Without Lifting A Finger

[From Samuel Beckett's Hidden Drives: Structural Uses of Depth Psychology by J. D. O'Hara]

From Molloy : I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. * Arnold Geulincx (31 January 1624 – November 1669) was a Flemish philosopher . He was one of the followers of René Descartes who tried to work out more detailed versions of a generally Cartesian philosophy. Samuel Beckett cited Geulincx as a key influence and interlocutor because of Geulincx's emphasis on the powerlessness and ignorance of the human condition. [ 1 ] He is cited by Samuel Beckett , whose character Murphy remembers the "beautiful Belgo-Latin of Arnold Geulincx", and in particular the gloomy nostrum (frequently repeated by Beckett to inquisitive critics) Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (roughly, 'Where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing.') In the novel Molloy (1950), Beckett's eponymous character describes himself as "I who had loved the image of o...

you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins To restore silence is the role of objects and the arctic radiance comes pissing on our midnights I took a pebble from my pocket and sucked it. It was smooth, from having been sucked so long, by me, and beaten by the storm and soon through that mist too which rises in me every day and veils the world from me and veils me from myself Yes, even then, when already all was fading, waves and particles, there could be no things but nameless things, no names but thingless names Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong Watch wound and buried by the watchmaker, before he died, whose ruined works will one day speak of God, to the worms

I enjoyed Daudet much more than I thought I would. His forays into Algeria--and away from his windmill--even got me thinking about Morocco, Bowles, and The Sheltering Sky . Though I read his "Windmill" with "uneven interest," as a whole I found the text simple (in a good way) and simply wonderful. * Still working on Herbert's collected prose. * With some intrepidation (what can I say: Beckett is intense and demands your complete attention) I started re-reading Beckett's trilogy (via Kindle): Molloy, Mallone Dies, and The Unnamable .   

The Sheltering Sky , a photo by Rainer ❏ on Flickr.

A couple interesting excerpts I've cut from the book "Conversations with Paul Bowles," edited by Gena Dagel Caponi: ***

Though the ardor has lessened (last book I read was Unwelcome Words --a little gem I picked up in a Santa Barbara used bookstore a few years back), I still like Paul Bowles. Certainly--once upon a time--I liked him for where he could take me (a big reason I finally went to Morocco was Bowles) more than style. Anyway, I've had "The Sheltering Sky" staring at me from the bookcase for some while. I've still not re-read it (keep staring and I might yield) but last night I chose ($2.99 via Fios) to revisit Bertolucci's cinematic version (did roughly 100 of the 138 minutes; will finish it tonight). A few things: 1.) Bertolucci was making love to the desert. 2.) I liked Debra Winger more than I remembered; and I believe this was the first role I ever saw Peter Pettigrew in (he's better here). 3.) I'd forgotten how many times Bowles himself appears (I only remembered the bit--must be near the end because I've not gotten there yet--about full moons). ...

[From "The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century" by G R Hibbard (1956), Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes ]

Andrew Marvell (31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678) was an English metaphysical poet , Parliamentarian , and the son of a Church of England clergyman (also named Andrew Marvell). As a metaphysical poet, he is associated with John Donne and George Herbert . He was a colleague and friend of John Milton . Marvell was born in Winestead-in-Holderness , East Riding of Yorkshire , near the city of Kingston upon Hull . The family moved to Hull when his father was appointed Lecturer at Holy Trinity Church there, and Marvell was educated at Hull Grammar School . A secondary school in the city is now named after him. His most famous poems include To His Coy Mistress , The Garden , An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell 's Return from Ireland , The Mower's Song and the country house poem Upon Appleton House . [From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marvell ] * Andrew Marvell (1621 - 1678) [From Wikimedia Commons]

Stumbled on this poem researching something else. Wonderful. Apparently echoes of it are in both Eliot's "Prufrock" and The Waste Land . I've done Donne (and occasionally return); but, I confess, I've imbibed very little of Marvell (will try to remedy this sin in the near future). * To His Coy Mistress By Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime. We would sit down and think which way To walk, and pass our long love's day; Thou by the Indian Ganges' side Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the Flood; And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires, and more slow. An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze; Two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; An age at least to every part, And...

Jaroslav Róna: Dítě z Marsu , a photo by Pitel on Flickr. This one seems to be many places at once. Curious little creature.

Jaroslav Róna: Muž s rybou , a photo by Pitel on Flickr. Not sure where this one is located. Presumably somewhere in the Czech Republic.

Parable with a Skull , a photo by mrs tulis on Flickr. Couldn't pass this fantastic photo up. Cool, huh.

Kafka Memorial , a photo by jonnybcivics on Flickr. Another famous Rona (I've shot it and included it in my blog--long long ago). Again: not my photo, not my angle. I like the lighting too.

Parable with Skull - Sculpture by Jaroslaw Rona - Prague Castle - Prague, Czech Republic , a photo by Adam Jones, Ph.D. on Flickr. Another angle: not mine. I've probably seen only a fraction of Rona's work, but everything I've seen I love.

Frederic Mistral (1830-1914) won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1904. He wrote in the language of Oc  [French: Langue d'oc ]. Apparently he and Daudet were good friends. From Daudet's story telling of a visit to Mistral in the small village of Maillane ("The Poet, Frederic Mistral"): Ah, the brave poet. Montaigne must have had someone like Mistral in mind when he wrote, Think of those, who, when asked what is the point of spending so much time and trouble on a work of art that can only be seen by a few people, replied, "A few is enough. One is enough. None is enough." * Frederic Mistral [From Wikimedia Commons]

Not as excited about his mythological essays as the others--but still plenty of good bits. Here's one: the beginning of the essay titled "Triptolemos": Here is a myth for those weary of the world's cruelty (the thoughtless cruelty of humans and the calculated cruelty of gods), a myth flat as a plain, a soothing myth, which is why narrators thirsty for blood and intrigue tend to avoid it.

Isn't that notch in the middle Two Harbors, Catalina? Isn't that the famous Ruby's (end of the pier in Huntington Beach)?

I Would Like to Describe I would like to describe the simplest emotion joy or sadness but not as others do reaching for shafts of rain or sun I would like to describe a light which is being born in me but I know it does not resemble any star for it is not so bright not so pure and is uncertain I would like to describe courage without dragging behind me a dusty lion and also anxiety without shaking a glass full of water to put it another way I would give all metaphors in return for one word drawn out of my breast like a rib for one word contained within the boundaries of my skin but apparently this is not possible and just to say–I love I run around like mad picking up handfuls of birds and my tenderness which after all is not made of water asks the water for a face and anger different from fire borrows from it a loquacious tongue so is blurred so is blurred in me what white-haired gentlemen separated once and for all and said this is the s...

The apocryphal letter--from Vermeer to Leeuwenhoek (commonly considered to be the first microbiologist)--is posited in Herbert's essay "Letter." It is largely meant to address the differences between Art and Science. Here is an excerpt:     I am afraid that you and others like you are setting out on a dangerous journey that might bring humanity not only advantages but also great, irreparable harm. Haven't you noticed that the more the means and tools of observation are perfected, the more distant and elusive become the goals? With each new discovery a new abyss opens. We are more and more lonely in the mysterious void of the universe.

Death of Seneca by Peter Paul Rubens , a photo by New Visions2010 on Flickr. This painting is mentioned by Herbert in his essay "Spinoza's Bed": It is an amazing thing that our memory best retains images of great philosophers when their lives were coming to an end. Socrates raising the chalice with hemlock to his mouth, Seneca whose veins were opened by a slave (there is a painting of this by Rubens), Descartes roaming cold palace rooms with a foreboding that his role of teacher of the Swedish queen would be his last, old Kant smelling a grated horse-radish before his daily walk (the cane preceding him, sinking deeper and deeper into the sand), Spinoza consumed by tuberculosis and patiently polishing lenses, so weak he is unable to finish his Treatise on the Rainbow. . . A gallery of noble moribunds, pale masks, plaster casts.

Perhaps one of my favorite novels. This is just an early excerpt from the frenetic beginning of Chapter 1: [Translation by Eric Mosbacher]

Witold Gombrowicz , a photo by xmattxyzx on Flickr.

Herbert reminiscing about his love for art (and his attempts to write about it) and Witold Gombrowicz in "Still Life": There were no longer stained-glass windows or columns, vaults or stone floors; only the skin of the architecture remained, as if hanging in the air. Inside the nave, fat pagan grass.     I remember this image better than the face of my interlocutor, Witold Gombrowicz, who was mocking my fondness for art. I did not even defend myself but only mumbled some nonsense, aware that I was only an object, a gymnast's bar upon which the writer was exercising his dialectical muscles. If I were an innocent stamp collector Gombrowicz would have made fun of my albums, classifiers, and sets of stamps; he would have proved that stamps are the lowest rungs of the ladder of existence, morally suspect.     "But it has absolutely no sense. How can one describe a cathedral, a sculpture, or some sort of painting," he asked me, quietly and pitilessl...

From Herbert's essay:    Here is an inventory of the objects represented in the painting: on the right side a potbellied pitcher of burnt clay in a warm, saturated brown;  in the middle a massive glass goblet, called a roemer , half-filled with liquid; and on the left side a silver-gray pewter pitcher with a lid and spout. In addition two porcelain pipes, a piece of paper with music, and a text on the shelf where the utensils were standing. At the top, metal objects I could not at first identify.    The background was the most fascinating of all: black, deep as a precipice and at the same time flat as a mirror, palpable and disappearing in perspectives of infinity. A transparent cover over the abyss. * [From Wikigallery.org] 

Herbert's title essay, "Still Life With A Bridle," starts with a nod to the Polish artist/author Jozef Czapski: For Jozef Czapski , and a quote from Arthur Rimbaud: Car je est un autre (For I is another). A brief footnote says it is from a letter to Paul Demeny, May 15, 1871. It does not give the context. Luckily I have Rimbaud's "Selected Letters," and fortunately this one made the cut (I give below only the paragraph which this declaration begins; I give only Wallace Fowlie's translation):     For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it is not its fault. This is obvious to me: I am present at this birth of my thought: I watch it and listen to it: I draw a stroke of the bow: the symphony makes its stir in the depths, or comes on to the stage in a leap. * Initially my eyes jumped to the fragment of a letter just before this one (written to Georges Izambard, May 13, 1871), because a very similar phrase was there (minus the car = ...

Gerard ter Borch (II) - Procession of flagellants - c. 1638 * From Herbert's essay: The "Procession of Flagellants" from the Rotterdam Museum Boymans van Beuningen I took without hesitation to be an error of an absentminded curator who hung a Spaniard among the Dutch. The "Procession" is a scene of violent, sharp contrasts of chiaroscuro. The atmosphere of menace and mysteriousness oscillates between a rending shout and deadly silence. Light falls from the lit torches, creating puddles of brightness amid thick, almost fleshlike darkness. On the left, something like an altar or a tribune. In the center, three exorcists in white frocks and white conical hoods recall predatory animals in an atlas of nightmarish hallucinations. We also see a man tied to a fence or wall with stretched-out arms, bare to his waist, on whom a storm of whiplashes will fall in a moment.  

The "Fatherly Admonition" in Berlin's Dahlem Museum is my favorite Terborch, one might say the fullest Terborch at the peak of his painterly potentiality: the enclosed fragment of an elegant room (its box conception of space brings to mind the dramas of Ibsen and nineteenth century naturalists). Against deep browns the screen of a bed with a baldachin and a curtain falling perpendicularly like a backdrop with a matte red shade. The same color, only gradually more intensive and saturated with light, is repeated in the coverlet on the table and upholstery of a chair. Three persons are in the room. . . . "Fatherly (Paternal) Admonition" By Gerard Terborch [From Wikigallery.org] 

KAFKA*Prjct, Mohawk Juggernaut , a photo by KAFKA*Prjct ® [Owes Packs Stay Posted!] on Flickr. Saw one of these on the 405 this week (not the Juggernaut but the simpler KAFKA*). Sure it's KAFKA but i wasn't sure what it was. I'm closer to knowing now. Not sure the master ( il miglior fabbro ) would approve.

It should be honestly confessed we have a strange liking for presenting follies in the sanctuaries of reason, and we also like to study catastrophes against a gentle landscape. There are reasons more important than frivolous personal or aesthetic inclinations, however. For doesn't the affair we have described remind us of other, more dangerous follies of humanity that consist in the irrational attachment to a single idea, a single symbol, or a single formula for happiness?    This is why we cannot put a large period after the date 1637 and consider the matter definitively closed. It is not reasonable to erase it from memory, or count it among the inconceivable fads of the past. If tulipomania was a kind of psychological epidemic, and this is what we believe, the probability exists--bordering on certainty--that one day it will afflict us again in this or another form.    In some Far Eastern port it is getting ready for the journey.

  Henry Pot, a painter of collective portraits, religious and genre pictures, represented the mania afflicting his country under a veil of transparent allegory in his work "The Cart of Madmen." On this cart we recognize Flora holding in her hand three of the most precious varieties of tulip: "Semper Augustus," "General Bol," and "Admiral Hoorn." Behind the patron of nature there are five symbolic figures: Good-for-Nothing, Wealth-Craver, the Drunkard, and two ladies, Vain Hope and Poverty. A huge crowd of people runs after the cart calling,"We too want to sell our tulips." [From Wikimedia Commons]

Have been reading Daudet's Letters from My Windmill (Lettres de mon moulin) , intermittently, between bigger bites of Herbert's prose, ever since I discovered him in Flaubert's Parrot and downloaded his Mill from Project Gutenberg. IMHO "Monsieur Seguin's Last Kid Goat" has an interesting beginning:    To Pierre Gringoire, lyrical poet, Paris.        You'll never get anywhere, Gringoire!    I can't believe it! A good newspaper in Paris offers you a job as a critic and you have the brass neck to turn it down. Look at yourself, old friend. Look at the holes in your doublet, your worn-out stockings, and your pinched face which betrays your hunger. Look where your passion for poetry has got you! See how much you have been valued for your ten years writing for the gods. What price pride, after all?    Take the job, you idiot, become a critic! You'll get money, you'll have your reserved table in Brebant's, you will be ...

banksy , a photo by mr. eightyse7en on Flickr.

Of course until now I didn't even know who Banksy was. And now I've learned two new names: Banksy and Andrzej Sobiepan. Scroll down and watch the video (the "hang job" is done to the Pink Panther Theme): http://www.artshub.com.au/au/news-article/news/arts/polish-art-student-stunt-inspired-by-banksy-187009

We were there for three nights (a short walk to the lake). Stayed on the California side (South Lake Tahoe) but occasionally crossed the line (casinos hold little allure for us). Though the town wasn't holiday white (we took the gondola up to Heavenly and saw a little snow), it was still beautiful and, for the most part, we had a great time.

Gothic architecture is a style of architecture that flourished during the high and late medieval period . It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture . Originating in 12th century France and lasting into the 16th century, Gothic architecture was known during the period as "the French Style," ( Opus Francigenum ), with the term Gothic first appearing during the latter part of the Renaissance . Its characteristic features include the pointed arch , the ribbed vault and the flying buttress . [From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_architecture#The_term_.22Gothic.22 ]

Paris suburbs : The Basilica of Saint-Denis - 1/3 - EXPLORE , a photo by Pantchoa on Flickr. From Herbert: This was the first use of ogive and cross-ribbed vaulting, which for some scholars is the essence of the Gothic style. *** Abbot Suger Abbot Suger , friend and confidante of the French Kings, Louis VI and Louis VII , decided in about 1137, to rebuild the great Church of Saint-Denis , attached to an abbey which was also a royal residence. Suger began with the West front , reconstructing the original Carolingian façade with its single door. He designed the façade of Saint-Denis to be an echo of the Roman Arch of Constantine with its three-part division and three large portals to ease the problem of congestion. The rose window is the earliest-known example above the West portal in France. At the completion of the west front in 1140, Abbot Suger moved on to the reconstruction of the eastern end, leaving the Carolingian nave in use. He designed a choir (chancel) that wo...

Piero della Francesca, The Flagellation of Christ, c. 1455-1460 , a photo by alexcianci on Flickr.

From Herbert's essay "Piero Della Francesca": Friends say: Well, so you were there and saw a lot; you liked Duccio, and the Dorian columns, and the stained glass at Chartes, and the Lascaux bulls--but tell us what you chose for yourself, who is the painter closest to your heart, the one you'd never give up for any other. A reasonable question since love, if true, should destroy the previous one, should enter, overwhelm your whole being, and demand exclusiveness. So I pause to think and reply: Piero della Francesca. There is a finality in the leaves cast like cards upon the sky--a moment transformed into eternity. --here the Renaissance master makes a direct reference to the tradition of Giotto. The figures of two monks in a desert landscape on cracked earth brushed with ashes, with a Byzantine bird overhead--Christ. The time of day is as in other works by Piero: indeterminate, a pink-blue dawn or perhaps noon. In their journey through the ages, the fresco's ...

Duccio 02 , a photo by alaindevisme on Flickr. Still reading (re-reading) essays by Zbigniew Herbert. Duccio really was, the mysterious painter whose date of birth is uncertain and of whom little is known other than that he died famous and in debt. His magnum opus, the Maesta, is just being renovated. I stand as if before golden stained glass in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, facing a panel of thirty-six small paintings that constitute the Maesta in verso . The room is small and dark, yet it contains a source of light. The radiance of the work is so extraordinary that even in a cellar it would shine like a star.

Siena Palio 0908_2801 , a photo by Boursot | Servais on Flickr.