Hughlings Himwich

For David Foster Wallace

You saw ugliness within

and without 

but found beauty

in the curve

of your line

in that space

that words make.

It was another sort

of prayer and another

sort of grace. 

Wittgenstein's Preface to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Preface

---

This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it -- or similar thoughts. it is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if it afforded pleasure to one who read it with understanding.

The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language. Its whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.

The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather -- not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to thnk both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.

How far my efforts agree with those of other philosophers I will not decide. Indeed what I have here written makes no claim to novelty in points of detail; and therefore I give no sources, because it is indifferent to me whether what I have thought has already been thought before my by another.

I will only mention that to the great works of Frege and the writings of my friend Bertrand Russell I owe in large measure the stimulation of my thoughts.

If this work has a value it consists in two things. First that in it thoughts are expressed, and this value will be the greater the better the thoughts are expressed. the more the nail has been hit on the heard. -- Here I am conscious that I have fallen far short of the possible. Simply because my powers are insufficient to cope with the task. -- May others come and do it better.

On the other hand the truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in the fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.

L. W.

Vienna, 1918

 

Gone to ground

Before the fall

I stood like a tree

Catching every breath

Of wind in my limbs

Like some sweet girl

Who laughs and jumps

Into her daddy’s arms.

That was before . . .

Then the big wind --

I held my ground

bending lifting

nothing . . .

nothing at all.

Then I broke

roots torn up

falling Into the night

of constellations

Bursting through

Leaves, the light

Scattering the sound

of a voice that cried

daddy, daddy

I thought you

would live forever.

That voice, shattered

Into a million shards

Of light, suddenly

Caught my fall

and held my head

in her arms, singing

Where O Where Has

My Sweet Daddy Gone.

 

Gone to ground.

Gone home.

The Music of the Bow

βιός τῷ τόξῳ ὄνομα βίος ἔργον δὲ θάνατος. (Heraclitus, frag. 48)

The name of the bow (biós) is life (bíos), but its work is death.

 

the music of the bow

a song without sound

the silence of the storm

Two Important Sources for Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Download Undifferentiated aesthetic continuum an essay by N.S.C. Northrup

Download Principles of Research-2  an address by Albert Einstein

Golgonooza

"All imaginative and creative acts, being eternal, go to build up a permanent structure, which Blake calls Golgonooza, above time, and, when this structure is finished, nature, its scaffolding, will be knocked away and man will live in it. Golgonooza will then be the city of God, the New Jerusalem which is the total form of all human culture and civilisation. Nothing that the heroes, martyrs, prophets and poets of the past have done for it has been wasted; no anonymous and unrecognised contribution to it has been overlooked. In it is conserved all the good man has done, and in it is completed all that he hoped and intended to do. And the artist who uses the same energy and genius that Homer and Isaiah had will find that he not only lives in the same palace of art as Homer and Isaiah, but lives in it at the same time."

Northrop Frye, 'Fearful Symmetry: a study of William Blake'

 

The Builders of Golgonooza (William Blake)

(Jerusalem, f. 12, ll. 25–44.) WHAT are those Golden Builders doing? Where was the burying-place Of soft Ethinthus? near Tyburn’s fatal Tree? Is that Mild Zion’s hill’s most ancient promontory, near mournful Ever-weeping Paddington? Is that Calvary and Golgotha Becoming a building of Pity and Compassion? Lo! 5 The stones are Pity, and the bricks well-wrought Affections Enamell’d with Love and Kindness; and the tiles engraven gold, Labour of merciful hands; the beams and rafters are Forgiveness, The mortar and cement of the work tears of Honesty, the nails And the screws and iron braces are well-wrought Blandishments 10 And well-contrivèd words, firm fixing, never forgotten, Always comforting the remembrance; the floors Humility, The ceilings Devotion, the hearths Thanksgiving. Prepare the furniture, O Lambeth, in thy pitying looms! The curtains, woven tears and sighs, wrought into lovely forms 15 For Comfort; there the secret furniture of Jerusalem’s chamber Is wrought. Lambeth! the Bride, the Lamb’s Wife loveth thee; Thou art one with her, and knowest not of Self in thy supreme joy. Go on, Builders in hope! tho’ Jerusalem wanders far away Without the Gate of Los, among the dark Satanic wheels. 20

 

For those who would like more:

http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2432&context=cq

 

Stroke of Insight

 

"I have returned to my beginning." -- Camus

And here are the trees and I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes -how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanisms and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multicolored universe can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is good and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science that was to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.

Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

Kiss and Tell

 

Who but a god

Could look at you

Sweetly laughing

And not die

 

For a kiss, dying

Again and again

Like gods of spring

that never truly

 

Die, your lips

Like night

hold back the day

And close my eyes . . .

 

Awake! Awake!

You are no god

To kiss and tell

Of life and death.

 

"Straight from the heart"

Principles of Research

address by Albert Einstein (1918)

(Physical Society, Berlin, for Max Planck's sixtieth birtday)

---

IN the temple of science are many mansions, and various indeed are they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them thither. Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out of the temple, the assemblage would be seriously depleted, but there would still be some men, of both present and past times, left inside. Our Planck is one of them, and that is why we love him.

I am quite aware that we have just now lightheartedly expelled in imagination many excellent men who are largely, perhaps chiefly, responsible for the buildings of the temple of science; and in many cases our angel would find it a pretty ticklish job to decide. But of one thing I feel sure: if the types we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would never have come to be, any more than a forest can grow which consists of nothing but creepers. For these people any sphere of human activity will do, if it comes to a point; whether they become engineers, officers, tradesmen, or scientists depends on circumstances. Now let us have another look at those who have found favor with the angel. Most of them are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other, in spite of these common characteristics, than the hosts of the rejected. What has brought them to the temple? That is a difficult question and no single answer will cover it. To begin with, I believe with Schopenhauer that one of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought; this desire may be compared with the townsman's irresistible longing to escape from his noisy, cramped surroundings into the silence of high mountains, where the eye ranges freely through the still, pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours apparently built for eternity.

With this negative motive there goes a positive one. Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and thus to overcome it. This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientist do, each in his own fashion. Each makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in tbe narrow whirlpool of personal experience.

What place does the theoretical physicist's picture of the world occupy among all these possible pictures? It demands the highest possible standard of rigorous precision in the description of relations, such as only the use of mathematical language can give. In regard to his subject matter, on the other hand, the physicist has to limit himself very severely: he must content himself with describing the most simple events which can be brought within the domain of our experience; all events of a more complex order are beyond the power of the human intellect to reconstruct with the subtle accuracy and logical perfection which the theoretical physicist demands. Supreme purity, clarity, and certainty at the cost of completeness. But what can be the attraction of getting to know such a tiny section of nature thoroughly, while one leaves everything subtler and more complex shyly and timidly alone? Does the product of such a modest effort deserve to be called by the proud name of a theory of the universe?

In my belief the name is justified; for the general laws on which the structure of theoretical physics is based claim to be valid for any natural phenomenon whatsoever. With them, it ought to be possible to arrive at the description, that is to say, the theory, of every natural process, including life, by means of pure deduction, if that process of deduction were not far beyond the capacity of the human intellect. The physicist's renunciation of completeness for his cosmos is therefore not a matter of fundamental principle.

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest. Nobody who has really gone deeply into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles; this is what Leibnitz described so happily as a "pre-established harmony." Physicists often accuse epistemologists of not paying sufficient attention to this fact. Here, it seems to me, lie the roots of the controversy carried on some years ago between Mach and Planck.

The longing to behold this pre-established harmony is the source of the inexhaustible patience and perseverance with which Planck has devoted himself, as we see, to the most general problems of our science, refusing to let himself be diverted to more grateful and more easily attained ends. I have often heard colleagues try to attribute this attitude of his to extraordinary will-power and discipline -- wrongly, in my opinion. The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart. There he sits, our beloved Planck, and smiles inside himself at my childish playing-about with the lantern of Diogenes. Our affection for him needs no threadbare explanation. May the love of science continue to illumine his path in the future and lead him to the solution of the most important problem in present-day physics, which he has himself posed and done so much to solve. May he succeed in uniting quantum theory with electrodynamics and mechanics in a single logical system.

 

 

Dance

 

Download Dance

ἀλήθεια

 

The source of longing for truth is not our desire to know but rather our yearning to participate in the very reality we would disclose and thereby transcend this life, this body, this death.  Out of this longing comes a life as simple and mysterious as the fall of rain, a life ever new and ever dying, as though we were to come to our last day as to our first, giving ourselves up to the morning, open at last to the possibility of all things. 

 

 

What we hold as dear

 

What choice there is

is but a noose

wound up with hair.

 

Above the ground

our feet swing free

now here, now there.

 

It is like prayer

that lifts the sky

then dissolves in air.

 

Let me be clear!

Is there something else

you hold as dear?

Almost Spring

 

Almost human

but for wolf breath

and raven wing

and the thunder

in the throat

and this wild wind

that drives me

deep into the night

this hunger for life

for death, for spring

to come again

in what once was

a human heart.

Gone

 

Gone.

The way of memory.

Gone the way

Of rain

And song

and fire.

Gone into trees,

earth and sky.

Gone beyond

The going, no longer

Gone, no longer lost.

Chapter Titles in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain

Heraclitus 124: σάρμα εἰκῇ κεχυμένον ὁ κάλλιστος, φησὶν Ἡράκλειτος, [ὁ] κόσμος

Balis’ translation: “The comeliest order on earth is but a heap of random sweepings.” (p.18)

The chapter titles of Frazier’s Cold Mountain strangely emerge from phrases from the text of each chapter. Each title has a resonance that significantly exceeds its original context, the result being that they appear on the surface at least to be but random sweepings little related to their original context. One could have easily picked other phrases from each of the chapters and achieved a similar resonance. Yet the chapter titles begin with “the shadow of a crow” and end with “spirits of crows, dancing” and generally move from mere “shadows” of the earlier chapters to expressions that are truer reflections of the later ones. They are random sweepings that take on a most comely order precisely because they are and are not random. So much of this book is about how meaning emerges from the apparent randomness of nature, these chapter titles being a case in point. From almost random associations we build patterns and structure until we almost believe this universe makes sense.

(See Post: Charles Frazier's Cold Mouintain and Heraclitus Fragment 124)

the shadow of a crow

He flipped his wrist, and the hat skimmed out the window and caught an updraft and soared. It landed far out across the playground at the edge of the hayfield and rested there black as the shadow of a crow squatted on the ground. (p. 2, a window upon the past)

the ground beneath her hands

The ground beneath her hands was dry and littered with chicken feathers and old chicken shit and the hard dead leaves of the bush. (p. 21, Ada in the boxwood)

the color of despair

You will be living fitfully. Your soul will fade to blue, the color of despair. Your spirit will wane and dwindle away, never to reappear. Your path lies toward the Nightland. (p. 59, Swimmer’s spell “To Destroy Life”)

verbs all of them tiring

To Ada, Ruby’s monologues seemed composed mainly of verbs, all of them tiring. Plow, plant, hoe, cut, can, feed, kill. (p. 80)

like any other thing, a gift

Before the war he had never been much of a one for strife. But once enlisted, fighting had come easy to him. He had decided it was like any other thing, a gift. Like a man who could whittle birds out of wood . . . You had little to do with yourself. (p. 96)

ashes of roses

Ada now remembered she had walked through the house to go upstairs to her room, she had been struck by the figure of a woman’s back in the mirror. She stopped and looked. The dress the figure wore was the color called ashes of roses, and Ada stood, held in place by a sharp stitch of envy for the woman’s dress and the fine shape of her back and her thick dark hair and the sense of assurance she seems to evidence in her very posture. (p. 111, Ada note recognizing her own reflection. The description goes on: . . . . The light of the lamps and the tint of the mirrors had conspired to shift colors, bleaching mauve to rose.)

exile and brute wandering

The night was tom-stridden for hours. They drank through boom and flash, sprawled in the straw, telling tales of exile and brute wandering. (p. 131, sharing sleeping quarters with Odell)

source and root

Ruby’s fanciful heron story of source and root reminded Ada of a story Monroe had told not long before his death. It concerned the manner in which he had wooed her mother . . . . (p. 152)

to live like a gamecock

--To live like a
gamecock, that is my target, he said in wistful voice. (p. 164. Spoken by Veasy to Junior about the pleasures of the roving life.)

in place of the truth

We might never speak again, and I don’t plan to leave that comment in place of the truth. You’re not owning up to it, but you came with expectations and they were not realized. Largely because I behaved contrary to my heart. (p. 208, Ada’s memory of her farewell to Inman going off to war.)

the doing of it

--Do you not get lonesome living here? Inman said. -- Now and again maybe. But there’s plenty of work, and the doing of it keeps me from worrying too much. (p. 221, Inman and the Goat-woman talking)

freewill savages

They lived in a deep cave of the mountain like freewill savages. All they wished to do was hunt and eat and lay up all night drunk, making music. (p. 226, Stobrod talking to Ruby about the cavers)

a satisfied mind

Coarse as the song was, Ada found herself moved by it. More so, she believed than an any opera she had attended from Dock Street to Milan because Stobrod delivered it with such utter faith in its substance, in its ability to lead one toward a better life, one in which a satisfied mind might one day be attainable. (. 266, comment on Stobrod’s playing of Stone Was my Bedstead)

a vow to bear

Inman set the pistol down on his bedding, for he had taken upon himself a vow to bear, never again to shoot one, though he had killed and eaten many in his youth . . . . The decision came as a result of a series of dreams he had over the period of a week in the muddy trenches of Petersburg. In the first of the dreams he had started as a man. He was sick and drank tea from bearberry leaves as a tonic, and gradually he became transformed into a black bear. During the nights the bear visions rode him, Inman roamed the green dream mountains alone and four-legged, avoiding all of his own kind and of other kinds. He rooted in the ground for pale grubs and tore at bee trees for honey and ate huckleberries by the bushful and was happy and strong. In that manner of life, he thought, there might be a lesson in how to wage peace and heal the wounds of war into white scars. In the final dream he was shot by hungers . . . he was strung from a tree by a rope around his neck and skinned, and he watched the process as from above. .. . he awoke that last morning feeling bear was an animal of particular import to him. (p. 278)

naught and grief

--That’uns come to naught and grief, he said to Stobrod. If you was to pitch in we might get somewhere. Stobrod bowed a note or two from Cindy, and then some other notes, seeming at random, unrelated. He went over them and over them, and it began to be clear that they made no sense. But he suddenly gathered them up and worked a variation on them, and then another more
precise, and they unexpectedly fell together in a tune. He found the pattern he was seeking, and he followed the trail of notes where they lead, finding the way of their logic, which was brisk, brittle, effortless as laughing. (p. 289, Pangle and Stobrod play for Teague and his gang.)

black bark in winter

Such was Ada’s hope for her own construction, that someday a tall locust would stand to mark Pangle’s place, and that every year into the next century it would tell in brief a tale like Persephone’s. Black bark in winter, white blossoms in spring. (p. 302, Ada’s has constructed a cross for Pangle’s grave out of the limbs of a locust tree. Ruby had commented before that locust had such will to live that you could split fence posts from the wood of its trunk and they’d sometimes take root in the postholes and grow.)

footsteps in the snow

You could be so lost in bitterness and anger that you could not find your way back. No map nor guidebook for such a journey. One part of Inman knew that. But he knew too that there were footsteps in the snow and that if he awoke one more day he would follow them to wherever they led as long as he could put one foot in front of the other. (p. 315, Inman’s following footsteps in the snow up into the mountains to find Ada.)

the far side of trouble

Inman thought about it, but then he let himself imagine he had at last come out on the far side of trouble and had no wish to revisit it, so he told only how along the way he watched the nights of the moon and counted them out to twenty-eight and then started over . . . . (p. 343, Inman and Ada are talking in bed like Odysseus and Penelope.)

spirits of crows, dancing

When she reached the place, the boy had already gathered up the horses and gone. She went to the men on the ground and looked at them, and she found Inman apart from them. She sat and held him in her lap. He tried to talk, but she hushed him. He drifted in and out and dreamed a bright dream of a home. It had coldwater spring rising out of rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plans blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October, corn tops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields, laurels blooming on the hillsides, ditch banks full of orange jewelweed, white blossoms on dogwood, purple on redbud. Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and a great number of crows, or at least the spirits of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs. There wassomething he wanted to say.

An observer situated up on the brow of the ridge would have looked down on a still, distant tableau in
the winter woods. A creek, remnants of snow. A wooded glade, secluded from the generality of mankind. A pair of lovers. The man reclined with his head in the woman’s lap. She, looking down into his eyes, smoothing back the hair from his brow. He, reaching an arm awkwardly around to hold her at the soft part of the hip. Both touch each other with great intimacy. A scene of such quiet and peace that the observer on the ridge could avouch to it later in such a way as might lead those of glad temperaments to imagine some conceivable history where long decades of happy union stretched before the two on the ground. (p. 353, Inman is dying in Ada’s arms.)

For You

I am old. I am young.

I am thirteen. I am an ancient child.

Winter

 

A bear walks in winter

Every growl commanding

The moon to rise, the sun

To dim, holds back

The spring, its claws

marking the trees

With fire, a song

More ancient than man.

Oliver Sacks' Footnote to "The Lost Mariner"

Kosakov’s Syndrome

“Gross disturbances of the organization of impressions of events and their sequence in time can always be observed in such patients,” he wrote. “In consequence, they lose their integral experience of time and begin to live in a world of isolated impressions.” -- Luria

Footnote

Further, there may be a profound retrograde amnesia in such cases. My colleague Dr. Leon Protass tells me of such a case seen by him recently, in which the patient, a highly intelligent man, was unable for some hours to remember his wife or children, to remember that he had a wife or children. In effect, he lost thirty years of his life—though, fortunately, for only a few hours. Recovery from such attacks is prompt and complete—yet they are, in a sense, the most horrifying of "little strokes" in their power absolutely to annul or obliterate decades of richly lived, richly achieving, richly memoried life. The horror, typically, is only felt by others—the patient, unaware, amnesiac for his amnesia, may continue what he is doing, quite unconcerned, and only discover later that he lost not only a day (as is common with ordinary alcoholic"blackouts"), but half a lifetime, and never knew it. The fact that one can lose the greater part of a lifetime has peculiar, uncanny horror.

There could be only one thing worse—and that would be to lose one's entire lifetime. My friend Dr. Isabelle Rapin, author of Children with Brain Dysfunction: Neurology, Cognition, Language, and Behavior, tells me that very rarely, in consequence of certain brain tumors or degenerative diseases, children may develop a severe Korsakov's syndrome. If this happens, it has been thought, they risk losing their childhood and even their infancy from a retrograde amnesia which may extend back to birth. Such children may not only become as helpless as newborns but may also become deeply "autistic" as they lose and forget all human relationships, even the most elemental—the memory of mother love.

In adulthood, life, higher life, may be brought to a premature end by strokes, senility, brain injuries, etc., but there usually remains the consciousness of life lived, of one's past. This is usually felt as a sort of compensation: "At least I lived fully, tasting life to the full, before I was brain-injured, stricken, etc." This sense of "the life lived before," which may be either a consolation or a torment, is precisely what is taken away in retrograde amnesia. The "final amnesia, the one that can erase a whole life" that Buñuel speaks of may occur, perhaps, in a terminal dementia, but not, in my experience, suddenly, in consequence of a stroke. But there is a different, yet comparable, sort of amnesia, which can occur suddenly—different in that it is not "global" but "modality-specific."

Thus, in one patient under my care, a sudden thrombosis in the posterior circulation of the brain caused the immediate death of the visual parts of the brain. Forthwith this patient became completely blind—but did not know it. He looked blind—but he made no complaints. Questioning and testing showed, beyond doubt, that not only was he centrally or "cortically" blind, but he had lost all visual images and memories, lost them totally—yet had no sense of any loss. Indeed, he had lost the very idea of "seeing"—and was not only unable to describe anything visually, but bewildered when I used words such as "seeing" and "light." He had become, in essence, a nonvisual being. His entire lifetime of seeing, of visuality, had, in effect, been stolen. His whole visual life had, indeed, been erased—and erased permanently in the instant of his stroke. Such a visual amnesia, and (so to speak) blindness to the blindness, amnesia for the amnesia, is in effect a "total" Korsakov's, confined to visuality.

A still more limited, but nonetheless total, amnesia may be displayed with regard to particular forms of perception. Thus, in one patient whose history I have already described ("The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat," London Review of Books, vol. 5, no. 9, May 1983), there was an absolute "prosopagnosia," or agnosia for faces. This patient was not only unable to recognize faces, but unable to imagine or remember any faces—he had indeed lost the very idea of a "face," as my more afflicted patient had lost the very idea of "seeing" or "light." Such syndromes were described by Anton
in the 1890s. But the implication of these syndromes—Korsakov's and Anton's—what they entail and must entail for the "world," the lives, the identities, of affected patients, has been scarcely touched on even to this day.

Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain and Heraclitus Fragment 124

 

Heraclitus 124: σάρμα εἰκῇ κεχυμένον ὁ κάλλιστος, φησὶν Ἡράκλειτος, [ὁ] κόσμος

Balis’ translation: “The comeliest order on earth is but a heap of random sweepings.” (p.18)

What is odd about Balis’ translation of the Greek (and of all others I have found) is that there is no evidence for the word ‘but’ in the original Greek. Here is a literal translation in the order of the actual Greek:

Sweepings at random piled up the most beautiful, says Heraclitus, (the) kosmos.

'Kosmos' in Greek has a variety of meanings: order, arrangement, universe. A more graceful rendering of the original Greek:

The most beautiful kosmos, says Heraclitus, is sweepings piled up at random.

By leaving out the ‘but’ a jarringly different meaning emerges. Things swept up at random somehow present an ‘arrangement’ that is most beautiful to behold. Frazier in Cold Mountain does begin with the pejorative meaning that the ‘but’ implies, but ends with something surprisingly more positive and more faithful to the original Greek. Here is Inman’s last vision:

When she reached the place, the boy had already gathered up the horses and gone. She went to the men on the ground and looked at them, and she found Inman apart from them. She sat and held him in her lap. He tried to talk, but she hushed him. He drifted in and out and dreamed a bright dream of a home. It had coldwater spring rising out of rock, black dirt fields, old trees. In his dream the year seemed to be happening all at one time, all the seasons blending together. Apple trees hanging heavy with fruit but yet unaccountably blossoming, ice rimming the spring, okra plans blooming yellow and maroon, maple leaves red as October, corn tops tasseling, a stuffed chair pulled up to the glowing parlor hearth, pumpkins shining in the fields, laurels blooming on the hillsides, ditch banks full of orange jewelweed, white blossoms on dogwood, purple on redbud. Everything coming around at once. And there were white oaks, and a great number of crows, or at least the spirits of crows, dancing and singing in the upper limbs. There was something he wanted to say. (p. 353)

We do not know what Inman wanted to say. We are left with "everything coming around at once' and with "a home", a kosmos, a beautiful arrangement of things all out of order. Disorder order, order disorder. The way things are and are not.

Luck by Langston Hughes

Sometimes a crumb falls

From the tables of joy;

Sometimes a bone

Is flung.

To some people

Love is given,

To others

Only heaven.

Ode to the Brain

 

Burn

 

Mind is alive

with the same

force that drives 

the stars to seek

their own demise

 

so mind creates

the light that guides

our steps at night

yet yearns

for that very dark

ness that alone endures

and alone

makes all things right.

 

Burn, burn

with the beauty

of the night. 

 

Oliver Sacks: A Neurology of Identity

The patient’s essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient’s personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined. Such disorders, and their depiction and study, indeed entail a new discipline, which we may call the ‘neurology of identity’, for it deals with the neural foundations of the self, the age-old problem of mind and brain. It is possible that there must, of necessity, be a gulf, a gulf of category, between the psychical and the physical; but studies and stories pertaining simultaneously and inseparably to both—and it is these which especially fascinate me, and which (on the whole) I present here—may nonetheless serve to bring them nearer, to bring us to the very intersection of mechanism and life, to the relation of physiological processes to biography.

---from Oliver Sack's Introduction to The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

Stars Below

 

Mind runs like water

over rock and root

and seeks to fall

to the stars below.

Birdle Burble by Alan Watts

(for James Broughton)

 

I went out of mind and then came to my senses

By meeting a magpie who mixed up his tenses,

Who muddled distinctions of nouns and of verbs,

And insisted that logic is bad for the birds.

     With a poo-wee cluck and a chit, chit-chit;

     The grammar and meaning don't matter a bit.

 

The stars in their courses have no destination;

The train of events will arrive at no station; 

The inmost and ultimate Self of us all

Is dancing on nothing and having a ball.

      So with a chat for chit and with tat for tit,

      This will be that, and that will be It!

now east now west

 

now east now west

 

the road has a mind of its own

and my feet obey

 

the rest of me stays behind

treelike

 

above

the sky grows gentle

 

MY HEART OPENS

 

the road goes on

as if not knowing

 

which way is best. 

 

 

Below the pond

 

On a walk through the field we come out below the pond

And see a bird floating as if on its own reflection

 

It is still early though the light seems of an evening

When first I found rest in the quiet of your eyes. 

 

A Creepy Long Sentence from David Foster Wallace's "Mr. Squishy"

What makes this long sentence so creepy is that by the time we arrive at its end Schmidt has unwittingly revealed himself to be the kind of creepy guy he ostensibly disavows. I have highlighted some of the structural elements.

Schmidt had had several years of psychotherapy and was not without some perspective on himself, and he knew THAT a certain percentage of his reaction to the way these older men coolly inspected their cuticles or pinched at the crease in the trouser of the topmost leg as they sat back on the coccyx joggling the foot of their crossed leg was just his insecurity, THAT he felt somewhat sullied and implicated by the whole enterprise of contemporary marketing and THAT this sometimes MANIFESTED VIA PROJECTION as the feeling that people he was trying to talk as candidly as possible to always believed he was making a sales pitch or trying to manipulate them in some way, as if merely being employed, however ephemerally, in the great grinding US marketing machine HAD SOMEHOW COLORED HIS WHOLE BEING and that something essentially shifty or pleading in his expression now always seemed inherently false or manipulative and turned people off, and not just in his career – which was not his whole existence, unlike so many at Team Δy, or even that terribly important to him; he had a vivid and complex inner life, and introspected a great deal – but in his personal affairs as well, AND THAT somewhere along the line his professional marketing skills HAD METASTASIZED THROUGH HIS WHOLE CHARACTER so that he was now the sort of man who, if he were to screw up his courage and ask a female colleague out for drinks and over drinks open his heart to her and reveal that he respected her enormously, that his feelings for her involved elements of both professional and highly personal regard, and that he spent a great deal more time thinking about her than she probably had any idea he did, and that if there were anything at all he could ever do to make her life happier or easier or more satisfying or fulfilling he hoped she’d just say the word, for that is all she would have to do, say the word or snap her thick fingers or even just look at him in a meaningful way, and he’d be there, instantly and with no reservations at all, he would nevertheless in all probability be viewed as probably just wanting to sleep with her or fondle or harass her, or as having some creepy obsession with her, or as maybe even having a small creepy secretive shrine to her in one corner of the unused second bedroom of his condominium, consisting of personal items fished out of her cubicle’s wastebasket or the occasional dry witty little notes she passed him during especially deadly or absurd Team Δy staff meetings, or that his home Apple PowerBook’s screensaver was an Adobe-brand 1440-dpi blowup of a digital snapshot of the two of them with his arm over her shoulder and just part of the arm and shoulder of another Team Δy Field-worker with his arm over her shoulder from the other side at a Fourth of July picnic that A.C. Romney-Jaswat & Assoc. had thrown for its research subcontractors at Navy Pier two years past, Darlene holding her cup and smiling in such a way as to show almost as much upper gum as teeth, the ale’s cup’s red digitally enhanced to match her lipstick and the small scarlet rainbow she often wore just right of center as a sort of personal signature or statement. (Oblivion, “Mister Squishy,’ 25-26)

I keep you close

 

The loneliest thought

Is not knowing you are there

and care for me.

 

It is like rain that falls

but does not reach

the ground. 

 

Yea but for love

you would not be here at all:

I keep you close. 

 

 

 

December 21

In deepest winter

clouds gather along the ridge.

It is all souls' night. 

 

Those who help not

 

Those who help not

those in need

who come their way

 

Are worthless

as those who stay inside

and fear the rain.

 

It is what is:

No more to ask

No more to give.

 

Rain cleans all bones the same.  

 

But for night

 

But for night

When eyes are blind

When you and I

 

Think as one

And touch as though

Were earth and sky

 

(So turn around

In mind and space

Our sighs in time)

 

Love would break

Like light the day

Those it would unite. 

 

"Where the sound goes" Collection

Download Wherethesoundgoes

Warning

 

so close your eyes

and let the dark

ness be thy sight

 

and If you die

there's none to say

I lied.

The Symbolism Survey

I love the initiative of this kid, who is now my age.

 

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2011/12/05/document-the-symbolism-survey/

For Ber

For Ber

 

like laughter or

like light to those

who know themselves

to be like trees

that root themselves

in common ground

though mind apart

for he is free

to give himself

so generously

Not another word

not another word

why even that

why not silence a blank page

cause one is also other

a phantom that can not be driven off

that lurks and lures and loves to be what it is not

the mirror holds no image yet

the other there waiting patient suffering

creates itself even in darkness

for the darkness is

we stride ever through

And if we turn within

"For Christ's sake, not another

Medusa: from beast to beauty

http://www.weltevreden.com/images/Medusa%20-%20From%20Beast%20to%20Beauty%20in%20Archaic%20and%20Classical%20Illustrations%20from%20Greece%20and%20South%20Italy%20-%20by%20Susan%20M.%20Serfontein.pdf

How To Be a Poet by Wendell Berry

How To Be a Poet
by Wendell Berry

(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

Ariel

On a bat’s wing I am flying:
Poetry is the art of dying.

There is a girl

There is a girl
so fell and free
she wants for love
like a memory

her hair like night
covers all the ground
and leaves behind
no trace of me.

Poet-Bashing Police

November 19, 2011
The New York Times
Poet-Bashing Police
By ROBERT HASS
Berkeley, Calif.

LIFE, I found myself thinking as a line of Alameda County deputy sheriffs in Darth Vader riot gear formed a cordon in front of me on a recent night on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is full of strange contingencies. The deputy sheriffs, all white men, except for one young woman, perhaps Filipino, who was trying to look severe but looked terrified, had black truncheons in their gloved hands that reporters later called batons and that were known, in the movies of my childhood, as billy clubs.

The first contingency that came to mind was the quick spread of the Occupy movement. The idea of occupying public space was so appealing that people in almost every large city in the country had begun to stake them out, including students at Berkeley, who, on that November night, occupied the public space in front of Sproul Hall, a gray granite Beaux-Arts edifice that houses the registrar’s offices and, in the basement, the campus police department.

It is also the place where students almost 50 years ago touched off the Free Speech Movement, which transformed the life of American universities by guaranteeing students freedom of speech and self-governance. The steps are named for Mario Savio, the eloquent graduate student who was the symbolic face of the movement. There is even a Free Speech Movement Cafe on campus where some of Mr. Savio’s words are prominently displayed: “There is a time ... when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part.”

Earlier that day a colleague had written to say that the campus police had moved in to take down the Occupy tents and that students had been “beaten viciously.” I didn’t believe it. In broad daylight? And without provocation? So when we heard that the police had returned, my wife, Brenda Hillman, and I hurried to the campus. I wanted to see what was going to happen and how the police behaved, and how the students behaved. If there was trouble, we wanted to be there to do what we could to protect the students.

Once the cordon formed, the deputy sheriffs pointed their truncheons toward the crowd. It looked like the oldest of military maneuvers, a phalanx out of the Trojan War, but with billy clubs instead of spears. The students were wearing scarves for the first time that year, their cheeks rosy with the first bite of real cold after the long Californian Indian summer. The billy clubs were about the size of a boy’s Little League baseball bat. My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and knocked her down.

Another of the contingencies that came to my mind was a moment 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan’s administration made it a priority to see to it that people like themselves, the talented, hardworking people who ran the country, got to keep the money they earned. Roosevelt’s New Deal had to be undealt once and for all. A few years earlier, California voters had passed an amendment freezing the property taxes that finance public education and installing a rule that required a two-thirds majority in both houses of the Legislature to raise tax revenues. My father-in-law said to me at the time, “It’s going to take them 50 years to really see the damage they’ve done.” But it took far fewer than 50 years.

My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.

NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm. Some of the deputies used their truncheons as bars and seemed to be trying to use minimum force to get people to move. And then, suddenly, they stopped, on some signal, and reformed their line. Apparently a group of deputies had beaten their way to the Occupy tents and taken them down. They stood, again immobile, clubs held across their chests, eyes carefully meeting no one’s eyes, faces impassive. I imagined that their adrenaline was surging as much as mine.

My ribs didn’t hurt very badly until the next day and then it hurt to laugh, so I skipped the gym for a couple of mornings, and I was a little disappointed that the bruises weren’t slightly more dramatic. It argued either for a kind of restraint or a kind of low cunning in the training of the police. They had hit me hard enough so that I was sore for days, but not hard enough to leave much of a mark. I wasn’t so badly off. One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest.

I won’t recite the statistics, but the entire university system in California is under great stress and the State Legislature is paralyzed by a minority of legislators whose only idea is that they don’t want to pay one more cent in taxes. Meanwhile, students at Berkeley are graduating with an average indebtedness of something like $16,000. It is no wonder that the real estate industry started inventing loans for people who couldn’t pay them back.

“Whose university?” the students had chanted. Well, it is theirs, and it ought to be everyone else’s in California. It also belongs to the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the greatest systems of public education in the world.

The next night the students put the tents back up. Students filled the plaza again with a festive atmosphere. And lots of signs. (The one from the English Department contingent read “Beat Poets, not beat poets.”) A week later, at 3:30 a.m., the police officers returned in force, a hundred of them, and told the campers to leave or they would be arrested. All but two moved. The two who stayed were arrested, and the tents were removed. On Thursday afternoon when I returned toward sundown to the steps to see how the students had responded, the air was full of balloons, helium balloons to which tents had been attached, and attached to the tents was kite string. And they hovered over the plaza, large and awkward, almost lyrical, occupying the air.

Robert Hass is a professor of poetry and poetics at the University of California, Berkeley, and former poet laureate of the United States.

What is not there

Like a woman
who does not know
she is beautiful
turns to a mirror

and looks and looks
but does not find
what is not there

and does not know
the mirror clings
to her form

and ravishes her,
body and soul

so too the sun
burns and brings
all to life,

mere shadows
on the ground.

The end of the free will debate

The free will vs. determinism debate derives its relevance from dualistic thinking, i.e. that our conscious self is not the one driving the boat, as if there were on the one hand a consciousness that is ignorant of the source of its choices and on the other a brain that is purely mechanical and unconsciously drives our decisions. That argument presupposes that consciousness is something other than the natural unfolding of brain function. This notion of unfolding yields an organic and coherent understanding of how we make decisions. Consciousness is a dimension of a dynamic system, one that allows for self-correction and support for an organism’s fundamental integrity. That the dynamic system is deterministic says no more than that the unfolding of the brain is a natural process that realizes itself in awareness. It is one process, not two. How could it be otherwise? To move at last beyond such dualistic thinking allows us further to contemplate ourselves as an unfolding within a universal process -- as a wave that moves always at one with itself and the sea of which it is an expression.

Sir Ken Robinson on Changing Educational Paradigms

 

The night leaps up

The night leaps up
And paints the sky
Just so a kiss
Draws a lover’s sigh.

You love so much
You long to die
Your eyes are stars
Your soul is fire.

No You

What will you do
What will you do
You have to live
And do and do

O you O you
What will you do
No one comes
To rescue you

So too so too
They'll come for you
They'll talk you up
And do and do

No one knows
No no one knows
Just what it's like
To be like you

O you O you
What will you do
There's no one there
To be there for you.

A Halloween Offering: Goethe's Der Erlkönig

The Erlking by Albert Sterner, ca. 1910

For more information on this poem and for an English translation go to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Erlkönig

Download 21 Der Erlkönig, D. 328

performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskrau & Gerald Moore

Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?
Es ist der Vater mit seinem Kind;
Er hat den Knaben wohl in dem Arm,
Er faßt ihn sicher, er hält ihn warm.

"Mein Sohn, was birgst du so bang dein Gesicht?" —
"Siehst, Vater, du den Erlkönig nicht?
Den Erlenkönig mit Kron und Schweif?" —
"Mein Sohn, es ist ein Nebelstreif."

"Du liebes Kind, komm, geh mit mir!
Gar schöne Spiele spiel' ich mit dir;
Manch' bunte Blumen sind an dem Strand,
Meine Mutter hat manch gülden Gewand." —

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht,
Was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?" —
"Sei ruhig, bleibe ruhig, mein Kind;
In dürren Blättern säuselt der Wind." —

"Willst, feiner Knabe, du mit mir gehen?
Meine Töchter sollen dich warten schön;
Meine Töchter führen den nächtlichen Reihn,
Und wiegen und tanzen und singen dich ein." —

"Mein Vater, mein Vater, und siehst du nicht dort
Erlkönigs Töchter am düstern Ort?" —
"Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, ich seh es genau:
Es scheinen die alten Weiden so grau. —"

"Ich liebe dich, mich reizt deine schöne Gestalt;
Und bist du nicht willig, so brauch ich Gewalt." —
"Mein Vater, mein Vater, jetzt faßt er mich an!
Erlkönig hat mir ein Leids getan!" —

Dem Vater grauset's, er reitet geschwind,
Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind,
Erreicht den Hof mit Müh' und Not;
In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.

Where does the sound go? An invtation

What is this? An invitation to respond poetically to the question. I want to hear from all of all my former students and others who feel moved to respond.I will collect and publish all the responses I receive. So I dream.

Former students will remember an old bell in my classroom. It was forged in 1878, and has a wonderfully resonant sound. This bell of memory or some bell in your possession may spark a response.

If your first response to the question is baldly scientific, remember that the response is to be poetic, though I can easily imagine an objective statement curling like smoke into something beautiful and mysterious.

What is a poetic response? As one of my 8th grade students put it: something “on the edge of nonsense.” Perhaps like this very invitation.

Deadline for submissions: November 1

Using the search routine on this page, you can find a poetic response of my own. It was written for students from whom I was sadly departing. It is only meant for those who need a little push off the cliff of our everyday sensibility. If you don’t need that push, you may not want to read it just now. In any case, I plan to write another.