Captured

Auden sums up precisely my unease about photography:

"Normally, when one passes someone on the street who is in pain, one either tries to help him, or one simply looks the other way. With a photo there's no human decision; you're not there; you can't turn away; you simply gape. It's a form of voyeurism. "

Paris Review "Writers at Work" interviews, 1972

In Praise of Great Men, part I

For some time now I have relished finding articulate praise of great men. I love the humility it takes to praise another, and the sporting nature of it. And it is such a more difficult task to be articulate in praise; articulate detraction is much easier. The other day i thought it would be good to gather the quotes that i have found over the years, and thought that here might be a good place to do so. So I shall try and find some of them again. To begin this recurring theme, a quote by Robert Whittington (1520) on Saint/Sir Thomas More:

"More is a man of an angel's wit and singular learning. I know not his fellow. For where is the man of that gentleness, lowliness and affability? And, as time requireth, a man of marvelous mirth and pastimes, and sometime of as sad gravity. A man for all seasons."

Yes.

Long Live Oral History!

I just realized the other day:

At the time of the crusades (11th - 13th centuries), there existed no maps (in the sense of an actual lay of the land) of europe or the levant. It wasn't until the late 15th century that Fra. Angelico produced his rough outline, and even then it only circulated among the elite (and many of the crusades were 'grass-roots' movements), and only a handful of copies were made. Furthering the lack of geographical knowledge was the fact that migration and trade were limited to very small local areas, and so contact with foreigners would have been near unknown. And YET - tens of thousands of peasants and knights made their way to the holy land to fight their zealous battles. How did they know which way to go to get there???
and then i realized: all churches of the time were built facing east - to face jerusalem and the rising sun/son which that signified. This knowledge would have been passed down from bishop to bishop and church architect to church architect, and it is the only way i can figure the crusaders knew which way to go. And so via oral history from the first apostles to the poor english peasants a thousand years later - knowledge of where the holy lands were was passed down, allowing the zealous to have a vague idea of where they were headed.
Cool!
Made me realize that it would have felt a lot more like a crazy treasure hunt than my GPS-oriented mind had previously painted the picture.

my new mantra:

"I am a part of all that I have seen."

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Once again - I read only the Introduction of a book -

So, the other day i picked up a copy of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
Besides being once again astounded at the punctilious nature of german thinking, I was struck by a way of thinking he offered:
Weber begins by defining his terms, the first of which is 'capitalism'. To my great satisfaction - for I have been wondering this for a while - he makes very clear that wanting to accumulate as much wealth as possible, and to turn a profit from business exchanges, is NOT unique to the ideology of capitalism, but is in fact a sentiment found across almost all peoples and times. To have such a stalwart name as Weber lay this out clearly was a salve to the irritation i have felt when surface-liberals tirade against the nebulous, evil beast whose name is the C-word. Weber goes on to say though - and this is what I mean to highlight in this post - that although the desire for wealth is not unique to capitalism, the degree to which we see this ideology infiltrating every facet of both public and private life today in the West, renders the phenomenon different than the hitherto seen desire. I.e. we call it differently: capitalism. And what struck me is the form of this thinking: that as a thing changes by degrees, eventually it can change so much it changes into a different thing.
For instance, a moped is just a small motorbike, but is small enough that we give it a different name. It is different from a motorbike, even though it shares all the same characteristics. A tangentially related example that set this whole idea rolling in my head: A friend of mine was relaying to me the events of a party the night before, and said how he had been hung over that morning, but had just "turned the corner" and was now better. This struck me: how often I think of progression happening in a single direction, but the truth is: sometimes things 'turn the corner'. It is just one step past where one was one step ago, and yet - it is an entirely new direction. To awkwardly force it into the language i just a moment ago established: after 'turning a corner', one has only progressed one degree further than one has before, and yet one is upon an entirely new "thing".

This seems less profound in writing than it does in my head, but i have a sense that this concept will be useful to me as i analyze things in the future.

This may or may not be interesting

It may interest the regulars around here (hi, Ben!) to see Marilynne Robinson tackle metaphysics in the latest Commonweal.

Though it deals with some standard subject matter on this blog, the article veers between being actually interesting and [yawn]. Honestly, I stopped halfway through, concluding only that Robinson is Annie Dillard in stained glass. Still, I feel I ought to give it another run, and I thought it fair to bring it to your attention as well.

I should also mention that as intriguing and elegant as the "fine-tuned universe" theory is, I still have the damndest time getting around Douglas Adams' brilliant little puddle analogy (fourth quote down, I couldn't source it any more precisely).

Objective Truth

So, for the last few years I have taken an arm-chair interest in phenomenology. The self-proclaimed motto of this school of thought is "To the things themselves", an idea i like very much. As best I can make of it - phenomenology is trying to do away with the deep-seated western idea that there is the 'world out there' and then the ideas in my head about this world; Rather - My consciousness is inter-dependent on the world. Following this is the idea that when we claim something to be true, it actually IS true of the thing - it is not just an approximation, or a subjective interpretation: The world we speak of IS the world we live in. This is an idea i really like, and in my most critical reflections, seems to be the most truthful analysis.

Then, I realized the other day that in my simplistic interpretation - this philosophy maintains the idea of objective truth, that is - truths about objects ARE True, capital T. Now, the idea of "objective truth" has been systematically shat upon from the day I entered college, causing me to hate all notions of it, and throw away all my apologetics books proving the existence of God.

And then i thought - 'hold the phone, why has objective truth gotten such a bad rap?' and some pieces came together:

It seems to me that what happened among educated evangelicals is this - we had some notions of truth - about the world, God, etc. usually some form of platonism, and then when we realized, that, wait - we CAN'T prove objectively that God exists - we threw the whole notion of 'objectivity' out the window. But wait a second- God is not an object! I don't mean in the theological sense, i mean, literally - 'god' has none of the properties of an object. so OF COURSE we can't have objective truth about him/it/whatever idea we are defending.

But then, why did so many give up the whole game and assume the super-dumb-sounding worldview of "we can't really know the truth about ANYTHING" or in it's more refined versions, "Post-modernism has shown us that we need to be more humble in our epistemology".

Lame!

My rebuttal is in these words from Heidegger (from his essay The Origin of the Work of Art):

"Occasionally we still have the feeling that violence has long been done to the thingly element of things and that thought has played a part in this violence, for which reason people disavow thought instead of taking pains to make it more thoughtful."

hells yeh.

Side note:

This ball was getting rolling in my head - bolstering my affection for phenomenology, and then i stumbled across 'Objectivism' a school of ideas spread by Ayn Rand and her followers... Ewwwwww. It seems to be making many of the claims I want to make about the nature of the world (although oddly - doesn't dialogue with, or use any of the language of phenomenology) but 1) self-proclaimed 'objectivists' seems to be maniacal creepsters, and 2) the leaps from the nature of existence to how political structures should function seem rather arbitrary. I shall explore this more and maybe will have a follow-up post -Perhaps a manifesto of my own on the nature of existence? ...borrrrrring :)

Once again, Grammar revals all -

just a quick thought -

the phrase " to take care of someone"

Troubling!

the verb "to take" with regards to what is supposedly a compassionate sentiment?

what is being taken? shouldn't care be given?!

yes - it should. And that's why we say "to give care" when that is what is happening.

But i hear the former phrase far more often, and i think seeing the ugliness of the verb in this context gives name to what to me does feel troubling when someone says it. The idea is central to WorkOut ideology - that it does no-one any good to "take care" of them. Let individuals express need, let others try and meet it, but don't reach beyond the bounds of the other person's self-hood and think that you can manage them better than they can manage themselves. It may look like "care" but it's actually 'taking' something. What, you ask? I don't know - a sense of being in control in the world, assimilating the greatness of another person into just an object in your world, the feeling of being virtuous. something like that.

that's all. So watch out if someone says it. it's not just a matter of words. deep down we know what words mean, and we use them accordingly. Sometimes, like in this instance, our grammar reveals our concealed intentions.

If being caring is the goal, I want to be sure that it is in the poise of "giving" - a state that the giver is in, and a virtue.

that's all.

Last Words

You already know this - but I love some of the things famous people have said right before dying. Wanted to put down my fav's here for the record:

• Am I dying, or is this my birthday?
  • Who: Lady Nancy Astor
  • Note: In her final illness, she awoke on her deathbed to see her family at her bedside.
• mè mou tous kuklous taratte (Μη μου τους κύκλους τάραττε)
  • Translation: Don't disturb my circles!
  • Alternate: Don't disturb my equation.
  • Who: Archimedes
  • Note: In response to a Roman soldier who was forcing him to report to the Roman general after the capture of Syracuse, while he was busy sitting on the ground proving geometry theorems. The soldier killed him, despite specific instructions not to.
• I should never have switched from Scotch to Martinis.
  • Who: Humphrey Bogart
• I haven't had champagne for a long time.
  • Who: Anton Chekhov, playwright, 1904. A sanitarium nurse gave him champagne to ease his death from tuberculosis.
• I have tried so hard to do right.
  • Who: Grover Cleveland, US President, died 1908.
• Suppose, suppose.
  • Who: Wyatt Earp
  • Note: Whispered to his wife.
• She is squeezing my hand!
  • Who: Buckminster Fuller
  • Note: In the period leading up to his death, his wife had been lying comatose in a Los Angeles hospital, dying of cancer. It was while visiting her there that he exclaimed, at a certain point: "She is squeezing my hand!" He then stood up, suffered a heart attack and died an hour later. His wife died 36 hours after he did.
• Only you have ever understood me. … And you got it wrong..
  • Who: Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel, to his favorite student.
• All is lost! Monks, Monks, Monks! So, now all is gone - Empire, Body, and Soul!.
  • Who: Henry VIII
• Tvert imot!
  • Translation: On the contrary!
  • Who: Henrik Ibsen
  • context: This was his response to a nurse who told a visitor he was a little better.
• I should have drunk more Champagne.
  • Who: John-Maynard Keynes
• I have not told half of what I saw.
  • Marco Polo, Venetian traveller and writer
• Dying is easy, comedy is hard
  • Who: George Bernard Shaw
  • Note: Said on his death bed.
• Moose … Indian.
  • Who: Henry David Thoreau
    • Note: These words he had said in a delirium before expiring. When urged earlier to make his peace with God his last coherent response was, "I did not know that we had ever quarreled."

I think Marco Polo's might be the most awesome.

found this quote the other day -

"The following winter was spent on schemes of social betterment. Agricola had to deal with people living in isolation and ignorance, and therefore prone to fight; and his object was to accustom them to a life of peace and quiet by the provision of amenities. He therefore gave private encouragement and official assistance to the building of temples, public squares, and good houses. He praised the energetic and scolded the slack; and competition for honour proved as effective as compulsion. Furthermore, he educated the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts, and expressed a preference for British ability as compared with the trained skills of the Gauls. The result was that instead of loathing the Latin language they became eager to speak it effectively. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the population was gradually led into the demoralizing temptations of arcades, baths, and sumptuous banquets. The unsuspecting Britons spoke of such novelties as 'civilization', when in fact they were only a feature of their enslavement."

- Cornelius Tacitus (AD 56 - AD 117) from The Agricola and the Germania trans. Mattingly, Penguin. 72 - 73, emphasis mine.

thought provoking/scary on several levels:
1) In what ways, like the Britons, am I duped by the trappings of empire? and at what cost?
2) Tacitus wrote this. Cultural colonialism is apparantly not a new post-colonial-studies idea, nor are the strategies and effects of Imperialism.
3) All things considered, was there actually net loss for the peoples of Britain? As contra to all the impulses i was taught to have from my liberal education - I am somewhat open to the idea that empire isn't such a bad thing, as long as it lets its people live relatively freely. Tacitus on the other hand, seems to not be so hopeful:

Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

trans: "To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."

yikes.

A Helpful Preface

So - I have conceptualized my time here (in Martinique) as a sort of luxury mini version of the Chateau D'If from the Count of Monte Cristo. Only with regards to the tutelage the protagonist receives from the elderly priest - transforming him in to an educated gentlemen, of course, not in regards to the sadistic prison warden.

What i mean is - I am taking the time to go back and get 'educated' by reading some classic texts I never actually ploughed through in college, but whose ideas i have supposedly been debating for a couple years now. Beginning with Plato, i have been working my way present-ward on the question of Metaphysics. Having taken a couple large leaps through history, I am now hacking my way through Heidegger.

Anyways, the reason for the post is this:
About half-way through a liberal-arts education these days, one inevitably comes up face to face with 20th century continental philosophy. Like most people, I have spent several years swinging back and forth between awe and disgust at the obtuse and bizarre nature of the texts that have emerged from this tradition. Is it the most genius ideas ever written? or, like the Emperor in his new clothes, does everyone praise them when in reality there is nothing there to be taken seriously? I have gone back and forth.
But regardless of however i may or may not weight the importance of the ideas throughout the seasons, one opinion has never changed, and that is the horror at the degree of obfuscation present in them.
Sometimes, like Chomsky, I am prone to dismiss such writings out of hand on this fact alone, but, I came across this passage in Heidegger (taken from Being and Time) the other day, that I think should be a prefatory note printed before any and all texts written in this continental tradition:

"With regard to the awkwardness and 'inelegance' of expression in the following analyses we may remark that it is one thing to report narratively about beings and another to grasp beings in their Being. For the latter task not only most of the words are lacking but above all the 'grammar'. If we may allude to earlier and in their own right altogether incomparable researches on the analysis of Being, then we should compare the ontological sections of Plato's Parmenides...with a narrative passage from Thucydides. Then we would see the stunning character of the formulations by which their philosophers challenged the Greeks. Since our powers are essentially inferior, and also since the area of Being to be disclosed ontologically is far more difficult than that presented to the Greeks, the complexity of our concept-formation and the severity of our expression will increase."

now, this does not entirely vindicate or ground this sort of writing, taken from the Introduction to 'Being and Time':

"Thus it is constitutive of this Being of Dasein [being-there] to have, in its very Being, a relation of Being to this Being."

But it does offer a valid reason for a possible necessity of such difficult language.

Now, that said, I also think there is a difference between a man like Heidegger muscling through the most fundamentally challenging questions of existence using language he fought to be able to wield for decades, and who possessed a rare brilliance of mind that was able to contain such magnitudes (I would also put Derrida, [Rorty is with me on this - 3rd paragraph. also, an awesome wiki article] and a very small handful of others in this category of greatness), and some Univeristy of Colorado professor who just slings bullshit po-mo terms around to make his thesis sound "cool". The latter I have no space for - if simple language can be used: Use it. If the topic is SO complex and nuanced, that massively difficult language is absolutlely necessary - well then, you better be brilliant. Which, I am finding out, Heidegger was.

So,Textbook editors for continental texts: please include this Heidegger quote as a preface in your books in the future.

also - the fact that no one pointed this out to me when i first started questioning such texts, affirms my suspicion that many of the people who throw such names and ideas around willy-nilly don't actually know what they are talking about. Otherwise, when I expressed my confusion, they could have given me this straight forward explanation that would have invariably helped me on my quest to try and understand what all this mess is about.

Now & Then

So last week I read Frederick Buechner's Now & Then. It was the second Buechner book I'd read, after Telling the Truth, which I read back in the fall (somehow I made it through four years of Wheaton without ever tackling him—or perhaps that's exactly why I hadn't until now).

I have never read an author, not even Hemingway, who leaves me with as mixed feelings as Buechner does. For one, I feel tremendous pressure to like him: he is a staple of the left-leaning, intellectual, liturgical Wheatie's (LLILW) bookshelf, right next to Balthasar and Berry, Auden and Milosz (assuming this is an "out" year for Lewis). More importantly, Ben likes him, and Ben has darn good opinions about religious writers. And I do like him, he punches a lot of my buttons. He's nuanced, he's lucid, he's mindful of paradox and mystery. He strikes me as being totally authentic, up front about his failures and his desires. He is also a beautiful writer, perhaps the most beautiful nonfiction writer I've ever had the pleasure of reading. And he calls out directly those nebulous things that are the core of what I can't dismiss about Christianity: in his own words, that it is

the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it the catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.

How can you argue with that? Which for me is the point: I can't. And because of that I feel somehow like I've been tricked. So that's one point of contention for me—am I swayed by the rhetoric or am I swayed by that ineffable thing, that "catch of the breath"? Am I being a responsible reader to think such a skeptical thought, or do I need to make the Kierkegaardian leap over my cynicism?

But putting aside that huge, gut-wrenching question, I still have some issues with FB. For one, his Christianity is extremely internal and individual—at least in what I've read, there's very little of the widows-and-orphans stuff that's so crucial to Jesus' teachings. Because of this, he's awfully abstract. He admits that all he can do is tell his story, which is awesome, but doesn't help much in terms of practicals. On one hand, I love his emphasis on growth, on religion as process, as narrative. On the other hand, he focuses perhaps too much on the "not yet" side of things and not enough on the "already" part, if that makes sense. I tend to be inclined towards the mystic, contemplative part of Christianity, so maybe I'm just seeing my own shortcomings in how Buechner articulates my views. Which is a good thing.

I don't want to get on FB for not presenting a perfectly rounded portrayal of Christianity in all its aspects (indeed, who outside of Aquinas or Barth could?). He's only presenting what has stuck out to him, highlighting what has maybe gone underappreciated. But I still can't help feeling he's a little...soft? Like his vision of religion is almost too easy to swallow. He talks about the darkness, the jaggedness of it, but what he says is belied by his own clear, elegant writing. He's maybe unconsciously sanded off some of those rough edges simply by being a great prose stylist (Marilynne Robinson is perhaps also guilty of this--maybe that's why both her and Buechner enjoy a wider audience among the New York Times set than most religious writers).

Ben, thoughts? You're more read in Buechner than I, is there any particular book that would undo some of this?

Reflections on the French Language pt. III

some gems from the selection of phrases in the back of my circa 1960 dictionary:

"Don't you have any pillows?"
"May I keep this as a souvenir?"
"May I take my camera into the church?"
"do you have it in white?
"I prefer solid colors"
"horsemeat"

and my personal favorite:

"By Force"

Oh 1960s tourists. Ha.

Reflections on the French Language, pt. II

couple more thoughts:

1) the word for 'boring' ("ennuier") is the same as the word for 'irritating'.

2) the french actually say "voila!" all the time. it's hilarious.

3) the word for 'self' and 'same' is the same! "meme". amazing.

4) many of the words that i am learning for everyday-things are cognates with super-fancy words in english. for instance, the word for 'room' is 'chambre' and the english word 'chamber' implies a super-fancy room. the word for 'porch' is 'terrace', whose english cognate implies a sort of ultra-grand porch. Or, the word for fun is 'amusement', like the more posh sounding, 'amusing'. I am noticing this phenomenon all over the place, and it has shown me how much of the medieval english notion of 'the french origin is far superior' is still present in today's english vernacular. Apparently our mother-tongue has not yet sloughed off the ramifications of William the Conqueror's installation of a francophone gentry and the prestige brits have placed on the french ever since.

Reflections on the French Language, pt. I

it has been far too long since I have posted, and i have been musing on some of the things i have been discovering about the french language. Many of these things i thought might be of interest to you too, Mark; as well as for the people who might once have gandered into 213 (which seems like oh so long ago now!) so, here is pt 1 of what might be several posts. consider it a 'report from the field' for the national geographic society in our hearts. :)

Oh, the presuppostion to these reflections is the idea that language shapes thought. that we cannot think far outside of the language we have been given, and that the way we call things shapes the way we see them / the way they are.

so, some early observations:

1) The french have no word for 'home'! no joke! you just say "chez moi" which means 'by me' or "maison" which is 'house'. No home! it also places it on the spectrum. in english we have 'home' and all the denotations therein ('no place like home', 'home is where the heart is', etc), but apparantly in german and dutch they have this word Gemutlichkeit (sp?) which means something even more than the english 'hominess'. anyway.

2) there is no verb in parlance for 'to need'. rather, one "has a need" ('as bousoin'). Interesting, the idea of the temporariness of need, rather than it being a state of existence.

3) the possesive changes based on the gender of the object. if the object is masc. it is 'Mon X', if it is fem, 'Ma X', or plural, 'Mes X'. whereas in english, without genders, but with plurals, we always just say "my". So in french, the object apprehended augments the way the subject is said. I wonder if this might lead to a greater understanding of the inter-relation between subject and object. then again, Descartes was a frenchmen, so maybe not.

that's it for now.

a bientot, mon ami!