Letters from a Librarian

'Harmonious' Hens

2009-07-04T14:09:00.003-04:00

[Vincenzo Campi - Chicken Vendors]

Two recent events: First -- I watched Jamie Oliver's 'Fowl Dinners' the other night -- exposing the process of the egg and chicken industry in Britain (and then preparing a gala chicken dinner for his guests). Some truly frightful information. Second -- I have been reading a lent copy of Philosophy in History (1984) with the intention of finding some perspective on how I can better orient myself in the wash of current philosophical debate, while relying on my footing in previous history-based degrees.

Flipping through some of the later essays in the text, I found Wolf Lepenies's piece, " 'Interesting Questions' in the history of philosophy and elsewhere." He quotes Nietzsche from The Use and Abuse of History:

The progress of science has been amazingly rapid in the last decade; but consider the savants, those exhausted hens. They are certainly not 'harmonious' natures; they can merely cackle more than before, because they lay eggs oftener; but the eggs are always smaller though the books are bigger.

Lovely convergence.

Séraphine de Senlis

2009-07-02T20:11:00.008-04:00

[All images by Séraphine de Senlis - via]

Last weekend my mother and I watched the 2008 movie Séraphine , about the life and art of Séraphine de Senlis. The movie was a bit broad and quick but beautifully showcased the art of an artist of whom I had never heard. Yolande Moreau is incredible in the role -- primitive, powerful and enchanting. The movie plays up the primitive or naif aspect of her art -- strongly representing her as a visionary artist with religious fervor which is really just a pure and childlike devotion to the Madonna. It's a beautiful story about a woman who was an artist first, not a personality.

I'm hoping to draw from her beautiful colors and composition to design something for a new embroidery project.

On Montaigne's Backshop

2009-07-02T00:07:00.004-04:00

[Julie Morstad]

I have put Montaigne aside for a bit to pick up Evelyn Scott (as recommended by Richard at The Existence Machine), but before I turn away from him, there are a few passages I'd like to share.

As I read my way deeper into the philosophy I am assigned to read for classes, I feel a great gulf opening up between what I am seeking and the knowledge that is sought by others. I often feel like an utter fool when I sit in discussions about the brain and our perceptual systems, I cannot follow metaphysical discussions any further than their metaphors, and I have never yet grasped the logical underpinnings of much of the philosophy that is so important. What I am seeking, like Montaigne and so many others is a way of living that is fulfilling and good and as true as living might be.

Montaigne says in 'Of Solitude' that The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to ourselves. -- this goes beyond 'Know thyself' and admonitions to practice virtue. It is something greater and more thorough.

In the same essay he advocates 'the backshop' -- so similar to Woolf's 'Room of One's Own' -- a place wholly one's own, where one might be entirely free,

wherein to establish our true liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. In this we must hold our ordinary conversation with ourselves, and so privately that no outside relationship or communication may find a place there [...].

He goes on, interestingly and with a sinister undertone, but to stop for a moment -- is this 'backshop' not what so many of us have lost? It is a luxury for sure, one for those who have time and money to spare. But those of us who do, have we not foregone that luxury for our other 'luxuries' -- the television, the internet, the pasttimes of a culture fatted on observing itself go through the gestures of living? I am as guilty as the next, spending my largesse (time) on activities that disappear from my mind the moment I turn my attention. I often scold myself for not readin as I ought, for not exploring some new writer or thinker, and those criticisms are fair enough.

But I also begin to recognize that I approach reading in a new way now. No longer do I search for the meaning or explanation of things. No longer to I read to glut myself or to distract myself or to cram the crannies of my mind with quotations and observations. When I read it is to sink in somewhere -- to revel in the joy that is the word, the language, straining itself to express and to 'retrieve from formlessness' some experience of oneself or the world. And I have replaced the time I spent reading with time spent on something I have overlooked for far too long -- myself.

What do I mean? Here is Montaigne again on the 'backshop' as a foil to my own view:

There to talk and to laugh as if without a wife, without children, without followers and without servants; to the end that, when the occasion comes for us to lose them, it may be no new thing to be without them. We have a soul that can be turned upon itself; it can be its own company; it has the means to attack and to defend, to receive and to give; let us not fear that in this solitude we shall stagnate in tedious idleness, "In solitude to be to thyself a throng." Virtue, says Antisthenes, is content with itself, without rules, without words, without deeds.

Echoes of Rousseau and so many others -- attach your heart to imperishable beauty and never to something that can be taken from you. Live amongst others as is necessary, but preserve for yourself the distance of the Sage strving always to overcome and move beyond. This model enchanted me for so long -- the model of perfectibility, of elevation. But it does not square with the other tenets -- at least not for me. How can I know myself if it is from one, flawed point of view only? How can I live fully and learn to choose and act with nobility and virtue if I limit myself to a secure backshop where the only disturbances are those manufactured turbulances of the spirit?

Montaigne agrees with Pliny that one ought to study oneself -- to examine oneself closely -- but to do this one must not live apart from others, but live with them and amongst them. I am beginning to do this work (work that I've long known I must do). To live ethically one cannot live alone -- to be virtuous one cannot persist in solitude and one cannot feign the gestures of friendship and companionship while existing only in the backshop. Use the backshop to learn of yourself and to stretch your mind and your abilities, but do not grow comfortable there. Do not tell soothing half-truths about solitude and perfection -- do not jealously guard the moments of liberty one finds in solitude. Rather, fuse those moments together -- use those lessons -- become a person that acts in concert with others and yet preserves a core of vitality and authenticity born from those long excursions in self-study.

To borrow from Montaigne: This is not my teaching, it is my study; and it is not a lesson for others, but for me.

Art and Illusion

2009-06-19T02:45:00.003-04:00

[Piranesi - Carceri Invenzione]

It might be said, therefore, that the very process of perception is based on the same rhythm that we found governing the process of representation: the rhythm of schema and correction. It is a rhythm which presupposes constant activity on our part in making guesses and modifying them in the light of our experience. Wherever this test meets with an obstacle, we abandon the guess and try again, much in the way we proceed in reading such complex pictures as Piranesi's Carceri.

In this emphasis on elimination of false guesses, on trial and error in all acquisition of knowledge "from the amoeba to Einstein," I am following K.R. Popper. It would be tempting to take up the problems of Gestalt psychology from this angle, for Popper emphasizes that the assumption of regularity is of utmost biological value. A world in which all our experiences were constantly belied would be a lethal world. Now in looking for regularities, for a framework or schema on which we can at least provisionally rely (though we may have to modify it for ever), the only possible strategy is to proceed from simple assumptions. Popper has shown that paradoxically this is not due to the fact that a simple assumption is more probably right but because it is most easily refuted and modified. [...]

Without some initial system, without a first guess to which we can stick unless it is disproved, we could indeed make no "sense" of the milliards of ambiguous stimuli that reach us from our environment. In order to learn, we must make mistakes, and the most fruitful mistake which nature could have implanted in us would be the assumption of even greater simplicities than we are likely to meet with in this bewildering world of ours. Whatever the fate of the Gestalt school may be in the field of neurology, it may still prove logically right in insisting that the simplicity hypothesis cannot be learned. It is, indeed, the only condition under which we could learn at all. To probe a hole we first use a straight stick to see how far it takes us. To probe the visual world we use the assumption that things are simple until they prove to be otherwise.

--Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion

Another summer project -- this wonderful book and trying to figure out what can be said of the importance of representations (illusory, veridical, and all the steps in between) to our perception of the world. Can there be a Gibsonian account of this and do I agree with it?

On Avicenna

2009-06-19T02:09:00.005-04:00

[Yamamoto]

The period of study that culminated in his seeing the point of metaphysics completed Ibn Sina's [Avicenna's] education, at least the phase that was predominantly receptive and retentive rather than actively productive and synthetic. He was eighteen. His knowledge, he tells us, would mature, even as his memory grew less elastic in adulthood; but, he insists, he made no really new departure beyond this date. This sounds like a boast that he had nothing more to learn and may shock our sense of modesty or propriety, or seem hyperbolic in relation to our ideals of a lifetime of learning. But what Ibn Sina actually said (although consistently mistranslated), was simply this: "My memory for what I understood was keener then, but the understanding is riper now. Yet it is the same, not reconstructed or reborn in the [...] least." What he meant was that the framework of his understanding was firm and his central beliefs would not alter radically as he matured.

--Lenn E. Goodman, Avicenna, 1992 [17]

Avicenna was 18 when he finally understood Aristotle's Metaphysics -- he had read it so many times that he had it almost by heart. But it was after reading al-Farabi's book On the Objects of Metaphysics, that he began to understand. He was able to step outside the framework of theology and understand Aristotle's questions as they were for Aristotle. Questions about what it is for something to be (ti en einai), about being-at-work (energeia), about being-at-work-staying-itself (entelecheia).

I have only just begun researching into his life and writings and already I am jotting down notes and understandings. I am hoping these notes will turn into some understanding of the metaphysical implications of Avicenna's theory of intentionality -- oof -- there is much work to be done.

Liberal Arts

2009-06-16T23:40:00.002-04:00

[Hammershoi]

From Montaigne's 'Of the Education of Children'

He will be told [...] what it is to know and what to be ignorant; what ought to be the end of study; what valor, temperance, and justice are; the difference between ambition and avarice, servitude and submission, license and liberty; by what token a man may know true and solid contentment; how far death, pain, and shame are to be feared, "How to avoid and how to endure each strain;" what springs move us, and the reason for so many different impulses in us. For, I think, the first lessons with which one should saturate his understanding ought to be those which regulate his habits and his common sense; that will teach him to know himself and how both to die well and to live well.

Among the liberal arts let us begin with that which makes us free. They all serve in some measure to the formation of our life and to the use made of life, as all other things in some sort do; but let us make choice of that which directly and professedly serves to that end.

Noted

2009-06-16T02:36:00.004-04:00

[Beardsley]

I have a few small projects in the works and finally taking some form -- so as a reminder to myself most of all, I plan to work through some thoughts on the following:

Sarah Scott's Millennium Hall -- in relation to Lucrezia Marinella's argument discussed earlier. I'm mostly just planning to work through the various character studies and tales of virtue rewarded and vice punished, but I also want to try and spell out an argument that rests upon an essentialist picture of men and women. Scott seems to argue that the essential vice of a woman is vanity -- a vice to which even the noblest and best-educated woman will be susceptible. The essential vice of man is passion for women/'love' -- though the evidence for this is more diffuse. But as such, women will be nobler than men because even in her essential vice a woman will harm only herself, whereas the man, in his essential vice will cause the destruction of others. Much to work through here.

I am assisting with some research this summer and the reading has begun to turn over some very fertile ground -- I hope to look closer at Marinella, and then Scott and her contemporaries. Rousseau will also be revisited.

I'll also hopefully continue some course work on issues in perception, tentatively branching out into aesthetic perception and/or issues in deception. I'll probably return to various articles from the most recent issues of Cabinet which are sticking in the back of my mind as relevant to these topics.

And finally, I've begun reading some selected essays by Montaigne and hope to share some excerpts here.

The generall & the particular

2009-06-06T00:28:00.002-04:00

[Sandra Juto]

From the new issue of Cabinet, the article 'Rain and Rainfall -- Great Britain -- Periodicity -- Periodicals' by Edward Eigen:

Here, at last, is the argument: "in his bare was," the historian "is so tied, not to what should be, but to what is, to the particular truth of things, that his example draweth no necessary consequence." And the philosopher, for his part, in his "bare rule," gives the precept for what should be, without convincingly showing why it is so. The argument, such as it is, comes from Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesie (published 1595). [...] what made him a mantic poet of rainfall are his reflections on how to "coupleth the generall notion with the particular example," the philosopher's precept with the historian's example.

I always read and learn the loveliest things in this magazine.

Renaissance

2009-06-04T23:58:00.005-04:00

[Miranda Lehman]

I've been trying to find a way in to a set of thoughts which keep recurring to me, so here is an effort --

I've spent the last three weeks in a strange state of longing -- there is the particular longing for the one who has left, but there is also a nostalgic longing, for a return to a different way of knowing. I have been writing imaginary letters, re-reading books from my childhood and fighting against the sort of learning I do here. In the books from my childhood all is simple and yet vastly complicated -- there are forces which are beyond our ken, working in the world and in individuals to change and create and eradicate. There are a set of lessons which arise again and again -- love is the strongest force in the world, creation is preferred above all, effort is always rewarded, self-knowledge is opposed to selfishness, the whole is much more than a sum of its parts, and so on. They are lessons which I believe in so strongly and so deeply that to realize how easily they are forgotten is painful.

I have forgotten these lessons -- lessons which will last long but require attention and engagement. But I am returning to them now, like Proust's undersea diver, feeling my way across symbols and representations which promise some sort of wonder-ful contentment.

But these lessons stand opposed to so much of the other lessons in my life. What do I mean? I do not know. It has something to do with Leibniz, the philosopher to whom I have been turning these days. It has something to do with his monads and his apperception and his God. It also has something to do with Cassirer and his philosophy and his history. It has something to do with Sophocles and Oedipus when he dies -- the lesson he has learned. It has something to do with little Meg Murray and Charles Wallace and Calvin O'Keefe in Madeleine L'Engle's wonderful books. It has something to do with persepective and perception -- points of view. It has something to do with God -- but not what most people mean by God, but rather some other sense which has always lurked inside of me -- believing not because of justification or evidence, but because to believe is to trust and to tend and to strive. It has something to do with understanding and wonder -- and less to do with knowing (though I can rarely tell the difference). It has something to do with the self -- the thing of which I know so little.

I grow weary of the 'philosophy' and the 'teaching' I do here. It breaks my spirit. Maybe I would like it better if it masqueraded under a different name -- but it is both too close and far too far from the philosophy and the teaching I have done elsewhere.

There are little lights though -- the light today when reading Koffka's strange Gestalt theories -- a hybrid of Whitehead and Leibniz. The light reading Spinoza last week and speaking of his creation -- learning what it was he had done, and how little it is understood. The light reading these small, simple books -- books about love and friendship and communication and understanding. The light that comes from thinking about a paper project -- a paper on perception and beauty that turns outward to understand the inward. But the greatest light comes from remembering to be strange and to be open and to be sensitive and to remember laughter and make-believe and finding voices and understanding in the places that others have forgotten to look.

Interlude

2009-06-01T19:41:00.004-04:00

[Redon - Evocation of Butterflies]

Apologies for the recent lack of posts -- I have been busy with classes and teaching, but mostly I've finally decided to read the Harry Potter series and have been, well, ensorcelled! Writing to come soon.

Three

2009-05-23T21:09:00.002-04:00

Current favorites:

A single word

2009-05-23T20:47:00.004-04:00

[emmanuel polanco]

Bad Habits

One such is the need to ponder every living thing with which I am confronted. The slightest encounter arouses in me the most peculiar urge to think. [...] I am possibly a somewhat high-strung person, but I am also a precise one. I feel even the most trifling losses, in certain matters I am meticulously conscientious and only occasionally am I obliged, for better or worse, to command myself: Forget this! A single word can thrust me into the most monstrous and tempestuous confusion, and then I find myself utterly possessed by thoughts of this apparently minuscule and insignificant thing, while the present in all its glory has become incomprehensible to me. These moments constitute a bad habit.

This little letter -- for it is a letter that young Joseph Marti writes to himself and then discards into the wastebasket of the small, yet well-appointed technical office, located on-site at the Evening Star villa -- this little letter so sums up these lovely stories of Robert Walser's. This next passage does as well:

What swimming person, provided he is not about to drown, can help being in excellent spirits? It appeared to him as if the gay, warm, smooth surface of the lake were taking, vaulted shape. The water was simultaneously cool and tepid. Perhaps a faint breath of wind came whispering across it, or else a bird flew above past his head, high up in the air. Once he came close to a small boat; a single man was sitting in it, a fisherman peacefully fishing and rocking away his Sunday. What softness, what shimmering light. And with your naked, sensation-filled arm, you slice into this wet, clean benevolent element. With every stroke of your legs, you advance a bit further in this beautiful deep wetness. From below, you are buoyed up by warm and chilly currents. You plunge your head briefly beneath the water to irrigate the excitement in your breast, squeezing shut your mouth and eyes and breath, so as to feel this delightful sensation in your entire body.

Walser writes so easily, so effortlessly -- all is simple and yet strange -- all is poetic, verging on purple and yet never, ever falling on that side. There is so much celebration! so much silliness, so much beautiful longing and love for the world just as it is, seen through the eyes of a young man who is so self-aware, so reckless, so lovable.

The wine-dark ivy

2009-05-20T23:13:00.005-04:00

[Flowerville]

How many have read Oedipus Rex and not read Oedipus at Colonus?

In his first lines in Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus reveals the following fact:

Suffering and time,
Vast time, have been instructors in contentment,
Which kingliness teaches too.

This play is about will and fate; about struggle and acceptance; about character and nobility. Oedipus and Theseus -- both exiled, both governed by fate -- how are they different, how are they the same?

Oedipus will die with contentment -- this tragedy is about the end of action, about transitions and acceptance -- he has been pursued by fate for all his life -- the fate which forced his hand at every turn. Oedipus will die in the grove sacred to the Eumenides -- the gentle-hearted -- Oedipus will die in the grove sacred to the Furies -- the relentless:

Ladies whose eyes
Are terrible: Spirits: upon your sacred ground
I have first bent my knees in this new land;
Therefore be mindful of me and of Apollo,
For when he gave me oracles of evil,
He also spoke of this:

A resting place,
After long years, in the last country, where
I should find home among the sacred Furies:
That there I might round out my bitter life,
Conferring benefit on those who received me,
A curse on those who have driven me away.

Oedipus was given portents and signs to tell him of this day. The Fates guided him, 'with feathery influence' to this final place, and here he is -- in Athens. He has come to pass on a blessing to one who will receive it, one who gives the wanderer, the cursed shelter -- Theseus.

I come to give you something, and the gift
Is my own beaten self: no feast for the eyes;
Yet in me is a more lasting grace than beauty.

[...]

I shall disclose to you, O son of Aegeus,
What is appointed for you and for your city:
A thing that age will never wear away.
Presently now, without a soul to guide me,
I'll lead you to the place where I must die;
But you must never tell it to any man,
Not even the neighborhood in which it lies.
If you obey, this will count more for you
Than many shields and many neighbors' spears.
These things are mysteries, not to be explained;
But you will understand when you come there
Alone. Alone, because I cannot disclose it
To any of your men or to my children,
Much as I love and cherish them. But you
Keep it secret always, and when you come
To the end of life, then you must hand it on

[...]

For every nation that lives peaceably,
There will be many others to grow hard
And push their arrogance to extremes: the gods
Attend to these things slowly. But the attend
To those who put off God and turn to madness!
You have no mind for that, child of Aegeus;
Indeed, you know already all that I teach.

This image: the nation that pushes its arrogance to the extreme is equated with those people who ignore the will of God and instead turn to ‘the madness’ of a similar arrogance. This is what Oedipus has learned from his life -- from the curse of his own fate. He is a man who has been entirely manipulated by fate and the playing out of prophecy. However, the prophecies that governed the events of his life were sequential. He was not governed by one all-encompassing prophecy spoken at birth that he gradually fulfilled; his prophecies followed one another, each growing in horror and resulting in greater misery.

Perhaps the prophecies of Oedipus' life were not static -- perhaps there was elasticity in the dynamic nature of the prophecies -- perhaps Oedipus was never locked into one irrevocable path. Perhaps the events of Oedipus’ past -- the ones which originated at the hand of a mortal, the decision of Jocasta and Laius to kill their son in the hopes of circumventing the first prophecy, the decision of the Shepherd to spare the life of Oedipus, Oedipus’ relentless questions, and eventually his self-mutilation -- perhaps these events are examples of mortals putting off God in the ‘madness’ of arrogance.

If this is true, then it seems that somewhere along the way, the gods blessed Oedipus and gave him a secret to bestow upon the nation who gave him shelter. Does Oedipus’ grace originate in his final willingness to accept his fate, to surrender to the prophecies of the gods? He is now in the position of bestowing a great and potent secret upon Theseus, a secret which will allow Theseus and his heirs to protect the city of Athens. But why to Theseus?

Why is this mystical secret is being given to a nation that is governed by law, a nation that is ruled by a king who knows all that Oedipus can teach, a king that says, ‘I must not speak in ignorance.’ Theseus is already in possession of all qualities Oedipus has had to learn from tragedy, and Athens under the rule of Theseus seems to have no need of a mystical secret. Even the protection against Thebes seems inconsequential as we learn within the play that Polyneices is leading seven companies of men to a battle against Thebes that will surely result in some devastation. If the secret is not useful to Athens, then is it merely a way for Oedipus to finally fulfill the role of oracle, and in that fulfillment, to disappear at his death like one who has been blessed by the gods? What does it mean that Oedipus has a secret to give, and why does he give his secret to Theseus and Athens?

To transform the world

2009-05-20T20:17:00.006-04:00

[Gabriele Beveridge]

'Knowledge can never transform the world,' I blurted out, skirting along the very edge of confession. 'What transforms the world is action. There's nothing else.'

[...]

'There you go!' he said. 'Action, you say. But don't you see that the beauty of this world, which means so much to you, craves sleep and that in order to sleep it must be protected by knowledge? You remember that story of 'Nansen Kills a Kitten' which I told you about once. The cat in that story was incomparably beautiful. The reason that the priests from the two halls of the temple quarreled about the cat was that they both wanted to protect the kitten, to look after it, to let it sleep snugly, within their own particular cloaks of knowledge. Now Father Nansen was a man of action, so he went and killed the kitten with his sickle and had done with it. But when Choshu came along later, he removed his shoes and put them on his head.

What Choshu wanted to say was this. He was fully aware that beauty is a thing which must sleep and which, in sleeping, must be protected by knowledge. But there is no individual knowledge, a particular knowledge belonging to one special person or group. Knowledge is the sea of humanity, the field of humanity, the general condition of human existence. I think that is what he wanted to say.

Now you want to play the role of Choshu, don't you? Well, beauty -- beauty that you love so much -- is an illusion of the 'other way to bear life' which you mentioned. One could say in fact there is no such thing as beauty. What makes the illusion so strong, what imparts it with such a power of reality, is precisely knowledge. From the point of view of knowledge, beauty is never a consolation. It may be a woman, it may be one's wife, but it is never a consolation. Yet from the marriage between this beautiful thing which is never a consolation, on the one hand, and knowledge, on the other, something is born. It is as evanescent as a bubble and utterly hopeless. Yet something is born. That something is what people call art.'

-- From Yukio Mishima's The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.

Invention

2009-05-08T00:50:00.005-04:00

[Flowerville]

Live and invent. I have tried. I must have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is live. No matter. I have tried. While within me the wild beast of earnestness padded up and down, roaring, ravening, rending. I have done that. And all alone, well hidden, played the clown, all alone, hour after hour, motionless, often standing, spellbound, groaning.

Beckett -- Malone Dies

It's very silly really -- this continued fixation -- what would it feel like -- what would it be like --

I ask these questions of art -- writing especially, because it's the only medium which seems within my reach -- but these questions can be asked of music, of painting, of making something, anything.

But I wonder also if the greatest invention is the self. How do I mean this? There are tropes -- we don masks, play roles, assume characters -- this is the work of an individual, one in a society, one who is surrounded by standards and seeks some way of developing. But this all seems like the description of some process of contrivance. It also describes a process far more concrete than that which we experience.

What is the self? Is it some coral reef-like structure? Is it like water seeping into sand, bleeding out and over barriers? Is it a core of darkness -- a wedge of light coruscating or wrapped in filaments? Is it a globe held delicately and safeguarded? Is it a nothing? Is it rather a process -- the process of invention or retelling or recollecting? A process of sense-making and story-telling?

Is it good to do this work -- the work of engaging with the self, of pretending that it is something, and somewhere? If so, why is it good? How does it help? Why is it a help? If it is not good -- a harm or at least an obstacle, why is that so?

In The Ravishing of Lol Stein, by Marguerite Duras, everyone invents. The narrator certainly does, he tells us about it. Lol also invents, and John Bedford does, inventing his role with regard to his wife -- Tatiana Karl does -- they all invent. Lol lives a life which she must invent after her own is interrupted. She is a young woman who is living as fully as could be imagined, or so we are told -- she is a dancer, and dancers live with body and mind united. But she is interrupted, arrested from living -- she sees her lover love another, and in that seeing she ceases to be herself -- she ceases. And from that point on she invents. They call this madness. Duras calls Lol 'her little madwoman' in Practicalities.

In Hiroshima, Mon Amour there is also invention. How does it work here? There is something which is enormous, unfathomable -- Hiroshima. There is also the Frenchwoman's love in Nevers. She is also a young girl, living and loving, arrested by the murder, the humiliation, the rejection. She is also mad, mad because of a lover and a loss. She becomes an actress and invents. And Hiroshima? It is a madness which is beyond understanding. It is death and madness. It dies, and then reinvents itself. There is the New Hiroshima Hotel. The new city does not sleep. It watches always. They make a movie to tell of Hiroshima -- they invent it anew. Both events are beyond understanding -- both surpass and overwhelm and yet seem to beg for interpretation and understanding.

The Frenchwoman tries to understand Hiroshima. She believes she does. She does not.

The Japanese man tries to understand Nevers. He believes he does. He does not.

Does the Frenchwoman tell the truth about Nevers, about her lover and her madness? Does it matter whether she invents?

In Lol Stein, the narrator tells us of his lies, his inventions. He gives us his opinion -- tells us how he thinks it is. Does he invent Lol's madness? Does it exist before its invention? Does he invent love? The love between Michael Richardson and Lol, and then between Michael Richardson and Anne-Marie Stretter, then between Tatiana Karl and Jack Hold, then Jack Hold and Lol, and so on.

Does it matter how the invention is done? I go beyond myself now, but what if I were to tell a tale of fabrication -- complete fiction? What if, like Bernard in The Waves, I made Percival into a great knight, riding against death -- what if I inflated his stumbling horse into a pure charger, made his death not a twisted back but an elemental annihilation? What if I reported the facts, straight as they are, no embellishment, no filigree?

It comes down to effort -- for Beckett at least. 'Live' is not the right word; nor is 'invent.' It is trying which matters, whatever that is.

Spun

2009-04-26T15:15:00.004-04:00

[miso via my love for you is a stampede of horses]

On writing, Duras says that it is not translation, nor transition, nor passing from one state to another --

It's a matter of deciphering something already there, something you've already done in the sleep of your life, in its organic rumination, unbeknown to you.

Proust says the same thing --

As for the inner book of unknown symbols (symbols carved in relief they might have been, which my attention, as it explored my unconscious, groped for and stumbled against and followed the contours of, like a diver exploring the ocean-bed), if I tried to read them no one could help me with any rules, for to read them was an act of creation in which no one can do our work for us, or even collaborate with us. How many for this reason turn aside from writing!

This deciphering -- it must begin from a place of desire -- wanting to understand or to communicate the experience (to oneself or to another). Also some recognition of the thing experienced as worthy of recognition and communication.

I wonder about these past months of mine -- when I have learned to become so wary and skeptical of ideas. It becomes harder and harder to take the risk -- to do the sleepwalking that Pursewarden spoke of to Clea in Durrell's book -- no willingness to commit to a set of unknown symbols and spell them out. Or rather to commit only so far as to hover lightly over something unseen and unspoken. That's what this web-writing does, it allows for lightness and frivolity and a way of being cavalier. It's good for that, but it encourages the lightness too much -- allows me to stay away from committing to something - from seizing upon something worth deciphering and believing in it -- taking it up and seeing how I might unravel the filaments and spin them to their lengths.

Essayer

2009-04-26T15:04:00.004-04:00

[Deth P. Sun - via My Love For You is a Stampede of Horses]

In this sort-of-a-book which isn't really a book at all I'd have liked to talk about this and that, as one does all the time on an ordinary day just like any other. To drive along the motorway of the word, slowing down or stopping as I felt inclined, for no particular reason. But it's impossible -- you can't get away from the road itself and the way it's going; you can't not go anywhere; you can't just talk without starting out from a particular point of knowledge or ignorance, and arrive somewhere at random amid the welter of other words. You can't simultaneously know and not know. And so this book, which I'd have liked to resemble a motorway going in all directions at once, will merely be a book that tries to go everywhere but goes to just one place at a time; which turns back and sets out again the same as everyone else, the same as every other book. The only alternative is to say nothing. But that can't be written down.

Marguerite Duras -- Practicalities

Ineffable

2009-04-18T01:30:00.001-04:00

[mine]

Three more days of work, then three days of vacation, then a return to writing and reading as I please, if however temporarily. Hope spring is as beautiful for you as it is for me right now!

Forever

2009-04-16T03:46:00.001-04:00

This drop of frozen mud

2009-04-14T02:53:00.005-04:00

[littlegirlblue]

When I first read Axel's Castle by Edmund Wilson I had not yet read the book from which Wilson derived his title -- Axel by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. I finished this book today -- a welcome respite from the logic-studying and paper-writing and marking that have consumed me and will continue to consume me for another week or so.

I had forgotten how resonant some part of me is to the symbolic, mystical, self-abnegating story. Axel is a story about purification -- about renunciation and temptation -- it is about nobility, about living and studying and desiring. But it ends in the ultimate leap of faith -- the renunciation of earthly life for the Ultimate, the Infinite, that which must exist beyond.

Axel and Sara meet in the family crypt, caskets and barrels of hidden gold flowing about their feet, jewels of beauty and rarity dazzling the cold marble walls of their holy meeting place. They love, they are sublime, mystical lovers. And they renounce.

AXEL, in an undertone, thoughtful, and as if to himself. A god no doubt envies me now, for I-- I can die.

SARA. Axel, Axel, are divine thoughts already chasing me from your mind? ... Come, here is the earth! Come and live!

AXEL, cold, smiling, and clearly punctuating his words. Live? No. Our existence is full -- and its cup is running over! What hourglass could count the hours of this night! The future? ... Sara, believe what I say: we have just consumed the future. All the realities, what would they be tomorrow, compared with the mirages we have just lived? Why follow the example of cowardly mortals, our former brethren, and barter this golden drachma with its effigy of the dream -- obol of the Styx -- which sparkles in our triumphal hands?

The quality of our hope no longer allows us the earth. What can we ask of this wretched star, where our melancholy lingers on, save pale reflections of such moments? The earth you say? But what has it ever accomplished, that drop of frozen mud, whose Time is never more than a lie up in the heavens? It is the earth, don't you see, that has become the Illusion! Admit Sara, that in our strange hearts we have destroyed the love of life -- and it is indeed in REALITY that we ourselves have become our souls! To agree to live after that would be but a sacrilege against ourselves. Live? Our servants will do that for us [...] the only fever of which we must, in fact, be cured of is that of existing.

The beautiful ideal of renunciation. There are many obvious glimmers of Platonism throughout -- the world is called a dim reflection of the True, the Real; Axel is entreated by his teacher, Master Janus, to listen to the calls of the god he bears within.

Axel goes on --

AXEL. You see the external world through your soul: it dazzles you! yet it can never give us one single hour that would compare, in intensity of life, with one second of the hours we have just known. The true, absolute, perfect fulfillment is the inner moment we have lived, one with the other, in the funereal splendor of this vault. We have just experienced the ideal moment: it is now irrevocable, whatever name you give it! To try and relive it, by shaping, each day, in its image, the ever disappointing dust of outward appearances, would merely mean taking the risk of perverting it, diminishing its divine impression, annihilating it in what is purest within ourselves. Beware of not knowing how to die while there is still time.

It is obvious why this book would have been so fundamental to the Symbolists. But what lies hidden just slightly deeper is this notion of renunciation as it was taken up by artists like Rimbaud -- or perhaps that attribution is wrong. Perhaps this myth of renouncing -- renouncing after having secured the most transcendent, momentous achievement -- renouncing in order to step away from the immutable, the irrevocable -- perhaps this is a myth that is attributed to artists when no other explanation could suffice to make clear why they have stepped away.

I wrote about Rimbaud previously -- in response to Wilson's characterization --

I have only ever known the Illuminations and the letters they excerpt -- I've only known his writing -- I knew nothing of his life and his history. Wilson seems to think he was the ultimate -- the man of letters who turned from the old ways, who invented new ways, brilliantly, violently, and then abandoned literature -- threw it to the ground and trampled it -- the man of letters become the man of action. He left the world of intellect and imagination -- the world represented by Valery's M. Teste, Huysman's des Esseintes, Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Axel. No more mysticism, no more dreams, visions -- no more obfuscation. Down that path lie dragons -- the dragons of disillusionment, renunciation, resignation. No joy to be found on this cold, barren earth. No hope to be found in society.

Wilson doesn't see Rimbaud as a sort of Axel, renouncing the dreams of art in order to capture them forever -- like jewels of amber -- he sees Rimbaud as the anti-Axel -- as rejecting the incense-ridden dreams of disillusionment, melancholy and the ideal death -- and choosing instead the vibrant life of the non-artist -- the tradesman who lives in a full and admirable way. Wilson goes too far though -- the opposite Ideal -- the myth of the artist-turned-simple-man.

I wrote before -- writing which, upon return, is very important to me --

I feel a vague rhetoric underlying this assessment -- the same sort as I found when studying the monographs and histories of Gauguin -- it's too facile to laud this sort of life. The life that searches for originality -- primitive and primal -- native. The search for humanity in its rawest state. Perhaps I can't help but see this incorrectly, as wrongheaded appropriation -- the worst sort of insidious colonialism. Wilson does qualify these statements and ideals for what they are, but nevertheless, they were pervasive. The 'life of action' - also a problematic phrase. Why is action and life equated with destruction and self-annihilation? Why is it equated with rejection, violence, even a masculine sort of triumph. Why not laud the lives of those who have balanced things? Those who have stood, feet planted squarely in two kingdoms? It seems there is an immediate assumption that to live in grayscale is somehow less than the life in black & white. Wilson creates an opposition throughout this -- he places the mystics -- Yeats' 'A Vision,' Valery's M. Teste, Proust's invalid, Joyce's sleeping man -- he places these mystics, these minds in opposition to action, rigor, boldness. Axel, the character in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's story, opposed with Rimbaud -- rejection vs. renunciation.

That's the problem though, the same problem I have with Wilson's sentence of the long passage -- "if actions can be compared with literary writings." Can they be? To what end and with what success? With what intention? Why separate them at all? They seem to be such separations -- the sorts of separations you can only make from the outside.

That's the problem of thinking of things as static -- a problem I found with Wilson, surprising for someone so clearly enamored of Bergsonian and Whiteheadian metaphysics. He made it clear that it was important to attempt what Proust attempted -- to see one subject from every view -- to see it through its effects and influences and in observing, to understand. That was a very good section -- and a very interesting application of Whiteheadian process to literature. Examine the connections, elucidate the influences, see the process behind the snapshot. But in the end, works of literature are seen as almost-theres -- as not-quite-life. He expects literature to discover its own 'theory of everything,' wondering whether he and his readers weren't watching the beginning of a new world order in literature and the arts. He wants to distill some pure stream of simplicity from the complexity and chaos which resulted after the 'false dualisms' of classic arts had crumbled.

There are so many problems with trying to think about art, creation, writing. One doesn't just think about these things -- one writes about the problems of writing, one writes about the problems of having written. I cannot understand how to articulate the problem of the multitude in a single person: I think of an individual, an artist, more specifically, a writer. I think of her with her family -- then washing her hair -- then at the office, -- then in bed with a lover -- then sharing a glass of wine in a crowded bar -- finally, working on a story. If you were that person, which part would you say mattered most? Which part would be easiest to describe?

I can't describe my mind in repose. The thoughts flash too quick for transcription. The best ones are always lost. Sometimes I'm successful -- a string of six little fishes pulled from the roiling lake. If I write though, that remains. It persists for some time at least -- it becomes something of its own. And my writing is little writing, it's sampler writing -- meant for a small clutch of eyes. What about the big writing? What if it's read recklessly, appropriated, interpreted, translated, adored, displayed, misunderstood? We want to make things simple -- that's what analysis is about. It's why we compare, it's why we question. We want to simplify and in so doing, to understand. Sometimes we go further -- we want to understand in order to respond. That's fine, but it's a false attempt.

There is nothing simple about reading. Nothing simple about writing. Nothing simple about art. Sometimes I wonder if anything is simple -- a statistical anomaly -- I read that somewhere -- simplicity is a statistical anomaly. But see, here I'm writing about simplicity -- that makes it automatically complicated. But there are moments -- perhaps falsely constructed by a brain that craves simplicity, perhaps not -- there are moments when everything flattens out, reduces to a single point. Yesterday I fell asleep in the grass -- I fell asleep with my hand on our cat and when she miaowed I was startled awake. For a moment, lying eye-level to a clover flower, things felt simple. This doesn't happen often -- and I think it's best that way.

'Sensitive Knowing'

2009-04-05T19:15:00.004-04:00

[emmanuel polanco]

If we look at things squarely the only thing left from the greatest philosophical enterprises is a pitiful aphoristic aftertaste, he said, no matter what the philosophy, no matter what the philosopher, everything falls to bits when we set to work with all our faculties and that means with all our mental instruments, he said, I thought.

Bernhard -- The Loser

I've been wondering a lot about this 'philosophy' I'm doing -- trying to see what it is about it which bothers me so much -- which causes my guard to raise, puts me on my defensive. And yesterday, when reading Bernhard, I thought about how these philosophers now are nothing of the sort -- they speak so little of real learning -- of that feeling of something having awoken within -- or moved -- the turning round of the mind from darkness into light. There is something so much more important about the conversation -- the conversation between individual and idea, between individual and text, between individual and individual. Philosophy is done in conversation -- in the process of working upon something -- of trying out a new line of thought, of struggling with a new problem. It is not this new sort of sophistic science which employs words calculated to affect and then promises to pry them open so that we can all see how they work. This new philosophy does not understand it eviscerates -- it isn't analysis it's evisceration -- it leaves empty husks behind -- the path of the woodworm -- chewing its way through everything and leaving only emptiness behind.

Philosophy is at its worst when it begins to write. I suppose this opinion could be a question of temperament -- that's fine -- I have the sort of temperament which prevents me from seeing much of contemporary analytic philosophy as philosophy at all. I have a temperament which disposes me to want something else -- to want philosophy to be some enduring endeavor, one which grapples with problems, both by battle and by embrace -- problems which change their face and form, like Proteus grasped too tightly. I want philosophy to be some sort of endeavor which moves -- which motivates and guides and develops. Something which cannot be a profession. Something which cannot be donned like a mantle and cap.

These thoughts returned to me today as I read through an interview of Jill Marsden by Christopher Branson sent by a friend (thank you Robert!). I was particularly struck by the exchange below. This notion of 'sensitive knowing' joined with the notion of philosophy as narrative -- as a likely story crafted to combat against forgetting -- these are what speak to me -- they are what seem right to me, they are lifelong endeavors, they could do the work of motivating and moving.

CB: I’d like to ask you about the relationship between the philosopher and art, as it is developed in your thought. I think, overall, what I most appreciated in your book was the idea of ‘affective’ knowing. If we are to take the death of God seriously—as our unbelief in forms of identity—then we have to pursue philosophy as sensitive knowing, i.e. as aesthetics, in the broadest sense. I completely agree with you that it is incorrect to pigeonhole aesthetics as the study of art. In fact, it makes it seem altogether absurd that aesthetics, in that sense, should be one of the central four philosophical disciplines, along with metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. It makes the whole enterprise seem trifling by comparison. You have the questions of ‘what is it?’, ‘how do I know it?’, ‘how should I live?’, and then we tag the question of art on at the end. ‘What is beautiful?’ To most ears this sounds like a flighty little trifle by comparison, a superfluous luxury. Such a view of aesthetics shows precisely that we have forgotten its original significance. But it does strike me that, if we are to pursue philosophy in the way you are proposing, it presupposes that the philosopher has an aesthetic sensibility, that he is sympathetic to the types of experiences you are thinking from and about. Now, we all have this to some extent: we all respond to music, for example, but then music is less problematic. It’s my intuition, however, that the majority of our systems of education, particularly philosophical and scientific training, actually inhibit the aesthetic sensibility, insofar as these processes alienate us from the act of seeing. We have a habit of over-intellectualising, wishing to determine a work’s ultimate “meaning,” or wishing to interpret its signs as simple referents of thought. And yet what we are faced with is not a collection of ideas, not even a text, but a piece of art, a composed form. In such cases, we are intellectualising something insofar as we are viewing it under the form of the same, seeking to find in it the concepts that we had already brought with us. The possibility for seeing the new, of the sensation of ecstasy, is thereby minimised. I was wondering if you could talk about your own relationship to art in this context, of the relation between art, philosophy and aesthetic sensibility.
JM: I suppose the idea of rapture has romantic overtones and I’m aware that to speak about aesthetics in terms of rapture seems to focus on a notion of pleasure which is a very old, eighteenth century notion. For me, by contrast, what was important was to really think what it means when you describe aesthetics as a science of sensitive knowing. That gives us a definition of aesthetics, and I liked what that definition suggested for philosophy. It’s too easy to equate thinking with consciousness and mentality, but if you pursue a Freudian line of enquiry, then very quickly you have to relinquish that prejudice and recognise that thought is already ‘of’ the body. If philosophy could abide with that notion, then ethics, epistemology and metaphysics would look quite different. So, for me, it was an attempt to start from a position which doesn’t assume that thinking is the soul’s silent dialogue with itself. I think that Nietzsche is exploring something like that in the ‘physiology of art.’ Art then would be one of the opportunities in which you might talk about that sensitive knowing, and it might be one of the vehicles for encountering that, but, interestingly, in Nietzsche it’s in other places that an aesthetic sensibility might prove more subtle and telling. I do have interests in certain artists, usually the tormented ones [laughs], and that’s not ancillary, but it isn’t imperative for me that aesthetics is thought about in relation to art. I suppose that there are states, and Nietzsche talks about these states, which inspire a kind of ecstasy, because they communicate something of the ecstasy of the creator of the artwork. I suppose this touches upon the question of what you are entering into contact with, when you encounter something which you want to say moves you—and we do use this language of transport, because something is happening. Again, it’s not so far away from Kant, when Kant is talking about the genius not knowing what he has produced—for obvious reasons, it can’t be rehearsed: Kant can’t have a genius knowing in advance what he is doing. So there is this illegibility of an artwork, which, at the same time, is communicated. It’s something which never seems to arrive within the circuit of cognition, it seems to add relatively little to cognition, and yet something happens, something is transmitted. Nietzsche is fascinated, particularly in the notebooks, when he’s talking about that element of perception, things which we are sensing all of the time, but of which we are unaware.

Earth

2009-04-04T01:32:00.004-04:00

[Anna Atkins - Ocean Flowers via Woolgathersome]

A rap on the skull, I think -- is that what it would take? It seems so. I returned today to Bernhard -- The Loser, and also to my excerpts and notes on Beckett.

What was it I wanted to share? On what it is like to collapse --

perhaps the far unchanging noise the earth makes and which other noises cover, but not for long. For they do not account for that noise you hear when you really listen, when all seems hushed. And there was another noise, that of my life become the life of this garden as it rode the earth of deeps and wildernesses. Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be. Then I was no longer that sealed jar to which I owed my being so well preserved, but a wall gave way and I filled with roots and tame stems for example, stakes long since dead and ready for burning, the recess of night and the imminence of dawn, and then the labour of the planet rolling eager into winter, winter would rid it of these contemptible scars.

And so what do I think of? A veritable flood of thoughts -- I think of spring and the outpouring mostly. When I was reading this morning and I felt my world slide away and this other created world of words that don't quite hang together (it's Bernhard after all) and words and people that are familiar and yet strange and death appears and then disappears and the same for art and all those repetitive phrases guaranteed to give the effect of anaesthesia -- an anodyne for the feverish mind, but one which has but a short-lived effect and will soon wear off and does. For when it wears off I realize what is missing and then I feel the throat-tightening feeling of having just now felt a thirst and lack that had been haunting me for too long.

And then there is Beckett's phrase above -- the self as a sealed jar -- or maybe it is that the sense of existing is a sense of being insulated and isolated -- preserved -- hermetically sealed and kept locked up in a pantry somewhere. And that that jar-feeling can give way to the feeling of a wall knocking down, crumbling into mold and dust and earth and mortar and old roots and new worms and rusting metal and growing seeds and a pile of that which lies forgotten in basements and cellars and pits. But the wall-crumbling also seems to be something else, I don't know what, but perhaps a growth of sorts, tilling or turning.

And Beckett also writes that when you are in the jar you have to ask yourself questions --

as for example whether you still are, and if no when it stopped, and if yes, how long it will still go on, anything at all to keep you from losing the thread of the dream. For my part I willingly asked myself questions, one after the other, just for the sake of looking at them. No, not willingly, wisely, so that I might believe I was still there. I called that thinking. I thought almost without stopping, I did not dare stop. Perhaps that was the cause of my innocence.

I think almost without stopping, I dare not stop. Perhaps this is the cause of my innocence.

Longing

2009-03-30T21:42:00.003-04:00

[Flowerville]

Still swamped -- until some semblance of freedom returns, some Musil [from notes on 'the novel' in his diary]:

And Robert was exceedingly arrogant. When, yet again, he had read a book without getting anything from it, indeed even when he seemed fated never to find the right way, he was ashamed to confess this to a comrade.

Often he came home, firmly determined to give up reading altogether rather than to read the kind of books he studied up till then -- when he went into his room he was seized by a sense of sadness and pointlessness and, as if to rescue himself, he forced himself down on the chair at his desk to work at his books in the place where he sat as a child.

Interlude

2009-03-22T15:59:00.003-04:00

[van der Weyden - Portrait of a Lady]

I'm continuing on in my series of posts on Women, Beauty and Love -- many of these thoughts have been born in the interstices of conversations, in moments between steps on my walk home, in moments in the darkness of night, trying to fall asleep and yet also trying, for the first time to see this mess I've discovered -- a mess which perpetuates the worst sort of dualism between mind and body, a mess which perpetuates 'battles' of the sexes and confusion both in relationships and in identities, a mess which makes people long to consume abstract things because they cannot find the nourishment they actually lack, a mess which turns external 'controllable' uncontrollables into a currency by which value is determined and traded for -- a mess I cannot help but see all around me.

I'm going to first look at a way of understanding the dangers of the longevity of the classical myths of beauty and love -- a brief foray into theories of identity-formation as a process in narrative-formation and role-creation -- then on to the contemporary Beauty Myth and its persistence, and finally where we might go from here. I'm not sure when these installments will come out, but that's what to expect.

On Women, Beauty and Love -- again; part 4

2009-03-18T02:10:00.005-04:00

[Botticelli -- detail from The Birth of Venus]

Of a decorative value ...

Lucrezia Marinella's polemic, The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men has a particular place and function in the history of feminist literature -- one which I will largely be ignoring. A few comments before the ignoring begins -- Marinella was responding to the publication of Giuseppe Passi's 1599 polemic, The Defects of Women. Both were part of the centuries long debate now known as the 'Querelle des Femmes' -- a debate which attempted to 'decide' what a woman was, what she was for, whether she was even of the same species as men. Marinella begins by systematically addressing and overturning Passi's attack, using the same authors (poets, philosophers, and church fathers) to prove opposing points. Taken in its historical context, Marinella's work is of the utmost importance and interest. Marinella provides an important opposing voice.

But her argument has dangerous implications -- and that is what I will be focusing on.

Marinella appropriates a Platonic notion of Love -- Love is a motivating force that works upon the Lover who becomes inflamed by his Beloved. Marinella makes significant additions to this basic analogy. In her model, women are always the Beloved and men always the Lover, because women are already noble, by nature, and thus need no purification or elevation (which is what the force of love provides). Men must love women because men are lowly, rustic creatures that will never learn to stretch themselves toward the heavenly if not motivated by the love of a beautiful woman.

And that is the second important addition in Marinella's model -- Love loves only the beautiful, and all women are beautiful in her argument. Furthermore, all outward beauty is evidence of inward beauty, which is itself testimony to some divine grace.

Her argument runs as follows:

P1. Beauty is the mark of virtue
P2. Virtue indicates a greater degree of excellence and proximity to divinity
P3. If women are more beautiful than men, then they are more virtuous
P4. If women are more virtuous than men, then they are more excellent/divine
P5. Women are more beautiful than men
C1. Therefore, women are more excellent/divine than men

Marinella argues from a Platonic tradition that sees the Forms as the Ideas located in the mind of God. As such, anything that seems to express greater perfection ('beauty' being the obvious mark of perfection and excellence and divinity, etc), must necessarily express a greater degree of virtue and excellence. Marinella argues that it is obvious that,

the Idea of women is nobler than that of men. This can be seen by their beauty and goodness, which is known to everybody [...] Women's souls can, therefore, be nobler and more prized in their creation than men's [...] because the nobility of the soul can be judged from the excellence of the body -- which is ornamented with the same character and beauty as the soul, 'which such a body manifests in itself.' The greater nobility and worthiness of a woman's soul is shown by its delicacy, its complexion, and its temperate nature, as well as by its beauty, which is a grace or splendor proceeding from the soul as well as from the body.

So women are more beautiful. In fact, it is their beauty which gives them the claim to greater excellence -- are the problems yet obvious? Is an unbeautiful woman a contradiction? If not, what is the unbeautiful woman? If outward beauty is the necessary mark of inward beauty, anyone who does not exhibit outward beauty can be immediately dismissed as having no inward beauty. And what about this connection between beauty and the divine? How much trouble (and misery and hunger and pain and confusion, etc) has this identification of Beauty with Perfection caused? How much trouble has been caused by this reduction of a woman's value to her beauty?

But there are even more problems -- Marinella refigures the ladder of loving and knowing that Diotima had given to Socrates. A version of her model:

‘Woman’ is beautiful, and as beautiful, she is the only object for the loving/admiring gaze which is so pleasing to the gazer
Gaze on the beauty of body leads to the internal awareness of the beauty of the soul which has given form to the beautiful body
‘Inflamed by love’ and ‘avid’ for ‘more vivid beauty,’ the mind of the lover ascends to the love of celestial beauty and heavenly beauty. At this stage, the lover is comparing the celestial beauty to the earthly beauty
The lover contemplates angelic beauty
The lover finds rest in the contemplation of God, He who anchors the chain and is its ultimate end, the ultimate end of Love

And so woman is the catalyst for the ascension of the lowly, rustic, imperfect man from his depths in the swamp to the heights of devotional thought. But if Marinella wants to show that women are already more excellent, because they are already more beautiful (which is the mark of virtue and the divine), then what do women do? They don’t need elevation through learning, they don’t need to love, so do they just remain passive, turned quietly inward upon their thoughts of the divine? She says,

I wish to go further and show that men are obliged and forced to love women, and that women are not obliged to love them back, except merely from courtesy. I wish also to demonstrate that the beauty of women is the way by which men, who are moderate creatures, are able to raise themselves to the knowledge and contemplation of the divine essence.

And so women are beautiful -- they are in possession of some excellence already -- it is so evident! And as beautiful, detached and noble, women stand outside the activities of learning and self-improvement -- why would they engage in unnecessary toil? What to do with women then? Craft pedestals perhaps. The muse tradition tells us that we should use women -- use their closeness to the divine. Except that once God leaves the picture, woman is refigured as close not to the divine, but to madness -- close to the limits of reason. Hysterical, nymphomaniacal, inspiring and maddening. The muse tradition -- woman is now to be used for her beauty, for her dreams, for her sexuality, for her wild, untamed power -- used and transformed in fetishized objects, dismembered images. And the very notion of what it is to be a woman becomes so void, so contentless, so abstract that no person could possible inhabit that gender. How could an individual be that sort of woman? What on earth would that be like?

I wrote years ago in favor of the muse ideal -- I wanted to be that woman, though I had no way of knowing what that meant. I had (still have) internalized the value system which tells me that I am valuable insofar as I am beautiful. Everything else is an extra adornment and is worth more in light of the fact of my appearance. In Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, Osmond speaks of the intelligent and beautiful Isabel Archer --

His egotism, if egotism it was, had never taken the crude form of wishing for a dull wife; this lady’s intelligence was to be a silver plate, not an earthen one—a plate that he might heap up with ripe fruits, to which it would give a decorative value, so that conversation might become a sort of perpetual dessert. He found the silvery quality in perfection in Isabel; he could tap her imagination with his knuckle and make it ring.

Marinella's argument for the recognition of the virtues of women can be used to support the argument that women are, at best, for visual consumption. They are nothing for themselves. They have no right to demand activity, no reason to engage in any process of learning, no reason to seek out love or challenge. They have no reason to seek out an identity -- no reason to try and understand what it means to be an individual. What does young Jakob say in Walser's Jakob von Gunten?

But one thing I do know for certain: in later life I shall be a charming, utterly spherical zero.

And that's the notion of 'woman' that we get from this tradition. Look at it closely -- look at the notion of beauty, the notion of love -- what are they but dusty, sclerotic leftover myths that do nothing but perpetuate ridiculous ideals?

And so -- onward to The Beauty Myth!