Friday, December 24, 2010

Image-making




"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. The alternative to manipulation is chaos."

Edward Bernays

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Frank Stella: Harran II (1967)

Frank Stella: The Black Paintings (1959)



Arundel Castle.



Tomlinson Court Park.



Die Fahne Hoch.



Marriage of Reason and Squalor.

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Sunday, November 14, 2010

Coyote Flying




“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”


Charles Darwin

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Range of Grief

"He was envious nevertheless, not of the longer life Malkie enjoyed, but of Libor's range of grief. He could not as Libor did, throw his sorrow into the future. He did not miss the Tyler who never got to be, only the Tyler who was."

The Finkler Question

Sunday, November 07, 2010

Out and With

'It will only make you more upset. Forget all that'

'Forget all what?'

'Music.'

'So I can't have a cello either?'

'The cello will make you even sadder. Go and play football.'


The Finkler Question

Saturday, October 23, 2010

We are Our World; We are Only But Our World

"We are what we are, and live in a given situation which has the characteristics -- physical, psychological, social -- that is has; what we think, feel, do is conditioned by it, including our capacity for conceiving possible alternatives ... Our images and powers of conception are limited by the fact that our world possesses certain characteristics and not others; a world too different is (empirically) not conceivable at all; some minds are more imaginative than others, but all stop somewhere."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Wisdom?



"It is not scientific knowledge, but a special sensitiveness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor which cannot be either altered, or even fully described or calculated; an ability to be guided by rules of thumb -- the 'immemorial wisdom' said to reside in peasants and other 'simple folk' -- where rules of science do not, in principle, apply. This inexpressible sense of cosmic orientation is the 'sense of reality', the 'knowledge' of how to live."

"It is the ever present sense of this framework -- of this movement of events, or changing pattern of characteristics -- as something 'inexorable', universal, pervasive, not alterable by us, not in our power, that is the root of Tolstoy's determinism, and of his realism, his pessimism, and his contempt for the faith placed in reason alike by science and by worldly common sense."

"Tolstoy himself knows that the truth is there, and not 'here' -- not in the regions susceptible to observation, discrimination, constructive imagination, not in the power of microscopic perception and analysis of which he is so much the greatest master of our time."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Ignorance?



"Men's acts may seem free of the social nexus, but they are not free, they cannot be free, they are part of it. Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it. 'Power' and 'accident' are but names for ignorance of the casual chains, but the chains exist whether we feel them or not. Fortunately we do not; for if we felt their weight, we could scarcely act at all; the loss of the illusion would paralyse the life which is lived on the basis of our happy ignorance. But all is well: for we never shall discover all the causal chains that operate: the number of such causes is infinitely great, the causes themselves infinitely small; historians select an absurdly small portion of them and attribute everything to this arbitrarily chosen tiny section."

"Since we are not, in fact, free, but could not live without the conviction that we are what do we do?...it is better to realise that we understand what goes on as we do in fact understand it -- much as spontaneous, normal, simple people, uncorrupted by theories, not blinded by the dust raised by scientific authorities, do, in fact, understand life -- than to seek to subvert such commonsense beliefs, which at least have the merit of having been tested by long experience, in favour of pseudo-sciences, which, being founded on absurdly inadequate data, are only a snare and a delusion."

"Man is at once an atom living its own conscious life 'for itself', and at the same time the unconscious agent of some historical trend, a relatively insignificant element in the vast whole composed of a very large number of such elements."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Saturday, October 09, 2010

Recognising Unimportance and Irrelevance

"There are ordinary human beings who are ignorant and vain enough to accept responsibility for the life of society, individuals who would rather take blame for all the cruelties, injustices, disasters justified in their name than recognise their own insignificance and impotence in the cosmic flow which pursues its course irrespective of their wills and ideals."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Thursday, October 07, 2010

Ole Ordinaire




"And so Tolstoy arrives at one of his celebrated paradoxes: the higher soldiers or statesmen are in the pyramid of authority, the farther they must be from its base, which consists of those ordinary men and women whose lives are the actual stuff of history; and, consequently, the smaller the effect of the words and acts of such remote personages, despite all their theoretical authority, upon that history."

"Those who went about their ordinary business without feeling heroic emotions or thinking that they were actors upon the well-lighted stage of history were the most useful to their country and community, while those who tried to grasp the general course of events and wanted to take part in history, those who performed acts of incredible self-sacrifice or heroism, and participated in great events, were the most useless."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Tolstoy's History and Anti-history



"History, only history, only the sum of the concrete events in time and space -- the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment -- this alone contained the truth, the material out of which genuine answers -- answers needing for their apprehension no special senses of faculties which normal human beings did not possess -- might be constructed."

"History alone -- the sum of empirically discoverable data -- held the key to the mystery of why what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinker in the nineteenth century. What is to be done? How should one live? Why are we here? What must we be and do? The study of historical connections and the demand for empirical answers to these proklyate voprosy became fused into one in Tolstoy's mind, as his early diaries and letters show very vividly."

"But side by side with this there is the beginning of an acute sense of disappointment, a feeling that history, as it is written by historians, makes claims which it cannot satisfy, because like metaphysical philosophy it pretends to be something it is not -- namely, a science capable of arriving at conclusions which are certain."

"History will never reveal to us what connections there are, and at what times, between science, art, and morality, between good and evil, religion and the civic virtues...What it will tell us (and that incorrectly) is where the Huns came from, when they lived, who laid the foundations of their power, etc."

"History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names. The death of Igor, the snake which bit Oleg -- what is all this but old wives' tales? Who wants to know that Ivan's second marriage, to Temryuk's daughter, occured on 21 August 1562, whereas his fourth, to Anna Alekseevna Koltovskaya, occurred in 1572...?"

"History does not reveal cause; it presents only a blank succession of unexplained events."

"If we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life [i.e as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free will] is destroyed."

"No matter how scrupulous the technique of historical research might be, no dependable laws could be discovered of the kind required even by the most undeveloped natural sciences. He further thought that he could not justify himself the apparently arbitrary selection of material, and the no less arbitrary selection of emphasis, to which all historical writing seemed to be doomed."

The Hedgehog and the Fox

Sunday, October 03, 2010

The Hedgehog and the Fox




"For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system, less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel -- a single, universal, organising principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance -- and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle. These last lead lives, perform acts and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal; their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision."

Hedgehogs - Dante, Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzache, Ibsen, Proust.
Foxes - Shakespere, Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce.

"Of course, like all over-simple classifications of this type, the dichotomy becomes, if pressed, artificial, scholastic and ultimately absurd. But if it is not an aid to serious criticism, neither should it be rejected as being merely superficial or frivolous; like all distinctions which embody any degree of truth, it offers a point of view from which to look and compare, a starting-point for genuine investigation."

Isaiah Berlin

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood

"Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires."

Araby, Dubliners

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Zoom

"Indeed, the condition of becoming generic is that of being specific...All generic patterns are impositions upon a reality that is always in excess of their embrace and that the very idea of order and meaning is itself a delusion from which we must escape or to which we have to give a reluctant and disillusioned consent. It may be a delusion, but it is all we have got."

Seamus Deane

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Look at the stars, look how they shine for you



"The futility of triumph or protest or vindication: the inanity of extolled virtue: the lethargy of nescient matter: the apathy of the stars"

Ithaca, Ulysses

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Change, without fire or lightning



"It's all very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality. I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, in the next house so to speak."

Eumaeus, Ulysses

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Non Serviam




"I understand your point of view though I have no king myself for the moment. This is the age patent medicines. A discussion is difficult down here. But this is the point. You die for your country. Suppose. Not that I wish that for you. But I say: Let my country die for me. Up to the present it has done so. I didn't want it to die. Damn death. Long live life!"

Circe, Ulysses

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Come on, you drink!



"Come on you winefizzling, ginsizzling, booseguzzling existences! Come on, you dog-gone, bullnecked, beetlebrowed, hogjowled, peanutbrained, weaseleyed fourflushes, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on, you triple extract of infamy!"

Oxen of the Sun, Ulysses

Sunday, July 04, 2010

Motivation

Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose.

On Positive Thinking: Willful Ignorance and Delusion




"It's cruel to take people who are having great difficulties in their lives and tell them that it is all in their heads and they only have to change their attitude."

"Biggest evidence is the financial meltdown...people who tried to raise problems in the last decade were shut up or fired...people who said 'I'm worried about our sub-prime mortgage exposure' or to point out that the housing prices could not rise forever, were fired."

Barbara Ehrenreich

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Advertisement in the Mirror



"Plain and loved, loved for ever, they say. Ugly: no woman thinks she is. Love, lie and be handsome for tomorrow we die."

Nausicaa, Ulysses

Sunday, June 20, 2010

One-eye Nations



"But it's no use. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.

What?

Love. I mean the opposite of hatred."

Cyclops, Ulysses

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Hersexysounds



"It is a kind of music I often thought when she. Acoustics that is. Tinkling. Empty vessels make the most noise. Because the acoustics, the resonance changes according as the weight of the water is equal to the law of falling water. Like those rhapsodies of Liszt's, Hungarian, gipsyeyed. Pearls. Drops. Rain. Diddleiddle addleaddle ooddleooddle. Hissss."

Sirens, Ulysses

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Q, not Q




" 'The men where you live,' said the little prince, 'grow five thousand roses in the same garden and they do not find what they are looking for ... and yet, what they are looking for could be found in a single rose or in a little water.'

'Yes, indeed,' I replied.

And the little prince added: 'But the eyes are blind. One must look with the heart.' "

The Little Prince

In routine, there is difference, without which days are randomly everything and nothing.




" 'It is something which is all too often forgotten'. said the fox. 'It is what makes one day different from other days, one hour different from other hours. For example, there is a rite among hunters. On Thursdays they go dancing with the village girls. So Thursday is a marvellous day for me. I can take a walk as far as the vineyards. But if the hunters were to go dancing just any day, every day would be like any other day for me and I would never have a holiday.' "

The Little Prince

Monday, May 31, 2010

Every life is many days




"If Socrates leave his house today he will find the sage seated on his doorstop. If Judas go forth tonight it is to Judas his steps will tend. Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves."

Scylla and Charybdis, Ulysses

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Plato vs. Aristotle

http://www.philosophos.com/knowledge_base/archives_9/philosophy_questions_961.html

Sunday, May 09, 2010

Opiate



"It's that sort of bread: unleavened shewbread. Look at them. Now I bet it makes them feel happy. Lollipop. It does. Yes, bread of angels it's called. There's a big idea behind it, kind of kingdom of God is within you feel. First communicants. Hokypoky penny a lump. Then feel all like one family party, same in the theatre, all in the same swim. They do. I'm sure of that. Not so lonely. In our confraternity. Then come out a bit spreeish. Let off steam. Thing is if you really believe in it. Lourdes cure, waters of oblivion, and the Knock apparition, statues bleeding. Old fellow asleep near that confessionbox. Hence those snores. Blind faith. Safe in the arms of kingdom come. Lulls all pain. Wake this time next year."

Lotus Eaters, Ulysses

Subjective Science

"What was the chap I saw in that picture somewhere? Ah yes, in the dead sea floating on his back, reading a book with a parasol open. Couldn't sink if you tried: so thick with salt. Because the weight of the water, no the weight of the body in the water is equal to the weight of the what? Or is it the volume is equal to the weight? It's a law something like that. Vance in High school cracking his fingerjoints, teaching. The college curriculum. Cracking curriculum. What is the weight really when you say the weight? Thirtytwo feet per second per second. Law of falling bodies: per second per second. They all fall to the ground. The earth. It's the force of gravity of the earth is the weight."

Lotus Eaters, Ulysses

Sunday, May 02, 2010

A Shout in the Street




"- History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.
From the playfield the boys raised a shout. A whirring whistle: a goal.
What if that nightmare gave you a back kick?
- The ways of the Creator are not our ways, Mr Deasy said. All human history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God.
Stephen jerked his thumb towards the window, saying:
- That is God.
Hooray! Ay! Whrrwhee!
- What? Mr Deasy asked.
- A shout in the street, Stephen answered, shrugging his shoulders. "

Nestor, Ulysses

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Smashing Pumpkins




"I couldn't forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewellery store to buy a pearl necklace - or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons - rid of my provincial squemishness forever."

The Great Gatsby

One up on down

" 'Oh, and do you remember' - she added - 'a conversation we had once about driving a car?'

'Why - not exactly.'

'You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn't I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.'

'I'm thirty,' I said. 'I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour.' "

The Great Gatsby

Sunday, April 04, 2010

Medusa's Odds




"My father always says, choosing a wife is like putting your hand into a bag full of writhing creatures, with one eel to six snakes. What are the chances you will pull out the eel?"

Wolf Hall

Thursday, April 01, 2010

Anti-gravity

Walking. Writing. Talking. Thinking. Laughing.

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Change

" 'The multitude,' Cavendish says. 'is always desirous of a change. They never see a great man set up but they must pull him down - for the novelty of the thing.'

...'I think it's just people. They always hope there may be something better.'

'But what do they get by the change?'

Wolf Hall

Helpful emendations

"And all outcomes are likely, all outcomes can be managed, even massaged into desirability: prayer and pressure, pressure and prayer, everything that comes to pass will pass by God's design, a design re-envisaged and redrawn, with helpful emendations, by the cardinal. He used to say, 'The king will do such-and-such.' Then he began to say, 'We will do such-and-such.' Now he says, 'This is what I will do.' "

Wolf Hall

Saturday, January 09, 2010

Lockean Practicality

"Since the world is what it is, it is clear that valid reasoning from sound principles cannot lead to error; but a principle may be so nearly true at to deserve theoretical respect, and yet may lead to practical consequences which we feel to be absurd."

"Locke aimed at credibility, and achieved it at the expense of consistency. Most of the great philosophers have done the opposite. A philosophy which is not self-consistent can very well be wholly false. The most fruitful philosophies have contained glaring inconsistencies, but for that very reason have been partially true."

Bertrand Russell/John Locke

Sunday, January 03, 2010

Box' of Shaded Memories #15



I watched too many days pass me by. What is the focus?

Friday, January 01, 2010

Leviathan: Fear of Anarchy and the Duty of Submission

"Hobbes holds that all men are naturally equal. In a state of nature, before there is any government, every man desires to preserve his own liberty, but to acquire dominion over others; both these desires are dictated by the impulse to self-preservation. From their conflict arises a war of all against all, which makes life 'nasty, brutish and short.' In a state of nature, there is no property, no justice or injustice; there is only war, and 'force and fraud are, in war, the two cardinal virtues."

"Hobbes considers the question why men cannot cooperate like ants and bees. Bees in the same hive, he says, do not compete; they have no desire for honour; and they do not use reason to criticize the government. Their agreement is natural, but that of men can only be artificial, by covenant. The covenant must confer power on one man or one assembly, since otherwise it cannot be enforced. 'Covenants, without the sword, are but words'. The covenant is not, as afterwards in Locke and Rousseau, between citizens and the ruling power; it is a covenant made by the citizens with each other to obey such ruling power as the majority shall choose. When they have chosen, their political power is at an end. The minority is as much bound as the majority, since the covenant was to obey the government chosen by the majority. When the government has been chosen, the citizens lose all rights except such as the government may find it expedient to grant. There is no right of rebellion, beause the ruler is not bound by any contract, whereas the subjects are. A multitude so united is called a commonwealth. This 'Leviathan' is a mortal God."