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Leo Kottke - The Driving of the Year Nail
Abby had to listen to a lot of this; so did everyone; so should everyone. I have a new belt buckle with a steer on it. Also, this!
mills
My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.
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Abby, Will, John, Rebecca, Andy, and I went to the ranch for a few days of filth, scrum, shooting, swimming, high-bluff-jumping, smoking, night-photography, drinking, and more. We didn’t take enough photos, possibly because we were too busy having a good time.
We followed some deer and some hogs and even caught some rain, despite the drought. Worse than usual, I am having a hard time being back.
The photos are here; I’ll probably post some more when I get the chance.
“Art is not the imaginative creation of unified public objects or limited wholes for edifying contemplation, with mystical analogies; it is the egotistically motivated production of maimed pseudo-objects which are licenses for the private concluding processes of personal fantasy.”
Irish Murdoch, quoted in an excellent post by B. Michael titled “Art, Love, and Sex - Iris Murdoch.” Murdoch, a novelist as well as a philosopher, makes this assertion against art in conjunction with a Platonic emphasis on the importance of love, which B. Michael very lucidly explains: if transcendence is our goal, does art offer a false shortcut while love, and sex, are better starting points for “moral attention”?
It is an interesting and open question, and I’ll only say this: I have sometimes felt in museums like someone looking for a clue, some bit of sculpted gnosis which will help me ahead of myself, beyond myself, as though this or that painting or novel can spare me the anguish of experience and bring me to an unearned understanding. This is art as a tool for attaining depth one lacks.
On the other hand: some speak of art as a means to do just that, and philosophy might be considered the same: we encode more wisdom into our species and at a faster rate than painful experience, which must be lived by every individual, permits. We learn by doing, but by sharing we spare others. When Kundera says art takes suffering and redeems it by turning it into existential wisdom, we might note that religion, philosophy, and all humanist disciplines attempt to do the same.
B. Michael’s post is worth reading.
“Kierkegaard had no easy idea of what ‘health’ is. But he knew what it was not: it was not normal adjustment –anything but that, as he has taken excruciating analytical pains to show us. To be a ‘normal cultural man’ is, for Kierkegaard, to be sick –whether one knows it or not: ‘There is such a thing as fictitious health.’ Nietzsche later put the same thought: ‘Are there perhaps…neuroses of health?’”
Earnest Becker, in one of my favorite books. The answer to Nietzsche’s question is clear: yes, there are neuroses of health. The acquisitive and organizational urge run amok that defines consumerism, for example; or the preoccupation with a plastic aesthetic over the corporeal, with its attendant concealment of pores, sweat, hair, anything organic and unruly; or the obsession with cheeriness that makes self-esteem, a low sort of self-satisfaction, into a virtue without which one might as well be naked.
There are as many neuroses of health as there are neuroses of illness. What we must use, then, to define real mental illness, as opposed to simply characteristics that are socially undesirable, is this question: does the quality or behavior interfere with the individual’s ability to freely self-determine, to create himself as he wishes?
Rainstorm from the office roof yesterday (larger here; originally on Photophobia).
“Paradoxically, the female grammarian who introduced this ‘he’ business was a feminist if ever there was one. Anne Fisher (1719-78) was not only a woman of letters but also a prosperous entrepreneur. She ran a school for young ladies and operated a printing business and a newspaper in Newcastle with her husband, Thomas Slack. In short, she was the last person you would expect to suggest that ‘he’ should apply to both sexes.”
Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kallerman in a rather fun article on whether ‘they’ is the best all-purpose pronoun. I occasionally make use of ‘s/he,’ but inconsistently; at times, a slash looks absurd in a line of prose. Traditionalists will be pleased to learn that while ‘they’ was once preferred it was a grammar book by Anne Fisher that popularized the notion that ‘he’ and ‘his’ and so on can be used to refer to both sexes.
The article also notes some amusing pronouns proposed to solve this problem, including ‘thon’ and ‘heer.’ Nevertheless, I suspect it won’t end the debate at my old school.
“My dog barks some. Mentally you picture my dog, but I have not told you the type of dog which I have. Perhaps you even picture Toto, from The Wizard of Oz. But I warn you, my dog is always with me!”
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
From this and that and Photophobia.
“It would take as many human bodies to make up the sun as there are atoms in each of us. The geometric mean of the mass of a proton and the mass of the sun is 50 kilograms, within a factor of two of the mass of each person here.”
Sir Martin Rees in a TED lecture. He suggests that humans have evolved to this scale, an almost beautiful mean between stars and atomic particles, because we must be large enough to permit massive complexity in structure while small enough to experience minimal gravitational effects.
This idea reminds me of Schrödinger’s amazing explanation of why the fundamental components of human life -particularly DNA- are sized as they are.
It always makes me feel rather happy to think that everything had to be just so for our world, as we know it, to occur. Rees calls this quality of the universe its biophilia and describes it more here.
What follows was posted, in its entirety, by the wonderful Sazerac:
“When I lived in New Orleans, I heard that a national leprosarium had operated up the river in Carville. I had no idea that the Federal Bureau of Prisons sent inmates there, adding another layer of humiliation to the leprosy patients who had already endured lifetimes of grief.
This photo shows Ella Bounds cranking her antique wheelchair in the breezeway of the Carville campus. Neil White tells how 12-year-old Ella arrived there in 1926:
The bounty hunter held his hand up, fingers outstretched toward the porch, and curled his index finger in against his thumb. ‘Three days,’ he said. ‘If she ain’t there in three days, I’ll come for her.’ Ella’s father didn’t move. He knew the man would return. Ten dollars was a lot. The bounty hunter climbed into his empty truck and drove away.
‘We feasted that night,’ Ella said. ‘Daddy kill a chicken. We had greens, biscuits, fatback, and punkin’ pie. We didn’t eat like that except for Christmas.’ Although Ella didn’t know it at the time, her father must have. It would be their last meal together as a family.
That night, Ella’s father handed her burlap sack he used for gathering turnips. In it she placed two picture books, a copy of the Saturday Evening Post, her boots, three or four everyday outfits, and the yellow Sunday dress that had been sewn for a cousin but now belonged to Ella. The next morning, while her brothers were still asleep, Ella and her father left in the dark. A neighbor’s mule pulled the wagon. The trip from Abita Springs to Carville would take two full days.
On the slow ride west, Ella sat on the front of the wagon. She had never before been allowed to sit alongside her father. Along the way, they stopped to have a picnic under a shade tree. They picked wild blueberries and ate them on the shore of a pond. When they reached the river road near Carville, they parked on the levee and walked down to the Mississippi River. Ella put her feet in the muddy water. Her father suggested she put on her Sunday dress. She changed behind brush at the river’s edge. Late in the afternoon, they arrived at the colony gate. A man who appeared to expect them went inside to alert one of the sisters.
‘I ain’t never seen a nun before,’ Ella said. ‘Big, white bird wings on her head scared me stiff.’ Ella held her bag as she looked at the nun and then back at her father. He nodded and pointed toward the Sister. Ella, in her yellow dress, walked over to the Sister of Charity, who put her arm around her and led her toward the building. They stopped at the door. Ella looked back at her father and waved. From the front seat of the wagon, he nodded again. Then she turned and stepped into the building where she would spend the rest of her life.
Ella died in 1998 and is buried in an unmarked grave near Abita Springs, according to White.”
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Simon & Garfunkel - At the Zoo.
The monkeys stand for honesty;
Giraffes are insincere;
And the elephants are kindly but they’re dumb.
Orangutans are skeptical
Of changes in their cages;
And the zookeeper is very fond of rum.
Zebras are reactionaries;
Antelopes are missionaries;
Pigeons plot in secrecy;
And hamsters turn on frequently.
What a gas! You got to come and see
At the zoo.
Update: Man about the Internet Tyler Coates already posted this eleven months ago and I commented on it then! I feel like a fraud.
“Scilicet ultima semper expectanda dies homini est, dicique beatus ante obitum nemo supremaque funera debet.”
Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, quoted by Montaigne. To my knowledge, this is the only Ovid quoted by Tom Waits.
One should always wait till a man’s last day, and never call him happy before his death and funeral.
Montaigne expands on this assertion by citing historical reversals of fortune: instances in which someone’s happy life is upended by tragedy and disaster and their final years are spent imprisoned, enslaved, impoverished.
There is something peculiar in this, though, for one might ask why the first sixty happy years of a man’s life wouldn’t handily outweigh the last miserable ten. This falls into the category of existential mathematics: in considering the past, present, and future, or the phases of a life, where do we assign the weight of our calculations?
What matters: the happiness of childhood or the anguish of adolescence? Are we happy now or only in some summation of biography? If happiness is of the moment, can a reckoning be cumulative?
The plain fact: I could not say if I have been happy in this sense; I don’t know; I feel as though I’ve been happy, but part of happiness is that one’s creaking memorial apparatus shuts off and one abandons oneself to the joy of the moment; one remembers pain better, and for good reason. Sometimes I think I’ve never been happy.
In another, darker sense this argument now seems odd: in the developed world, those of us who do not die by accident or violence will die in a manner as gradual and unhappy as can be imagined. If one leads a life of success and contentment, if such a thing is possible, but spends the last decade of it forgetting oneself, losing one’s memories to gray mist, losing one’s loved one’s to the void and nullity of dementia, losing one’s physical autonomy, losing everything one wanted to be, can we say one was happy?
Would Ovid or Montaigne feel that our prolonged deaths negate the happiness of our lives? Whom would they call happy at his funeral?
“We can only learn to love by loving.”
Iris Murdoch, quoted by Frederick Woodruff. Murdoch is also responsible for what I believe is one of the greatest synopses of philosophy and psychology I’ve read.
The dream of escape is deferred by endless obsession over detail; in planning for all the contingencies one might meet, plotting their potentialities amidst the flux of the fantasized unknown, one can avoid making the decision -final, explosive, dangerous- to eject.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Paul Simon - The Obvious Child.
One of my favorite songs of his, and probably the reason I started playing drums.
