the impossible

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” --Alice in Wonderland

         1.

There is a whole move that remains to be named, its source, its purpose not clear from the use: to proceed as if some impossibility were fact. This is separate from the "what-ifs" of conjecture or the "they say" of received stories. It’s not only dream logic, which would be true if dream-things were real, or wishful thinking. It points towards transcendence, towards the unsayable, towards the absolute. Mystery & the most vital parts of all art unite in an asymptote that is at once a horizon & a release from ego.

The category of the impossible includes things which violate known physical limits (Element 139, Pleiadeans, the Wow! Signal, unpronounceable words, stars that are green), things which have now been falsified (ghost planets, apocryphal books, magic, debunked ideas, perhaps time travel), things that seem self-contradictory (the Esperanto Koran, unreadable books, the "living dead", conlang archaicism, alternative histories), & finally, the realm of paradox itself (i include here infrared photography, animal painting, & computer poetry--arts which are highly problematical in conception--as well as various koans & Sufi tales). --Except for the fact that most paradoxes are merely verbal, "paradox" would be a better name for it than “the impossible."

If we consider that the ego is both true & false (metaphorical) but invariably taken for true, it becomes significant that catharsis catalyzed by art-in-experience might be a change in truth-states; also, in more contemporary relevance, it might become clearer just what the threat consists of, when a depiction of the Prophet is offered.

         2.

In a field of non-duality, the impossible exists in its obvious form without complications. In a field of forced duality, however, many things of other truth-value become either forbidden or fascinating (i. e. unresolvable). The acme of these is the impossible, & it stands for all the rest.

Fascination with the impossible can end with the relinquishment, not of the object of fascination, but of the dualistic field in which it is embedded. This is a recognition—"dementation"—that creates the possibility for change. This is what koans do. Anything that means deeply enough can be a koan. But every koan has a simple, false name that must first be destroyed. "Nothing must come/ Between you and the shapes you take/ When the crust of shape has been destroyed." --Wallace Stevens. Meister Eckhart: "I pray to God to free me of God."

         3.

Every misprision has its corresponding recognition. One could make an analogy with chemical reactions: to make or unmake a misprision requires or releases (psychic) energy. The conversion-experience. The frisson of insight. Intellectual beauty. Are these truly misprisions, or simply react as if they were? "...human kind/ Cannot bear much reality." --When there is only: Love as Love, Death as Death...

         4.

"Many the thyrsus-bearers; few the initiates."

The history of philosophy is not a history of continual progress, like the history of science, but a history of intellectual fashions, like the history of art. There has nearly always been a fruitful tension between the sayable & the unsayable, never quite reducing one to the other completely, never quite resting in a final balance. Meanwhile the spontaneous generation of mythemes continues apace, more or less unhindered by the tamper-fingers of philosophy. Looking at it from a standpoint of multivalent logic, one can see that this division of labor has been justified, to the extent that it allows free reign to those who want dogma as well as those who resist it, at least as long as neither party obtains political power. One can imagine representatives of these estates sitting down to some kind of peace talks, but not that they might walk away content with their concluded negotiations. I can only offer on my part the observation that those philosophers who are still read either bring an engaging personal accent to their reflections, or express to the illumination of later celebrants a sense of "the one perfect [mystery] which filleth, foldeth all" (Clark Ashton Smith).

V. Revisited (2)

(via @beTusconan via Geoff Manaugh on twitter)

"It often seems that we can stare directly into the wasteland without fear, not because there is nothing of risk there, but because our own words simply cannot communicate the inevitability of doom."

Particularities. Exotic, but you feel must be right, particularities: far beyond the needs of verisimilitude or plot. As an end in themselves. As if characters (& which one will become the star?). The mystery of knowing. (And not infrequently someone will remark on this.) How this is different from in Tolstoy.

Whether Pynchon stole anything from Gaddis (who seemed not to care if you got it--unlike P., who says: All of this, matters).

V. Revisited

I first read V. in college (along with several hundred other books) but i have been pushing it as P.'s finest moment ever since. I recently acquired my own copy in hardback, after a long wait (if not search) in the used-book biz. So now i am re-reading it.

First thought is: what i remember is the book's darkness--fuligin--compared to other dark books. I didn't remember the goofy frame of "the whole Sick Crew" nearly as much. And, unsurprisingly, i find myself not only rereading paragraphs, i'll even go back 2 or 3 pages to see if i understood something correctly. (Sadly, modern readers don't seem to want to put this much effort into a text.) Now, when i come across a character V. or Victoria, i look for hidden significance; when i first read it, it was a long time before i figured out what was going on.

This is a book of, among other things, divergent convergence. It gathers every byway, & makes them all describe (like a papier-mache covering to a balloon which is then deflated) an absence that impinges on each. A negative theology translated into fiction. I have also said that later Pynchon did not develop this technique, only dropped the singular withholding, toward an accumulation that rarely achieves apotheosis. Does this mean he felt more keenly the chaos of the encroaching century, & could no longer be satisfied with giving it a unifying name? We'll see...

(To be continued.)

traklypse

Blind Chivvy.

(via)

Also.

" 'Matter' is nothing in itself except an anomaly in space. People are just angles in that anomaly." --@HarryStephenKeeler

"Now, having read the book, I glimpse a different tragedy. Lee was a young writer on a roll, with several novels in mind to write after this one. She wrote none of them. Silence, lifelong. I wonder if the reason she never wrote again was because she knew her terrifyingly successful novel was untrue. In taking the easy way, in letting wishful thinking corrupt honest perception, she lost the self-credibility she, an honest woman, needed in order to write." --Ursula Le Guin

beauty (a response)

"We find we must give an immanent account of beauty."

More fruitful, methinks, to start from the phenomenon of connoisseurship, than from an abstraction (with so many varied referents) like B. Connoisseurship can be unproblematically analyzed into cultural, perceptive, personal-historical aspects. For instance, while i have seen the "Mona Lisa" (once, briefly, in my youth--at a sizeable distance) & found it a little eerie, at best; it isn't one of my favorite paintings. (I preferred, then & now, painters who are colorists.) But i can recognize a kind of ultimate dexterity in the technique of Velasquez, da Vinci, & above all Vermeer. This, from having tried oil painting for myself. Aesthetics, of course, means one thing in the European tradition, another in the Asian tradition, & something else in Modernism. I have learned to appreciate all of these. And therefore i find anyone who wants to set one over the others (are you listening, Fred?) a bit near-sighted... At the same time, the works i return to, again & again, are ones that say something to me personally. They might not even be by acclaimed artists at all.

What about, say, the taste of Laphroiag? To me there are few sensations more exquisite. But i would not have liked single-malt scotch with the taste-buds of a 25-year-old, much less those of a 15-year-old. When i hear someone complain about one of the flavors i find beautiful, as if it possessed no intrinsic merit, again i laugh (that just means more for ME). Could that person educate themselves into being able to enjoy it? Some might, others might not. Certainly i am far from my culture's norm of wanting extremely sweet flavors; i even dislike them. --Though at one time i didn't.

There are hours, moods when everything i see seems beautiful. And more & more i don't need to have aesthetic sensations that have been culturally mediated. Beauty remains... Is it like a harmony between the perceiver & some portion of things perceived? I find glimpses of the wild rabbits in our yard beautiful, more beautiful than any of the human surroundings. Yet throughout our sojourn on this planet, the only thing most humans could think of to do with a rabbit has been to kill it, eat it, & use its skin to make gloves.

I like rabbit fur best when it's still on the rabbit.

footnote

"Where space strives to create a system of equivalences that transforms the infinitude that dwells within things into finitude subject to mastery and commodification, landscape is the infinitude within things, their absolute singularity and contingency, that is without equivalent. It is characterized by texture, intensity, or haecceity."

"Landscape" is already a generalization. There are only: my neighborhood; other people's neighborhoods.
Sometimes the other people are rabbits.

blue like chess

(via o-lightning dot com)

There are some people who really love the idea of self-driving cars. Like selling arms to the world or pouring poison in our own house, it's enough to make you believe in Freud's Todtrieb idea. But no, it's only the perennial wish once more, to be free of the burden of having to think.

Great review of a great movie.