walgie

[walgie]

In his Berlin lectures on fine art, Hegel argued that art involves a unique form of aesthetic intelligibility—the expression of a distinct collective self-understanding that develops through historical time.

[walgie]

Zadie Smith in Conversation with Madeleine Thien

Perhaps this idea is not original to Nietzsche? Anyway, I thought of his aphorism when I heard Zadie Smith last night. She talked about hearing a beautiful song (I think) and the experience of enjoying it.

Then the disappointment of finding out that someone had written a 2,000 word essay about it.

Her point was that the appropriate reaction to the beautiful thing was to just appreciate it and let it be.

Bloom uses a dubious translation

That for which we find words is already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.

Götzen-Dämmerung (1889) "Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemässen", No. 26

Wofür wir Worte haben, darüber sind wir auch schon hinaus. In allem Reden liegt ein Gran Verachtung.

[walgie]

Est deus in nobis

El Caballero de la Triste Figura quotes this (here) from Ovid but apparently Ovid used it twice.

est deus in nobis, agitante calescimus illo; impetus hic sacrae semina mentis habet

Fasti VI (link)

and

Est deus in nobis, et sunt commercia caeli: Sedibus aetheriis spiritus ille venit.

Ars amatoria III (link)

[walgie]

Nikki Giovanni, The Collected Poetry, 1968-1998

[walgie]

Whigs and Tories

In 1670 Charles II committed one of the most treasonous acts ever devised by an English monarch... Signing the secret Treaty of Dover in May 1670, he accepted a huge subsidy from Louis on the promise of converting to Catholicism himself and then persuading his people to follow suit. In the event of resistance, French troops would come to his aid. Yet he pulled back. ... By 1672 Charles was passing anti-Catholic legislation to appease Parliament, so excluding his own heir and brother from public office ... James’s opponents began to congregate around an alternative candidate. James Scott, Duke of Monmouth, was the offspring of an affair Charles had had in the 1650s with a woman called Lucy Walters. .., Monmouth was a Protestant. Support for him saw the birth of party politics, at least in the matter of names. Monmouth’s backers were nicknamed ‘Whigs’, an insulting abbreviation of a 1640s word for Scots horse rustlers. More threatening was the name given to followers of Uncle James: toraighe, Irish brigands it was more convenient to call ‘Tories’.

Roberts, Restoration Plays and Players 2014

[walgie]

Seven years

On the train from Jasper to P.G., reading Abelard’s Consolatoria in English translation, I came across this

I live in a barbarous country, the language of which I do not understand.

(source)

The following is taken from not the exact same text, but close:

Terra quippe barbara et terre lingua mihi incognita erat

(source)

I recognized something that I had seen before. The precise wording escaped me, and I spent some time vainly searching Google for the fragments that I could remember.

Finally, in bed, it came back to me:

Barbarus hic ego sum, qui non intellegor ulli,

see https://kai-kebero.tumblr.com/

Seven years ago, I didn’t give references, so now here is a discussion of that line and here is a version of the text.

[walgie]

A sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

[walgie]

Stanley A. Milner Library

My flight arrives a Sunday morning, and by the afternoon, I manage to reach the lobby of the library. A kind, chatty librarian proudly shows off The Wall. she much prefers the serenity of the coral reef which is playing on The Wall today (tomorrow will not be so tranquil). She suggests the audio tour, and she emails me a link to the files on the website. Sounds like a great idea, but I left my earphones at the hotel. I will go back and get them.

I don’t make it back to the library until the next day. I am dreadfully hung over from meeting up with Janine for Sunday tea (by which I mean beer and appys) and then with drinks Mark after the Zoom meeting (it became clear later that he was passing the time before he paid a booty call to his much younger girlfriend).

Anyways, the audio tour is disappointing. Facts and statistics without context, and a list of the spaces and their intended uses, but nothing insightful about the  architecture and interior design.

The architecture reminds me of the Surrey Central library - airy.

There is a movie studio and music studios - reminds me of the renovations of the VPL central branch.

I am drooling over the 3D printers in the Makerspace (currently in use) and the Alienware rigs in the Gamerspace (currently closed).

I am sure that books and magazines - printed reading material - account for a fraction of the space and of the capital budget. I’m certain that the notion of a ‘library’ resonates emotionally with taxpayers and parents. Any politician who  tries to cut funding to something that goes by the name ‘library’ would be pilloried in the media. And parents who worry about what their kids are doing are soothed by the name ‘library’. But this is not primarily a ‘library’, in the sense of ‘a place for books’. Perhaps we should  rather call this a community centre, for playing video games, surfing the web, make music recordings, use power tools.

[walgie]

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips, 1920) Freud reformulated his two classes of instincts and opposed the one, Eros or the Life Instinct, with the destructive or Death Instinct. The aim of the Death Instinct was to get rid of life through the running down of the organism, and therefore of the tensions within it. This "dominating tendency of mental life"—"to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tensions due to stimuli"—was called the "Nirvana principle," a term suggested by Barbara Low and here adopted by Freud.

https://nosubject.com/Nirvana#:~:text=This%20%22dominating%20tendency%20of%20mental,and%20here%20adopted%20by%20Freud.

[walgie]

même un artichaut a du coeur

Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain

[walgie]

Pleasure past and anguish past, Is it death or is it life? Life out of death.

Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market. See https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market

[walgie]

The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense.

Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2005). See https://samharris.org/response-to-controversy/

[walgie]

Louis

Ludovicus (Latin)

Origin & history

Medieval Latin. Latinzation of Old High German *Hlūtwīg‎ or Frankish *Hlōdowig‎, from Proto-Germanic *Hlūdawīgą‎,

The first element is

(h)lūt

("famed; loud") (whence modern German laut ),

from Proto-Germanic hlūda(z)‎ , hlūþa(z) (whence also English loud),

from Proto-Indo-European *ḱlew-‎ ("to hear").

The second element is Old High German

wīg

("battle, strife"), from Proto-Germanic *wīgaz‎, *wīgą

Proper noun

Lūdovīcus (masc.) (genitive Lūdovīcī )

(Medieval Latin) A male given name cognate to Louis.

[walgie]

L'homme a mangé la terre (2019)

See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10262268/

I watched this on Kanopy, where is goes by the much more anodyne title “Breakpoint: A Counter History of Progress”.

Memorable scenes

The story of how, during the depression in the 1930s, General Motors conspired to put electric streetcar companies out of business, to build the market for its gasoline engine buses. I have heard this story somewhere else - and it feels like it was within the past two years, but I can’t remember precisely when or where.

The film claims that Oppenheimer resisted plans to try the atomic bomb on an uninhabited area of Japan, because he wanted to learn of the deadly effects.

President Carter’s speech in 1979 - why have I never known about this before? See articles at The Conversation and NPR:

too many of us now worship self-indulgence and consumption... Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns... owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

[walgie]

Bearing Witness (2005)

See https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0430217/

Eventbrite suggested an event to me: Re-Screen of "Bearing Witness" Documentary and Panel 

A documentary on female journalists working in combat zones featuring Marie Colvin.

Followed by a panel with Cathleen Colvin, Marijana Wotton (director/producer), Mary Rogers (CNN Camerawoman), and Janine di Giovanni (Senior Foreign Correspondent for The Times of London at the time of filming). 

Bearing Witness highlights five intrepid women journalists and their yearlong experiences in Iraq beginning in April 2003. The five journalists are veterans of numerous global trouble spots, and their commitment resembles more a calling than a job. At a time when journalists are as likely to be targeted as protected and news is increasingly diluted, these women’s dedication to reporting the horrors of war from the front lines is a validation of the Fourth Estate.

So, at eight o’clock AM on a rainy Sunday morning in January, I was sitting on the floor watching it on the iPad.

Memorable scenes

Colvin’s comment on the suicide of her second husband Juan Carlos, at age 52 yrs.

it was a very Juan Carlos thing to do... he didn’t want to start over again

Panel discussion - Cathleen Colvin asks Mary Rogers how she balances her personal life. Her reply:

I don’t have a personal life

Not how I would have chosen to spend a Sunday morning, but actually worthwhile. And now I would like to watch A Private War

[walgie]

Relearned: ET IN ARCADIA EGO

Panofsky, Erwin. “Et in Arcadia Ego: On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau” (1936)

I learned this saying from Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, sometime during my college days 1990-1994. I’m not sure where I learned the interpretation. I have a vague recollection, connected to an essay (perhaps a foreword in the edition I was reading?) about Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment (his first name is Arkady). The interpretation was that this phrase would be used to assert having lived an idyllic life: I [the speaker] too have been in Arcadia.

Note: zero copula, copula deletion - the sentence does not contain a verb. So we assume some form of “to be”. Typically we would assume present tense, but this interpretation assumes a past tense.

Note: this interpretation reads “ET” to modify “EGO”. But this seems unlikely, since they are at opposite ends of the sentence.

Panofsky offers an explanation of this interpretation of these words:

They conjure up the retrospective vision of an unsurpassable happiness, enjoyed in the past, unattainable ever after, yet enduringly alive in the memory: a bygone happiness ended by death

Panofsky’s thesis is that the only grammatically correct interpretation is for the speaker to be Death, claiming to cast his shadow over Paradise (Arcadia)

Even in Arcadia, I am there

He starts by tracing the concept of Arcadia as a place of bliss to Virgil’s Ecologues:

It was, then, in the imagination of Virgil, and of Virgil alone, that the concept of Arcady, as we know it, was born - that a bleak and chilly district of Greece came to be transfigured into an imaginary realm of perfect bliss.

In part II, Panofsky continues

In the Renaissance, however, Virgil’s - not Ovid’s and Polybius’ - Arcady emerged from the past like an enchanting vision. Only, for the modern mind, this Arcady was no so much a Utopia of bliss and beauty distant in space, as a Utopia of bliss and beauty distant in time. Like the whole classical sphere, of which it had become an integral part, Arcady became an object of that nostalgia which distinguishes the real Renaissance...it developed into a haven, not only from a faulty reality but also... from a questionable present

In part III

Giovanni Francesco Guercino... produced the first pictorial rendering of the Death in Arcady theme; and it is in this picture, painted a Rome between 1621 and 1623... that we first encounter the phrase Et in Arcadia ego

In Part IV, Panofsky discusses Poussin’s two paintings of the Et in Arcadia ego theme. The second version (1637-1638) is now in the Louvre.

... we can observe a radical break with the medieval, moralizing tradition...Here, then, we have a basic change in interpretation. The Arcadians are not so much warned of an implacable future as they are immersed in mellow meditation on a beautiful past. They seem to think less of themselves than of the human being buried in the tomb - a human being that once enjoyed the pleasures which they now enjoy... In short, Poussin’s Louvre picture no longer shows a dramatic encounter with Death, but a contemplative absorption in the idea of mortality. We are confronted with a change from thinly veiled moralism to undisguised elegaic sentiment.

This general change in content... is consistent with the more relaxed and less fearful spirit of a period that had triumphantly emerged from the spasms of the Counter-Reformation.

“I, too, lived in Arcady... I, too, enjoyed the pleasures which you now enjoy...”

He calls this the ‘elegaic interpretation’.

[walgie]

We’ve decided to go because England seems characterised – not unlike the 1930s – by an impassioned anti-intellectualism that seeks simple answers and negates context and complexity.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/sep/08/higher-education-in-the-uk-is-morally-bankrupt-im-taking-my-family-and-my-research-millions-and-im-off