Dear diary,
I am amused by fragmentary things. Because they are disconnected, they seem to open out into infinity. Once sense is made, the thought is closed, and it no longer lives. I like poetry because it allows thoughts to breathe. The best poetry is fragmentary. When you chop a sentence in half, potential bleeds out. The sublime is beyond us.
That’s all I have to say, for today. I’m totally healthy and well, but I don’t feel good. Does that ever happen to you? You know that you’re in tiptop shape, because you stick out your tongue and it’s bright pink thus proving that your physical condition is robust enough to survive ingesting hemlock: you could even pin down a lion, if forced to wrestle one in the Flavian Amphitheatre. But you feel like a pipsqueak.
By the way, why did we ever stop christening our babies with fine names like Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian? I’m not saying that I approve what the actual, historical personages who are best known for wearing these words did with their lives – I’m merely suggesting that, if we’re going to continue creating new human flesh, we should title it with good-strange designations and allow it to have a stake in such words’ identity, so that when someone mentions them, for instance, it would be wholly reasonable to inquire: which Suetonius?
*
I’m not one of those people who puts post-it notes with inspiring quotations all over the office, but there are a couple sayings that I look at almost every day, and this is one of them – the words are Marcel Duchamp’s:
Society takes what it wants. The artist himself does not count, because there is no actual existence for the work of art. The work of art is always based on the two poles of the onlooker and the maker, and the spark that comes from the bipolar action gives birth to something – like electricity. But the onlooker has the last word, and it is always posterity that makes the masterpiece. The artist should not concern himself with this, because it has nothing to do with him.
Another quote-heavy entry lacking in purpose? Fine, I’ll make this another purposeless, quote-heavy entry. The passage below is a good example of a style of “reasoning” that I find maddeningly humorous – it is just one among many possible examples from Plato’s dialogues; I happen to have been reading the one called Phaedo recently, so I copied it down. I would note the speaker, but, to tell the truth, I am lost at this point in the text. Phaedo is technically narrating everything to Echecrates, but some platonic expert out there will have to set me straight whether this part is supposed to be Phaedo reporting Socrates through Plato, or Plato recording Phaedo speaking for himself, or Simmias addressing the group, or someone else. All I know is that it can’t be Cebes, since Cebes answers as an auditor at the end. Unless Plato is having Cebes speak to himself. In fact, since my attribution is bound to be wrong, I might as well be outrageously wrong and say that it is Cebes addressing himself in earnest.
‘I am saying all this because I’d like you to share my own point of view. It seems to me not only that tallness itself absolutely declines to be short as well as tall, but also that the tallness “in” us never admits smallness and declines to be surpassed. It does one of two things: either it gives way and withdraws as its opposite shortness approaches, or it has already ceased to exist by the time that the other arrives. It cannot stand its ground and receive the quality of shortness in the same way as I myself have done. If it did, it would become very different from what it was before, whereas I have not lost my identity by acquiring the quality of shortness; I am the same man, only short; but my tallness could not endure to be short instead of tall. In the same way the shortness that is “in” us declines ever to become or be tall; nor will any other quality, while still remaining what it was, at the same time become or be the opposite quality; in such a situation it either withdraws or ceases to exist.’
‘I agree with you entirely,’ said Cebes.
Also I thought you might want to know that the argument to book three of John Milton's Paradise Lost begins like this:
God sitting on his Throne sees Satan flying towards this world...
And this brings to mind a couplet that my sweetheart and I recently encountered in the manuscript poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson:
For Lucifer, that old athlete
Tho’ flung from Heaven falls on his feet
P.S.
I didn’t really want to write a blog post today, is this obvious? I just wanted an excuse to share my new-old rap song here in the postscript. I call it “new-old” because I performed it more than a decade ago but only uploaded it onto the internet last night.
2 comments:
Your first paragraph is something I always have in mind when I write. I tell myself, it's easier to make sense than poetry. I also say, giving the reader the answer is at the same time denying your work a second glance. But then quite often I don't listen to that little voice and write something too too mortal. Oh, well. Better than nothing, I suppose. Thanks for the quotes! You've mentioned Duchamp many times and I love that quote. When I get through my ceiling-high stack of books, he's high on my list.
Yeah it's about potential versus necessity, I think. It's nice that we're on the same page! Sublimity over craftsmanship. It's always worth RE-quoting the divine Blake:
Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.
And just a wink re: Duchamp. He's a hero for me, and I mention him a lot; but, like Nietzsche, Duchamp left much misunderstanding in his wake: at first, I loathed Duchamp, because I bought into the hype about him. What won me over was reading Calvin Tomkins' Duchamp: A Biography. For me, it's become like a modern gospel; by which I mean that the writers who recorded the sayings and acts of Jesus HAD DESIGNS UPON THEIR READERSHIP; and I think that Tomkins desires to convince us of M.D.'s genius in a similar way – I welcome this: my problem is not with propaganda but only with poorly written propaganda! Seriously tho, Duchamp never fails to amaze me with his intuitions about artistry.
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