READIN

Friday, March 26th, 2010

🦋 I thought we would be together forever.

And that's when I first learned about the Vortex. They had chained themselves here on purpose, in order to preach about the Vortex. It was a world in the Pacific Ocean where a hundred million tons of us had gathered... They said there was no Maker; they said we were the Maker. They said in the Vortex, we were free. It was Paradise.

In Ramin Bahrani's magnificent documentary Plastic Bag, Werner Herzog appears in what is perhaps his first non-bio-degradable role, as a discarded plastic bag longing for the nirvana of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Plastic Bag is one in a series of 11 short speculative films from the first season of FUTURESTATES -- you can watch the others at their web site.

posted evening of March 26th, 2010: 2 responses
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Thursday, March 25th, 2010

🦋 Forms of address

There is a tricky bit of translation at the beginning of Woyzeck:

HAUPTMANN: Langsam, Woyzeck, langsam; eins nach dem andern! Er macht mir ganz schwindlig. Was soll ich dann mit den 10 Minuten anfangen, die Er heut zu früh fertig wird? Woyzeck, bedenk Er, Er hat noch seine schönen dreißig Jahr zu leben, dreißig Jahr! Macht dreihundertsechzig Monate! und Tage! Stunden! Minuten! Was will Er denn mit der ungeheuren Zeit all anfangen? Teil Er sich ein, Woyzeck! WOYZECK: Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann. H: Es wird mir ganz angst um die Welt, wenn ich an die Ewigkeit denke. Beschäftigung, Woyzeck, Beschäftigung! Ewig: das ist ewig, das ist ewig - das siehst du ein; nur ist es aber wieder nicht ewig, und das ist ein Augenblick, ja ein Augenblick - Woyzeck, es schaudert mich, wenn ich denke, daß sich die Welt in einem Tag herumdreht. Was 'n Zeitverschwendung! Wo soll das hinaus? Woyzeck, ich kann kein Mühlrad mehr sehen, oder ich werd melancholisch. W: Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann. H: Woyzeck, Er sieht immer so verhetzt aus! Ein guter Mensch tut das nicht, ein guter Mensch, der sein gutes Gewissen hat. - Red er doch was Woyzeck! Was ist heut für Wetter? W: Schlimm, Herr Hauptmann, schlimm: Wind! H: Ich spür's schon. 's ist so was Geschwindes draußen: so ein Wind macht mir den Effekt wie eine Maus. - [Pfiffig:] Ich glaub', wir haben so was aus Süd-Nord? W: Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann. H: Ha, ha ha! Süd-Nord! Ha, ha, ha! Oh, Er ist dumm, ganz abscheulich dumm! - [Gerührt:] Woyzeck, Er ist ein guter Mensch --aber-- [Mit Würde:] Woyzeck, Er hat keine Moral! Moral, das ist, wenn man moralisch ist, versteht Er. Es ist ein gutes Wort. Er hat ein Kind ohne den Segen der Kirche, wie unser hocherwürdiger Herr Garnisionsprediger sagt - ohne den Segen der Kirche, es ist ist nicht von mir. W: Herr Hauptmann, der liebe Gott wird den armen Wurm nicht drum ansehen, ob das Amen drüber gesagt ist, eh er gemacht wurde. Der Herr sprach: Lasset die Kleinen zu mir kommen. H: Was sagt Er da? Was ist das für eine kuriose Antwort? Er macht mich ganz konfus mit seiner Antwort. Wenn ich sag': Er, so mein' ich Ihn, Ihn -

CAPTAIN: Slowly, Woyzeck, slowly; one thing at a time! You make me dizzy. What am I going to do with the 10 minutes that you'll save by the time you're done? Woyzeck, think of it, you've been alive a good thirty years already, thirty years! That's three hundred sixty Months! and Days! Hours! Minutes! What are you going to do with all that monstrous time? Pace yourself, Woyzeck! WOYZECK: Yes sir, Captain sir. C: I get scared for the world when I think about eternity. Pay attention, Woyzeck! Forever: that's forever, that's forever -- you understand; but it's also not forever at all, it's just the blink of an eye -- Woyzeck, it frightens me, when I think of how the world goes around in a day. What a waste of time! What's going to come of that? Woyzeck, I can't even look at a mill-wheel any longer, without becoming melancholy. W: Yes indeed, Captain. C: Woyzeck, you always have such a hunted look! A good man wouldn't look that way, a good man with a clean conscience. -- But speak up, Woyzeck! How is the weather today? W: Bad, sir, bad: wind! C: I can feel it already. There's something blowing out there, such a wind sounds like a mouse to me. -- [whistles] I believe it's a South-North wind we have? W: Yes sir, Captain sir. C: Ha, ha, ha! South-North! Ha, ha, ha! Oh, you're a dummy, such a shameful dummy! - [turns] Woyzeck, you're a good man -- but -- [grandiose] Woyzeck, you have no morality! Morality, I mean like when somebody is moral, you understand. It's a good word. You have a child without the blessing of the Church, as our estimable chaplain says -- without the blessing of the Church, it's not just me saying that. W: Captain sir, blessed God won't hold it against the little thing, whether somebody said Amen over it before it was made... The good lord said: Let the little children come unto me. C: What are you saying there? What kind of a weird answer is that? You're confusing me with your answers. When I say "You", I'm talking about you, you...

The captain's soliloquies here are very clearly staged -- Dan Schneider presents that as a shortcoming of the movie; but it seems pretty charming to me.

posted evening of March 25th, 2010: Respond
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Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

🦋 Manifold

I found some lovely images at bright stupid confetti last week -- the artist is Justine Ashbee and her flowing, convoluted surfaces are similar to what I would like to draw, if I were able to draw.

posted evening of March 23rd, 2010: Respond
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Monday, March 22nd, 2010

🦋 A labyrinth of fire

"The Theologians" offers an alternate vision of eternity:

Months later, when the Council of Pergamo was convened, the theologian entrusted with refuting the errors of the Monotoni was (predictably) John of Pannonia; his learnèd, measured refutation was the argument that condemned the heresiarch Euphorbus to the stake. This has occured once, and will occur again, said Euphorbus. It is not one pyre you are lighting, it is a labyrinth of fire. If all the fires on which I have been burned were brought together here, the earth would be too small for them, and the angels would be blinded. These words I have spoken many times. Then he screamed, for the flames had engulfed him.

It is (perhaps) not immediately obvious that eternal recurrence entails the same extension of the present moment I discussed in my last post -- it was not immediately obvious to me. But if the present moment is going to be repeated an infinite number of times, it must have eternal duration. And indeed you can visualize the universe of eternal recurrence with the same four-dimensional model; but instead of a straight vector, the 3-space which we inhabit has to follow a cyclical orbit.

I found the end of "The Theologians" confusing:

The end of the story can only be told in metaphors, since it takes place in the kingdom of heaven, where time does not exist.* One might say that Aurelian spoke with God and found that God takes so little interest in religious differences that He took him for John of Pannonia. That, however, would be to impute confusion to the divine intelligence. It is more correct to say that in paradise, Aurelian discovered that in the eyes of the unfathomable deity, he and John of Pannonia (the orthodox and the heretic, the abominator and the abominated, the accuser and the victim) were a single person.

* (And what a marvelous, breathtaking statement this is.)

posted evening of March 22nd, 2010: Respond
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🦋 Good news

(cartoon by Andrew Wahl)

(The president's address to the House Democratic Caucus is worth while.)

posted evening of March 22nd, 2010: Respond
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Sunday, March 21st, 2010

🦋 Billy Pilgrim's Progress: Visions of Eternity

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and his death many times, he says, and paid random visits to all the events in between.

He says.

Slaughterhouse-5: or, The Children's Crusade

In Appendix III to his Christelige Dogmatik, Erfjord rebuts this passage [i.e., Runeberg's claim that it would be blasphemous to limit the Messiah's suffering to "the agony of one afternoon on the cross."] He notes that the crucifixion of God has not ended, because that which happened once in time is repeated endlessly in eternity. Judas, now, continues to hold out his hand for the silver, continues to kiss Jesus' cheek, continues to scatter the pieces of silver in the temple, continues to knot the noose on the field of blood. (In order to justify this statement, Erfjord cites the last chapter of the first volume of Jaromir Hladík's Vindication of Eternity.)

"Three Versions of Judas"

In my first year of college I spent a lot of time thinking about physics. One thing that particularly got my attention was the idea of time as a fourth dimension. My understanding of this (and listen, I never got very far with physics) was that the universe could be visualized as a four-dimensional space containing everything that ever happened or will happen, and the three-dimensional universe we inhabit as a three-dimensional space moving through this hyper-space at a constant rate -- this motion is what we experience as "time," and the present moment is the intersection of our 3-space with Reality. (I think this idea may have been laid out more fully in Edwin Abbot's Flatland.**) This picture of physical reality, which is Erfjord's conception of reality in the footnote to "Three Versions of Judas" -- taken in combination with an idealism that sees thought as existing separately from physical reality -- makes possible the chrono-synclastic infundibulum; Billy Pilgrim's experience takes as read that our "present moment" is something which has extended, eternal existence.

Well: I got upset about this. It became very important to me, to show that 3 physical dimensions are all there is -- that motion is reality, not an illusion. (I still can't answer the question, Well, what would be the difference anyway?) That past and future have existence only in our memories and expectations -- that the fourth axis is a convenient way of representing motion, nothing more. What does this entail? There is a danger of solipsism in this view -- since every perception of mine is a perception of something that has happened, and every communication reaches its object after it is uttered, saying that only the present moment "really exists" can be a way of saying that only my consciousness really exists -- and we're back to idealism. I worked through that, and my solution was materialistic -- consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the material objects that exist, that are moving -- but it never got very coherent given my lack of philosophical chops.

So there you have it, for a long time now I've been walking around with this vision of eternity, but never really committed it to paper or (since freshman year) even talked about it much, since it seemed kind of silly and pointless. It's brought back to mind by the Borges reading I've been doing recently, I thought I might as well write it down.

* ("Phase"? Well it's true, I read his books way more frequently and obsessively two decades ago than I do now; OTOH I have repeatedly been surprised, going back to them, at how well they have held up, at how strongly they continue to engage me. Though I see looking back through my blog, I have not written much at all about them.)

** (Or thinking further, this imagery might actually have been in Slaughterhouse-5.)

posted evening of March 21st, 2010: Respond
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🦋 Sunday riding

Riding your bike uphill is, properly considered, a meditative activity. On a long incline, one is (well, "I am") moving slowly enough that one doesn't need to pay as much attention to the roadway and traffic as one does on a downhill or level stretch. As I was riding up South Mountain this morning -- a particularly brutal hill, it takes me more than 5 minutes, maybe closer to ten -- it occurred to me that if I could get the internal DJ (who this morning was spinning a bizarre mix of "Ripped off and promoted lame" by the Pop-o-pies and Bach's Double Concerto) and the internal Narrator (who was busy composing this very blog post...) to quiet down, it would be a good opportunity for introspection.

Ellen's suggestion this morning that we drive up to the park on top of the mountain and go for a walk made me think what a nice day it was for a bike ride, and I ought to ride up and meet Ellen and Sylvia (and Pixie) -- this turned into a long, peripatetic bike ride for me, Google Maps tells me I rode 16 miles in all, with the midpoint of the ride being meeting the rest of the family for a walk in the park. A really nice time (though those uphills made me wish I weighed a little less.)

posted morning of March 21st, 2010: 2 responses
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Saturday, March 20th, 2010

🦋 Family shot

Here we are, sitting on the porch on this divinely pleasant first day of Spring:

posted evening of March 20th, 2010: Respond
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🦋 The City of the Immortals

That day, all was revealed to me. The Troglodytes were the Immortals; the stream and its sand-laden waters, the River sought by the rider. As for the city whose renown had spread to the very Ganges, the Immortals had destroyed it almost nine hundred years ago. Out of the shattered remains of the City's ruin they had built on the same spot the incoherent city I had wandered through -- that parody or antithesis of the City which was also a temple to the irrational gods that rule the world and to those gods about whom we know nothing save that they do not resemble man. The founding of this city was the last symbol to which the Immortals had descended; it marks the point at which, esteeming all exertion vain, they resolved to live in thought, in pure speculation. They built that carapace, abandoned it, and went off to make their dwellings in the caves.

posted evening of March 20th, 2010: Respond
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🦋 Borges the storyteller

Reading both "The Secret Miracle" and "Three Versions of Judas" -- I am identifying strongly with the main characters (Hladík and Runeberg) -- but instead of identifying with the narrator, I am identifying the narrator as Borges -- the "position of the reader" in which I find myself, is listening to him telling a story. (This reminds me of how much I enjoyed reading his lectures, picturing him addressing the class.) The third person works very well here.

These two stories go together very well, and are moderately distinct from the rest of the fictions -- both are strongly dependent on religious content*; both narrate the composition of a work which vindicates the main character -- Hladík's "grand invisible labyrinth," Runeberg's heresy -- and the character's death. "The Secret Miracle" seems to me the closest in style to Poe of any of Borges' fictions.

*I was going to call them "deeply religious," but I don't think that's quite right -- Runeberg is "deeply religious," Hladík's experience is one of religious ecstasy; understanding each story requires a willingness to identify with religious sentiment but not, I think, any personal commitment to religious thinking. I have always assumed Borges was an atheist (and a lapsed Catholic) but I don't know if that is accurate.

posted morning of March 20th, 2010: Respond
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