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.

purptuply

Philosophers have sometimes talked about a country of liars, but before James Morrow no one has imagined a City of Truth. This first-rate satire postulates the discovery of a way to condition humans so that even the prospect of telling a lie becomes unbearably painful. Then he adds a secret underground of fantasy-enthusiasts, a child with an incurable, terminal illness, & a father who believes that only lies can cure him. (It's to Morrow's credit that they don't.)

The reader would expect a novelist to come down in favor of fiction. This work, however, offers something more nuanced. "I don't love the lies...but I don't hate them either," is the father's final reflection. It is clear that, as in the abortion-satire film Citizen Ruth, both sides can easily be made ridiculous. Still, from an Aspergian point of view, it would be as wrong to place lying & truth-telling on the same level, as myths & scientific accounts of causality. Ours is a society of lies. One of them is that it believes in telling the truth. Another, that it is not even possible to know the truth. On the one hand, an ethics without probity is empty; on the other, an epistemology without axioms is nonsense.

Such paradoxes hardly perturb the majority of Cretans, who lie at every opportunity & whose constant mutual gazes demand lying in return.

"nocitura toga, nocitura petuntur
militia" --Juvenal, Satire X.8-9

change and tamper monkeys

(via amazon dot com)

It’s true that saktra is all too prone not only to revisit the same restaurant every time, but even to sit in the same chair at the same table, & order the exact same item on the menu. Nevertheless, this is more about an internal sense of the order of the world, than attachment to actual places or things. At odds with this intransigence, seemingly trivial, stands an army of agents of change: sheer randomness, entropic deterioration (resisting this is, alas, not even in favor, often enough, among neurotypicals, who you’d think would like to have their Great Machine run, if not elegantly, at least with unimpaired forward motion--), but most of all by the incessant compulsive activity of a small class of humans i will henceforward refer to as "tamper monkeys".

Their salient trait is an irritation with, not just the rules of the status quo, but its very arrangement. Now, saktra is in favor of any change, even a radical one, so long as it makes the situation better (--or is this just an INTJ trait?...must consider). But why spend hours moving furniture around in a room whose functions & contents will remain unaltered afterwards? Well, the itch will have been scratched. For the moment.

Saktra is apt to feel irrationally persecuted by such spasms. They occur in corporate contexts under the guise of “restructuring” & the like; when not a covert assault upon jobs, pay, or privileges, they often occur when someone who has been undeservedly empowered with such options starts moving colored squares around on a computer screen. Why they can’t be content with video games is beyond me. (Probably it comes from a subconscious realization of being otherwise useless.) Do tamper monkeys serve a real purpose in the scheme of things?

Yes. Because the people with good ideas are not going to be listened to, social evolution depends upon tamper-monkey innovation as the single motor of progress.

The Kludge

The word “kludge” originated in computer programming & remains a useful way of describing the typical company programs that long ago escaped the comprehension of their users, so many have been the hired tinkerers & so scanty has been the window of taking time to figure out the actual relations of every part. A kludge is like a patchwork quilt too big to see all of at once. Supremely inelegant, yet for the purpose supremely essential, even in this form, as long as it works.

It recently occurred to me that not only is the Law—our body of laws—a sort of super-kludge (one where no one understands it all, & the difference between what one lawyer knows & what another lawyer knows may equal defeat or victory), just about any human tradition is as well; & furthermore, that this is one of our core human characteristics (at least as neurotypicals). When a critic examines “The Novel” it is to the super-kludge of the majority of novel-like books written, that he refers. (No one has read them all.) An explosion of originality in one area may trigger unfathomable repercussions all over the entire network… And of course, each one is read, in part, for what it says in its place among the others.

But we seldom actually talk about about kludge-ness, instead of its icons. It would be to add a counter representing the unknown, to the counters in the game of knowns. Then saktra comes to the game, not only not knowing kludge-ness but expecting, what? Things to be done for a reason? You go & play the game according to your own lights. The result somehow doesn’t refer back enough. It needs some of those invisible tokens added.

And knowing that you work—even as an artist in isolation—within a context that will be perceived as the evolving kludge: not saying so, says something you may or may not intend. Something that for many, at first, will be the only thing they hear in it.

bringing in the sheaves

(via via metafilter)

      "A Pavane for Grothendieck

Gray sheaves, their zodiac;
red mathoms from Cathay.

Or a place beyond words
they almost remember.

Hesitant counting stilb
even with the cloud plague.

Nothing from this charade
durable: all is sand.

Incest as cicala
emitting in a jar

Change paths; theremin vugg
keeps watch like a grackle

"Climate science is our Napoleon at Jena, not the world spirit on horseback, but the biospheric totality via comsat. If there is a short list of things calling us to a timely rather than a hesitant thought, then surely it is on that list."

"He showed Malgoire a 200-liter oil drum filled with cinders and estimated he had destroyed a total of 25,000 pages.."