As I explained before, my in-laws gifted me a book of "100,000 DRAWING PROMPTS!" Each page has a phrase written in its top-left corner. Pictured here is the 2nd one that I tried. As you can see, it's sort of a sophomore jinx; but I'm keeping my baby & sharing it, because that's the fun of this project: it's impromptu, I don't get to revise or curate. (By the way, my 1st attempt, "Angel's wings," which I think turned out better, is at the top of my Jan 4 entry.)
Dear blog,
I woke up this morn thinking about Socrates and Jesus. Similarities and differences. Athens and . . . where did Jesus work, Nazareth? (Bethlehem Jerusalem Rome Egypt America the desert the wilderness – those are other names of famous places.) But mostly I was thinking about the Sophists and the Pharisees: it’s interesting to me that there were these brands, and that each has been tarnished. I don’t care about the reality or the truth: I only want to focus on my own warped take. So, in MY mind, the Sophists were just a gang of professional teachers; which is to say, something like professors who taught people for money (as opposed to wandering sages who spread wisdom free of charge); that’s why Socrates poked fun at them: Socrates considered it ridiculous, even unethical to make knowledge into a marketable commodity. Then, on the other hand, you have the Pharisees, which, to MY mind (rightly or wrongly), were like run-of-the-mill hypocrites, spiritual bigots, holier-than-thou churchy know-it-alls whose “knowledge” tends to be trivial rather than wise.
Now the funny thing is this (again, I want to underline the glaringly obvious fact that I’m not making a statement about reality but about its childish representation in my mind): ALL the modern day followers of Socrates are Sophists—that is, paid teachers, college professors—just as ALL the modern day followers of Jesus are Pharisees!—that is, deacons, church ministers, theologians at Christian colleges, graduates of seminary school (or whatever it’s called).
That’s the way that time twists your legacy. According to the gossip spread by Bryan (that’s me, Bryan Ray, in case you didn’t know whose blog you were reading), Socrates spent his whole life trying to rouse local sleepwalkers, and his archenemies were the Sophists; then a couple thousand years after his death, no sleepwalkers care: only the Sophists worship him. And same for Jesus: he spends his lifetime pleading with average citizens to love their enemies, forgive their debtors, treat strangers as neighbors, don’t judge but accept others, abandon religion, forget church, ditch doctrine, stop abusing scripture for hairsplitting arguments and instead act according to the generosity of your divine heart. And the archenemies of Jesus’ enlightened views are the prigs who favor religious traditions over people. Then, a mere two millennia later, NOTHING BUT such prigs pay lip service to “Christ.”
So if the rule is that your living advocates will abandon you, and only the heirs of your opponents will embrace you posthumously, then I, who command at present a discipleship of zero, will inherit the entire world after my death.
Sorry about the tirade and all its inaccuracies. I only meant to tell you what I woke up thinking about this morning. What did YOU wake up thinking about? The same thing!? Wow, maybe God’s trying to tell us something.
Today we finally got to experience the great outdoors without dying of killer frost. Until now, it has been two full weeks of sub-freezing weather, which left me confined to this single room. (I live in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.) And I hate using the treadmill for exercise: unless you hire someone to keep swapping out the painting that hangs on the wall in front of your face while you are pacing, the scenery does not change, no matter how fast you go. Whereas if you walk thru the woods—not Cézanne’s landscape but the real woods of nature—there are at least two trees that you can admire, as they pass by, on a sort of infinite loop, signifying progress: the tree of life, and the tree of wisdom (A.K.A. the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). I like to alternate eating the fruits of either; as a fellow instructor at my sweetheart’s school of music used to say: “Water, wine, water, wine; / in the morning, you’ll be fine.” Meaning, if you consume a full glass of water following every glass of wine during an evening get-together, you will avoid having a massive hangover the following day. (This does not work, by the way; the only cure for the pain of reality is a heroin overdose.)
I also started reading the next novel in the multi-volume disclosure of U.S. history by Gore Vidal. None of the other books contained the author’s intro that this volume started with, named simply the same as the series: “Narratives of Empire.” I just got a paperback copy of book 6, Washington, D.C. – I checked it out from the library. (As usual, I had to order the title from afar—it wasn’t at my local branch—because THEY don’t want anyone to read it. By “THEY” I mean, of course, the sinister forces dedicated to maintaining mass ignorance; that is: Our Holy Marketplace.) And, since I have nothing to say in this entry, I might as well give a quote or seventy, because this introductory essay deeply appealed to me.
Actual power he would cede to anyone who allowed him to be a figurehead.
That’s from part 2 of chapter 2, or chapter 2 of part 2, of the novel itself – it’s not from the intro; I had copied it down in the same notebook with the intro-quotes, and didn’t notice that it was out of place until I had already typed it in. Sorry about that. Now the rest of these are definitely from the opening essay:
This first one I found interesting from a general literary standpoint; also I like what Vidal implies about the purpose of marriage:
. . . The popular novel of the last century was, more or less, a sort of religious tract warning against intemperance, disobedience to authority, sexual irregularity and ending, often, with a marriage, an institution guaranteed to control the worker whose young children, hostages to fortune, would oblige him to do work that he did not want to do. No wonder modernism erupted with such force a century ago. Joyce, Mallarmé and Mann, each in his own way, chose not to observe the world from the point of view of a (contented?) victim of society. Modernism chose to illuminate the life of the interior . . .
This idea of modernism diving inward makes me think especially of Beckett—his trilogy: Three Novels.
But I need to check out some books by Mallarmé. I’ve never read anything by him, but I’ve always wanted to: his stuff sounds like it would naturally appeal to me.
& that phrase “victim of society” makes me wonder: How did things get to this point? Society should always be a positive concept. Honoring one’s parents should not be a chore. One’s job should not be a drudgery. Everything about life should be pleasant or sublime. Pain will exist, but at a less extreme level: it will be like a spice that accompanies progress, in the sense of “no pain, no gain”—muscle soreness after a physical workout is tolerable and fair: ALL pain should be like that. Pain should be the necessary ingredient to arrive at the goal of difficult pleasure, nothing more. The discomfort associated with healthy dieting, following a spell of gluttony, is a favorable “pain”; likewise the discomfort of being a wealthy businessperson who is highly taxed. Instead of complaining about the commonweal requiring a fraction of one’s profits, one should go out into one’s country and behold with pride the results of one’s participation: Geniuses flourishing everywhere. Bear in mind that you yourself will benefit from their unprecedented exertions, which were made possible by YOU.
I look forward to the time when the average citizen of a strong and healthy nation will thank the rich “for their service to our country” the way that one currently thanks the members of the armed forces.
I look forward to the time when the notion of a country maintaining an ARMY will sound as absurdly barbaric as the notion of a modern shopper walking thru the mall with a SWORD in her belt. (Didn’t they used to do that, say, in Elizabethan times, or am I mis-remembering this? I picture a person playing a role in a period piece on stage, dressed with a visible scabbard protruding from their sash, or from their obi. Or a rapier or dagger. Lethal metal blade. Personal weaponry. Longsword, broadsword. Hilt, grip, cross-guard, pommel, fuller, locket, chape.)
All I am trying to say is this: Mental prowess renders physical violence superfluous. (Yet, for purposes of research, one opens the encyclopedia, and it is hard to leave off quoting it: “A ricasso is an unsharpened length of blade just above the handle on a bayonet.” “The ricasso normally bears the maker’s mark.” “Many swords have no ricasso.”)
Attempting to clarify why he’s chosen to write in the form that, in a blurb quoted on the cover, Gabriel García Márquez calls “historical novels or novelized histories,” near the beginning of the intro Vidal writes:
I have always thought that history (after pure invention – Gulliver’s Travels or Alice in Wonderland) is the only form of narrative that has universal appeal . . .
I like this for the simple reason that he acknowledges the primacy of “pure invention.” Altho I marvel at Vidal’s accomplishment in his “Empire” series, pure invention will always be my home.
*
NOTE. There’s a few more paragraphs that I want to copy, because they seem spot-on; but there’s nothing that I want to remark about them, other than that I side with their perspective; so I’ll just pile them all in a great heap, here at the end – that way, for the reader who has no interest in this, it’ll be easy to ignore. The last quote below is actually also the ending of Vidal’s essay – if I didn’t admit that, I’d feel guilty for stealing not only his words but the very ordering of his paragraphs. (By the way, how sad is it to realize that Vidal wrote this stuff more than twenty years ago… WHY is nothing abhorrent ever amended!?)
Part of the not-so-endearing folklore of my native land is that we have no class system; this means that any mention of it by a novelist will provoke deep, often quite irrational, anger. After all, our teachers are paid to teach that we are a true democracy (not a republic and certainly not an oligarchy) and our meritocracy is easy to break into if you will only take your academic studies seriously.
[ . . . ]
When the decision was made by Bismarck to educate the lowest order so that it would be able to handle complex machinery and weapons, intellectuals knew that there was risk involved. If they could read, might they not get ideas? Wrong ideas? The argument about education went on for a generation or two and involved everyone from Mill to the Reverend Malthus. Meanwhile they did learn to read. But what should they read? What actually went on inside the palace was out of bounds and there were to be no Cabinet meetings, ever; on the other hand, sunsets were nice, and so the good and the beautiful and the true became the Serious Novel as we know it – cautionary tales designed to keep the lowest order in its place as docile workers and enthusiastic consumers.
[ . . . ]
I suspect that I was drawn to the idea of my own country as a subject by those schoolteachers who are paid to give us a comforting view of a society that, after eliminating the original population of the continent, lived more or less happily with slavery while imposing an often demented monotheism on one another as well as on the other breeds that came under its restless rule.
[ . . . ]
Personally I prefer a flawed republic to the murderous empire that began in 1898 and is now, as I write, firmly established as a militarized economy and society with no end in view. But here I am not a judge so much as an enthralled narrator of a family and of a country whose curious mystique has always haunted me, so much so that I call this series of novels Narratives of Empire, now summed up in a seventh and final volume, The Golden Age, a title not entirely ironic since we always kept thinking that it might come to be all gold until, thanks to Vietnam, we realized that, like everyone else ever born, we are simply at sea in history and that somehow our republic got mislaid along the way to an unloved empire, soon to be running down as such entities always do.
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