"..." 5

"The crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career."

—Albert Einstein

Quotes and aphorisms

Some interesting quotes, thoughts, and aphorisms that have been filling up a text file on my desktop for the last several months:

"Some peacocks hide their peacock's tails from all eyes—and call that their pride." —Nietzsche

"The feeling of confidence. How is this manifested in behavior?" —Ludwig Wittgenstein (hereafter 'LW')

"...I told him I had reviewed a book by Dr. C. E. M. Joad called Teach Yourself Philosophy. Wittgenstein assumed it would have been a bad book and hoped I had not lost the opportunity of saying so. I said that I had said so; but that I had lent the book to a policeman of my acquaintance who had read it aloud to his wife cover to cover. They had both been greatly charmed: "It opened up a new world to me," the policeman said. This very much interested Wittgenstein and after a moment he said: "Yes, I understand how that is. Have you ever seen a child make a grotto with leaves and stones and candles--and then creep in out of the world into a world he has made for himself? It was the grotto that your policeman friend liked to creep into."
—Karl Britton, "Portrait of a Philosopher"

"A main cause of a philosophical disease--an unbalanced diet: one nourishes one's thinking with only one kind of example." —LW

"Language is an instrument. Its concepts are instruments." —LW

"People say again and again that philosophy doesn't really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don't understand why it has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions." —LW

"Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling: what a frightful waste of time! What's the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing?" —LW

Philosophy hasn't made progress? — If somebody scratches the spot where he has an itch, do we have to see some progress? Isn't it genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?" —LW

"If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done." —LW

"The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you must still seduce the senses to it." —Nietzsche

"You must say what you really think as though no one, not even you, could overhear it." —LW

"Ambition is the death of thought." —LW

We are not analysing a phenomenon (e.g. thought) but a concept (e.g. that of thinking), and therefore the use of a word. So it may look as if what we were doing were Nominalism. Nominalists make the mistake of interpreting all words as names, and so of not really describing their use, but only, so to speak, giving a paper draft on such a description." —LW

"To say that men and women should not inject their "personal morality" into public-policy debates is a practical absurdity; our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition."
—Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope

"The running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it." —LW

"The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God… To pray is to think about the meaning of life…To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life… To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning." —LW

"Because it is in pain that we find the meaning of life..." (from Pan's Labyrinth)

"The human body is the best picture of the human soul."  —LW

Frustration may arise from one's actions from time to time, but it is better to struggle as you climb the ladder than to look down imperiously. As much as these moments may seem undesirable and elicit discomfort, it is better this way. One who looks down from ahigh has settled on what there is in the world, and is committing oneself to a particular hierarchy. But wouldn't things be better if one actively appended one's worldview so that the top was never reached? Or would most prefer that such things be reached and discarded rather than perpetually out of reach--would most prefer the outcome rather than the process?

One cannot live for outcomes. These have a superficial quality--and always the same too: anticipation and satisfaction. Instead, one should live for the process of becoming. This may seem hard to do, but it seems as though life is better structured for this.

"[The tolerance of Ambiguity is the cornerstone of adulthood.]"
(I haven't been able to find the actual quote. My poetry professor was quoting Jung, I think.)

"Aim at being loved without being admired." —LW

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness." —LW

"The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear." —LW

"Love's the breath a Life still lifts when Life is finally over with."

"Life's the death a Love still gets when Love is finally over with."

i. Random accumulated thoughts and quotations

Poem 20

. . .
Pooling and quelling as every fine
,
lissome thread tears
away, gently, from its spindled nap
—
its gesture drifting into a pile.      Such slack inertia
never effaces the threads' fall
,
though their winding, still
-
flowing coils spool endlessly in extenso
:
undulating. Threadbare—the attic
-
light narrows each line, skirting edges in
sunstreams / else-inking in obscurity—as if one drew






thin, delicate hairs falling across the face of the world—each umbra
accosting boundless contours: a heavy ballad of dilated
(
rain
)
soon-fading glints dropping with pooling thread from snapped termini
. . .

"..." 4

July 3, 1997
Jane Alexander
The National Endowment for the Arts
1100 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20506

Dear Jane Alexander,
     I just spoke with a young man from your office, who informed me that I had been chosen to be one of twelve recipients of the National Medal for the Arts at a ceremony at the White House in the fall. I told him at once that I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration. I want to clarify to you what I meant by my refusal.
     Anyone familiar with my work from the early Sixties on knows that I believe in art's social presence--as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright.
     In my lifetime I have seen the space for the arts opened by movements for social justice, the power of art to break despair. Over the past two decades I have witnessed the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice in our country.
     There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art--in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A President cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.
     I know you have been engaged in a serious and disheartening struggle to save government funding for the arts, against those whose fear and suspicion of art is nakedly repressive. In the end, I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist. I could not participate in a ritual which would feel so hypocritical to me.

          Sincerely,
          Adrienne Rich
          cc: President Clinton

Aesthetics: scene or "music"?

Bougereau

Cezanne

Picasso

Duchamp

Matta

I'm still having somewhat of a problem with my understanding of visual aesthetics. I'm wanting to say that the sensory aspect of the visual is something that is strictly functional—and in this sense it must describe a scene where light is used to understand contour and positioning, color is used to differentiate objects and materials, and so forth... I still believe that these elements can be played with (color especially), but I don't think there would be any sense out of such playfulness other than a loose "musical" arrangement of shapes, values, and hues.

I'm not quite sure if I want to embrace this fundamentally arbitrary sort of visual "music", or stick with representing a scene that is in some way tied to a narrative. The latter definitely has sense; the former definitely doesn't, but it explores its medium more completely...


i. Journal Entry: Baya-baya-ba
ii. Journal Entry: Art and Indecisiveness


2/12 update:

For the sake of having this make sense, I'm going to put forward a (precarious) distinction rather than a choice between two alternatives.

Scene	"Non-Scene" (purely formal)
"Illusionistic" Refers to a perceptual visual vocabulary and emulates aspects of it, e.g. objects, lighting, etc.	Doesn't correspond to perceptual objects or vocabulary (at least in any recognizable way). Likely stresses "material-ness", e.g. paint on canvas, lines on a page, chiselled stone.

In actuality this distinction is a little troubling, as it would be unlikely that a given work would fall solely into either category. "Scenes" always have some aspect of purely formal arrangements in them, and formal arrangements, when viewed by a viewer, will almost undoubtedly have "retinal" presuppositions thrust upon them (e.g. this color pushes forward; these values show form).

In other words, there's some kind of odd gambit going on between the two.

This world of ours 4

Anthropogenic warming. Impending doom. Tortillas and ethanol.
1. Humans blamed for climate change
2. Waxman: White House misled public on global warming
3. Climate resets 'Doomsday Clock'
4. 'Doomsday' vault design unveiled
5. Mexicans stage tortilla protest

Then there's:
6. View of US's global role 'worse'
7. France glimpses art in video games
8. Sweden plans Second Life embassy

And:
9. Richest 2% own 'half the wealth'
10. Gender bias 'increases poverty'
11. Birth rate 'harms poverty goals'
12. 'Altruistic' brain region found

And:
13. Stress 'harms brain in the womb'
14. Study Puts Rate of Autism at 1 in 150 U.S. Children
15. No sleep means no new brain cells

Put it all together, this farrago:
the intersections that evade the eye's scrutiny.


2/13 update:

Oh, and:
16. New crops needed to avoid famines
17. Obama throws his hat in the ring