Every library everywhere

Today is Virginia Woolf's birthday

In a letter to Clive Bell, Woolf writes about her experiences reading the philosophy of G.E. Moore:

I split my head over Moore every night, feeling ideas travelling to the remotest part of my brain and setting up a feeble disturbance, hardly to be called thought. It is almost a physical feeling, as though some little coil of brain unvisited by any blood so far, and pale as wax, had got a little life into it at last, but had not strength enough to keep it.

I commend anyone who can benefit from G.E. Moore in this way; it demonstrates the shallowness of my reading that I cannot. With respect to visceral philosophical horrors, I may have more in common with Musil’s Törleß, whose struggle with Kant begins like this:

That morning, Törleß had bought himself the Reclam edition of the volume he had seen at his professor’s, and he used the first recess to begin reading. But with the mess of brackets and footnotes, he didn’t understand a word, and if he conscienciously followed the sentences with his eyes, he felt as though some aged, bony hand were twisting and screwing his brain out of his head.

The worse thing about not knowing where you are is that you fill so losted

Friday is always Free Friday at the museum, and tonight I took some notes on a couple items from the new show, which features odds and ends from the collection of Julien Levy, lover of surrealism.

From a Krazy Kat comic strip clipped from an unidentified newspaper:

[Krazy:] S’FUNNA, ALL AT A SUDDIN, I DUN’T SIM TO KNOW WHERE I’M AT—

I’M SOMEPLACE THAT’S NO PLACE TO ME—IT’S EEDA SOME WHERE ANY WHERE, OR NO WHERE—BUT WHERE?

NOT ONLY DO I DUN’T KNOW WHERE IT IS—BUT ALSO I DUN’T KNOW WHERE IT AIN’T.

THE WORSE THING ABOUT NOT KNOWING WHERE YOU ARE IS THAT YOU FILL SO LOSTED

AND Y’DUN’T IVVIN KNOW WHERE Y’IS LOSTED AT—

IT’S SO KINFUSING TO BE LOSTED AT A STRANGE PLACE

I’LL WRITE TO IGNATZ AND TELL HIM—IT’LL BE SUCH A SIPPRISE TO HIM

Another Krazy Kat:

[Krazy:]SH—H— A L’IL “KAMILLION” IS RESTING INSIDE FROM TOO MUCH “COLOR”—DUN’T MAKE NO NOISE

[Ignatz:] WELL, STEP OUTSIDE, AND I’LL SOKK YOU AS SILENTLY AS POSSIBLE

[Offissa Pupp:] AH—HAH— SOMEBODY IS GOING TO TAKE SILENT TRIP TO THE CLINK

From a “List of Proposed Titles for the ‘Dream of Venus’ Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York,” Salvador Dalí and Julien Levy. I use italics for words in handwritten script; the rest is typwritten; strikethroughs original:

What is at the Bottom of Your Mind?
Dali’s Depth of the Mind
Dali’s Dream Dive
20^M LEGS UNDER THE SEA
DALI’S BOTTOMS OF THE SEA
DALI TRANCE FORMS
DALI’S SEA BOTTOMS
SEA NYMPHS AND MANIACS
SEA BOTTOMS UP
DALI’S KALA PANI
DALI’S FISH FLESH AND FOWL
LIQUID LADIES
DALI’S WET DREAM
NUDE DRENCH
DALI'S VISIBLE WOMEN
BEAUTIES OF DISORDER
SWIMMIN WOMEN
EROS IS EROS
DALI’S NUDE AQUARIUM
NO NUDES ARE GOOD NUDES
DALI’S SEXCESS
PSYCHANATOMY
SEE! SEA! SI! DALI!
DALINIAN DEARIES
THE FAIR’S SEX

Woodner Tr. 7-5346
Morris Ci 7-2160
Brecher Ci 7-0200
home tr 7-8485
Wittenberg Li 4-5121
Weintraub Mu 2-5400
Wm. W. Gardner 477 Melwood St. Pittsburgh

Reason refuses to allow feeling to warm itself at its own private hearth

The particular form of guilty conscience revealed by the type of eloquence in which such superficiality flaunts itself may be brought to your attention here and above all if you notice that when it is furthest from mind, superficiality speaks most of mind, when its talk is the most tedious dead-and-alive stuff, its favourite words are ‘life’ and ‘vitalize,’ and when it gives evidence of the pure selfishness of baseless pride, the word most on its lips is ‘people’. But the special mark which it carries on its brow is the hatred of law. Right and ethics, and the actual world of justice and ethical life, are understood through thoughts; through thoughts they are invested with a rational form, i.e. with universality and determinacy.

Hegel, Preface to Philosophy of Right, italics mine

This passage gave me a chill when I read it this evening, containing as it does an indictment of Fort Kant as a cult of irrationalism, imagism, subjectivism, givenism, privacy, and picture-thinking. As we continue our research into mind, we must be careful to distinguish between positive and negative freedom, and to promote the universality and determinacy through which alone the former is possible.

For one current reading of the thesis that freedom is possible only through the rule of law, see this latest speech from Al Gore, metaphysician of American democracy.

Friday the 13th

I think it was during my first grade year (1983-84) that other kids at the bus stop, slightly older kids whose knowledge of the world, potentially infinite in its scope, was demarcated from my own by the special kind of opacity wrought by exclusion from a sphere of coolness and not knowing what is being talked about but ramifying the words internally in flourishes of imagination and deeply wanting to know what other kids did after school, especially on warm evenings when they might be outside roaming the neighborhood till eight, walking from backyard to backyard, if their parents were so permissive, I think it was during this time that these other kids, who exposed me to a range of vocabulary that seems in retrospect pretty low class and reflective of social realities I was fortunate not to know except in imagination, would talk excitedly about Friday the 13th, a night-stalking murderer who was not just the subject of a motion picture but an actual marauder of the suburbs who had been seen haunting our neighborhood at night, looking through rear windows at girls on the phone or in the tub, skulking by in profile with a strange, curved knife, wearing a mask whose shape, a pattern of circular holes in plastic or bone, I knew from a magazine or a framed and bulbed poster in a movie theater lobby where I had seen an image of the mask backlit so that shafts of light would beam through the holes, illuminating swirling columns of dust particles as a projector would, and I would lay in bed and imagine the shock of seeing that face at my bedroom window and think, I hope Friday the 13th isn't out there.

You call me up by sunphone any old time

Bumboosers, save your stamps—Fort Kant is again receiving comments.

Science of the experience of consciousness

Soul has a self-increasing account [logos].

—Heraclitus, as quoted by John Stobaeus, who falsely believed he was quoting Socrates (Anthology III i 174-180, Diels-Kranz B 115)

*******

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,
die sich über die Dinge ziehn.
Ich werde die letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen,
aber versuchen will ich ihn.

Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm,
und ich kreise jahrtausendlang;
und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm
oder ein großer Gesang.

—Rilke, from The Book of Hours, First Book, The Book of the Monastic Life

Discourse on the Method (of rightly conducting one’s reason and seeking the truth in the sciences)

Heraclitus says, as though he had achieved something great and noble,

I inquired into myself

—Plutarch, Against Colotes, 1118C

Heidegger, writing about just this sort of thing, says

What then was wrested from phenomena by the highest exertion of thought, albeit in fragments and first beginnings, has long since been trivialized.

—Being and Time, 2

Virtue and knowledge

The lyrics to the bridge of “Easy,” by the Commodores, go like this:

I want to be high, so high
I want to be free to know the things I do are right
I want to be free
Just me

Consider the difference between the line Lionel Richie in fact wrote, (a.), and a superficially similar line that might have sounded more natural, (b.):

(a.) I want to be free to know the things I do are right
(b.) I want to be free to do the things I know are right

The agent imagined in (b.) believes he has knowledge of right action basically in the bag, and he faces some external obstacle to the performance of such action. This comes off as a bit arrogant and disingenuous. “I know how to act well, but I am prevented from doing so.” It’s hard to sympathize with this sort of would-be hero, and the Commodores don’t go in for it.

The agent imagined in (a.) isn’t having a crisis of action, but a crisis of knowledge of action; that is, he is a philosopher. For the Commodores, moral knowledge is the grail: it’s not enough to be able to act well, one must also know that one is acting well. The relevant obstacle to virtue is not someone or something preventing you from acting well, as (b.) imagines—as if anyone else could prevent you from acting well!—but someone or something that is destructive of moral knowledge. Cognitive freedom is a condition of such knowledge, whether one pictures that freedom as the Commodores do—“I want to be high, so high”—as a sort of intuitive, visionary state, or as Plato and Kant do, as the freedom of the power of reason. For them, philosophical reasoning is the best, indeed the only, means of attaining knowledge of virtue and preserving it against forgetfulness in its many forms.

The thunderbolt steers all things

—Heraclitus, as quoted by Hippolytus in the Refutation of All Heresies (Diels-Kranz B 64).

The battle-field of these endless controversies is called metaphysics

Kant had a close personal relation with the officers of the Königsberg garrison, and for a long time ate almost every day with them; General von Meyer, a “clear mind,” in particular liked it when the officers of his regiment were instructed by Kant in mathematics, physical geography, and fortification.

—Ernst Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought

New Year's meme by Carl & Hilary

Hilary and I each did the New Year’s meme. We got it from John. Me first:

1. What did you do in 2005 that you'd never done before?

I started a weblog. I did lots of Heraclitean things that I’ll never do again.

2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Yes—I had resolved to write more. During 2004, the only thing I wrote other than e-mails and discipline referrals was a long dependent clause about a photograph of a professor sitting in his office. I hereby resolve to write yet more in 2006.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

I skipped the Hall-Dale Class of ’95 reunion because Hilary’s parents and grandparents were staying at my parents’ house that night, so I missed a lot of good gossip. I met my cousin Nicky’s baby daughter, Skyler, who I don’t think was born in 2005. This made me very happy.

5. What countries did you visit?

I never left the country, though I visited the New England states of New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

6. What would you like to have in 2006 that you lacked in 2005?

Encounters with machine elves. The opportunity to decide for myself whether time is a fractal wave of increasing novelty.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Not figuring out a life plan or life goals or really advancing my interests in any objective way. Not fearing oblivion enough.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

I got my feelings hurt a couple times, but that was it.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

New brake lines for my '88 SAAB 900. I’m sorry I didn’t buy them sooner. A friend and I had a harrowing ride back from the Biddeford tidepools on US 1.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Kids who found weird ways to survive.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

People who complained about high gas prices.

14. Where did most of your money go?

The plum pudding I made on Christmas.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Take out some reallys and I got excited about riding my bike. Not so much as a form of exercise as a form of exploration. Walter Benjamin. I got multiple-really excited about the mind. What it feels like when it meets itself and sets all of its hypothesis-framing and –testing and variable-isolating functions to work on its own operations. How much the mind remembers about the world when it’s not looking. Or when that world isn’t there anymore.

16. What song will always remind you of 2005?

“Submarine” by Björk, which didn’t come out in 2005.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Making other people feel good.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?

Having temper tantrums.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

I was at my parents’ house in Hallowell with my brothers. It was the perfect Christmas day: playing with new toys, reading new books, cooking, eating.

21. Did you fall in love in 2005?

Every day, just about.

23. What was your favorite TV program?

Hilary and I rented several episodes of two PBS mini-series: The Mind and The Brain. These shows are fucking awesome, and so is the mind, and so is the brain. We watched a good special on the Symbionese Liberation Army. I saw some of the new Doctor Who series, and I’m sorry that Christopher Eccleston has left already. I become a slave to the tube any time I’m at a friend’s house with Classic VH-1.

25. What was the best book you read?

I finished reading Remembrance of Things Past in January, though I did most of the work in 2004. I can’t say how much that book has meant to me.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?

It would be presumptuous to say I discovered it, but rap music is my big new musical interest. “Musical” in the full sense—not “rap as a social/political phenomenon” or “rap as literature” or “rap as rhythmically interesting,” but rap invested with the full power and aesthetic spectrum of musical art. Dr. Dre’s The Chronic is my favorite rap album, though it goes way past anything genre-specific. Sgt. Pepper-caliber music of the imagination.

I saw Feathers for the first time, at Strange Maine. They’re really good, way beyond their psych-folk image, and their record belongs between Led Zeppelin III and Led Zeppelin IV, and they will be famous this time next year. Kelefa Sanneh will be bumming that he didn’t find them first.

The Chris Weisman IntelliGents started discovering themselves at the Red Door in Portsmouth, and pretty much every jaw in the audience dropped. Power trio. Comparisons worthless. Fucking hardcore rules. Chris wore a green dashiki. Here’s a demo of the opening number from that show, Abeline, minus the Gents.

I figured out the chords to “Sweet Love,” a Commodores song, and felt that I had penetrated the core of Lionel Richie’s musical intelligence, though Chris and I disagreed over whether the chords were better characterized as sus chords or slash chords.

27. What did you want and get?

An acrylic polymer clay statuette of a meditating Buddha, though I had to make it myself.

28. What did you want and not get?

Karl Rove on Fitzmas morning.

29. What was your favorite film of this year?

My dad and I went to see The Edukators for his birthday, and we were the last two people admitted to the cinema.

32.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Finishing just one of the many books I tried reading. See, after reading Proust, I felt like I could do anything. I made it pretty far in Gravity’s Rainbow and The Magic Mountain before fading out. I’m halfway through Bleak House and perilously close to letting fall all the threads I’ve painstakingly gathered.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2005?

I wore a magenta “One Great Kid from Hall-Dale” sweatshirt pretty much every day it was cold. I bought two pairs of New Balance. Hilary got me an apparently homemade Steelers patch at a junk shop, and I crudely sewed it onto a gray hat.

34. What kept you sane?

Taking baths.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

I cut more out more pictures of Hugo Chávez than anyone else, and I was the most imperious about silence when stories about him came on the radio.

My favorite US celebrity during 2005 was Jay-Z. “I’m like Che Guevara with bling on, I’m complex.” You could write a dissertation on that line.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

My own tendency to naturalize and regard as ordinary and inevitable and justifiable things that are in fact unnatural, unsustainable, within the control of human agency, and morally suspicious, although this issue stirred me only when I wasn’t busy naturalizing away, dazzled by the 1,000 things. The fragility of economic/historical consciousness.

37. Who did you miss?

I missed John, who missed me.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

Students I cannot name, due to what the Director of Special Services calls “confidenshuality.” Hilary’s friend Kazumi. The directors and staff of the Upward Bound program I worked at.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2005.

That pretty much everybody is motivated by self-interest to do things that compromise the legitimate interests of others. I don’t know if this lesson is valuable.

Hilary’s answers:

1. What did you do in 2005 that you'd never done before?

Bought a giant bottle of liquor (Campari).


2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Do not remember old resolution, so must not have kept it. New resolution is to be a less negative and sarcastic person.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

My friend Angela may have given birth by 12/31/05—it is likely.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

No.

5. What countries did you visit?

None.

6. What would you like to have in 2006 that you lacked in 2005?

A dazzling landscape technique that makes it into real paintings instead of just practice pieces.

7. What date from 2005 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

Date toward end of March when I found out I got into Skowhegan. First I got the e-mail, then I called the office to see if they made a mistake. When I found out it was not a mistake, it was the biggest shock.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Learned how to paint tie-dye (kind of).

9. What was your biggest failure?

Spent hours picking out perfect birthday present for sister, then had to give it up (I had an extra) when brother failed to produce a gift. Brother presented perfect present (set of silk/brass/mirror Indian bangles) as his own, stealing the present-giving show.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

New cat allergy. Unfortunate but Carl had one anyways.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

New clutch for my 1990 SAAB 900.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Carl was a selfless, noble helper throughout my grad-school applying process, other than asking constantly where I would take him for dinner as a reward.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

Portland Parking Authority.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Money went for photography and developing and duping of slides, car repairs, and two three-month sessions of being unemployed.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Trip to Japan, subsequently cancelled.

16. What song will always remind you of 2005?

Spaghetti Royal

17. Compared to this time last year, are you

This time last year my future was less uncertain.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Exercise, good eating, positive friendly attitude.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?

Drinking, swearing, unpleasant sarcastic jokes and fits of temper.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

Christmas was at Mimi and Papa’s in White Mountains, together with Mary, Henry, Asa, and Lydia. Watched approximate total of 10 hours videos/television.

21. Did you fall in love in 2005?

Was already in love since 1995.

22. How many one-night stands?

Zero.

23. What was your favorite TV program?

New Hampshire Crossroads.

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?

Forgive me landlords but you sold our building for condos.

25. What was the best book you read?

Elizabeth Costello

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Made none.

27. What did you want and get?

Wanted an art studio and got one!

28. What did you want and not get?

Wanted to get good at watercolor. Hasn’t happened quite yet.

29. What was your favorite film of this year?

Educators pardon me Edukators

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

My birthday party was a cheese party. I was 26.

32.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

If I had gotten into de Ateliers. I would be Dutch by now.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2005?

Fashion is—same clothing since 1999 thus a kind of worn-out look.

34. What kept you sane?

—

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Do not “fancy” but am devoted to Martin Lukes—I hope a made-up celebrity counts.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

Riots in Paris (I lived in Paris January to June of 2001).

37. Who did you miss?

Missed Chris Forgues, who I did not see even once.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

Carl’s high-school friend Zach Tyler, his wildlife artist mother D.D. and his dad Hank and his (Zach’s) girlfriend Bev (all in one family so counts as one person). Also: Kazumi Shiho.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2005.

Life lesson: Things will be easy if one does not subconsciously wish for a disaster.

Blog 2006

Inspired by Winsor McCay’s Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend comic strips, a collection of which my brother gave me for Christmas, I have undertaken a series of psychonautical investigations involving eating Welsh rarebits before bed, the results of which are compelling enough to justify the inclusion of casein among the many substances documented in the Vaults of Erowid. While my endeavors haven’t exactly been good science—I’ve also been taking vitamins that contain high doses of B12, which reputedly enhances recall of dreams—I have come to believe in the psychic potency of rarebit. The night of my first experiment, my sleep ranged from the paralysis and dopplegängerism and hypnagogic rush of non-REM night terrors to the lucidity of early morning REM nightmares. The second night’s series of visions concluded with me facing a currency exchange automat in some side chamber of the student union of a Big-Ten-ish research university, the seats of whose indoor sports amphitheater were covered with sleeping tourists who had read in a travel guide that one could spend the night there for free. The automat dispensed giant, high-value Dutch coins, and a sign posted next to it forbade its use by Turkish citizens, whose government had outlawed the images with which the coins were cast.

*******

Hilary has been applying to graduate school, and she sent off half of her applications last Friday. Early this morning, she was awoken by a supernatural and seemingly external voice that whispered, Go look at your resume. After a moment of the sort of shock and inability to move that one quite reasonably would feel after such an encounter, Hilary got up to check a copy of her resume, and she found that she had in fact failed to correct one of Word’s autoformatting helps, whereby a date was stuck onto the end of line rather than the beginning, a small enough error, though one fears what message the goblin will bring next.

Here is Hilary’s most recent painting, “Live Free or Die”:

*******

Hilary’s brother, Asa, lives in a rented house in rural Vermont. Yesterday, he and a friend heard a rustling coming from the upright piano. They peeked behind it and saw a rat. Asa ran out of the room and came back wearing heavy welder’s gloves. He kicked at the piano, and the rat jumped out and rushed back and forth confusedly, stopping only when a sheet of paper was dropped on it. Asa picked up the rat, who bit into the glove and didn’t let go. He walked the rat out to the chopping block and cut it in half with an axe.