The Reactionary

"Look carefully. I have a bucket with nothing in it. But if I turn it upside down I still have nothing in it. Thus is gravity disproven."

The Light

"Look, there's light at the end of the tunnel!" And there was, but unfortunately it was soon revealed to be the wrong end, and the light merely a naked 40 watt bulb, emitting also a light buzzing sound.

Dispute

This is a fragment of a future novel that will almost certainly remain unpublished, and indeed unwritten, due to the forces of depravity and ignorance that engulf the common man. The scene takes place in the office of one of the two central protagonists, both of whom are Marxist historians, working in a modern academic institution, perhaps near you. Though the characters are fictitious their identities will remain in obscurity, for fear of defaming the non-existent.

"You're a fucking shit lecturer, and an even worse historian."
"No I'm not."
"Yes you fucking are."
"Then what about my analysis of the Cuban missile crisis? Featherby said it was masterful."
"You got lucky."
"Luck had nothing to do with it."
"Luck had everything to do with it. Your Diet of Worms parallel was suggested to you by some stoned student who neither knew nor fucking cared whether he was coming or going."
"That's a goddamn lie."
"You know it's not, and I've got the fucking tape to prove it."
"Erra who gives a shit anyway? We're the only two people who know what the hell we're talking about."
"And we don't even fucking exist."
"True."

Ayne Bru- Saint Candidus c.1500

I have received a steady, occasionally unsteady, stream of virulent abuse from various corners of the globe( allowing for the contradiction of globes and corners) for not having posted any images by the not particularly famous Spanish artist Ayne Bru, and so with a little reluctance, if only towards the possible perception that the I am simply bowing to pressure rather than truly exercising my own independent will, the above image can be seen above.
Atop Candidus is Stroll About In Spring by Zhan Ziqian, artist of the Sui Dynasty (581–618).

The Edifice

"Good God, what the hell is that monstrosity?"
The other looked offended. "That is one of our proudest creations," he replied. "We call it The Philosophical Edifice."
They were gazing at a massive sprawling mansion of sorts, a building that sprouted the most fantastic shapes, with sections often tottering on the brink of apparent collapse, but atop of which, in defiance of all reason, would appear doomed efforts to continue building, while more than intermittent piles of rubble all around were the incoherent memories of previous masonic fragments, from which piles workers would fill their wheelbarrows and bring the stoical and loyal stone to current areas of construction.
"What lunatic is responsible for all this?"
"Well, the lunatic you speak of is more than one, for starters," came the dignified response. "There have been many architects."
"All incompetent?"
"We have had some setbacks, yes, but we are refining our methods. We have very high hopes for a new mortar mix we are experimenting with."
"You might also have a closer look at your foundations while you're at it."
The other smirked. "Even if such a thing could, or should, be considered- which it shouldn't," he hastened to add, "it's much too late to be thinking like that."

Socrates & Excellence

Below a summation of what struck me in the few minutes spent reading whatever relevant piece of Socrates' thoughts on excellence or virtue.

"To be perfect one must behave perfectly, otherwise one would not be perfect."
"Yes, Socrates, that would seem to be a reasonable use of 'perfect.'"
"The imperfect man behaves imperfectly because he is imperfect. If he were perfect he wouldn't behave imperfectly as a perfect man would behave perfectly."
"All linguistically sound."
"Only a man ignorant of the desirability of being perfect would wish to remain imperfect."
"And how does he attain this perfect state in consequence of which he acts perfectly?"
"By acting perfectly."
"All good stuff, Socrates. And how does he go about behaving perfectly?"
"By means of knowledge of how to act perfectly."
"Someone should be writing this stuff down, Socrates. It would be a tragedy if this got lost."

I wasn't going to bother posting the above, thinking the point had been already made in some recent post or two, but randomly opening my Early Socratic Dialogues book presented me with this line from the helpful commenter on one the dialogues of genius contained within:

Socrates has introduced the notion that the presence of fineness in things is responsible for their fineness.

I admit to wondering if Socrates' reputation for wisdom- lets say he was known as Wise Socrates- wasn't somewhat in the ironical sense, as where a big man is known as Little John, or a small man Big John. I'd like to add that I think the presence of smallness in things is responsible for their smallness.

Jiddu Versus the Escapists

"It is only to the serious that truth is shown, not to those who are merely seeking security and are caught in some form of conclusion."
Jiddu Krishnamurti

Cannibalism

Cannibalism is is an experiment in the wisdom of the phrase, "You are what you eat."

The Path Makers

"Look at that old fool hopping on one leg. Who is he?"
"He is a very great man- a philosopher."
The old man would sometimes stumble and fall over, only to, and with no sign of emotion, slowly pick himself up and hop onwards.
"What the hell is he doing?"
"He is on the arduous path to truth."
"He's mad."
"Such naivety. A very great man."
Some distance behind the old sage slowly approached another hopping elderly man ascending the same dreary hill, but this one accompanied by a younger who would occasionally stick out a leg and trip up the one hopping leg of the elder.
"What a bastard!"
"Oh no, you have it all wrong. He is also a great philosopher, and the younger fellow is his servant."
"And how is he helping things?"
"This philosopher is also beating the difficult path to truth, but by mortifying the body the servant is helping reconcile the mind to reality."
That man, having tumbled to the ground after a sharp movement of his servant's left leg, put his weight on his two arms, raised himself a little, looked towards the first man hopping stiffly onwards, and shouted, "My path is more difficult!" upon which the first man glanced backwards, and muttered to himself, "But I will get there first", and continued onwards at a slightly heightened speed, which break in his rhythm, however, disturbed his balance, and the angular contraption of his body tumbled over yet again.

Socratic Dialogue: Smoking

Man cannot do wrong intentionally as that would be unreasonable, and as we all know man is a reasonable creature.

"You took up smoking a couple of years ago, didn't you?"
"That's right."
"But why, since they're so bad for your health?"
"Come again?"
"You know, the terrible effects they can have on your health."
"I've no idea what you're talking about."
"You know: 'Smoking kills.' 'Smoking Causes Lung Cancer', etc. It's even written on the packets."
"You're raving. You don't think I'd have started smoking if I knew cigarettes were bad for my health. Noone does wrong willingly. You must know that. And since so many of us are smoking, and we can't all be ignorant, then obviously they're not bad for our health."
"Yes, of course. How embarrassing."
"That's all right- happens the best of us, here, have a fag."
"Cheers."

Socrates & Virtue

My Socrates book tells me that Socrates claims that: "to behave virtuously there is a certain body of knowledge that must be required- knowledge presumably of the meaning of moral terms such as justice, piety, etc. Only if we know these can we be excellent and efficient in moral conduct.
'Noone does wrong willingly.' If we do wrong it is because we have acted in ignorance of justice or piety or some other moral term."

And so all this can be ultimately condensed to virtue being a matter of linguistics. To be virtuous all we have to do is figure out what the word 'virtuous' means, and all the rest will follow. Utopia would inevitably arise from everyone's being on good terms with an ideal dictionary. Thank goodness words like virtue and goodness exist, otherwise we would be in right trouble. My advice is if you're ever charged with murder, plead total ignorance of the word or concept 'murder'.
Notes From Underground is justifiably scathing at the continuing faith in this infantile notion of virtue's being fully bound up with knowledge, and how man cannot do wrong intentionally. What it probably essentially amounts to is man is a slave and he just has to bind himself to the right master, ie Reason, and all his problems will be solved. Only a slave could conceive of this in the first place.

Controversy

Important if/and/or/but controversial literary disputations over at Georgy Riecke's here and here.

Plato & Socrates

Dipping into a book by Plato of early Socratic Dialogues yesterday. First impressions:
Watch in awe as our master of reason, in tedious fashion, about some inane subject, outsmarts an idiot.

The Cynic...Tolstoy

Cynic: one of a set of Greek philosophers who regarded virtue as the supreme good and despised all comfort and refinement; modern meaning, one who believes that man's conduct is based on self-interest; a misanthrope; a surly, morose man.

My eye caught the above definition while searching for some other more rarefied word in my battered old dictionary, which split definition seemed almost amusingly perverse, changing from the old faith in the pre-eminence of virtue to something of its opposite, where virtue has disappeared altogether from the being and worldview of the cynic; he having become an embittered misanthrope. Though perhaps the evolution is much more natural than might first appear. The Greek cynic- and I'm afraid I'll make no effort to fill the vacuum of my philosophical knowledge but just work from the sparse definition offered- and his faith in virtue appears to be a logically conceived morality; more a matter of reason than inner experience, and thus his equal emphasis on that which he despises, and interestingly that being the not particularly harmful things of pleasure.

Morality is in a sense religion without the holiness, an unfree matter of obligation; and, unfed by true inner sustenance, apt to become dogmatic and intolerant. The faith in virtue presumably does stem from an original dwelling in, or at least momentary experience of, the inner reality where 'the good and the true' are indeed known for certain to be good and true, while the false and bad, insofar as they are perceived at all, equally self-evidently false and bad. This not a matter of reason, but living certainty, the same as I do not believe in the existence of my feet as a result of reasoning - and it's not even a question of belief but direct knowledge. If the individual, or even an entire culture, falls away from this mystical reality, then the assertion of the reality of virtue is a fading linguistic memory of this truth, and which, if not corrected by genuine experience, will continue to fade, and so the disappearance of the world to which the concept of virtue refers will inevitably lead to the despairing, misanthropic conclusion. Thus the modern cynic being someone who has lost faith in his ideal; the ideal in the first place being the replacement of living truth with an idea of that truth.


This bullying dogmatism and primacy of concern with the false in the modern era especially pronounced in the case of the later Tolstoy who came to denounce all the art for which he is best known as essentially immoral, not sufficiently concerned with ethical truth; and while asserting the moral truth of Christianity displayed in works such as his final novel, Resurrection, an unattractive, bullying cynicism about the mysterious inner world to which the morality actually refers, instead haranguing about the primacy of reason. His relationship with truth a matter of intellect, rather than inner knowledge. And so his deeply misguided condemnation in a work like What Is Art of earlier works of art of his own like Sevastopol Sketches, based on his experiences in the Russian army during the Crimean War, and where his awareness seems to dwell in, to the point of actually - and not artificially- being the very physical and mental atmosphere in which wider humanity lives, a kind of direct intuiting, or being, of life alien to the later rationalistic, moralistic Tolstoy. And so the remarkable passage below from Sevastopol in May, though of course the effect much weakened by standing outside of the literary whole:

He could feel something wet in the region of his chest- this wet sensation made him think of water, and he could have drunk whatever his chest was wet with. "I must be bleeding from the fall," he thought and, becoming more and more flustered with the fear that the soldiers who were continuing to flicker past were about to trample him, he mustered all his strength and tried to shout: "Take me with you!" Instead, however, he began to groan so horribly that he grew frightened at the sound he was making. Then red lights began to dance in front of his eyes and he had the impression that the soldiers were piling stones on top of him. The lights grew more and more sparse, and the stones being placed on top of him seemed to weigh more heavily on him. He made an effort to heave them aside, straightened himself up, and then neither saw nor heard nor thought nor felt anything more. He had been killed on the spot by a shell splinter that had struck him in the middle of the chest.

Off On

He took off his coat only to immediately put it back on again. "Why take off your coat only to put it straight back on again," he asked himself in irritated perplexity. "How can you expect a sensible answer from someone who takes off his coat only to put it straight back on again," came the reply. "A good response," he thought, and took back off his coat.

Truth Seeker

"Where does truth lie?"
"In the space between two words."
"Ah but which two words?"
"Any two words."

An Eye For an Eyelash- The Gaza Massacre

Good article from Medialens here. One quick sample:

Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, one of two foreign doctors working at Gaza's biggest hospital, al-Shifa, told CBS News:

"I've seen one military person among the hundreds that we have seen and treated. So anyone who tries to portray this as sort of a clean war against another army are lying. This is an all-out war against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza and we can prove that with the numbers."
Even the death toll cited above does little to communicate the true one-sidedness of the wider violence, injustice and cruelty. One hardly knows where to begin. For example, largely unmentioned by the media, prior to the latest invasion, 14 Israelis had been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from Gaza over the last seven years as against 5,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks.

Companion piece, The Humiliation of America by Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration.

Henry James Related Monologue to a Dog Overheard on a Pedestrian Bridge

I overheard earlier today an alcohlic beggar explaining the following to his scruffy dog, so apologies if it offends any social or artistic sensibilities:

Vanity can of course be one of life's great all-consuming passions and one manifestation is that of the somewhat intellectually tinged upper-bourgeois, living hard at the coal-face of respectable unreality, who, not content merely with the material pleasures of his cushioned existence, yet desires it to be 'important', the very stuff of art, immortalised; and so follows his love of the Henry Jameses of this world. His life isn't an exchange of truth for comfort and the mutual vanity of the society of his fellow carpet-galley-slaves, but actually some sad but wise sacrifice!

I've only read one Henry James book myself, some time ago, and can't really remember much about it but the boredom it provoked, so I do of course realise the above may be very unfair.

Overheard Elsewhere

"Within the biological scheme of things all facts are equal, but in the historical world some facts are more equal than others."
"So history is the record of extraordinary biological acts?"
"Perhaps you could say that."
"But extraordinary to whom? Who decides?"
"Historians."
"Who are?"
"A type of creature that feeds on historical facts."
"So which came first- history or the historian?"
"I would say they are simultaneous in their appearance within the realm of existence."

Overheard While Recycling Rubbish

"The writer is an absolute but benevolent despot who commands an army of words which he sends into battle to conquer the filthy, depraved hordes of meaninglessness."
"Nonsense."

Death

Death is non-existence. Non-existence by its very non-nature does not exist. Therefore death does not exist.

This might seem a mere elegant play on words but not actually to be taken seriously. However language meaningfully used is meaningful and there is nothing false about the given logic. But to look at it slightly differently, but heading towards perhaps the same logical destination: putting into perspective, for example, a writer who is 'obsessed with death', or simply anyone's fear of death. This is all a process of thought, and what is the nature of the thought, 'death'?

The language term 'death' is an idea or principle of absolute negation and inertia. One cannot be in a state of inertia while engaged in an activity- tautologically. A concept is an activity of the mind. And so the very idea of death as absolute inertia contradicts its very nature as an idea, or activity in which the mind is engaged. An activity cannot produce inertia. 'Death' is an unintelligible concept; the idea that the mental substance of an idea can be devoid of substance.

Another tangent is to say that the products of the mind are emanations of life. Death is the one thing that does not exist in life, and so for this reason is a meaningless concept.