De Profundis…. I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. Of such modes of existence there are not a few: youth and the arts preoccupied with youth may serve as a model for us at one moment: at another we may like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness of impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and art.

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.

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Ideas for Where Do Crumbs Come From continuation … After Hours Crumb Party… Crumbs qua “crummy people”… Crumbs starting businesses, crumbs falling in love, adventures of crumbs.

The classic example is what happened to U.S. debt from World War II. When and how did we pay it off? The answer is that we never did. Yet as Figure 1 shows, despite rising dollar debt, by 1970 growth and inflation had reduced the debt to an easily handled share of G.D.P…. nyt

needs work:

https://thesourceoftheleak.wordpress.com/?p=26389&preview=true

Iago from James

Children’s book: Attack of The Two Fuzzballs

Children’s book: A Very Forgetful Pair

(Kind of demented) Children’s book: Tentacles in The Play Room

Links all lead to Perseus.

5.1 / English… οὗτος γνησιώτατος τῶν Πλάτωνος μαθητῶν, τραυλὸς τὴν φωνήν, ὥς φησι Τιμόθεος ὁ Ἀθηναῖος ἐν τῷ Περὶ βίων: ἀλλὰ καὶ ἰσχνοσκελής, φασίν, ἦν καὶ μικρόμματος ἐσθῆτί τ᾽ ἐπισήμῳ χρώμενος καὶ δακτυλίοις καὶ κουρᾷ. ἔσχε δὲ καὶ υἱὸν Νικόμαχον ἐξ Ἑρπυλλίδος τῆς παλλακῆς, ὥς φησι Τίμαιος.

Paraphrasing Heidegger’s expressed thought;

Why might I think Heidegger’s “True Meaning” is different from Heidegger’s “Expressed Thought”;

(What about his expressed thought, in translation, has suggested something more true that is unexpressed)

(What is it about the reader, myself, that is dissatisfied with the thought as expressed in translation, believes there’s ‘something more to it.’)

(The sense is it can be made more succinct and in being made more succinct being made also more true.)

How is it that I sense, when paraphrasing Heidegger’s expressed thought, I’m saying more than he would have? (In being more succinct have I left something important out?)

How (when paraphrasing Heidegger’s thought) do I differentiate between a thought that is interesting because it is a new thought to me, “an interesting idea”, and a thought that is interesting because it is indeed Heidegger’s (I’ve succeeded in expressing otherwise Heidegger’s thought) and a thought that is interesting because it is an especially interesting idea of Heidegger’s;

(As I say, dealing not with Heidegger nor with Heidegger’s thought nor with Heidegger’s expressed thought but with a published translation of his expressed published thought.)

*
(A minor or basic observation about Heidegger’s “published expressed thought” is that to get at being, as he understands it, requires a scholastic enterprise, and scholarly apparatus, — one can’t get at being by merely being by say ‘meditating.’)

That is, reading is required; meditation is not so much required.

(In the experience of being isn’t the answer to the meaning of being. One couldn’t describe being by “being truly” and then describing what it was…. One has to understand being to be? The concept of being must be understood before the thing itself can? Being must involve the history of its concept?)

One rather needs ontology as it has come down through written history –through tradition– Aristotle, The Scholacists, Descartes, Kant — in fact, H. expressly states the necessity of tradition in the understanding of one’s ‘historicity’.)

*

I posted on the literary reddit (“A glass bowl suspended by Three Chains“) about two rather similar seeming light fixtures in The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon, but now I’m thinking that I buried the lede somewhat and that the real story is that the sentences as a whole, including the light fixture they describe, are so similar. Here, again, are the two sentences:

—The Big Sleep (pp.722), in the offices of Harry Jones: “I found the light switch and light glowed in a dusty glass bowl hanging from the ceiling by three brass chains.”
—The Maltese Falcon (pp.398), in Sam Spade’s room: “A switch clicked and a white bowl hung on three gilded chains from the ceiling’s center filled the room with light.”
^{(Page numbers refer to the appropriate volume of the Library of America edition.)}

And here are the similarities I see between them:
— both composed of two independent phrases joined by conjunction “and”;
— both with first phrase referring to the light switch being turned on;
— both with second phrase referring to the light activated by the switch;
— both with a “switch” operated light in a “bowl” “hanging”/ “hung” “(on/by) three (brass/ gilded) chains” “from the ceiling” / “from the ceiling’s center”
— neither contains significant information excluded by the other
— in sum, this could easily be two different people describing the same light or the same person describing the same light at different times.

Some differences:
— in Sleep, the first independent phrase employs the passive voice, while Falcon employs the active;
— in Sleep, “light” (as in “the dual nature of”) is the subject of the second independent phrase, with “bowl” appearing as the object of a preposition; while in Falcon it is the “bowl” that is the subject, and “light” that is the object of the preposition.
— the light in Sleep “glows”, while the light in Falcon “fills the room with light” creating the impression that, in general,
— the light in Sleep is dimmer than that of Falcon.

There would almost be a question of plagiarism if the thing in question were in any way worth plagiarizing, or if there were any other such examples. A friend has suggested it could be a homage, yet it would seem an obscure homage. Maybe it’s nothing.

Off to ponder elsewhere for a period… Highlighted Creative work of past year: Ghost Girls (tale of true horror), Man Who Dreamed of Rearranging His Desk (meditation on failure), and AHA! (ridiculous — indeed all ridiculous).

Also in ’18, shambolic scattershot walk project took definitive steps toward choateness or its opposite, of which this is held to be the crowd pleaser: bright red winter coat and these more indicative of broader ambitions: (1) (2).

WLK/ or Gals with leashes, Jets and Clouds

*

Strides and Jerseys self as cold front Equality perfect lot In which some trivial questions are asked experience of nothing notable footfalls and gumchews (6) walking while hearing car alarm ***13 Weathered Pencil edgewood, ; by Center; 28th Rd (lot) ; WR/ Hill ; Monroe ; Abingdon near tennis courts ; 395 overpass, overpass; seeing onramp; past mailbox near first mail box; whether or not you’ve seen a fire engine Bright Red Winter Coat (8) post de luz The firehouse is Creon

*
Outtakes, potential intakes

(2) (9) gals with leashes, jets and clouds, portraits and faces.fresher and fresher paint to potentially canibalize (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)…. (12),,,,,,,,,, WR/ (Monroe-18th)* (wlk)cement bunker of hill * ; Wakefield , *,after intersection

“The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,/ They scorn the best I can do to relate them.” (Walt Whitman, Song of Myself)

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Body position: not unlike the Pietà with the role of Mary being served by the wheeled office chair; feet propped on the corner of the desk, at the level of my head; torso slightly twisted to view computer; hand pawlike upon the mouse. A bodily position which is not to change as I proceed through a series of wikipedia pages: from Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, to Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat, to Velasquez and Las Meninas, to the Order of Santiago, to James son of Zebedee (in Spain); and ending at the Historia Compostelana.

I had never heard of the last item. I had had no idea that there were legends of St. James having been in Spain. Velasquez had received the Order of Santiago late in his life. Not even the king could grant this order, I read, but a special commission was required to investigate the purity of the bloodline of the nominee. St. James was “the moor killer”, which was barbaric, that a holy figure could be thought of this way, but I could see the attraction in being immersed in some of these myths: the decapitated form of St. James in a pilotless ship sailing across the Mediterranean to Spain. Rather than me, here, this, this desk, distant hum of a refrigerator and whir of the computer fan. Not sailing or lying headless in a boat. I suddenly remembered I had aggressively to search out life, as I read in Tolstoy the other day — life was God. I remembered the Slaughtered Ox, which is a striking painting. (As I edit this post months after first having written it, I find myself in the exact “Pietà position” described in its opening… And I find myself still in this position and still editing months after having finished the preceding sentence.)

Idea occurs to me that all the world was created that I might focus on a simple thing. Idea occurs to me that Life is not outside the window, not outside the door, not to be found in an “adventure”, whether real and challenging or fake and amusing, but in that moment when I clicked from the page of the Order of Santiago to the page of St. James of Zebedee then scrolled down to the part about Spain. This was somewhere in the past, if not in memory. Somewhere in these moments in which so much passes without me noticing it, there was life.

Velasquez, it occurred to me, was one of those great painters I simply never thought about: how much greatness there had been which one never thought of or knew about in the first place, so of what use was greatness? (Then I clicked on the Order of Santiago.)

(Tolstoy had asked that also. Even if he were as great an artist as Shakespeare, what then? What would that matter?) For Tolstoy Life was God, while for Aristotle logos was I guess God; but if logos was the same as reason (which is certainly disputable) Tolstoy did not think it was God; for reason, according to My Confession, if I’d read it properly, belonged to the upper classes and only persuaded one of the evil of living, and of god’s non-existence. Be like the simple people who never doubted such things, thought Tolstoy (though he was skeptical of the forms of the church, which these simple people embraced. Was the word “god” itself such a form, an icon? Was that why one ought not pronounce the name of the supreme being?). The existence of God was as evident and obvious as the appearance of life….

Using Perseus, I’d looked up ἀγεννής earlier, which means low-born, low-minded, sordid: Aristotle didn’t think much of the lower orders and slaves, certainly didn’t suppose they had the answers to life. (After I had looked up ἀγεννής I had looked up the English word illiberal, which is another translation of the word ἀγεννής and indeed the one given in the translation I was reading.) Idea again occurred to me that all the world was created that I (by which I meant all persons) might focus on a simple thing –could be a word, could be a stone– then I clicked on the link to Historia Compostelana and somewhere also along the line (I recall now it was from the James page) I had clicked on a link to an apocryphal text that was supposedly written by James, at which point it occurred to me that I had been interested for a while now in how you got the word Iago from the word James, but instead of finding that out I landed on the wikipedia page for Shakespeare’s character Iago, and read about the source text Shakespeare used for Othello, and thought about how many great authors and film makers had not started from scratch but used as there template someone else’s narrative. There Will Be Blood: “Oil!” The Shining: “The Shining”. Othello: “Un Capitano Moro” in which, according to the wikipedia article, the Iago character is not given a name. (A picture of Edwin Booth as Iago, from 1870, is featured in the top right corner of this article.) (I did not find out how you got Iago from James.)

*
Las Meninas ; Order of Santiago ; James, son of Zebedee in Spain ; Historia Compostelana

Bill Callahan

Les montagnes d’arguments entassés depuis un an s’écroulement à la fois
The mountains of arguments piled up for a year collapsed in an instant

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