me a good slap for misunderstanding him so thoroughly. Nonetheless, dead as he is, I shall add this volume to the growing, internal works cited page that appendices my continuing search for the nacheinander and the nebeneinander, the unreal reality of life.
Monday, May 16, 2016
The Revelation to John
It's hard to believe that I'm actually finishing this project. For all of the other inconsistencies in my life, and all of the other projects I've thrown into the metaphorical firepit over the last ten years, this blog is one thing about which I have been conscientious. Every book I've read during that time. Hundreds of them. It may be the only consistent thing in my life. I'm pretty proud of it, whether or not anybody ever reads it.
1:1 I guess this is technically a fourth hand account, transmitted by an as yet unnamed angel. John's use of "soon" here likely does not mean what he thought it did at the time.
1:3 This is interesting. What effect does reading these words aloud have? This is the only mention of such a phenomenon of which I am aware. Should I be reading this aloud as I go? I'm tempted to. But what are the terms and conditions of this blessing? And what makes this prophecy different from others?
1:4 A nice parallel to the beginning of his own gospel. John may have aged, but his voice and perspective are still recognizable here. Who are these seven spirits though?
1:5 The ruler of the kings of the Earth? In what way? I am inclined to view Christ's Kingdom as entirely unaffiliated with Earthly governments.
1:7 I wonder what aspects of this in the Greek make it verse, and not prose. What sets this passage apart linguistically?
1:8 A definite conflation of God and Christ here, consistent with John's theology elsewhere.
1:9 He "was" on Patmos? Where is he now?
1:11 The literality of the seven churches here argues toward a literal interpretation of the seven spirits in 1:4.
1:12-16 More symbolism of 7s, but the figure here can be none other than Christ. Didn't John say that the message was delivered to him through an intermediary in 1:1?
1:19 The Son of Man does not say "soon", but "after this". John must have interpolated the time frame.
1:20 And, as I recalled, the seven spirits are indeed literal. One for each church. What church are those spirits supervising today, if any?
2:1 Ah, John is writing to the angels now? Then perhaps not so literal after all. Either "angel" here is a metaphor for a human overseer, or it refers to the spirit of the church in a metaphorical sense.
2:3,6 Peter and Paul also pounded this point pretty hard.
2:10 Curious to know if this came true in a literal sense.
2:11 The theme of conquest seemed unworthy of mention in 2:7, but the repetition here alerts one to a pattern.
2:12 And the way he identifies himself to each congregation is a nice little mini-theme within each message. I don't recall John being this literary.
2:17 A fascinating and layered image. I don't recall if it gets develop later or not, but I have my eye out for it.
2:20 Again, John almost sound like Paul here, only more florid. Did they agree to this extent in life?
3:1 I would hate to be in the Sardis congregation when this letter was received . . .
3:11 Well, now he has said "soon". I guess John wasn't taking liberties.
3:12 To each congregation, he makes a different promise for their conquest. Of them all, the white stone with a new name on it is the one I would most like to receive.
4:1 This clears up the confusion about the messenger earlier.
4:2 The distinction is an important one. The Son of Man with his seven spirits etc. is a physical manifestation, and all of his accoutrements are symbols of earthly things. With this verse, though, everything we see until notified otherwise will be a symbol of something heavenly.
4:5 So much for that theory haha. We now have the seven flames and seven spirits again.
4:6-8 I've always tended toward an interpretation of this section as an alternate view of Isaiah's chariot. The see in from of the throne that John sees is the same expanse that Isaiah sees from below. The four living creatures, each with one face, are the same as the Cherubs Isaiah saw. Etc.
4:8 Definitely a theme with John, here and elsewhere.
4:9-12 I wonder how John resolved the clear separation between the one seated upon the throne and the Son of Man he met earlier. Or did the dichotomy register for him?
5:6 These seven spirits are becoming the most fascinating part of this book. Bound at the time of the writing to the seven congregations, but clearly not eternally so, they are here said to be sent into all the earth. This part of the symbolism was also seriously undertreated in my upbringing, to the extent that I hardly remember it being interpreted at all.
5:8 The one seated upon the throne is rather pointedly silent.
5:13 This dichotomy becomes even more pronounced here. There can be no doubt in John's mind that this Lamb is Christ. Who then is seated upon the throne? It cannot be this same Lamb. And the argument cannot hold that one is simply an earthly manifestation of the other, since we are solidly in the spirit realm here.
1:1 I guess this is technically a fourth hand account, transmitted by an as yet unnamed angel. John's use of "soon" here likely does not mean what he thought it did at the time.
1:3 This is interesting. What effect does reading these words aloud have? This is the only mention of such a phenomenon of which I am aware. Should I be reading this aloud as I go? I'm tempted to. But what are the terms and conditions of this blessing? And what makes this prophecy different from others?
1:4 A nice parallel to the beginning of his own gospel. John may have aged, but his voice and perspective are still recognizable here. Who are these seven spirits though?
1:5 The ruler of the kings of the Earth? In what way? I am inclined to view Christ's Kingdom as entirely unaffiliated with Earthly governments.
1:7 I wonder what aspects of this in the Greek make it verse, and not prose. What sets this passage apart linguistically?
1:8 A definite conflation of God and Christ here, consistent with John's theology elsewhere.
1:9 He "was" on Patmos? Where is he now?
1:11 The literality of the seven churches here argues toward a literal interpretation of the seven spirits in 1:4.
1:12-16 More symbolism of 7s, but the figure here can be none other than Christ. Didn't John say that the message was delivered to him through an intermediary in 1:1?
1:19 The Son of Man does not say "soon", but "after this". John must have interpolated the time frame.
1:20 And, as I recalled, the seven spirits are indeed literal. One for each church. What church are those spirits supervising today, if any?
2:1 Ah, John is writing to the angels now? Then perhaps not so literal after all. Either "angel" here is a metaphor for a human overseer, or it refers to the spirit of the church in a metaphorical sense.
2:3,6 Peter and Paul also pounded this point pretty hard.
2:10 Curious to know if this came true in a literal sense.
2:11 The theme of conquest seemed unworthy of mention in 2:7, but the repetition here alerts one to a pattern.
2:12 And the way he identifies himself to each congregation is a nice little mini-theme within each message. I don't recall John being this literary.
2:17 A fascinating and layered image. I don't recall if it gets develop later or not, but I have my eye out for it.
2:20 Again, John almost sound like Paul here, only more florid. Did they agree to this extent in life?
3:1 I would hate to be in the Sardis congregation when this letter was received . . .
3:11 Well, now he has said "soon". I guess John wasn't taking liberties.
3:12 To each congregation, he makes a different promise for their conquest. Of them all, the white stone with a new name on it is the one I would most like to receive.
4:1 This clears up the confusion about the messenger earlier.
4:2 The distinction is an important one. The Son of Man with his seven spirits etc. is a physical manifestation, and all of his accoutrements are symbols of earthly things. With this verse, though, everything we see until notified otherwise will be a symbol of something heavenly.
4:5 So much for that theory haha. We now have the seven flames and seven spirits again.
4:6-8 I've always tended toward an interpretation of this section as an alternate view of Isaiah's chariot. The see in from of the throne that John sees is the same expanse that Isaiah sees from below. The four living creatures, each with one face, are the same as the Cherubs Isaiah saw. Etc.
4:8 Definitely a theme with John, here and elsewhere.
4:9-12 I wonder how John resolved the clear separation between the one seated upon the throne and the Son of Man he met earlier. Or did the dichotomy register for him?
5:6 These seven spirits are becoming the most fascinating part of this book. Bound at the time of the writing to the seven congregations, but clearly not eternally so, they are here said to be sent into all the earth. This part of the symbolism was also seriously undertreated in my upbringing, to the extent that I hardly remember it being interpreted at all.
5:8 The one seated upon the throne is rather pointedly silent.
5:13 This dichotomy becomes even more pronounced here. There can be no doubt in John's mind that this Lamb is Christ. Who then is seated upon the throne? It cannot be this same Lamb. And the argument cannot hold that one is simply an earthly manifestation of the other, since we are solidly in the spirit realm here.
Friday, May 13, 2016
Samuel Wilson Fussell: Muscle
Whatever the intended audience for this book was, I am not among their number.
The most charitable interpretation I can offer is that it's a cautionary tale, one that successfully deglamourizes the world of competitive bodybuilding. As though bodybuilders were not already unappealing enough, the detailed observations on cystic acne, prolapsed rectums, incontinence, and other side effects should more than serve to dissuade the reader from ever setting foot in that world.
A more cynical interpretation is that the book is written as a mea culpa, an apology to his parents and others whom he left behind to pursue his ridiculous task. Each chapter is filled with self-deprecating explanations of why he did what he did, why he jettisoned his effete, academic life, and why he was sorry. This is the literary equivalent of the fellow in your office who wants so badly to be thought of as intelligent that you can't bring yourself to give it to him. It is the guy who says things like "What unspeakable hubris!" unironically, and "My clothes took on increasingly Brobdingnagian proportions" with a smirk that dares you to ask him what it means (201, 180). The last chapter may well have been titled, "Can I Come Back Yet?"
But my personal interpretation is that the book was written for an audience of one. I have certainly had those moments where I look back on my life from the emotional dumpster fire in which I stand and think, "How did I even get here?" It is as though another took hold of my strings and shook me wildly across the stage, and then left me in a heap, draped across the lip of the bandshell. What have I done? Why did I throw all of that away, and for what? It must not have been me; I was clearly possessed by a malevolent puppeteer, or an insane djinn. At those moments, the only way to preserve one's sanity and move forward is to write a book, to spin a narrative out of the frayed threads, and then tell oneself, "This is what it meant."
The most charitable interpretation I can offer is that it's a cautionary tale, one that successfully deglamourizes the world of competitive bodybuilding. As though bodybuilders were not already unappealing enough, the detailed observations on cystic acne, prolapsed rectums, incontinence, and other side effects should more than serve to dissuade the reader from ever setting foot in that world.
A more cynical interpretation is that the book is written as a mea culpa, an apology to his parents and others whom he left behind to pursue his ridiculous task. Each chapter is filled with self-deprecating explanations of why he did what he did, why he jettisoned his effete, academic life, and why he was sorry. This is the literary equivalent of the fellow in your office who wants so badly to be thought of as intelligent that you can't bring yourself to give it to him. It is the guy who says things like "What unspeakable hubris!" unironically, and "My clothes took on increasingly Brobdingnagian proportions" with a smirk that dares you to ask him what it means (201, 180). The last chapter may well have been titled, "Can I Come Back Yet?"
But my personal interpretation is that the book was written for an audience of one. I have certainly had those moments where I look back on my life from the emotional dumpster fire in which I stand and think, "How did I even get here?" It is as though another took hold of my strings and shook me wildly across the stage, and then left me in a heap, draped across the lip of the bandshell. What have I done? Why did I throw all of that away, and for what? It must not have been me; I was clearly possessed by a malevolent puppeteer, or an insane djinn. At those moments, the only way to preserve one's sanity and move forward is to write a book, to spin a narrative out of the frayed threads, and then tell oneself, "This is what it meant."
Sunday, April 03, 2016
김려령: 완득이
한국 아동 소설을 읽을 때 왜 이렇게 고아, 아니면 부모랑 사이가 안 좋은 주인공 많이 나오냐는 생각이 든다. 생각해보니 Harry Potter, Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird등과 같은 서양 소설도 그렇게 서있다. 왜 그랬을까요? 고아와 공감이 국가 간 경계를 넘어간 것 같는다.
근데, 이 책을 통하여 그렇게 경계 못 넘는 점을 이해하게 되었다. 대부분 한국 사람들 떡, 막창과 같은 쫄깃쫄깃한 음식을 미칠 뜻이 좋아한다. 대부분 서양인들이 "떡은 맛이 하나도 없는데 음식 아니고 입 운동"이라고 하면서 싫어한다. 왜 그런지 알게 됬다. 완득이란 주인공이 "나도 어느새 폐닭에 익숙해졌나보다. 씹기도 전에 똑똑 끊어진는 이 퍼석한 닭 정말 별로다"고한다. 한국 친구들 "질감도 맛이다" 설명한다. 난 그렇지 않다. 질감과 맛에 큰 차이가 있다. 떡은 질감이 있지만 맛은 없다. 그래도 한국 친구의 개념을 파악된 것같다.
근데, 이 책을 통하여 그렇게 경계 못 넘는 점을 이해하게 되었다. 대부분 한국 사람들 떡, 막창과 같은 쫄깃쫄깃한 음식을 미칠 뜻이 좋아한다. 대부분 서양인들이 "떡은 맛이 하나도 없는데 음식 아니고 입 운동"이라고 하면서 싫어한다. 왜 그런지 알게 됬다. 완득이란 주인공이 "나도 어느새 폐닭에 익숙해졌나보다. 씹기도 전에 똑똑 끊어진는 이 퍼석한 닭 정말 별로다"고한다. 한국 친구들 "질감도 맛이다" 설명한다. 난 그렇지 않다. 질감과 맛에 큰 차이가 있다. 떡은 질감이 있지만 맛은 없다. 그래도 한국 친구의 개념을 파악된 것같다.
Friday, March 25, 2016
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
I like to put things into my own words usually, but in this case I find myself in such perfect agreement with the late Roger Ebert that I feel compelled to quote his review of this movie at length:
"The movie starts promisingly, with an amusing period-piece newsreel about the Cassidy gang. And then there is a scene in a tavern where Sundance faces down a tough gambler, and that's good. And then a scene where Butch puts down a rebellion in his gang, and that's one of the best things in the movie. And then an extended bout of train-robbing, climaxing in a dynamite explosion that'll have you rolling in the aisles. And then we meet Sundance's girlfriend, played by Katharine Ross, and the scenes with the three of them have you thinking you've wandered into a really first-rate film."
I concur wholeheartedly, and I also agree with Ebert when he goes on to observe that it all falls apart about halfway through. this is especially true of the dialogue, which eventually
". . . gets so bad we can't believe a word anyone says. And then the violent, bloody ending is also a mistake; apparently it was a misguided attempt to copy "Bonnie and Clyde." But the ending doesn't belong on "Butch Cassidy," and we don't believe it, and we walk out of the theater wondering what happened to that great movie we were seeing until an hour ago."
This last line perfectly captures what went wrong. What happened to the good, though not great, movie this could have been? What misbegotten committee is responsible for turning it into a monstrous hybrid of Godard, Bacharach, and Apatow? The only circumstance under which I could recommend this movie is to an aspiring director, as an example of how to lose one's vision.
"The movie starts promisingly, with an amusing period-piece newsreel about the Cassidy gang. And then there is a scene in a tavern where Sundance faces down a tough gambler, and that's good. And then a scene where Butch puts down a rebellion in his gang, and that's one of the best things in the movie. And then an extended bout of train-robbing, climaxing in a dynamite explosion that'll have you rolling in the aisles. And then we meet Sundance's girlfriend, played by Katharine Ross, and the scenes with the three of them have you thinking you've wandered into a really first-rate film."
I concur wholeheartedly, and I also agree with Ebert when he goes on to observe that it all falls apart about halfway through. this is especially true of the dialogue, which eventually
". . . gets so bad we can't believe a word anyone says. And then the violent, bloody ending is also a mistake; apparently it was a misguided attempt to copy "Bonnie and Clyde." But the ending doesn't belong on "Butch Cassidy," and we don't believe it, and we walk out of the theater wondering what happened to that great movie we were seeing until an hour ago."
This last line perfectly captures what went wrong. What happened to the good, though not great, movie this could have been? What misbegotten committee is responsible for turning it into a monstrous hybrid of Godard, Bacharach, and Apatow? The only circumstance under which I could recommend this movie is to an aspiring director, as an example of how to lose one's vision.
Charles Singer: A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900
One of my favorite books from Ward's Lifetime of Reading so far has been E.H. Gombrich's The Story of Art. Instead of just discussing various movements and their proponents, he wove a narrative of art as the constant interplay between the Turners and the Constables of the world, the Caravaggios and the Caraccis. The story of art has been that of a pendulum swinging constantly between what we see and what we know. Between our senses and our mind. Reading that book has influenced how I see art more than any other experience.
This is probably responsible for my glee once I realized a few chapters in that Singer's intent was to do the same for scientific thought. The story he tells, though he takes a well-calibrated amount of space to explain the various theories and discoveries themselves, is largely one of the constant push and pull between Plato and Aristotle--between mind and matter. Scientific thought--and intellectual inquiry of all flavors--can never resist the urge to extrapolate beyond what we see. To Platonize things and look for the underlying principle, the ideal. Neither can it long stay in the theoretical, and before long it returns to the concrete, skeptical world of Aristotle.
Which is why the story is filled with characters who, sensing the approach of the parabolic arc, turn their attention in the other direction. Some look inward for answers, as Singer observes in his lovely treatment of Kepler:
"That Kepler sought so persistently for a simple mathematical scheme of the material worlds and, having found one, he regarded it as fitting his scheme of the moral world, suggests certain reflections on the workings of the human mind itself. Whatever reality may be, we seem to be so made that we aspire towards an interpretation of the universe that shall hold together in a complete and reasonable scheme. The fact that we thus aspire does not in the least prove that such a scheme corresponds to reality" (239).
And even as those forces draw the pendulum in one direction, others are gathering their momentum. Those such as Giordano Bruno, easily the most fascinating figure in Singer's treatment of the subject. He is described as a renegade monk who "showed a lofty indifference to common sense that cannot fail to command our respect--at a distance" (218). Bruno's willingness to completely jettison Platonic models of existence makes him a far more engaging character than his predecessor, Copernicus, although it is this latter whom we remember. His notion of space as being without a center and, therefore infinite, was diametrically opposed to the contemporary anthropocentric models. This vision went far further than, preceded, and is more sustainable than Galileo's.
Of course all of this ties in nicely to my general framework for existence: the interplay between the nacheinander and the nebeneinander. The series and parallel natures of our experience. Where will the pendulum fall? Is reality what we see, or what we know, Subhuti? Singer presciently closes his book with a supposition on that matter: "It seems probable that Science itself is now reaching a stage in which an adequate scientific equipment will involve some regard to the world as an interconnected whole, in other words, in which Science and Philosophy will dwell less apart . . . Notably it seems probable that the conceptions of the separation of mind from mind and of mind from matter may need modification" (516). No pendulum can swing forever. At some point, Van Gogh and Monet, Linnaeus and Cuvier, will have to come to rest.
This is probably responsible for my glee once I realized a few chapters in that Singer's intent was to do the same for scientific thought. The story he tells, though he takes a well-calibrated amount of space to explain the various theories and discoveries themselves, is largely one of the constant push and pull between Plato and Aristotle--between mind and matter. Scientific thought--and intellectual inquiry of all flavors--can never resist the urge to extrapolate beyond what we see. To Platonize things and look for the underlying principle, the ideal. Neither can it long stay in the theoretical, and before long it returns to the concrete, skeptical world of Aristotle.
Which is why the story is filled with characters who, sensing the approach of the parabolic arc, turn their attention in the other direction. Some look inward for answers, as Singer observes in his lovely treatment of Kepler:
"That Kepler sought so persistently for a simple mathematical scheme of the material worlds and, having found one, he regarded it as fitting his scheme of the moral world, suggests certain reflections on the workings of the human mind itself. Whatever reality may be, we seem to be so made that we aspire towards an interpretation of the universe that shall hold together in a complete and reasonable scheme. The fact that we thus aspire does not in the least prove that such a scheme corresponds to reality" (239).
And even as those forces draw the pendulum in one direction, others are gathering their momentum. Those such as Giordano Bruno, easily the most fascinating figure in Singer's treatment of the subject. He is described as a renegade monk who "showed a lofty indifference to common sense that cannot fail to command our respect--at a distance" (218). Bruno's willingness to completely jettison Platonic models of existence makes him a far more engaging character than his predecessor, Copernicus, although it is this latter whom we remember. His notion of space as being without a center and, therefore infinite, was diametrically opposed to the contemporary anthropocentric models. This vision went far further than, preceded, and is more sustainable than Galileo's.
Of course all of this ties in nicely to my general framework for existence: the interplay between the nacheinander and the nebeneinander. The series and parallel natures of our experience. Where will the pendulum fall? Is reality what we see, or what we know, Subhuti? Singer presciently closes his book with a supposition on that matter: "It seems probable that Science itself is now reaching a stage in which an adequate scientific equipment will involve some regard to the world as an interconnected whole, in other words, in which Science and Philosophy will dwell less apart . . . Notably it seems probable that the conceptions of the separation of mind from mind and of mind from matter may need modification" (516). No pendulum can swing forever. At some point, Van Gogh and Monet, Linnaeus and Cuvier, will have to come to rest.
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
The Letter of Jude
This book strikes me as the outlyingest of the Greek scriptures. Even by virtue of authorship it is singular among those books adopted as canonical by the early church. There seems to be some confusion about the identity of this Jude. Was he a brother of Jesus? Or one of the original 12 apostles? It would seem to depend on whom you ask. My religious upbringing asserted the former. In either case, nearly nothing is known about him, as compared with Peter, John, Paul et al. As with the book attributed to James, it appears I will need to take it largely on its content.
1:2 Contrasting this salutation with those of Paul and Peter, one would expect the book to be less concerned with "grace" and more with love".
1:4 A recurring theme. Jude adds his voice to those other writers in defending the church against apostasy.
1:6 Whence does this bit of theology come? A reference from some apocryphal book? Not found in any of the canonical books, to my knowledge. And yet it is treated as established fact here.
1:9 Yet another unfamiliar reference--apocryphal even by Catholic standards.
1:14 And a reference to the book of Enoch--not exactly mainstream.
1:23 Well, at least we can see why "grace" was left out of his salutation.
Of all the many epistles that have been lost to history, and still more that have been preserved but refused canonicity, how did this one manage to be included? I can find no other answer than that the Jonathon Edwardsian fire and brimstone appealed to the sensibilities of those in charge of such decisions. y my original count, I have one more book to go in this little project. But the more I read, the more I want to add to the list books that have been inexplicably excluded.
1:2 Contrasting this salutation with those of Paul and Peter, one would expect the book to be less concerned with "grace" and more with love".
1:4 A recurring theme. Jude adds his voice to those other writers in defending the church against apostasy.
1:6 Whence does this bit of theology come? A reference from some apocryphal book? Not found in any of the canonical books, to my knowledge. And yet it is treated as established fact here.
1:9 Yet another unfamiliar reference--apocryphal even by Catholic standards.
1:14 And a reference to the book of Enoch--not exactly mainstream.
1:23 Well, at least we can see why "grace" was left out of his salutation.
Of all the many epistles that have been lost to history, and still more that have been preserved but refused canonicity, how did this one manage to be included? I can find no other answer than that the Jonathon Edwardsian fire and brimstone appealed to the sensibilities of those in charge of such decisions. y my original count, I have one more book to go in this little project. But the more I read, the more I want to add to the list books that have been inexplicably excluded.
Jaws
Well, that was unexpected. I suspected that this film earned its place on the AFI's list of 100 influential movies by virtue of its social impact, rather than its quality. And for the first third of the movie, I was comfortable in my assessment: it was a serviceable, but unremarkable monster movie.
But then they got in the boat. At that moment it went from being cinematic to theatrical, in the sense of being suitable for the stage, rather than the screen. In fact, I can easily imagine the best actors of our time being drawn to the roles of three men trapped in a life and death struggle with a force of nature. Working title: Two and a Half Men (badum tssss). And the movie never backtracked; it never went back to land and remembered that it was a monster movie. Once those men got in a boat, it became a dramatic character study, and so it remained.
But then they got in the boat. At that moment it went from being cinematic to theatrical, in the sense of being suitable for the stage, rather than the screen. In fact, I can easily imagine the best actors of our time being drawn to the roles of three men trapped in a life and death struggle with a force of nature. Working title: Two and a Half Men (badum tssss). And the movie never backtracked; it never went back to land and remembered that it was a monster movie. Once those men got in a boat, it became a dramatic character study, and so it remained.
Sunday, December 20, 2015
Emile Zola: Therese Raquin
I am, perhaps more than most, a very susceptible reader. I find myself, without meaning to or resisting, absorbing whatever I encounter, including books, movies, and people. After reading a nineteenth century novel, I am far more likely to use "whence" in an email than not, and equally likely to refer to somebody as "gurl" after watching RuPaul's Drag Race. The other day I got into a lengthy and, at times, heated conversation with a black friend about the extent to which it was appropriate for me to use snippets of AAVE in our conversation.
So it is not a surprise at all that my take on this book is heavily colored by the movies I watched this week, specifically Guillermo Del Toro's Crimson Peak and El Espinazo del Diablo. On almost every page, I saw Zola's gruesome and vivid prose as filmed by that auteur, and speculated how the latter might revel in filming the water-logged greens and creeping, malevolent reds found there. Camille's corpse especially lends itself to Del Toro's take on ghost stories, never jumping or shrieking cheaply at the reader, but waiting in clear view and all the more sinister for it.
And what made the book ever so slightly dissatisfying was, or seemed to be in my heavily influenced mind, the same as that which occasionally detracts from Del Toro. Especially in Crimson Peak, though the journey never seems false or contrived, it is often far too clear. In watching that movie, it was not clear how the doomed siblings would die, or at whose hand, but the journey they would take to get there, and the process the movie would go through, was certain from the beginning.
Likewise in Therese Raquin, one couldn't say for certain whether the two murderous lovers would die at each other's hands, at the scaffold, or, as was ultimately the case, by their own hands. It was certain, however, what steps would take them there. Even though Zola crafted every moment flawlessly, once it became apparent where the story was going, I found myself less interested in arriving.
So it is not a surprise at all that my take on this book is heavily colored by the movies I watched this week, specifically Guillermo Del Toro's Crimson Peak and El Espinazo del Diablo. On almost every page, I saw Zola's gruesome and vivid prose as filmed by that auteur, and speculated how the latter might revel in filming the water-logged greens and creeping, malevolent reds found there. Camille's corpse especially lends itself to Del Toro's take on ghost stories, never jumping or shrieking cheaply at the reader, but waiting in clear view and all the more sinister for it.
And what made the book ever so slightly dissatisfying was, or seemed to be in my heavily influenced mind, the same as that which occasionally detracts from Del Toro. Especially in Crimson Peak, though the journey never seems false or contrived, it is often far too clear. In watching that movie, it was not clear how the doomed siblings would die, or at whose hand, but the journey they would take to get there, and the process the movie would go through, was certain from the beginning.
Likewise in Therese Raquin, one couldn't say for certain whether the two murderous lovers would die at each other's hands, at the scaffold, or, as was ultimately the case, by their own hands. It was certain, however, what steps would take them there. Even though Zola crafted every moment flawlessly, once it became apparent where the story was going, I found myself less interested in arriving.
Sunday, November 08, 2015
조현용: 우리마로 깨닫다
제가 배운 한국어에 대한 것 중 가낭 많은 게 조현용 때문이다. 작가로서 쓰신 책이든 교수로서 전달하신 강의든 학자로서 발표하신 연구든 가장 많이 도와주신 분. 이 책은 제외가 아니다. 한국어 어원을 바탕으로 내성 하는 이 책이 철이 있게 한국인의 개념을 반사한다. 한국이 조현용과 같은 사람으로 가득차게 되면 얼마나 좋겠네요.
Sunday, September 27, 2015
Arthur Schopenhaeur: The Wisdom of Life
". . . if a man finds himself in possession of great mental faculties, such as alone should venture on the solution of the hardest of all problems--those which concern nature as a whole and humanity in its widest range, he will do well to extend his view equally in all directions" (105). With these words, Schopenhauer declares himself to his audience, urging those worthy of reading his treatise to pursue the universal, rather than the specific. He would have done well to follow his own advice.
What he chooses to focus on, namely the task of taxonomizing all that a man has at his disposal, that which "makes" a man, so to speak, he treats insightfully and which a certain amount of panache. I'm especially fond of his takedown of so-called "knightly honour", that system of chivalry which was popular in 19th century Europe which would brook the bearing of no insult among the civilized classes. The result of this social paradigm, he rightly notes, "The rudest is always right . . . However stupid, bad or wicked a man may have been, if he is only rude into the bargain, he condones and legitimizes all his faults" (75). Such a state of social affairs cannot be said to have any merit, as he goes on to illustrate, and is akin to trying "to prove he warmth of your room by holding your hand on the thermometer and so make it rise" (80).
The vigor with which he eviscerates the social mores of his time, however, gives evidence that he has not achieved his aim to treat "humanity in its widest range." His attention is myopically limited to a specific period of time, and furthermore to those levels of society which are concerned with honour in the sense that he means. The modern reader has no need of being convinced that a duel to satisfy some perceived insult is barbaric and pointless. Schopenhauer unknowingly preached to the choir of posterity. He did it with wit and vigour, but as he observes, "the strongest arm is unavailing to give impetus to a featherweight" (96).
Which is merely one example of the larger problem with this work. When he chose as his topic that which makes a man, he did so literally and in earnest. It does not occur to him, for example, that women are part of the fabric of humanity as well. He does this largely by omission, but when he does address the fact that perhaps women also exist, he does so in a tone so dismissive as to make this reader seethe. "The most essential feature in woman's life is her relation to man," seems to summarize his opinion of the matter, and he says little more than that (67). Neither is he content to limit himself to humans with a penis, living in 19th century Europe, and possessed of some level of social status. He for all intents restricts himself to a test group of one: himself. For example, if I were to list that which a man has at his disposal, friends and family would be high on the list. Having never experienced these pleasures, Schopenhauer makes the unforgivable assumption that all men are like himself, and comes to the conclusion that "what one human being can be to another is not a very great deal" (30).
I am often tempted by this line of reasoning myself. Having never really experienced romantic love, it would be easy for me to assume that it did not exist. But I have seen it. I have seen the miracle of two good people working together for some even greater good, and even my ardent cynicism cannot deny that there are happy, loving, admirable couples in my acquaintance. Schopenhauer assumed that his human experience was the only one, and there but for the grace of whatever go I.
What he chooses to focus on, namely the task of taxonomizing all that a man has at his disposal, that which "makes" a man, so to speak, he treats insightfully and which a certain amount of panache. I'm especially fond of his takedown of so-called "knightly honour", that system of chivalry which was popular in 19th century Europe which would brook the bearing of no insult among the civilized classes. The result of this social paradigm, he rightly notes, "The rudest is always right . . . However stupid, bad or wicked a man may have been, if he is only rude into the bargain, he condones and legitimizes all his faults" (75). Such a state of social affairs cannot be said to have any merit, as he goes on to illustrate, and is akin to trying "to prove he warmth of your room by holding your hand on the thermometer and so make it rise" (80).
The vigor with which he eviscerates the social mores of his time, however, gives evidence that he has not achieved his aim to treat "humanity in its widest range." His attention is myopically limited to a specific period of time, and furthermore to those levels of society which are concerned with honour in the sense that he means. The modern reader has no need of being convinced that a duel to satisfy some perceived insult is barbaric and pointless. Schopenhauer unknowingly preached to the choir of posterity. He did it with wit and vigour, but as he observes, "the strongest arm is unavailing to give impetus to a featherweight" (96).
Which is merely one example of the larger problem with this work. When he chose as his topic that which makes a man, he did so literally and in earnest. It does not occur to him, for example, that women are part of the fabric of humanity as well. He does this largely by omission, but when he does address the fact that perhaps women also exist, he does so in a tone so dismissive as to make this reader seethe. "The most essential feature in woman's life is her relation to man," seems to summarize his opinion of the matter, and he says little more than that (67). Neither is he content to limit himself to humans with a penis, living in 19th century Europe, and possessed of some level of social status. He for all intents restricts himself to a test group of one: himself. For example, if I were to list that which a man has at his disposal, friends and family would be high on the list. Having never experienced these pleasures, Schopenhauer makes the unforgivable assumption that all men are like himself, and comes to the conclusion that "what one human being can be to another is not a very great deal" (30).
I am often tempted by this line of reasoning myself. Having never really experienced romantic love, it would be easy for me to assume that it did not exist. But I have seen it. I have seen the miracle of two good people working together for some even greater good, and even my ardent cynicism cannot deny that there are happy, loving, admirable couples in my acquaintance. Schopenhauer assumed that his human experience was the only one, and there but for the grace of whatever go I.
Friday, August 21, 2015
The 3rd Letter of John
I took the liberty of reading this brief item through once before beginning on a verse by verse inspection. I find that it has very little in the way of theology to recommend it, and has very much the flavor of a brief email "keeping in touch", as one says. One must wonder what John said to this fellow when and if they met in person.
1:1 In keeping with his opening in the previous epistle, the writer refers to himself merely as "the elder". This sobriquet opens itself to multiple possibilities.
1:5 In contrast to Paul's proscriptions, which are often doctrinal, this seems rather personal. Diotrephes' offense lay in his lack of charity--both toward John and to others in the early church.
1:11 It is easy to see why John was seen as closer to Christ than the other disciples. This admonition mirrors the work of his mentor both in its simplicity and its spirit. Additionally, like much of what Christ is reported to have said, it is incompatible with much of modern Christian doctrine.
In short, not much here to comment upon, but nothing to give offense either.
1:1 In keeping with his opening in the previous epistle, the writer refers to himself merely as "the elder". This sobriquet opens itself to multiple possibilities.
- This is an official title. If so, it's noteworthy that he is "the" elder, not "an" elder. Would Peter object to this seeming demotion?
- This is merely a nickname. The affectionate tone of the note is compatible with opening the book "from your old friend."
- This is a way of distinguishing himself from some other John, of which there are many. Insofar as his name is nowhere mentioned, this seems unlikely.
- This is something of a code word, and truthfully, this is not the only place where the writer seems to be judicious in disclosing identities.
- I'm seriously overthinking it.
1:5 In contrast to Paul's proscriptions, which are often doctrinal, this seems rather personal. Diotrephes' offense lay in his lack of charity--both toward John and to others in the early church.
1:11 It is easy to see why John was seen as closer to Christ than the other disciples. This admonition mirrors the work of his mentor both in its simplicity and its spirit. Additionally, like much of what Christ is reported to have said, it is incompatible with much of modern Christian doctrine.
In short, not much here to comment upon, but nothing to give offense either.
Taxi Driver
Well, I suppose I have my answer. Either by virtue of having found the perfect proof for my theorem, or of having become bored with the question, I feel like putting the idea of "greatness" in a movie to bed.
Everything about this movie was great. The performances: iconic. Aesthetic elements, cinematography, score (Scorsese's real gift, if you ask me), set design, costumes, everything: flawless. And yet the movie itself was not great, in my mind. It was good, flawlessly executed, even a masterpiece, but I can't bring myself to say that it was great. What could possibly have been lacking?
I have come to the conclusion that the sine qua non of a great movie is the script. To be specific, the very idea of the movie must be great for the movie itself to achieve greatness. If I were in a more mathematical frame of mind, I would write a formula wherein the potential quality of the movie lies in its central idea, and it can never rise above that, but can sink below it based on the quality of other factors. But I am not in such a frame of mind. I will simply say that Taxi Driver had a good idea, a good reason for existing, but not a great one, and although no one involved with the movie could have done zir job better, it was never going to be great.
Everything about this movie was great. The performances: iconic. Aesthetic elements, cinematography, score (Scorsese's real gift, if you ask me), set design, costumes, everything: flawless. And yet the movie itself was not great, in my mind. It was good, flawlessly executed, even a masterpiece, but I can't bring myself to say that it was great. What could possibly have been lacking?
I have come to the conclusion that the sine qua non of a great movie is the script. To be specific, the very idea of the movie must be great for the movie itself to achieve greatness. If I were in a more mathematical frame of mind, I would write a formula wherein the potential quality of the movie lies in its central idea, and it can never rise above that, but can sink below it based on the quality of other factors. But I am not in such a frame of mind. I will simply say that Taxi Driver had a good idea, a good reason for existing, but not a great one, and although no one involved with the movie could have done zir job better, it was never going to be great.
Monday, August 17, 2015
Nagai Kafu: Life and Writings (Edward Seidensticker, ed.)
When we speak of something as an acquired taste, often it is a backhanded way of saying that its virtues are not obvious, or even readily found. When I say here that the writing of Nagai Kafu in particular, and Japanese literature in general, is an acquired taste, however it is not in that sense. Rather, it is to say that to appreciate it, one must step entirely out of everything one has learned from a lifetime of Western literature.
I recall a similar experience reading The Tale of Genji and Soul Mountain many years ago. I failed to appreciate either of them because I kept expecting something that wasn't going to happen. I'm used to good books having a narrative, a plot, and interesting structure, a resolution of some sort, lifelike characterization, and other things that Western literature does so well. It was very much like missing the forest for the trees, failing to appreciate the journey due to an obsessive focus on the destination. In Eastern literature, at least as far as I've experienced, the point is in the moment, not in the momentum. The joy of reading Genji, or Li Po, or Tu Fu, etc. is the same joy as that of sitting in a park and watching the leaves blow. This is a quiet, still joy, and one that Kafu exemplifies.
In his excellent editorial and biographical comments, Seidensticker well highlights these joys, found everywhere in Kafu's writings. Narratively weak and filled with bald, unremarkable characters, his stories might well seem to be poorly written. Indeed, if one reads them as stories, such a judgement is more than fair. If, however, one reads them as poems, as insightful, touching descriptions of subtle moments in the life of a man growing weary with the world, but still determined to record its pleasures faithfully, one ceases to care about the plot, characters, structure, and everything else that a Western approach to writing has indoctrinated us to believe is important. One is able to sit in the yard of this self-described scribbler, and watch the leaves.
I recall a similar experience reading The Tale of Genji and Soul Mountain many years ago. I failed to appreciate either of them because I kept expecting something that wasn't going to happen. I'm used to good books having a narrative, a plot, and interesting structure, a resolution of some sort, lifelike characterization, and other things that Western literature does so well. It was very much like missing the forest for the trees, failing to appreciate the journey due to an obsessive focus on the destination. In Eastern literature, at least as far as I've experienced, the point is in the moment, not in the momentum. The joy of reading Genji, or Li Po, or Tu Fu, etc. is the same joy as that of sitting in a park and watching the leaves blow. This is a quiet, still joy, and one that Kafu exemplifies.
In his excellent editorial and biographical comments, Seidensticker well highlights these joys, found everywhere in Kafu's writings. Narratively weak and filled with bald, unremarkable characters, his stories might well seem to be poorly written. Indeed, if one reads them as stories, such a judgement is more than fair. If, however, one reads them as poems, as insightful, touching descriptions of subtle moments in the life of a man growing weary with the world, but still determined to record its pleasures faithfully, one ceases to care about the plot, characters, structure, and everything else that a Western approach to writing has indoctrinated us to believe is important. One is able to sit in the yard of this self-described scribbler, and watch the leaves.
Sunday, March 01, 2015
Second John
1:1 Well this is obfuscatory. Who is this lady? I'm sure that most will take it as a metaphor for the church as a whole, but a reading that assumes an individual audience might be revelatory.
1:3 More anti-trinitarian theology from John.
1:4 This leads one away from a metaphorical interpretation of the "lady". If she is the church as a whole, then surely it would be less than an overjoy that only some of her children were walking in the truth.
1:5-6 This is beginning to read almost like an Abelard and Heloise situation.
1:12 And there is no way that John was going to meet the entire congregation face to face. This simply must be an individual.
1:13 Especially considering that the church proper has no metaphorical sister . . . this verse especially makes me sympathetic to the reading that John was writing to Mary herself.
1:3 More anti-trinitarian theology from John.
1:4 This leads one away from a metaphorical interpretation of the "lady". If she is the church as a whole, then surely it would be less than an overjoy that only some of her children were walking in the truth.
1:5-6 This is beginning to read almost like an Abelard and Heloise situation.
1:12 And there is no way that John was going to meet the entire congregation face to face. This simply must be an individual.
1:13 Especially considering that the church proper has no metaphorical sister . . . this verse especially makes me sympathetic to the reading that John was writing to Mary herself.
Philip K. Dick: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said
There's a reason why Philip K. Dick is in my trinity of science fiction, alongside Vonnegut and Asimov. While he can match the other two for creativity and vision, the latter are simply better writers--more consistent, more unified, and more erudite in every way. But unlike Vonnegut and Asimov, the power of Dick (phrasing!) is that somehow he reaches beyond the page and reads you back. Every time I read something by him, I find it reflected in my own life, and his books answer the questions that you didn't even think to speak aloud.
This book, like all of Dick's, is flawed. My reaction the first time I read it holds true six years later: that it could have done with a whole lot less explaining. But this second reading finds me in a less analytical mood. I forgive the author for caving to what were no doubt the demands of his publisher and tying things up at the end in a way that doesn't seem to match the rest of the book. I forgive him because the other 90% is a work of breathing, staring philosophy, and it would not surprise me at all if it grew a pair of legs and walked off my desk of its own accord.
This book, like all of Dick's, is flawed. My reaction the first time I read it holds true six years later: that it could have done with a whole lot less explaining. But this second reading finds me in a less analytical mood. I forgive the author for caving to what were no doubt the demands of his publisher and tying things up at the end in a way that doesn't seem to match the rest of the book. I forgive him because the other 90% is a work of breathing, staring philosophy, and it would not surprise me at all if it grew a pair of legs and walked off my desk of its own accord.
Thursday, February 19, 2015
Richard Jackson Harris (ed): Cognitive Processing in Bilinguals
Generally there are three reasons to read a research anthology of this sort:
Nick Ellis of the University of North Wales seems to be an exception. In his article on Linguistic Relativity, a subject in which I have little innate interest, I found a quote from Joyce sticking out like a sore thumb. What was Ulysses doing in this starchy tome? Although the quote in question was simply about doing mental calculations, and was altogether unnecessary in this volume, it reminded me of my own take on that monstrous novel. To say that Ulysses is a stream of consciousness work is only partially correct. There are parts of it that treat the serial circuit of human thought, but it is equally devoted to the parallel process of human experience. Joyce gives us a typically obtuse way of thinking about this in section 3:
"Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably."
It is the interaction of the nacheinander and the nebeneinander that make up life. Those things we experience, perceive, and feel happen all at once, and those things we think and remember happen one after the other. Insofar as this holds for all human activity, it is no surprise that it applies equally to the field of language acquisition. Krashen's "monitor" and Chomsky's "language acquisition device" work together simultaneously, and this dichotomy is observable everywhere in the literature on the subject: the aforementioned implicit and explicit knowledge, learning and acquisition, form and meaning, all these are simply names for the two ways in which the mind works with language--and not incidentally, the left and the right hemispheres. If I can get my students to use both, and consciously so, I should probably write a paper on it. Perhaps Mr. Harris will be interested including it in his next anthology.
- Because there is a single article that is seminal in its field, and unavailable elsewhere. In this case, the article in question was Kroll and Shull: Lexical and Conceptual Memory in Fluent and Nonfluent Bilinguals. Although I spent a good portion of my thesis tearing it up, there is no doubt that this work on the so-called "translation asymmetry" is a crucial and influential piece of research.
- To get a nice set of references for your bibliography and give weight to what you want to say, since you are a lowly master's candidate and you are making some rather bold claims. Hypothetically, of course.
- To figure out what you want to read next. In this case, I was most taken by Brian MacWhinney's discussion of the Competition Model, and Jacqueline Thomas' treatment of explicit and implicit knowledge (via Bialystok). The bite-sized morsels offered here were enough to tempt me in those directions without having to slog through dreary textbooks on cerebral lateralization or phonological processing.
Nick Ellis of the University of North Wales seems to be an exception. In his article on Linguistic Relativity, a subject in which I have little innate interest, I found a quote from Joyce sticking out like a sore thumb. What was Ulysses doing in this starchy tome? Although the quote in question was simply about doing mental calculations, and was altogether unnecessary in this volume, it reminded me of my own take on that monstrous novel. To say that Ulysses is a stream of consciousness work is only partially correct. There are parts of it that treat the serial circuit of human thought, but it is equally devoted to the parallel process of human experience. Joyce gives us a typically obtuse way of thinking about this in section 3:
"Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base, fell through the nebeneinander ineluctably."
It is the interaction of the nacheinander and the nebeneinander that make up life. Those things we experience, perceive, and feel happen all at once, and those things we think and remember happen one after the other. Insofar as this holds for all human activity, it is no surprise that it applies equally to the field of language acquisition. Krashen's "monitor" and Chomsky's "language acquisition device" work together simultaneously, and this dichotomy is observable everywhere in the literature on the subject: the aforementioned implicit and explicit knowledge, learning and acquisition, form and meaning, all these are simply names for the two ways in which the mind works with language--and not incidentally, the left and the right hemispheres. If I can get my students to use both, and consciously so, I should probably write a paper on it. Perhaps Mr. Harris will be interested including it in his next anthology.
Emile Zola: Germinal
Up until the last chapter, I was prepared to write about how masterfully Zola ropes the readers in, enticing her or him with the prospect that things might just turn out--even though he clearly has no such intention. This was my take on L'assommoir, and combined with his thoroughly believable, though not necessarily relatable, characters I saw a pattern developing. Even the ostensible villains of the novel react in perfectly human ways to representatively human circumstances. The mine collapse in Part VI seemed the perfect resolution to this vector, and this gutsy and unexpected turn reminded me of The Mill on the Floss or Empire Falls. Had he stopped there, I would have put him right up there with Balzac, ahead of Flaubert and Stendahl, as the very best of French writers.
But he didn't stop. He went on for another hundred or so pages, and that last chapter undid everything. Whereas L'assommoir sacrificed nothing to Zola's social ideas, and in fact worked with them nicely, it would seem that he simply could not help himself in Germinal. What was an inspiring narrative that needed no help to make its point, turned into a manifesto. I don't like being told what to think; it insults my pride of readership and chafes against my rather typically American rebelliousness. It is for this reason that Germinal, though it could have been even better than L'assommoir, wound up being merely The Jungle.
But he didn't stop. He went on for another hundred or so pages, and that last chapter undid everything. Whereas L'assommoir sacrificed nothing to Zola's social ideas, and in fact worked with them nicely, it would seem that he simply could not help himself in Germinal. What was an inspiring narrative that needed no help to make its point, turned into a manifesto. I don't like being told what to think; it insults my pride of readership and chafes against my rather typically American rebelliousness. It is for this reason that Germinal, though it could have been even better than L'assommoir, wound up being merely The Jungle.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Honore de Balzac: La Comedie Humaine
Baaaaaaaaalzac! It's funny for so many reasons. One can hear Eulalie Mackechnie Shinn clucking it alongside Chaucher and Rabelais. And let's not forget its giggle-inducing homophone. It's a wonder, considering how long the name has been in my consciousness, that it has taken me so long to get around to reading this author. At last I have, though, and glad I am that I did. I found him to be not only an engaging and epigrammatic storyteller, but also a complete original, treating the subject of men and women in a way that I don't recall experiencing before. An enjoyable mix of Hemingway's brutal honesty and George Eliot's vibrant philosophy. One can see, of course, why Mrs. Shinn would have objected to the content--had she ever read it.
In The Human Comedy, Balzac does not shy away from the darkest sides of human love and sexuality; rather, he embraces them. Even the most brutal aspects, however, are never treated brutally. The themes are straight out of (or rather into, considering timing) Bret Easton Ellis: revenge, rape, jealousy, lust, sadism, and even bestiality. But the style and treatment are more Tennyson: the heights and depths of human spirit that drives those themes. Even arguably the most substream of the stories, the (metaphorically?) bestial "A Passion in the Desert", ends with the stunning explanation for the allure of one's wild nature: "It is God without men."
This tension between the human and the divine only partly sets up Balzac's cosmology, however. In "The Duchesse de Langeais", Balzac thoughtfully and systematically lays out the real structure of his universe: "What man, in any rank of life, has not felt in his soul an indefinable pleasure in a woman he has chosen, even dreamed of as his own, who embodies the triple moral, physical, and social perfections that allow him to see in her the satisfation of all his wishes?"(327). Society, this third element of Balzac's trinity, has just as clear a voice in his stories as the other two. It is only in "Langeais", though, that he fully unfolds his meaning. Peppered throughout are subtle references through imagery--the triple sconces of the Duchess' cloister, the three masked figures of her vision--and explicit reference to the three divinities, though always wearing different masks. In fact, the patten is so consistent that one could make a chart were one inclined to that sort of thing . . .
p. 291 p. 303 p.327 p.366
love men social horse
music principles moral bull
religion things physical lion
Perhaps the most stimulating part of this cosmology is its ability to be simultaneously clear and vague. There is no doubt that Balzac's intention is to set up a trinity; great writers never do this sort of thing on accident. But there is considerable doubt as to the precise nature of the three elements. Although the above chart draws a perfectly acceptable corollary between the various mentions of these elements, it is by no means the only possible one. Do things belong to the physical world? Or the social one? What about men? At times they operate according to their animal passions, at others according to their social constructs. One would assume that religion is a moral force, but in Balzac (in "A Passion in the Desert", for example) God is nature, and therefore well within the physical realm. It is tempting, in fact, to construct a narrative wherein Montriveau of "Langeais" and the general of "Desert" are in fact the same person, the latter taking place during the former's trek across the desert (322-323). One is further tempted to this reading by Balzac's constant acsription of animal qualities to the two lovers in "Langeais". Montriveau even goes so far as to say to the Duchesse, "perhaps you are like the tigers in the desert, who lick the wounds they have first inflicted" (373). Rather an irresistible reference to the general and his panther.
At any rate, the line between the members of Balzac's triumvirate is far too blurry to allow any parallel with the Catholic trinity. It rather feels more like a threefold version of yin and yang, one constantly running into and becoming the other. For him, the world is not run by a constant tension between light and dark; it is far from so binary. It is, rather, the constant and blurry interplay between love, lust, and romance that drives all humans to behave in the way they do.
In The Human Comedy, Balzac does not shy away from the darkest sides of human love and sexuality; rather, he embraces them. Even the most brutal aspects, however, are never treated brutally. The themes are straight out of (or rather into, considering timing) Bret Easton Ellis: revenge, rape, jealousy, lust, sadism, and even bestiality. But the style and treatment are more Tennyson: the heights and depths of human spirit that drives those themes. Even arguably the most substream of the stories, the (metaphorically?) bestial "A Passion in the Desert", ends with the stunning explanation for the allure of one's wild nature: "It is God without men."
This tension between the human and the divine only partly sets up Balzac's cosmology, however. In "The Duchesse de Langeais", Balzac thoughtfully and systematically lays out the real structure of his universe: "What man, in any rank of life, has not felt in his soul an indefinable pleasure in a woman he has chosen, even dreamed of as his own, who embodies the triple moral, physical, and social perfections that allow him to see in her the satisfation of all his wishes?"(327). Society, this third element of Balzac's trinity, has just as clear a voice in his stories as the other two. It is only in "Langeais", though, that he fully unfolds his meaning. Peppered throughout are subtle references through imagery--the triple sconces of the Duchess' cloister, the three masked figures of her vision--and explicit reference to the three divinities, though always wearing different masks. In fact, the patten is so consistent that one could make a chart were one inclined to that sort of thing . . .
p. 291 p. 303 p.327 p.366
love men social horse
music principles moral bull
religion things physical lion
Perhaps the most stimulating part of this cosmology is its ability to be simultaneously clear and vague. There is no doubt that Balzac's intention is to set up a trinity; great writers never do this sort of thing on accident. But there is considerable doubt as to the precise nature of the three elements. Although the above chart draws a perfectly acceptable corollary between the various mentions of these elements, it is by no means the only possible one. Do things belong to the physical world? Or the social one? What about men? At times they operate according to their animal passions, at others according to their social constructs. One would assume that religion is a moral force, but in Balzac (in "A Passion in the Desert", for example) God is nature, and therefore well within the physical realm. It is tempting, in fact, to construct a narrative wherein Montriveau of "Langeais" and the general of "Desert" are in fact the same person, the latter taking place during the former's trek across the desert (322-323). One is further tempted to this reading by Balzac's constant acsription of animal qualities to the two lovers in "Langeais". Montriveau even goes so far as to say to the Duchesse, "perhaps you are like the tigers in the desert, who lick the wounds they have first inflicted" (373). Rather an irresistible reference to the general and his panther.
At any rate, the line between the members of Balzac's triumvirate is far too blurry to allow any parallel with the Catholic trinity. It rather feels more like a threefold version of yin and yang, one constantly running into and becoming the other. For him, the world is not run by a constant tension between light and dark; it is far from so binary. It is, rather, the constant and blurry interplay between love, lust, and romance that drives all humans to behave in the way they do.
Friday, January 30, 2015
First John
Well, here goes. I'm definitely near the end of this little project, and have been putting it off, as I tend to do with all things resembling completion. The rest of this Bible belongs to John, a figure who could be described as either fascinating or enigmatic. In some ways he feels to me like the narrator of the Hebrew scriptures. A fellow whose voice is felt on every page, but who we never really get to know directly. Kinda the Nick Carraway of the Bible. Peter and Paul both come through loud and clear in their books, but John seemed to take great care to remove himself, even referring to himself in the third person, and never by name in his gospel account. I look forward to seeing what pokes through in these last four books, or whether he maintains that mysterious objectivity.
1:1 The unnamed plural here is an interesting choice. Different from Peter, James or Paul. If any of them had written it, no doubt this would have begun with their names. John already seems set to let this letter stand on its own merit.
1:3 Really, this trinity thing is out of hand. I've discussed John's treatment extensively in my discussion of his gospel account, and here is further indication that he had no concept of Jesus and God as being the same person.
1:4 I really like this approach. This is how prayer should work. Not asking for anything, just saying it because to not say it is to be incomplete.
1:5 Again, exactly like a prayer--my version at least, which is heavily influenced by Ernest Holmes.
1:8-10 A concise and accessible treatment of a weighty theological topic.
2:1 Now this is interesting. A sudden shift to the first person singular. Fitting, in that his topic now seems to be taking a turn away from the rhetoric of theology and toward the personal appeal.
2:2 And back to "we" here, but now it feels less like the royal we, and more like the addressee-inclusive we. I wonder if Greek makes that distinction like Mandarin and Hawaiian, or leaves it unmarked like English. Update: unmarked.
2:4 The second use of this expression already. It is as if for John "the truth is not in you" is the ultimate proscription. I will be on the lookout for future treatment of "truth", but it feels important to him in a way that it did not to Paul et al.
2:9-11 And the same can be said for "light". In fact, truth and light already seem to be synonymous for John.
2:12-14 A beautiful little stanza, with a good measure of poetic quality. I am intrigued especially by "him who is from the beginning" in 14. As he is addressing the "fathers' in the congregation, no doubt he means those who saw Christ with their own eyes. This dovetails nicely with the theology in his gospel account.
2:15-17 Verses that still ring in my head from the memorization of my youth. Interestingly, little deviated from the New World Translation that I remember.
2:18 and here is a nice pin in the balloon of those amateur theologians who predict/await/identify the antichrist. There was never such a figure in the Bible. It's an adjective, not a title.
2:21 More emphasis on truth, and in a way that is indistinguishable from the treatment of light. A nice set of dichotomies he is setting up here: truth and lies, light and darkness, the world and the will of God.
2:24 Using syntax to make his reference clear here. John loves this word "abide". Wonder if the same Greek word is being translated each time here. Update: indeed it is. Menein in 2:6, menetw and meinh in 2:24. This is a great little point. In 6, the reader abides in God. In 24, truth abides in the reader, even as the reader abides in the son and the father. A potentially revealing nesting doll arrangement.
2:27 And the same verb here, time used for anointing. That indirectly conflates "truth" with spirit, which makes sense given his next words. If we are to extend John's pattern here, that would mean spirit has to have an equivalent darkness. Let us see if there is mention of such a contrast.
2:29 Now this is a potentially incendiary verse. John has put the cart in its rightful pre-equine position here. It is not that those who have been born of God must do right. It is that those who do right are by definition born of God. Those who do not do right are simply not of God, and are liars if they say otherwise, as in 1:8 and 2:4. The most telling point, however, is that it is the doing of right that is the deciding factor. Although such distinctions would have been meaningless in John's context, one can extrapolate that creed, faction, and silly recited declaration of belief are irrelevant.
3:2-3 I'm going out on a limb here. Brace yourself. Taken in a certain way, this is a rather revealing metaphysical statement. Those who are properly constituted have the ability to see based on their similarity to that seen. This could be taken sociologically, to mean that we only understand what we are conditioned to experience; or literally, to mean that one must be . . . vibrating? at the right frequency? Ok, I'm gonna stop now. That sounds too woogity woogity to be supportable.
3:4-10 Waaaaaaaitaminnit, here's where it gets a bit fuzzy. This seems to directly contradict what is goin on back in 1:8-10.
3:14 And here's the other half of the dichotomy that we were looking for in 2:27. The opposite of light is darkness, and the other side of spirit is death. Same verb and everything.
3:15 Oh, but now he's set up another one. Gotta backtrack on that last statement.
3:23 This is the only thing that saves the earlier contradiction. John's definition of sin in 1:8-10 and his definition here do not seem to be the same thing. It's entirely possible that he was speaking Mosaically earlier. Linguistic clues from the Greek: sin in Greek is not a separate concept like it is in English. It just means to miss something, although even this translation is fuzzy because of the multiple meanings of "miss" in English. In any case, John is probably just using it as a general lexical item, not a concrete theological construct, which makes some contradiction more understandable.
4:1 Okay, hold on. I have to take issue with this translation decision to capitalize Spirit in 3:24 and not here. This is a clear editorializing that is in no way indicated in the Greek. It's the same word.
4:2-3 Now we are pretty clearly speaking of actual spirit beings here, not some metaphorical spirit of brotherhood or Saint Louis. This always intrigues me when the Bible hits these areas, because it seems like there's something almost scientific about it. Like the discovery of a new species. What are the characteristics of these creatures? They can clearly communicate. There's even a taxonomy given here. This remains a huge blind spot in my own personal experience though. I always look at this sort of thing with a pretty heavy dose of side-eye, as though Teresa of Avila were in front of me spouting her silliness.
4:10-12 You can almost feel John's passion here, like the rising cadence of a really good sermon. I could wish that he gave us a little more to go on here, but it's compelling nonetheless.
4:14-15 Sadly, these verses that are so central to modern Evangelicalism also hold some pretty strong rationale for not believing in a trinity. It's a shame what is picked and chosen.
4:16 Here's the best part of the whole abiding thing: it's reflexive. The reader abides in God, and vice versa. One is simultaneously the vessel and the contents.
4:17 We get a whiff here of John's earlier visions. He has likely already written the Revelation by the time this epistle is composed, and his warning to be ready bears a very specific urgency. Those things that he saw cannot be unseen.
5:3 Indeed. They're contained in one verse.
5:5 John has taken a turn away from "truth" to the less attractive "belief" here.
5:6 And we're back. Phew.
5:11 I'm quite interested in knowing exactly what John's concept of eternal life was. Is he intimating something he observed as one of the few who actually might have seen into the beyond and lived to write about it? Sadly, he does not elaborate here.
5:16-17 Wow, these verses are pretty fresh to me. Lots of interesting implications here:
5:19 And here's another tantalizing bit of metaphysics. For lack of any other candidate, I'm going to go ahead and say that this evil one is the corollary to spirit in John's lengthy dialectic.
5:20 The perfect ending,
5:21 but this is just weird.
1:1 The unnamed plural here is an interesting choice. Different from Peter, James or Paul. If any of them had written it, no doubt this would have begun with their names. John already seems set to let this letter stand on its own merit.
1:3 Really, this trinity thing is out of hand. I've discussed John's treatment extensively in my discussion of his gospel account, and here is further indication that he had no concept of Jesus and God as being the same person.
1:4 I really like this approach. This is how prayer should work. Not asking for anything, just saying it because to not say it is to be incomplete.
1:5 Again, exactly like a prayer--my version at least, which is heavily influenced by Ernest Holmes.
1:8-10 A concise and accessible treatment of a weighty theological topic.
2:1 Now this is interesting. A sudden shift to the first person singular. Fitting, in that his topic now seems to be taking a turn away from the rhetoric of theology and toward the personal appeal.
2:2 And back to "we" here, but now it feels less like the royal we, and more like the addressee-inclusive we. I wonder if Greek makes that distinction like Mandarin and Hawaiian, or leaves it unmarked like English. Update: unmarked.
2:4 The second use of this expression already. It is as if for John "the truth is not in you" is the ultimate proscription. I will be on the lookout for future treatment of "truth", but it feels important to him in a way that it did not to Paul et al.
2:9-11 And the same can be said for "light". In fact, truth and light already seem to be synonymous for John.
2:12-14 A beautiful little stanza, with a good measure of poetic quality. I am intrigued especially by "him who is from the beginning" in 14. As he is addressing the "fathers' in the congregation, no doubt he means those who saw Christ with their own eyes. This dovetails nicely with the theology in his gospel account.
2:15-17 Verses that still ring in my head from the memorization of my youth. Interestingly, little deviated from the New World Translation that I remember.
2:18 and here is a nice pin in the balloon of those amateur theologians who predict/await/identify the antichrist. There was never such a figure in the Bible. It's an adjective, not a title.
2:21 More emphasis on truth, and in a way that is indistinguishable from the treatment of light. A nice set of dichotomies he is setting up here: truth and lies, light and darkness, the world and the will of God.
2:24 Using syntax to make his reference clear here. John loves this word "abide". Wonder if the same Greek word is being translated each time here. Update: indeed it is. Menein in 2:6, menetw and meinh in 2:24. This is a great little point. In 6, the reader abides in God. In 24, truth abides in the reader, even as the reader abides in the son and the father. A potentially revealing nesting doll arrangement.
2:27 And the same verb here, time used for anointing. That indirectly conflates "truth" with spirit, which makes sense given his next words. If we are to extend John's pattern here, that would mean spirit has to have an equivalent darkness. Let us see if there is mention of such a contrast.
2:29 Now this is a potentially incendiary verse. John has put the cart in its rightful pre-equine position here. It is not that those who have been born of God must do right. It is that those who do right are by definition born of God. Those who do not do right are simply not of God, and are liars if they say otherwise, as in 1:8 and 2:4. The most telling point, however, is that it is the doing of right that is the deciding factor. Although such distinctions would have been meaningless in John's context, one can extrapolate that creed, faction, and silly recited declaration of belief are irrelevant.
3:2-3 I'm going out on a limb here. Brace yourself. Taken in a certain way, this is a rather revealing metaphysical statement. Those who are properly constituted have the ability to see based on their similarity to that seen. This could be taken sociologically, to mean that we only understand what we are conditioned to experience; or literally, to mean that one must be . . . vibrating? at the right frequency? Ok, I'm gonna stop now. That sounds too woogity woogity to be supportable.
3:4-10 Waaaaaaaitaminnit, here's where it gets a bit fuzzy. This seems to directly contradict what is goin on back in 1:8-10.
3:14 And here's the other half of the dichotomy that we were looking for in 2:27. The opposite of light is darkness, and the other side of spirit is death. Same verb and everything.
3:15 Oh, but now he's set up another one. Gotta backtrack on that last statement.
3:23 This is the only thing that saves the earlier contradiction. John's definition of sin in 1:8-10 and his definition here do not seem to be the same thing. It's entirely possible that he was speaking Mosaically earlier. Linguistic clues from the Greek: sin in Greek is not a separate concept like it is in English. It just means to miss something, although even this translation is fuzzy because of the multiple meanings of "miss" in English. In any case, John is probably just using it as a general lexical item, not a concrete theological construct, which makes some contradiction more understandable.
4:1 Okay, hold on. I have to take issue with this translation decision to capitalize Spirit in 3:24 and not here. This is a clear editorializing that is in no way indicated in the Greek. It's the same word.
4:2-3 Now we are pretty clearly speaking of actual spirit beings here, not some metaphorical spirit of brotherhood or Saint Louis. This always intrigues me when the Bible hits these areas, because it seems like there's something almost scientific about it. Like the discovery of a new species. What are the characteristics of these creatures? They can clearly communicate. There's even a taxonomy given here. This remains a huge blind spot in my own personal experience though. I always look at this sort of thing with a pretty heavy dose of side-eye, as though Teresa of Avila were in front of me spouting her silliness.
4:10-12 You can almost feel John's passion here, like the rising cadence of a really good sermon. I could wish that he gave us a little more to go on here, but it's compelling nonetheless.
4:14-15 Sadly, these verses that are so central to modern Evangelicalism also hold some pretty strong rationale for not believing in a trinity. It's a shame what is picked and chosen.
4:16 Here's the best part of the whole abiding thing: it's reflexive. The reader abides in God, and vice versa. One is simultaneously the vessel and the contents.
4:17 We get a whiff here of John's earlier visions. He has likely already written the Revelation by the time this epistle is composed, and his warning to be ready bears a very specific urgency. Those things that he saw cannot be unseen.
5:3 Indeed. They're contained in one verse.
5:5 John has taken a turn away from "truth" to the less attractive "belief" here.
5:6 And we're back. Phew.
5:11 I'm quite interested in knowing exactly what John's concept of eternal life was. Is he intimating something he observed as one of the few who actually might have seen into the beyond and lived to write about it? Sadly, he does not elaborate here.
5:16-17 Wow, these verses are pretty fresh to me. Lots of interesting implications here:
- the reader has the power to forgive sin
- but only of a certain type, for there are evidently magnitudes
- mortal sin is super super bad, and it exists, and John is not going to tell us what it is
5:19 And here's another tantalizing bit of metaphysics. For lack of any other candidate, I'm going to go ahead and say that this evil one is the corollary to spirit in John's lengthy dialectic.
5:20 The perfect ending,
5:21 but this is just weird.
Tuesday, August 05, 2014
Marcus Tullius Cicero: Selected Works
Although I didn't find this selection of works particularly pithy or epigrammatic, I nonetheless came away from it considerably moved. It's easy to see from the structure of his works why Cicero is considered one of the fathers of modern rhetoric. The structures and devices he uses feel perfectly modern, and would not be out of place on the floor of Parliament or a Presidential debate. And like most of that sort of thing, it is the effect of what is said, rather than any particular point, which lingers in the memory. Cicero himself seems to acknowledge that he is offering no new thought, but merely putting existing ideas into a nice package.
In spite of all that, I put the book down with the feeling of being personally admonished by a great man.
What good have I really accomplished in life? My father recently told me that, out of his children, I was the one whom he felt had done the most real good in the world. I was surprised at this, not because my brother and sister are great philanthropists, but because I don't think of myself as having contributed in any meaningful way to the rest of society. There are no doubt some few students whom I, In my years as a public school teacher, was able to help. I count this as nibbling at the edges of good, and not any great credit to me. I do what I can, and I am admittedly invested in the welfare of those around me, but I don't feel like any marginal difference I might have made even tips the scale against some of my rather foolish and harmful decisions.
And even if life were not measured in a grand ledger of good accomplished versus harm done, how would I fare when measured against Cicero's standard of virtue: wisdom, fortitude, justice and temperance? It would be disingenuous of me to deny that I have accrued some wisdom over my lifetime--a combination of copious reading and the ability to piece things together in a logical way. I don't think I can allow myself to say that the remaining three virtues have found a home in me. I have behaved unjustly--not often, but seriously. My fortitude is marginal, and my temperance nonexistent. What in me is there worth admiring? My father seems to think there is something worthy in me, but surely his judgement is less than objective. I could wish that he were more like Cicero, in fact: to be able to see my worst qualities, and give me sound advice on their remedy.
As it is, I will have to make use of the burst of motivation I received from Cicero, thousands of years after his death, to make some small adjustment in my habits before it wears out. Or at least, as the determination he has given me fades, to revisit his writings and be stimulated once again by this great rhetorician.
In spite of all that, I put the book down with the feeling of being personally admonished by a great man.
What good have I really accomplished in life? My father recently told me that, out of his children, I was the one whom he felt had done the most real good in the world. I was surprised at this, not because my brother and sister are great philanthropists, but because I don't think of myself as having contributed in any meaningful way to the rest of society. There are no doubt some few students whom I, In my years as a public school teacher, was able to help. I count this as nibbling at the edges of good, and not any great credit to me. I do what I can, and I am admittedly invested in the welfare of those around me, but I don't feel like any marginal difference I might have made even tips the scale against some of my rather foolish and harmful decisions.
And even if life were not measured in a grand ledger of good accomplished versus harm done, how would I fare when measured against Cicero's standard of virtue: wisdom, fortitude, justice and temperance? It would be disingenuous of me to deny that I have accrued some wisdom over my lifetime--a combination of copious reading and the ability to piece things together in a logical way. I don't think I can allow myself to say that the remaining three virtues have found a home in me. I have behaved unjustly--not often, but seriously. My fortitude is marginal, and my temperance nonexistent. What in me is there worth admiring? My father seems to think there is something worthy in me, but surely his judgement is less than objective. I could wish that he were more like Cicero, in fact: to be able to see my worst qualities, and give me sound advice on their remedy.
As it is, I will have to make use of the burst of motivation I received from Cicero, thousands of years after his death, to make some small adjustment in my habits before it wears out. Or at least, as the determination he has given me fades, to revisit his writings and be stimulated once again by this great rhetorician.
Birth of a Nation
It's easy to see why this film was included on AFI's list of 100 influential films. The staggering ambition of the project is evident from the very first captions, and its contribution to cinematographic technique is non to be underestimated.
Nonetheless, one can't help but feel that it was included for other reasons altogether. Griffith's subject is understandably abhorrent to modern eyes, but it was not without controversy in its own time as well. The eponymous nation, after all, is not the newly united America after the civil war, but the abhorrent Ku Klux Klan. And it is not only the decision to lionize that organization that puts the film squarely in the indefensible column. Every characterization, from the lascivious mulatto carpetbagger to the conniving mulatto housekeeper is so nauseatingly racist as to make it very nearly unwatchable, and this is aggravated by the fawning treatment of the heroic Klansman protagonist.
All of which need scarcely be said again by me, as thoroughly as it has been treated both by the viewing public at the time of its release and film historians since then. I will add, however, that the chief thing that bothered me about the film was not any of the aforementioned racism, but rather the aggrandized tone that Griffith himself takes in the filming. Although the film was on the surface about the post-war South, I can't help but feel that the whole thing was really about Griffith's own ego. Perhaps he thought at the time that such an illustrious name as his would give gravitas to what even contemporary viewers recognized as horseshit. It did not, and it does not, and I wonder if his subsequent film "Intolerance" will reek in the same way.
Nonetheless, one can't help but feel that it was included for other reasons altogether. Griffith's subject is understandably abhorrent to modern eyes, but it was not without controversy in its own time as well. The eponymous nation, after all, is not the newly united America after the civil war, but the abhorrent Ku Klux Klan. And it is not only the decision to lionize that organization that puts the film squarely in the indefensible column. Every characterization, from the lascivious mulatto carpetbagger to the conniving mulatto housekeeper is so nauseatingly racist as to make it very nearly unwatchable, and this is aggravated by the fawning treatment of the heroic Klansman protagonist.
All of which need scarcely be said again by me, as thoroughly as it has been treated both by the viewing public at the time of its release and film historians since then. I will add, however, that the chief thing that bothered me about the film was not any of the aforementioned racism, but rather the aggrandized tone that Griffith himself takes in the filming. Although the film was on the surface about the post-war South, I can't help but feel that the whole thing was really about Griffith's own ego. Perhaps he thought at the time that such an illustrious name as his would give gravitas to what even contemporary viewers recognized as horseshit. It did not, and it does not, and I wonder if his subsequent film "Intolerance" will reek in the same way.
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