Two unrelated photos, but matched for color and line.
If you have time, read below the break. Nothing revolutionary, mind you, but possibly helpful…
—
—
What’s Going On?
Computers As Tools(this will relate to photography): Computers are especially good at math, pattern recognition, automating processes and performing set tasks as reliably as possible (much more reliably than we can across many domains). They possess superior pattern recognition as well as sophisticated analytical/synthetic reasoning; pushing frontier knowledge. Computers are also pretty dumb, and, so far, we’ve needed to program them. They break down a lot. Code degrades.
Think of an abacus. A cash register. A complex sorting machine. Speaking computer language requires specific combinations of math and human language, where every character counts.
We lean on computers (even for maintaining some works of art, but mostly for curation). Move electrons around in the right pattern, and your computer can store works of art. Now you can have the computer analyze and synthesize a lot of writing/human wisdom about that art. It’s like having access to a larger (limited) library and a personal, automated librarian (full of sound and fury).
A novel might have taken a particular genius decades of blood, sweat and tears, speaking directly to you. They crammed themselves into the medium, pursuing immortality. You still need the read the damned novel. Mull the novel over. Let it sink in. Go for a walk. It still helps to have a good teacher walk with you.
A work of art can make us think, make us feel; sometimes changing our lives completely. It can orient an entire civilization around itself, defining what counts in life regarding truth, wisdom and beauty. The computer makes access to these works of art cheaper and easier than ever before (for better and worse).
Many dangers are obvious (lower lows): Time and attention suck. Memory-crutch. Seven-second-video-brain-rot and optimized mind-crack. We lose what we don’t use. No gatekeepers (for better and worse). We’ve incentivized loud, shallow voices into a chorus of (S)elf-aggrandizing mediocrity. Latchkey kids plopped in front of an AI engine. Relationships withering on the vine. Lost souls seeking companionship with what is, essentially, a souped-up abacus. Sexbots. Crazies made crazier. Barbarians acting more like barbarians (they hit you, they laugh. you hit them, they cry).
There are a lot of problems in the world.
Higher highs: Well-adjusted, contented, reasonable people enhancing their pretty-good lives into more opportunity and contentment. Relationships enriched and deepened because time/distance have been shortened. More and easier access to wisdom. Quicker advancement upon many success curves. Deeper natural skill + work alignment in many more cases, even for some artists (less of a gap between what you’re good at vs what you have to do).
There are a lot of good things in the world. Work at ’em.
My current use case (what I use computational engines for) is a simple photography tool. I do NOT ALTER the photos or mess too much with the creative process. A basic subscription to Anthropic’s Claude has created a not-too-shabby html tool IN A FEW MINUTES. A few hours later, after testing and re-testing, and I can shuffle photos around and look at them WITHOUT a subscription to a website/platform etc. Claude’s made a platform for uploading, shuffling and editing photos while analyzing patterns at my discretion.
This tool is NO replacement for my creative process, intuition, judgement and practice. I rarely crop. I still have to put the work in. I still get more out of friendship, mentors, intelligent (critical and friendly) feedback and individual/institutional knowledge than I do a souped-up abacus. But now I have massively shortened time and distance constraints on certain elements of my understanding.
That’s useful.
What’s happening to all of us right now (to some extent): The layer of ‘speaking the language a computer understands’ is now much less needed. It’s been quickly automated. Many software engineers and the people who maintain them, are facing a new landscape.
What counts most in the current emerging setup: Knowledge + real-world experience + judgment + willpower, even amongst programmers. It’s never been easier to use computers through a direct, natural-language interface.
Possibly useful to you: Think of each company like a large building (Amazon/Microsoft/Apple). They’re ripping out much of the old wiring and replacing it with newer wiring and smaller, more powerful electrics.
Who loses? Many, many electricians who knew how to use the old wiring (speaking a language only the computer understands). Increasingly, the rest of us can walk in the room and flip the light-switch. The new engines can make HTML tools, reports, synthesize data sets and platforms, write workflows, aggregate vast quantities of data in…minutes.
Other institutions (who else loses)? Institutions will replace their wiring along different time-horizons, with differing consequences (knowledge-work, process-minders, automate-able tasks are the most at risk). There’s a lot of asymmetry and different competitive pressures/incentives for different orgs. Also, lest we forget, garbage in=garbage out. You’re only as good as your command, and natural language commands are still commands for a ‘dumb’ computer. These things aren’t your friend.
Adoption is increasing (no longer early).
Are you using?
Have you been using?
—
Consider subscribing if you like limited, sometimes incorrect knowledge.
Join today.
Schmaltz-50% more.
Bullshit-Down 30%. Certainly true.
Diminishing T & Middle-Aged Man Resignation-Up 20% last quarter. Review in process.
‘The most useful definition of modernist fiction I’ve encountered comes from Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction. He says modernist fiction tends to “foreground epistemological questions” such as “How can I interpret the world I’m part of? What is there to be known? Who knows it? What are the limits of that knowledge?” In contrast, postmodernist fiction tends to “foreground ontological questions” such as “What is a world? What kinds of worlds are there and how are they constituted? What happens when…boundaries between worlds are violated?’
As to the epistemological questions surrounding Modernism, below are four poems. Hopefully, each is a representative example of a move away from the Romanticism that had been prevalent up until the late 1800’s.
In addition to the move away from traditional Romantic rhyme and meter towards modern blank verse, there’s also a certain conception of the Self rendered in them; a presentation of our natures that might be worth examining in some detail.
I believe we can see clearly a move away from tradition towards the Self, the Poet isolated, the poem itself as a means of communication, and an anxiety so common within the 20th century.
‘At the heart of Bloom’s project is the ancient quarrel between “poetry” and “philosophy.” In Bloom’s opinion, we ought not have to choose between Homer and Plato; we can have both, as long as we recognize that poetry is superior.’
Says the guy who writes about poetry…
What does one find within, as one looks without, waking from sleep and dream?
What kind of world is this, and can the poet actually help us know it?
You tossed a blanket from the bed You lay upon your back, and waited; You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted; They flickered against the ceiling. And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the shutters And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands; Sitting along the bed’s edge, where You curled the papers from your hair, Or clasped the yellow soles of feet In the palms of both soiled hands.
—
The world will stain you, and it is a fallen, modern world, rendered profoundly and exquisitely.
As consciousness creeps in, building a bridge to the day, to the world, to the facts left as though they were the first facts, the light as though it were the first light, what one finds is distressing, both within and without.
That distress must be ‘made new,’ which is to say, the suffering (original?) in which we all sometimes find ourselves must match our experiences within the modern city and world, at least, the world created within Eliot’s lyrical verse.
Of the four poems, only the first and last have a 3rd-person subject.
—
Wallace Stevens‘ ‘I’ is in a more contemplative state, but it’s an ‘I’ exploring similar themes, and experiencing some distress in trying to know how the world actually is, and what might lie within.
The journey to The Self may not be a journey for the faint of heart.
The Poems Of Our Climate (stanzas II and III)
II Say even that this complete simplicity Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed The evilly compounded, vital I And made it fresh in a world of white, A world of clear water, brilliant-edged, Still one would want more, one would need more, More than a world of white and snowy scents.
III There would still remain the never-resting mind, So that one would want to escape, come back To what had been so long composed. The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
—
Even if the verse can describe a perfected world, delivering us, perhaps, a little closer to perfection, our poet is still not free from the impulses and desires which simply never cease.
Interestingly, we end-up not with a discussion of the heart, the spirit, libido etc. as a source for those desires (for Plato, the irrational), but rather, for Stevens, just a mind.
We also find more Romantic elements of language and an almost baroque/rococo arrangement of words and ideas, dandyish even, yet combined with an intense effort to abstract, define, and clarify. From here, the poet may proceed on his task of flawed words and stubborn sounds.
***I find myself thinking of elements of modern architecture and abstract-expressionist painting. The meaning, or at least some delivery from our restless existences, can be found within the abstract itself. Or at least within a retreat to the abstract for its own sake, away from the world.
The modernist, glass-walled house on the hill will exist in its own space, offering and defying meaning. The structure’s own shapes will be stripped down to often mathematically precise forms interacting with Nature. These shall guide Man, or at least offer individual men a little refuge.
It is perhaps in Stevens’ poem we can see the questions of knowledge about the world suggesting questions about whether there is a world at all, or, at least, what kind of worlds each Self might be able to inhabit.
—
Here’s one of Robert Lowell’s poems, occurring a generation later, in the mid 20th-century, as part of the confessionals.
The Self is extremely isolated. In fact, Lowell went more than a little crazy. Unlike the known nervous breakdown of Eliot from which Eliot recovered, Lowell’s life was essentially one long breakdown from which he never recovered.
Here he is, looking back:
Epilogue
Those blessed structures plot and rhyme- why are they no help to me now i want to make something imagined not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything i write With the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot lurid rapid garish grouped heightened from life yet paralyzed by fact. All’s misalliance. Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts. warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.
—
The weight of having to make that meaning, for yourself, and by yourself, is a horrible weight indeed. One can glorify one’s Self and family, but that, alas, only goes so far. Rhyme and form still carry one’s living name, as far as they do.
Of course, there’s still wonderful rhythm and form here (this is excellent verse), but blanker now, with a relentless focus on the ‘I.’ The poet is perhaps talking a little more to himself, and the poem keeps self-consciously calling attention to itself.
—
In fact, it reminded me of the poem below, by Robert Creeley, which was published a few years afterwards.
From this page:
‘Creeley was a leader in the generational shift that veered away from history and tradition as primary poetic sources and gave new prominence to the ongoing experiences of an individual’s life. Because of this emphasis, the major events of his life loom large in his literary work.’
There’s Nothing but the Self and the Eye seeking and making meaning, by itself within a void of emotionally compact and precise language (of course there’s still form and other things besides).
Can the poet fit inside the little abstract chapel of words he’s building for himself (let alone the world, tradition etc.)?
For all the talk about ‘space,’ there seems very little.
The Window
Position is where you put it, where it is, did you, for example, that
large tank there, silvered, with the white church along- side, lift
all that, to what purpose? How heavy the slow
world is with everything put in place. Some
man walks by, a car beside him on the dropped
road, a leaf of yellow color is going to
fall. It all drops into place. My
face is heavy with the sight. I can feel my eye breaking.
—
The distress is still there…but I’d argue that we are now a good distance away from the grandness of Eliot’s vision, his religiosity and virtuosity with form and meter at the dawn of Modernism. Very few people can/could do what Eliot did (addition: even if he can help us gain knowledge of our Selves or the world).
That said, it’s unclear there’s enough tradition and confidence to even undertake such a project, now, even as such talents come along. The state of things is more scattered. We’re in a very different place of selves and artists isolated, of anxiety and post-anxiety.
Aside from the very accomplished poets above, in terms of both knowledge (epistemology) and being (ontology), we often have writers feeling pressure to weigh-in on such questions without even being about to write that well; artists who can’t draw or paint that well, and frankly, quite a bit of bullshit besides.
So, where are we headed? Who’s ‘we’ exactly?
Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
As previously posted:
Why not just put a few algorithms to work in writing those artist statements?
‘In “Sea Change,” Graham becomes Prospero, casting spells by spelling out her thoughts to merge with ours, and with the voices of the elements. The result is a mingling of perceptions rather than a broadcasting of opinions. Instead of analysis, the poems encourage emotional involvement with the drastic changes overwhelming us, overwhelm- ing the planet.’
and:
‘Strengths and weaknesses, flows and ebbs, yet every poem in “Sea Change” bears memorable lines, with almost haunting (if we truly have but 10 years to “fix” global warming) images of flora and fauna under siege. Jorie Graham has composed a swan song for Earth.’
‘Chaotic, dark, confined, dangerous, beautiful.’ Those are the five words that popped into my head after checking out ‘Subway.’
Ars Celare Artem.
Those Latin words, shared by a friend, popped into my head, too.
Throughout your life, depending on circumstances, you’re paying attention to different things: ‘What is that man doing..is this a problem?’ ‘She’s definitely checking me out.’ ‘Man, I’m bored. I really can’t miss this interview.’ ‘I guess…….we’ll just wait for the results.’
Human misery, neglect and loneliness are on display, but so are simple joy, love and connection.
Davidson rode the NYC City subway lines during the early 1980’s for long hours and months with Leica Rangefinder and Nikon SLR in tow. In fact, I’d argue Davidson’s choices really make the beauty and moments of connection ‘pop.’
Lens choices and angled composition
—
MoMA no. 1: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/216851. How much of the frame does the subject’s head fill. 1/12? Not a lot, yet all the angles seem to converge. There’s some small comfort in such vulnerability and some small order in the territorial scrawling, but not much.
—
MoMA no. 15: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/216851. How close is too close, before each of us appears somewhat absurd, undignified and….greasy? I almost object to the framing of this lady, but the color and composition really work (the red flower pops against the purple scrawls).
She’s got a quiet dignity, perhaps…but more like some rare animal caught suddenly on a trail cam. The leading lines of the car and the embers of the day fade quietly behind her.
As for the photo, it’s tough to balance the flash on her, the low light inside the car, and the natural light outside, so the horizon is a bit overexposed, but boy does the whole thing work.
The gang forms them, and they form the gang. They’re scraggly and young enough to be slightly pathetic (Orphans from The Warriors?), but the hand tat and knife-cuts around the eyes are serious enough.
Kids in bad circumstances grow up fast. Dangerous places tend to mobilize what’s dangerous within us. Davidson frames the open space/vanishing point on the right, catching lovely light against the stacked chaos on the left.
This seems like an in-between place; a private moment for a young girl on a public train.
The color palette is cool (green/gray/blue) and the doors appear weirdly gothic and strange. Most of the lines converge on her.
I hope her life turned out okay. In fact, one of Davidson’s other haunting image made me wonder the same thing (Girl holding kitten).
—
This post is intended to share the work of Bruce Davidson. In fact, I’m probably just driving up the price of the book I don’t have. I find his work consistently has something to teach.
Other thoughts: Do the driving passions of the poet/photographer/musician seeking out the marginalized result in genuine understanding, or also self-indulgence and self-regard?
A bit of both?
Does such work eventually help broaden understanding and bring people together, or can it hurt, too?
‘The most useful definition of modernist fiction I’ve encountered comes from Brian McHale’s Postmodernist Fiction. He says modernist fiction tends to “foreground epistemological questions” such as “How can I interpret the world I’m part of? What is there to be known? Who knows it? What are the limits of that knowledge?” In contrast, postmodernist fiction tends to “foreground ontological questions” such as “What is a world? What kinds of worlds are there and how are they constituted? What happens when…boundaries between worlds are violated?’
As to the epistemological questions surrounding Modernism, below are four poems. Hopefully, each is a representative example of a move away from the Romanticism that had been prevalent up until the late 1800’s.
In addition to the move away from traditional Romantic rhyme and meter towards modern blank verse, there’s also a certain conception of the Self rendered in them; a presentation of our natures that might be worth examining in some detail.
I believe we can see clearly a move away from tradition towards the Self, the Poet isolated, the poem itself as a means of communication, and an anxiety so common within the 20th century.
‘At the heart of Bloom’s project is the ancient quarrel between “poetry” and “philosophy.” In Bloom’s opinion, we ought not have to choose between Homer and Plato; we can have both, as long as we recognize that poetry is superior.’
Says the guy who writes about poetry…
What does one find within, as one looks without, waking from sleep and dream?
What kind of world is this, and can the poet actually help us know it?
You tossed a blanket from the bed You lay upon your back, and waited; You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted; They flickered against the ceiling. And when all the world came back And the light crept up between the shutters And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, You had such a vision of the street As the street hardly understands; Sitting along the bed’s edge, where You curled the papers from your hair, Or clasped the yellow soles of feet In the palms of both soiled hands.
—
The world will stain you, and it is a fallen, modern world, rendered profoundly and exquisitely.
As consciousness creeps in, building a bridge to the day, to the world, to the facts left as though they were the first facts, the light as though it were the first light, what one finds is distressing, both within and without.
That distress must be ‘made new,’ which is to say, the suffering (original?) in which we all sometimes find ourselves must match our experiences within the modern city and world, at least, the world created within Eliot’s lyrical verse.
Of the four poems, only the first and last have a 3rd-person subject.
—
Wallace Stevens‘ ‘I’ is in a more contemplative state, but it’s an ‘I’ exploring similar themes, and experiencing some distress in trying to know how the world actually is, and what might lie within.
The journey to The Self may not be a journey for the faint of heart.
The Poems Of Our Climate (stanzas II and III)
II Say even that this complete simplicity Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed The evilly compounded, vital I And made it fresh in a world of white, A world of clear water, brilliant-edged, Still one would want more, one would need more, More than a world of white and snowy scents.
III There would still remain the never-resting mind, So that one would want to escape, come back To what had been so long composed. The imperfect is our paradise. Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
—
Even if the verse can describe a perfected world, delivering us, perhaps, a little closer to perfection, our poet is still not free from the impulses and desires which simply never cease.
Interestingly, we end-up not with a discussion of the heart, the spirit, libido etc. as a source for those desires (for Plato, the irrational), but rather, for Stevens, just a mind.
We also find more Romantic elements of language and an almost baroque/rococo arrangement of words and ideas, dandyish even, yet combined with an intense effort to abstract, define, and clarify. From here, the poet may proceed on his task of flawed words and stubborn sounds.
***I find myself thinking of elements of modern architecture and abstract-expressionist painting. The meaning, or at least some delivery from our restless existences, can be found within the abstract itself. Or at least within a retreat to the abstract for its own sake, away from the world.
The modernist, glass-walled house on the hill will exist in its own space, offering and defying meaning. The structure’s own shapes will be stripped down to often mathematically precise forms interacting with Nature. These shall guide Man, or at least offer individual men a little refuge.
It is perhaps in Stevens’ poem we can see the questions of knowledge about the world suggesting questions about whether there is a world at all, or, at least, what kind of worlds each Self might be able to inhabit.
—
Here’s one of Robert Lowell’s poems, occurring a generation later, in the mid 20th-century, as part of the confessionals.
The Self is extremely isolated. In fact, Lowell went more than a little crazy. Unlike the known nervous breakdown of Eliot from which Eliot recovered, Lowell’s life was essentially one long breakdown from which he never recovered.
Here he is, looking back:
Epilogue
Those blessed structures plot and rhyme- why are they no help to me now i want to make something imagined not recalled? I hear the noise of my own voice: The painter’s vision is not a lens it trembles to caress the light. But sometimes everything i write With the threadbare art of my eye seems a snapshot lurid rapid garish grouped heightened from life yet paralyzed by fact. All’s misalliance. Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts. warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.
—
The weight of having to make that meaning, for yourself, and by yourself, is a horrible weight indeed. One can glorify one’s Self and family, but that, alas, only goes so far. Rhyme and form still carry one’s living name, as far as they do.
Of course, there’s still wonderful rhythm and form here (this is excellent verse), but blanker now, with a relentless focus on the ‘I.’ The poet is perhaps talking a little more to himself, and the poem keeps self-consciously calling attention to itself.
—
In fact, it reminded me of the poem below, by Robert Creeley, which was published a few years afterwards.
From this page:
‘Creeley was a leader in the generational shift that veered away from history and tradition as primary poetic sources and gave new prominence to the ongoing experiences of an individual’s life. Because of this emphasis, the major events of his life loom large in his literary work.’
There’s Nothing but the Self and the Eye seeking and making meaning, by itself within a void of emotionally compact and precise language (of course there’s still form and other things besides).
Can the poet fit inside the little abstract chapel of words he’s building for himself (let alone the world, tradition etc.)?
For all the talk about ‘space,’ there seems very little.
The Window
Position is where you put it, where it is, did you, for example, that
large tank there, silvered, with the white church along- side, lift
all that, to what purpose? How heavy the slow
world is with everything put in place. Some
man walks by, a car beside him on the dropped
road, a leaf of yellow color is going to
fall. It all drops into place. My
face is heavy with the sight. I can feel my eye breaking.
—
The distress is still there…but I’d argue that we are now a good distance away from the grandness of Eliot’s vision, his religiosity and virtuosity with form and meter at the dawn of Modernism. Very few people can/could do what Eliot did (addition: even if he can help us gain knowledge of our Selves or the world).
That said, it’s unclear there’s enough tradition and confidence to even undertake such a project, now, even as such talents come along. The state of things is more scattered. We’re in a very different place of selves and artists isolated, of anxiety and post-anxiety.
Aside from the very accomplished poets above, in terms of both knowledge (epistemology) and being (ontology), we often have writers feeling pressure to weigh-in on such questions without even being about to write that well; artists who can’t draw or paint that well, and frankly, quite a bit of bullshit besides.
So, where are we headed? Who’s ‘we’ exactly?
Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
As previously posted:
Why not just put a few algorithms to work in writing those artist statements?
‘In “Sea Change,” Graham becomes Prospero, casting spells by spelling out her thoughts to merge with ours, and with the voices of the elements. The result is a mingling of perceptions rather than a broadcasting of opinions. Instead of analysis, the poems encourage emotional involvement with the drastic changes overwhelming us, overwhelm- ing the planet.’
and:
‘Strengths and weaknesses, flows and ebbs, yet every poem in “Sea Change” bears memorable lines, with almost haunting (if we truly have but 10 years to “fix” global warming) images of flora and fauna under siege. Jorie Graham has composed a swan song for Earth.’
Oh boy.
What are these poems being asked to do?
And moving away from poetry into the realm of ‘performance art,’
All the words that I utter, And all the words that I write, Must spread out their wings untiring, And never rest in their flight, Till they come where your sad, sad heart is, And sing to you in the night, Beyond where the waters are moving, Storm-darken’d or starry bright.
Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village.
This is old song That will not declare itself . . .
Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are Twenty men crossing a bridge Into a village.
That will not declare itself Yet is certain as meaning . . .
The boots of the men clump On the boards of the bridge. The first white wall of the village Rises through fruit-trees. Of what was it I was thinking? So the meaning escapes.
The first white wall of the village . . . The fruit-trees. . . .
Thoughts while you’re walking? marching? with a destination?
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman – I have detested you long enough. I come to you as a grown child Who has had a pig-headed father; I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood, Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root – Let there be commerce between us.
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable. Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting. His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom, In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard, In the smell of grapes on the autumn table, And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
“I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the Stern Fact, the Sad Self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”
“Democratic and aristocratic states are not in their own nature free. Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments; and even in these it is not always found. It is there only when there is no abuse of power. But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.”
“That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
This poem commemorates a deep loss in my life. After the shock of sudden death, we each found ourselves a deep pool to wade through. Don’t worry, Dear Reader. Time gives memories back; the thoughtless remarks, the bad jokes, and conversations seemingly gone forever.
Keep moving. If you find your heart hardened in the wake of death or loss, find yourself in light.
The mistake was light and easy in my hand, A seed meant to be borne upon the wind. I did not have to bury it or throw, Just open up my hand and let it go.
The mistake was dry and small and without weight, A breeze quickly snatched it from my sight, And even had I wanted to prevent, Nobody could tell me where it went.
I did not think on the mistake again, Until the spring came, soft, and full of rain, And in the yard such dandelions grew That bloomed and closed, and opened up, and blew
Under the bronze crown Too big for the head of the stone cherub whose feet A serpent has begun to eat, Sweet water brims a cockle and braids down
Past spattered mosses, breaks On the tipped edge of a second shell, and fills The massive third below. It spills In threads then from the scalloped rim, and makes
A scrim or summery tent For a faun-ménage and their familiar goose. Happy in all that ragged, loose Collapse of water, its effortless descent
And flatteries of spray, The stocky god upholds the shell with ease, Watching, about his shaggy knees, The goatish innocence of his babes at play;
His fauness all the while Leans forward, slightly, into a clambering mesh Of water-lights, her sparkling flesh In a saecular ecstasy, her blinded smile
Bent on the sand floor Of the trefoil pool, where ripple-shadows come And go in swift reticulum, More addling to the eye than wine, and more
Interminable to thought Than pleasure’s calculus. Yet since this all Is pleasure, flash, and waterfall, Must it not be too simple? Are we not
More intricately expressed In the plain fountains that Maderna set Before St. Peter’s—the main jet Struggling aloft until it seems at rest
In the act of rising, until The very wish of water is reversed, That heaviness borne up to burst In a clear, high, cavorting head, to fill
With blaze, and then in gauze Delays, in a gnatlike shimmering, in a fine Illumined version of itself, decline, And patter on the stones its own applause?
If that is what men are Or should be, if those water-saints display The pattern of our areté, What of these showered fauns in their bizarre,
Spangled, and plunging house? They are at rest in fulness of desire For what is given, they do not tire Of the smart of the sun, the pleasant water-douse
And riddled pool below, Reproving our disgust and our ennui With humble insatiety. Francis, perhaps, who lay in sister snow
Before the wealthy gate Freezing and praising, might have seen in this No trifle, but a shade of bliss— That land of tolerable flowers, that state
As near and far as grass Where eyes become the sunlight, and the hand Is worthy of water: the dreamt land Toward which all hungers leap, all pleasures pass.
In June, amid the golden fields, I saw a groundhog lying dead. Dead lay he; my senses shook, And mind outshot our naked frailty. There lowly in the vigorous summer His form began its senseless change, And made my senses waver dim Seeing nature ferocious in him. Inspecting close his maggots’ might And seething cauldron of his being, Half with loathing, half with a strange love, I poked him with an angry stick. The fever arose, became a flame And Vigour circumscribed the skies, Immense energy in the sun, And through my frame a sunless trembling. My stick had done nor good nor harm. Then stood I silent in the day Watching the object, as before; And kept my reverence for knowledge Trying for control, to be still, To quell the passion of the blood; Until I had bent down on my knees Praying for joy in the sight of decay. And so I left; and I returned In Autumn strict of eye, to see The sap gone out of the groundhog, But the bony sodden hulk remained. But the year had lost its meaning, And in intellectual chains I lost both love and loathing, Mured up in the wall of wisdom. Another summer took the fields again Massive and burning, full of life, But when I chanced upon the spot There was only a little hair left, And bones bleaching in the sunlight Beautiful as architecture; I watched them like a geometer, And cut a walking stick from a birch. It has been three years, now. There is no sign of the groundhog. I stood there in the whirling summer, My hand capped a withered heart, And thought of China and of Greece, Of Alexander in his tent; Of Montaigne in his tower, Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.
Hope in this world is a tricky thing, with all the suffering around, should we care to look.
I doubt Williams is invoking the Godhead here, but a ‘Jesus Christ’ might slip out of me or you upon suddenly catching sight of the wretched. Open sores and infections usually indicate deeper physical illness. Rambling speech and shuffling feet usually indicate a disordered mind and soul. Some people could be so far gone they may not be coming back.
But there’s an abandonment in the desire to be free, untethered, and lost within the world.
One of my takes: Love means obligations to others, where abandonment also meets responsibility, not merely abandonment to one’s own desires. Each of us, despite our habits, could become captive to our desires. Watch out for yourselves.
There’s something like a ‘narrative’ race on in the power-centers, and for politicos, right now, because I see U.S. institutions as seriously weakened, overbuilt and stagnant.
On that note, W.S. Merwin came of age during the post-war period, the son of a Presbyterian minister. I’d argue we’re witnessing a religious vision becoming transposed through the Modernist and post-Modernist lenses in his work (especially with the ‘eco’ stuff). This is what I’ve been calling the journey of the (S)elf, within the Romantic bowl of ‘Nature,’ where increasingly isolated individuals are seeking wholeness and transcendence through ‘the environment’ and ‘collective action’ and ‘(S)cience.’ This process of secular humanization is fast upon us here in the U.S. (much more advanced in Europe).
What occurs at the basic level of conception, and once held in the King James Bible, is now more likely to be ‘revealed’ to be a concern with the environment, or the ‘oppressed.’ Notice it’s not really about (S)cience but a kind of belief-level claim to knowledge and truth. Basically, I see ‘true-belief’ and righteous actors as often making things worse, and typically blaming everyone else in the process.
Do the wretches have something to teach? About what and to whom? Are poets exiles (the ones who imagine themselves as drunks)? What about ministers?
The Drunk In The Furnace
For a good decade The furnace stood in the naked gully, fireless And vacant as any hat. Then when it was No more to them than a hulking black fossil To erode with the rest of the junk-hill By the poisonous creek, and rapidly to be added To their ignorance,
They were afterwards astonished To confirm, one morning, a twist of smoke, like a pale Resurrection, staggering out of its chewed hole, And to remark then other tokens that someone, Cosily bolted behind the eyeholed iron Door of the drafty burner, had there established His bad castle.
Where he gets his spirits It’s a mystery. But the stuff keeps him musical: Hammer-and-anviling with poker and bottle To his jugged bellowings, till the last groaning clang As he collapses onto the rioting Springs of a litter of car seats ranged on the grates, To sleep like an iron pig.
In their tar-paper church On a text about stoke holes that are sated never Their Reverend lingers. They nod and hate trespassers. When the furnace wakes, though, all afternoon Their witless offspring flock like piped rats to its siren Crescendo, and agape on the crumbling ridge Stand in a row and learn.
What might work better for a lot of us, a lot of the time: The Victorian idea of the ‘deserving’ poor. Reality means having to make decisions in a world of limited resources about how to help those not helping themselves. We all have obligations to others, but they largely occur to those we love, and those whom we must honor and protect.
‘Auden’s masterpiece came quickly because the occasion was one for which Europeans of his generation had been waiting, consciously or unconsciously, for most of their lives. The poet tapped into this ambient sense of dread before he was out of his teens.‘
I stopped to pick up the bagel rolling away in the wind, annoyed with myself for having dropped it as if it were a portent. Faster and faster it rolled, with me running after it bent low, gritting my teeth, and I found myself doubled over and rolling down the street head over heels, one complete somersault after another like a bagel and strangely happy with myself.
‘The same idea occurs in Schopenhauer, for whom the truth of the world is Will, which cannot be represented in concepts. Schopenhauer devoted roughly 500,000 words to this thing that no words can capture…’
‘…I too am tempted to eff the ineffable. like my philosophical predecessors, I want to describe that world beyond the window, even though I know that it cannot be described but only revealed. I am not alone in thinking that world to be real and important. But there are many who dismiss it as unscientific cast of mind are disagreeable to me. Their nerdish conviction that facts alone can signify, and that the ‘transcendental’ and the eternal are nothing but words, mark them out as incomplete. There is an aspect of the human condition that is denied to them. ‘
Scruton, Roger. “Effing The Ineffable” Confessions Of A Heretic. Notting Hill Editions Ltd, 2016. Print. (Pgs 87 & 88).
Personally, I’m not sure that all naturalists and people in the sciences I’ve known wish to reduce the world to strictly mathematical laws, nor consign all domains of human endeavor to ‘non-science.’
Some people, I suspect, have the onboard wiring and have pursued learning which make them profoundly interested in order, patterns, and logic. Some people are just really smart and dedicate themselves to a particular problem or two, maybe possessing the genius and courage, even, to define a new problem after years of hard work of mastering a field, leading to genuine new knowledge.
I am grateful for the Mars Curiosity Rover, and the hundreds of engineers that worked for much of their professional lives to land this thing on Mars. It’s still yielding valuable data.
But, I”m guessing there’s lot of waste and bureaucratic stasis at NASA. Perhaps a similar regression to the mean within institutions towards narrower ideas and ideologues happens here, too (if only x were removed, y will occur).
I see such outcomes partially caused by the decay of things, partially by design, and partially as a process of secularization (beneath the idealist and systematist lie human nature and reality). Such incentives don’t necessarily lead to leadership by the most knowledgeable, but over time, rather to leadership by administrative fiat and distant political winds.
—
Now, there’s arrogance, hubris and false pride to be in all of us, to be sure, and many sharp thinkers are no exception (in some cases the bigger the brain (or ego), the bigger the fool). I don’t find foolish and/or earnest conviction in any short supply on this Earth.
To be fair, I don’t think this proves, nor does Scruton even attempt to prove, that the ineffable, therefore, exists (or if the ineffable does exist, as it reveals itself to us, that it requires saying or expression through us, nor through Handel or Bach or post-Kantian German thinking).
Such expression surely offers me consolation, though, for I take refuge in works of art. I am profoundly grateful to walk at evening and listen to a few minutes of music:
I am profoundly grateful that I may share in someone else’s pain, suffering and disconsolation, across centuries, transmuted into an act of beauty and wonder, through a centuries-developed form and method (an orchestra is rather a thing of technical achievement, too, just as is a store-bought guitar or a Korg).
Sure, there’s much epistemological ignorance amongst some in the sciences and, frankly, within all of us.
Come to think of it, I think most of us manage one or a few things well, and mess up at least a few areas of our lives without even trying. It’s also very, very tempting to talk about that which we know very little (this blog, for instance), as though something is known.
This may make me no more than a 2nd or 3rd rate idea man, taking, essentially, more than has been given.
Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village.
This is old song That will not declare itself . . .
Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are Twenty men crossing a bridge Into a village.
That will not declare itself Yet is certain as meaning . . .
The boots of the men clump On the boards of the bridge. The first white wall of the village Rises through fruit-trees. Of what was it I was thinking? So the meaning escapes.
The first white wall of the village . . . The fruit-trees. . . .
Thoughts while you’re walking? marching? with a destination?
Snow falls: years of anger following hours that float idly down — the blizzard drifts its weight deeper and deeper for three days or sixty years, eh? Then the sun! a clutter of yellow and blue flakes — Hairy looking trees stand out in long alleys over a wild solitude. The man turns and there — his solitary track stretched out upon the world.
Via a reader: John Searle on The Philosophy Of Language as part of Bryan Magee’s series:
It’s always a pleasure to observe someone with deep understanding explain a subject clearly.
There’s some interesting discussion on modernism and postmodernism too, or the tendency for the ‘moderns’ to focus on language itself as a problem to be re-examined and possibly solved, or the study of linguistics to be put upon a foundation similar to that of many sciences.
As we’ve seen in the arts, the poem, a novel, the very written words themselves can become subjects which poets, novelists, and writers examine, doubt, and in some cases ‘deconstruct.’
As to that tribe in South America, cited as evidence against Chomsky’s claims of necessary recursion and the existence of a universal grammar, Searle has some things to say in the interview below.
‘But evidence has overtaken Chomsky’s theory, which has been inching toward a slow death for years. It is dying so slowly because, as physicist Max Planck once noted, older scholars tend to hang on to the old ways: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
Sounds of the winter too, Sunshine upon the mountains—many a distant strain From cheery railroad train—from nearer field, barn, house The whispering air—even the mute crops, garner’d apples, corn, Children’s and women’s tones—rhythm of many a farmer and of flail, And old man’s garrulous lips among the rest, Think not we give out yet, Forth from these snowy hairs we keep up yet the lilt.
If the previous puddle-photo goes on the inside-left of our fictional 1993 CD case, this one goes on the back, where the songs are listed.
The band is kind of artsy, reflective, and maybe a little druggy (female vocalist, long-haired bassist and guitarist, fitness-guy drummer). They are making the best damned music on the 1993 Charlotte/Albuquerque/Des Moines scene.
In late October in the park the autumn’s faults begin to show: the houses suddenly go stark beyond a thinning poplar row; the edges of the leaves go brown on every chestnut tree in town.
The honking birds go south again where I have gone in better times; the hardy ones, perhaps, remain to nestle in the snowy pines. I think of one bold, raucous bird whose wintry song I’ve often heard.
I live among so many things that flash and fade, that come and go. One never knows what season brings relief and which will merely show how difficult it is to span a life, given the Fall of Man.
The old ones dawdle on a bench, and young ones drool into their bibs; an idle boffer, quite a mensch, moves fast among the crowd with fibs. A painted lady hangs upon his word as if his sword was drawn.
Among so many falling fast I sometimes wonder why I care; the first, as ever, shall be last; the last are always hard to bear. I never know if I should stay to see what ails the livelong day.
I never quite know how to ask why some men wear bright, silver wings while others, equal to the task, must play the role of underlings. “It’s what you know, not who,” they swore. I should have known what to ignore.
I started early, did my bit for freedom and the right to pray. I leaned a little on my wit, and learned the sort of thing to say, yet here I am, unsatisfied and certain all my elders lied.
A middle man in middle way between the darkness and the dark, the seasons have tremendous sway: I change like chestnuts in the park. Come winter, I’ll be branches, bones; come spring, a wetness over stones.
In June, amid the golden fields, I saw a groundhog lying dead. Dead lay he; my senses shook, And mind outshot our naked frailty. There lowly in the vigorous summer His form began its senseless change, And made my senses waver dim Seeing nature ferocious in him. Inspecting close his maggots’ might And seething cauldron of his being, Half with loathing, half with a strange love, I poked him with an angry stick. The fever arose, became a flame And Vigour circumscribed the skies, Immense energy in the sun, And through my frame a sunless trembling. My stick had done nor good nor harm. Then stood I silent in the day Watching the object, as before; And kept my reverence for knowledge Trying for control, to be still, To quell the passion of the blood; Until I had bent down on my knees Praying for joy in the sight of decay. And so I left; and I returned In Autumn strict of eye, to see The sap gone out of the groundhog, But the bony sodden hulk remained. But the year had lost its meaning, And in intellectual chains I lost both love and loathing, Mured up in the wall of wisdom. Another summer took the fields again Massive and burning, full of life, But when I chanced upon the spot There was only a little hair left, And bones bleaching in the sunlight Beautiful as architecture; I watched them like a geometer, And cut a walking stick from a birch. It has been three years, now. There is no sign of the groundhog. I stood there in the whirling summer, My hand capped a withered heart, And thought of China and of Greece, Of Alexander in his tent; Of Montaigne in his tower, Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.
“I took some tobacco down with me the other day but I found out when I got there communication had been stopped. As I was sitting on the banks, one of the Yankees from the other side called to me to know if I had any tobacco. I told him I had. He said that he had a good knife to trade for it. I told him that trading was prohibited. He said “Your officers won’t see you, come over, I want a chew of tobacco very bad.” I asked some of them who they were going to vote for President. One of them said “Old Abe” but most of them said they were for McLellan.”
They filmed the original ‘Highlander’ movie inside this photo. While not remotely true, this comment might strike you as ‘quirky’ and interesting.
With not-so-great photos, I like to push the crop and zoom feature to its Earthly limits, until the photo ends up in the ‘abstract’ bin.
‘In Pink Study #3, the Photographer’s limited understanding and abilities are bypassed through daft use of a particular tool. Mediocrity is layered upon mediocrity, as your Eye passes briefly over the result.
I like the term ‘citizen scientist,’ as it is flatters me. It keeps me pursuing goals. I’ll be that guy at the party who knows a little something. Let’s converse. Let’s look each other in the eyes for a moment.
I’m currently collecting rocks in local Seattle parks for an AI identification project.
We each have wells down which we can gaze. We know this. A smile is enough. The birds suddenly whirl-up and are gone. The conversation moves on. Tis better to have loved and lost, and all that.
Life is strange. Love is all?
You have a joy you keep close to your heart. Keep it there.
This one gets me: A man goes up to his attic to grab some things before a tornado arrives. He points the phone out, standing in place. Terrified? Mesmerized?
The monster approaches.
His life is engulfed, briefly, by Nature’s fury. His life must be engulfed, afterwards, in loss and despair.
With exponentially more computing power comes more input, and enough variables to recreate and predict actual tornadic conditions.
Step back from the terror; the place where death comes. Climb inside a supercell and see what might be going on. Supercells are rare. EF5 supercells are very, very rare.
Beautiful.
Storm-chasing attracts daredevils. I’ll bet there must be any number of douchebags on the circuit.
It takes courage. Some humility even. More video data and live, human experience can be collected into useful channels.
Better understanding can help save lives.
Sometimes, you take the wrong path, or make the wrong decision. You may not know it at the time, but you come to know it soon enough. An anti-cyclonic vortex bears down, roaring away at 200 mph.
This is it. Fuck. No. Please. Oh God.
No matter how much knowledge and experience you have, one wrong decision can cost you your life:
Keep looking up: Lightning can lead to the edges of our atmosphere, and into space.
What’s the weather like on Mars? Where’s all the water? Does it have conditions which still harbor life?
About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
