joculum

Rexroth again

2009-12-22T14:26:12Z

As I do every year (or at least intend to on Rexroth's birthday), I commend to your attention Kenneth Rexroth's poem for Brother Antoninus, "Advent" (with due recollection of the strange course of the life of the only Beat poet who was also, for many years, a Catholic monk):

Advent, Kenneth Rexroth

For Brother Antoninus

Rorate coeli, desuper, et nubes pluant
justum. Aperiatur terra, et germinet
Salvatorem.

The year draws down. In the meadows
And high pastures, the green grass veins
The grey. Already the stubble
Fields are green. Orion stands
Another year over California,
Simple and lucent, guarding the full moon.
Dew descends from heaven
Good pours from the clouds.
The earth wavers on its whirling track.
We milk by lantern light. The shadows
Of the cattle are illimitable.
The lantern light knots in gouts of gold.
As the sun retreats, and the moon
Turns its face away and back again,
Following the spinning earth
Like our following lanterns
Through the dark, back to the white breath
Of the cattle, back to the smell
Of hay and dung and milk,
Back to the placental
Dark in the abandoned ruins,
God goes again to birth.

I would also commend (as I believe I also have done previously) Bureau of Public Secrets' Rexroth essays page as a resource for re-visions of life, the universe, and everything (or society, history and religion, anyway):
http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/index.htm

I woke this morning pondering how Rexroth's anarchist communalism and "radical religious empiricism" stand in direct opposition to both dominant opposing camps, which means that the main figures of both traditions have regularly been murdered or exiled by one side without gaining the approval of the other.

That would bring me to a discussion of Rexroth's vision versus David Brooks' Burkean conservatism (which finds comfort in the collapse of economists' "rationalist and individualist" presuppositions, in this morning's New York Times) but not even I would want to read that discussion, three days before Christmas.

Nor the discussion from NPR of whether baboons possess a sense of aesthetic wonder (Melvin Konner proposed, at the end of The Tangled Wing, that many animals do). But the quarrel between opposing commentators over whether this was just a feel-good supposition because it was Christmas would be highly relevant to Brooks' argument, and to Rexroth's.

The world is divided into (among many other dualities) people who fall back on the ad hominem accusation that "this is just a feel-good argument," and people who fall back on some other kind of ad hominem accusation.

And best wishes for a happier 2010 than 2009 was, for those of my readers for whom Christmas is not a holiday they choose to recognize.

at the hinge of the seasons

2009-12-21T22:21:39Z

I never got round to posting properly about the extraordinary weather during Neil Gaiman's visit (around nine p.m., an unexpected bolt of lightning straight off the cover of American Gods piercing the Dickensian fog that hung over the city for the two days of his visit—neither weather phenomenon being something that normally happens to Decatur in December). But the season rushes on and we rush with it. So no more about Neil.

I believe I have previously commended (and probably posted here) Marianne Stokes' semi-Klimtian painting of the Madonna and Child before, but I am always stunned by its incorporation of archaic design motifs...U.K. readers will feel it is a hopeless cliche, of course, having been on the Christmas stamp a couple of years ago. But I like it.

Painted in Dubrovnik/Ragusa just over a century ago (and yes, I find Wolverhampton's URL for the art historical information unintentionally comic): http://www.wolverhamptonart.org.uk/whats_on/madonna

that other journey to the west

2009-12-21T22:08:20Z

I know you are growing weary of these, but I had another request today and it is easier to borrow Nisa Asokan's photograph while giving proper credit to the photographer than to link to the Flickr page. I am the myrrh-bearer wrapped in the starry robe (well, Chicago 2016-logo hoodie, anyway), leaning portentously on his authentically ancient Eastern staff:

more about that journey to the west

2009-12-14T22:22:17Z

Here is the URL for one of the pages on which Neil Gaiman—whom, by virtue of Dan Guy's shorthand for him while he was filling in blog entries while Gaiman was in China, I shall henceforward refer to here as "the other Mr. G."—discusses the research for his mysterious Monkey project:

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/search?updated-max=2009-11-12T16%3A04%3A00-06%3A00&max-results=10

I know I am being obsessive about this, but back on October 17th, Dr. Schulz and I—Larry Schulz, the translator of The Tower of Myriad Mirrors, the sequel/supplement to The Journey to the West—did our little dog-and-pony show at Kiang Gallery explicating Chi Peng in terms of The Journey to the West.

Little did we know that AT THAT VERY MOMENT the other Mr. G. was trekking through far-off Xinjiang, taking pictures of camels, pomegranates, and police stations, and relentlessly researching the legends of the Monkey King for his book.

And for those of you who don't read my other blog regularly, this is the reference promoting our gallery walkthrough:

http://counterforces.blogspot.com/2009_10_01_archive.html

well, what do you know? a rhetorical note re Neil Gaiman

2009-12-14T21:37:18Z

I hope my Agnes Scott contacts will pass along the full story of getting the Neil Gaiman reading to happen on a day of thick fog and three-hour flight delays. One hopes he booked an early flight so as to catch his breath before doing the reading and then facing a miles-long but orderly line of eager fans. (Who will be called forward one row at a time, thus preventing additional folks from sneaking in after the reading for an up close and personal moment with Mr. Gaiman.)

Last week I had fantasized putting together an ad hoc show of "art Neil might like to look at" (only no one responded to my query, proving my suspicion that no Atlanta artists read this blog and few enough read the other one), but it turns out that the art show he would have been interested in was already to be found at Kiang Gallery, albeit by as non-local an artist as you can get; viz., Chi Peng whose "The Journey to the West" photos update the Monkey King mythology in contemporary comic-book and video-game fashion, as in this mix of Monkey and The Matrix (unfortunately, in this low-res version you can't read the titles of the books and DVDs on the back shelf and on the floor; they're quite funny when taken in combination):

I was clued in by this "Ask Neil a Question" entry on "little blog of stories":

the grammar monkey said...

Thanks for giving us this opportunity! Here's mine:

You mentioned on your blog that while you were in China recently, you were doing a bit of research about the Monkey King and the Journey to the West. Can you tell us anything about the project that research was for?

--Lauren

where shall light be found?

2009-12-14T15:01:12Z

from the Edgewood nativity:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nisaasokan/4178103143/in/photostream/

the impossibility of being unique

2009-12-12T16:00:15Z

I am sure that somewhere in the world at this very moment there are two or more other people who are concurrently reading Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman and The Man Who Loved China, Simon Winchester's biography of Joseph Needham which has been given a descriptive subtitle I shall not quote because it is worthy of the early Fiona Apple. (Apple, it will no longer be remembered, released an album with one of the longest-ever titles, originally the longest ever.) For that matter, the sentence preceding the parentheses is worthy of the early Fiona Apple.

Anyway, the volume about Gaiman has the advantage of bringing outsiders up to speed on the contents of Gaiman's many projects and the relationships between them. Winchester's volume doesn't quite do the same for Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, and in fact the biography is marred by a few remarkable observations such as that the young Needham could be released from naval medical service in time to enter Cambridge in October 1918 because the war had ended in August 1918.

So one ought to take this with the appropriate degree of caution, but Winchester's description of a tiny moment from Needham's Edwardian childhood illustrates an underlying reason behind my relative the entire neglect of more than a fraction of the Gaiman oeuvre on which I am having to bring myself up to speed: real life is always much more strange and dream-inducing than anything written as deliberate fantasy:
"The family took the clanking steam train up to the medieval Templars' church in the center of London each Sunday to hear the controversial mathematician and priest E. W. Barnes preach one of his so-called 'gorilla sermons.' Barnes...was at the forefront of a movement to remodel Christian doctrine in the light of scientific discovery—most notably Darwinian evolution, from which the 'gorilla sermons' took their name."

enough! (or, too much)

2009-12-09T16:38:00Z

A Footnote to a New Theory of entirely too much

I guess to do it right I would have to add how globalization has created a planet full of contending cultures such as previously existed only in isolated zones, and I would have to bring my theory into contention against those three books that Everybody Has Read Or Pretends He or She Has Read: Empire, Multitudes, and now Commonwealth.

But cut me some slack, I just now figured out how all this fits together, and I have always had difficulty framing all this in terms of Commonly Accepted Categories, even though it consists of a bunch of commonly accepted categories, just categories commonly accepted in different academic disciplines, which don’t seem to like to converse with one another.

more theory, in theory. but you don't have to read it. it's Christmas.

2009-12-09T16:37:10Z

I Know Why I Haven’t Seen This Before: Sorry, Folks, It’s a Whole New Theory of Everything

Jerry Cullum

Any theory of human society and psychology that is sparked by an almost certainly wrong anthropological theory about tribal cultures in upland South Asia is almost certainly insane. But the theory doesn’t involve space aliens, ineffable revelations, or thoughts that I and only I have had, so maybe it’s worth going past the LJ-cut when you feel sufficiently rested and misguidedly curious.

The anthropological theory is James C. Scott’s hypothesis that tribal cultures on the margins of the great South Asian civilizations are anarchistically inclined peasant collectives that renounced literacy as tools of power and otherwise organized themselves to produce a largely egalitarian community in which Big Men couldn’t arise beyond a certain level—all these things having happened because these separate tribal units had had more than enough run-ins with the incipient authoritarianism of the imperial states that dominated the various lowland cultures of China, India, Burma, Cambodia, et cetera.

Scott’s hypothesis is too simple by half, but he’s on to something. And the semi-ignorant garble of the Boston Globe reporter writing about him in his article of December 6, 2009 led me to hypothesize further (from what is probably invincible ignorance on my part).

The aforementioned reporter ended his article by extrapolating to the notion that the high cultures of the Asian empires defined themselves in contrast to the “barbarians” on their frontiers, which the reporter took to be equivalent to the anarchist collectives of Scott’s model of the mountain regions of South and West Asia. He cited the restive Tibetans as an example.

But Tibet on the fringes of China is more like the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth squeezed in between the Germans and the Russians: it was an empire of its own, dominating some varieties of cantankerous peasants who might very well have withdrawn into the mountain fastnesses to get away from the rule of Lhasa.

And this smaller Tibetan empire, unlike the smaller states of Southeast Asia that were resisting one great empire at a time, was pinned in between a variety of contending empires, even as it sought to dominate the tribal units of its own that had no wish to be dominated.

Bingo. Ideal turf (because of all the political and social tensions) for the development of Tibetan Buddhism, just as Afghanistan and the outer fringes of Persia (not identical with the borders of today’s Iran) and the mountain territory in between the warring empires constituted ideal territory for the development of the various mystico-psychological religions about which I have written previously. Whether Orthodox hesychasm (which reached its apogee in the outer fringes of czarist Russia, i.e. Finland) and the various Jewish mysticisms of the Pale and beyond fit my hypothesis about the sociology of knowledge avant le lettre, I’ll leave for others to debate.

Now we come to my forty-year quarrel with the utopians of the 1960s and after. Herbert Marcuse began his English-language career with Eros and Civilization, an attempted synthesis of Freud and Marx that was followed by Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, Brown and Marcuse went off in their separate directions and occasionally got together long enough to quarrel with each other’s emphases, Brown being more Freudian, Marcuse more Marxist (and both probably demonstrably wrong).

Then in the fullness of time came Fredric Jameson’s re-reading of Jacques Lacan’s structuralist Freudianism and Louis Althusser’s structuralist Marxism in The Political Unconscious. I cannot claim to have read that notoriously difficult book, but the companion commentary Jameson, Althusser, Marx provided more than enough food for thought.

Jameson, at that stage of his career, shared the view that we cannot possibly know what a post-revolutionary society will want or require. It may be that the paintings of Breugel (or Breughel, or whoever) that we value so highly today must be destroyed and forgotten in order for the post-revoutionary society to flourish, and that there will be no regret for this fact in that unimaginable condition-to-come.

Bad choice of examples. At least as far as I was concerned. For it calls up my quarrel with the anti-aesthetic theoreticians of all stripes, whom I believe to be one type of personality, engaged in universalizing about something that is only their own inner condition. (Which is what all of us do, frankly.)

Now I am left with the feeling that Ernst Bloch might have had something to say about this in The Principle of Hope, because that vast book is devoted to the many different visions of utopia. But since Bloch at one point ended up as an apologist for Stalinist repression at its worst, and since Comm-u-nism in general is a topic best left to one side in American discussions, I would prefer to work from other examples.

But I do have to go back to the very simple example of the Bread and Roses Theatre’s insight that the people do like flowers and pretty pictures, and it won’t do for the party bosses and the highfalutin’ theorists to insist that this is because they have been led to accept false substitutes for material satisfactions like real pie instead of paintings of pies. (Some of the theorists would add that the people like roses because they aren’t getting enough sex, but those theorists are frowned on by the commodity-satisfactions theorists.)

Now, I have written before that the ultimate problem of the moment is not how to reconcile Freud and Marx (actually, the problem would be how to reconcile either one with today’s research in their respective disciplines), but how to reconcile both with Darwin. For Darwin has usually been the great excuse used by conservatives of all stripes, which is paradoxical when you consider the extent to which the folks in America who call themselves social conservatives are anti-evolutionist. But the free-market nihilists who make common cause with the so-called religious right are Darwinians all the way, right down to the primacy of biological imperatives over social ones.

(The interesting thing about reductionism is that the Marxist reductionists and Darwinian reductionists are mirror images of each other, disagreeing only on whether social relations are illusory reflections of biological ones or biological relations are fictions created to mask the reality of social relations. The psychological reductionists insist that both are fictions created by the mind to mask the psychological needs that underlie both the uses of society and the uses of the individual body. I insist that all of them have their heads inserted into bodily cavities better used for other functions.)

So, back to Tibet, or medieval Europe, or wherever. The tribal cultures of Scott’s mountain margins all have art, and song, and they have story even when they do not have writing; this suggests that roses remain a concern even when bread has become secure. (Of course, there are societies in which aesthetic needs are distributed differently from the ways they are in others…less interest in making a really good painting or piece of lace or beadwork, and more in making a really good stew or rocking chair or alcoholic beverage. But the issue of whether the various arts and crafts can be prioritized is a separate one…if we stop to think about “high” and “low” and their political and gender implications, we’ll never get to where I am going.)

Empires tend to go in for excess social repression, as a way of wringing maximum surplus value out of their labor forces. They don’t just require contributions of food and hours of time spent in warfare or construction, they make it impossible for flower gardens to be cultivated, and otherwise excessively humiliate and degrade their human resources.

So the response of certain social revolutionaries has been to get their own back by burning down the castles and demolishing the public sculptures, when the response the people really wanted was to be able to plant their own flowers around the sculptures and have a nice picnic with the food that the revolution kept them from having to donate to the landowner, and maybe visit the castle on weekends and take in the sights. (I have written before about how Ronald Hutton’s research indicates that most of the “pagan survivals” in British festivals were Reformation inventions by the folk, trying to sneak a bit of beauty past Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers and the later enforcers of Low Church piety.)

And whatever else religion has done in these latitudes, it has provided a space for the creation of art that is available to the people. The assumption that cathedrals are merely props for power is shortsighted; people like cathedrals, the way that today they also like movies and video games. Whether the cathedrals also support a repressive social order, or provide spaces in which to conduct psychological education and consciousness-raising, is separate from the question of whether they provide a space for the creation of a complex aesthetic object that couldn’t be gotten by leaving artmaking in the hands of the villages or hiding the stuff away in the treasuries of the socially powerful.

Substitute “monasteries” or “pilgrimage sites” for “cathedrals” or other terminology appropriate to the specific social and historical contexts around the world, as you will. The centers of religion have been centers for the transmission of psychological and social insight, filtered through the usual human propensity for getting it all wrong whenever possible.

And because we are a swamp of primal urges and a mountaintop of possible capacities surrounding the little island of the force that calls itself “I,” there is a lot of room for land reform in the internal regions. We are just beginning to get accurate maps of the territory.

Freud did get it right, that the swamps can never be drained, only landscaped. Jung got it right, that the mountains are really there to be climbed. Marx got it right, that all this muck and higher territory creates an illusory self that collides or colludes with other self-aggrandizing selves, and the social results create impacts on those selves, results of which the selves are not at all aware. In fact, the collective force of the collisions and collusions results in independent impacts that operate whether anyone is running the machine or not. (Tip of the hat here to Benjamin and Gramsci.)

And Darwin got it right, that all of this is underpinned by material mechanisms that arise out of blind biological forces that themselves arise out of the limitations of physical reality as it arose from the explosion of some centrally condensed Urstoff,a primal stuff that we can describe rather than leave to the realm of mystery.

And the mystics got it right that…well, I think I’ve written enough for one morning, don’t you?

Except maybe to suggest that they were closer to the “give us bread + Breugel” interpretation, or to the partly right and partly wrong visions of Brown and early Marcuse, than to the mechanistic models of structuralist Marxists and Freudians of any persuasion.

We’ll let the anarchists duke it out as to the degree to which the self-organizing collective of mutual aid can be derived from the doings of a bunch of Baptist tribesmen engaged in a longstanding rebellion against a repressive central government somewhere in upland Southeast Asia (and Ernst Bloch would doubtless understand the uses of the Baptist religion as an oppositional force that the missionaries never expected it would be, and how it might comport with economic activities that would horrify their straitlaced Baptist brethren in the American South…though the underlying moral codes for personal conduct might be amazingly similar).

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. (As a social entity in one of the neighboring burgs sang once upon a time.)

Neil Gaiman arrives in Decatur

2009-12-08T14:28:49Z

Or, actually, is supposed to arrive in less than a week to do a reading at Agnes Scott College, the reward to Little Shop of Stories for having staged one of the two most successful Halloween party homages to The Graveyard Book.

A photographer whom I have discussed before on this blog is planning to present him with exactly the photograph I would have recommended (actually, I would have recommended either of her two chefs d'oeuvre, but Neil Gaiman should be able to see the virtues of this one when she hands it him, even after hours of signing umpteen thousand books for a miles-long line of well-wishers).

This has got me to thinking that the poor fellow ought not to be subjected to the Standard Tour during his brief visit since, as I have tried to indicate occasionally, there is so much Authentic Strangeness to be found in the neighborhood. But I'm not on the Little Shop of Stories circuit, and it's their party. And given the fact that he is doing the same gig in Winnipeg, Manitoba exactly twenty-four hours later, I have the feeling he will be rushing in from the airport and rushing out again, so I would like for him to be driven to Agnes Scott via the scenic route, at least, if not shunted off to some hypothetical très intime Edgewood-mansion gathering.

I do wonder how many artists are planning to attend the Agnes Scott reading, and how many of those would say that Neil Gaiman has been influential in the formation of their artistic sensibility.

Anybody who wants to contact me offlist, as they say, with the answer presumably has my e-mail address already. Anybody who wants to post here as an Anonymous Commenter and put their name in the body of the comment should be able to use the comment function without being an LJ-user. (Unlike blogspot, apparently, where Counterforces regularly reverts to denying anonymous comments no matter how many times I supposedly change the default setting.)

Unlike my recent song-and-dance vis-à-vis Leonard Cohen, this is not a subterfuge to give away a spare ticket. I don't even have a ticket for myself for the Presser Hall event, which is described (as of today, since the page will change soon enough) here:

http://www.neilgaiman.com/where/

when in doubt, fall back on Pamela Colman Smith

2009-12-07T21:32:59Z

The centenary (finally) of the Waite-Smith Tarot provides an excuse for a brief exercise in literary history.

I already wrote more than enough about Pamela Colman Smith's commission from A. E. Waite to design a pack of Tarot cards to his specification: http://joculum.livejournal.com/197924.html

But perusal of the Centenary Edition of the Waite-Smith Tarot that U.S. Games Systems brought out in the spring along with a brief summary of Smith's career leads me to reflect again on how a not very well paid artistic commission combined with an offhand literary reference in the right place led to a small place in history for an artist who would scarcely even have been remembered as a book illustrator otherwise. (Not that she was terribly well remembered until recent years in any case.)

Since the Tarot packs in common use prior to 1909 featured only the relevant number of Wands, Pentacles, Cups or Swords on the so-called Lesser Trumps, without Pamela Colman Smith we would not have had the Man With Three Staves in Eliot's Waste Land, which apart from the Wheel and the Hanged Man is pretty much the only authentic Tarot card in the whole purported reading by Madame Sosostris.

Eliot must have seen at least a couple of Tarot images in some fortune-telling or occultist context between December 1909 and whatever month of 1921 (or earlier) it was when he wrote those lines in The Waste Land. And we know it was Pamela Colman Smith's cards that he saw because of allusion to the man with three staves (which is one of the more memorable images, actually). But he obviously didn't study Smith's images in detail.

When one does, it's intriguing to speculate on how many little details are Smith's invention and how many were specified by Waite. In any case, the overall arrangement of the components of the image is Smith's contribution, and presumably the relative visual importance of the minor symbols.

As I wrote back in March (before the aforementioned edition was published), there are probably any number of articles to be gotten from attentive study of Smith's Tarot designs, which are very much of a piece with her book illustrations. And as I wrote then, Dr. J. W. Cullum (as he was known in his pretentious youth) will not author any of them.

just to belabor the point to the point of rendering my readers catatonic.

2009-12-07T15:26:22Z

Eagleman is clearly one of those mind-****ers not seen since the heyday of some of the people I wrote about on this blog in years past. But his dizzying essay on edge.org has clear (or not so clear) implications for any number of academic disciplines. (The implications, however, may be present only for those already possessing the agenda and recognizing the debates that are not mentioned in his article. Which is one of the reasons that the joculum blog is so habitually incomprehensible to its readers. It is not much more comprehensible, of course, when I spell out the debates in philosophy and social science and literary and art criticism.)

Eagleman's summary, which precedes an essay that begins with a historical reflection with an unacknowledged debt to Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges and a couple of other writers:

"Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?"

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/eagleman09/eagleman09_index.html

and by sheer coincidence.

2009-12-03T18:21:10Z

I had never heard of David Eagleman, to the point of mistranscribing his name when I wrote it down from the NYT. Leaving aside his novel Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives which I somehow overlooked back in April, a glance at his web page reveals that his 2010 forthcoming books are on topics I have written about often on this blog (one of them earlier this morning, in fact). (Plasticity: How your Brain Dynamically Reconfigures Itself; and Dethronement: The Unconscious Brain Behind the I, Oxford and Pantheon, respectively)

He seems to be a sudden superstar, since his book tour ended on November 12 in London (unless this is a Hannibal Fogg type of listing on his website; please advise):

Nov 12 - London, England - Performance of Sum with Brian Eno, Philip Pullman, Nick Cave and Miranda Richardson at Queen Elizabeth Hall

now this.

2009-12-03T17:34:04Z

David Eagleman's op-ed piece in this morning's New York Times discusses the likely impact on the American people of President Obama's speech setting out an Afghanistan timeline.

He cites an experiment from Emory University that I found fascinating; given a choice between a stronger electric shock at a time of their choice or a weaker shock at an indefinite time in the future, a surprising number of experimental subjects chose to self-administer the stronger shock right away instead of enduring the anxiety of waiting for the weaker shock to arrive without warning.

But what I really found fascinating was that given a political speech, the NYT chose to print an analysis by a neuroscientist.

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy, and other extreme sports and entertainments

2009-12-03T17:26:42Z

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

Jerry Cullum

The late professor of Asian religions John Fenton was extraordinarily fond of a found New Yorker cartoon that he taped to his office door: a business-suited type at a bar, berating a second business-suited gentleman with “The trouble with you, Fenton, is you don’t understand the goddamned Oriental mind.”

I have written often that my sense is that we don’t understand anybody’s minds, our own least of all. I have been fascinated recently by a fact that I haven’t encountered before, in all the writings about shamanism: field work cited by Michael Taussig from the Pacific Northwest, where it was general knowledge that the magic tricks practiced by shamans were in fact tricks; not only did shamans confess their best tricks to one another in hopes of having a trick explained to them that they didn’t yet know how to do, but everyone knew that this is how it worked. But there were rigorous expectations that the tricks be done well; if the trick was done badly, then the healing wouldn’t happen.

This sounds too impossibly postmodern to be true, but I have also written repeatedly that “postmodern” is just what happens whenever there are zones of cultural collision and tension, and there have always been zones of cultural collision and tension, ever since the Paleolithic.

And as I’ve written before, the geographic zone stretching from eastern Iran to Afghanistan has historically been a particularly nasty neighborhood in terms of contending cultures in which disputes tend to get worked out unpleasantly. (There are other intermountain zones where the same dynamic obtains among different ethnic groups, but I make no hypothesis.)

So it continues to make perfect sense to me that there should have been places of refuge, monasteries that were effectively interdisciplinary institutes for anyone who was hot and bothered by the mysteries of human existence and/or the immediate problem of figuring out how to make folks get along better with one another. There would have been a huge incentive, and only occasionally would there have been central governments up to the task of sponsoring universities. (Of which latter, the ones in the adjacent richer neighborhoods were legendary, and pulled off some major intellectual discoveries.)

But it would also make sense that many of the hypotheses developed under such complex conditions would have been wrong, and the ones that were right would have been couched in self-protective phraseology. Using the wrong words to hot-headed people can get you killed, to this very day. So you do a lot of dodging and weaving, and you encode your insights in jokes.

So just as history has to be brushed against the grain (to use Walter Benjamin’s phrase) to reveal the patterns of material benefit (and the barbarism of exploitation that underpins civilization), truly strange tales and texts have to be read against the grain to reveal not just the motives and the material underpinnings of their composition, but to reveal the actual content in order to evaluate it.

The trouble being that since the mind is mostly unconscious (as we now know in a purely material sense) and stretches from the swamps to the dizzying mountain heights, most of the would-be explanations of the data really do make no sense, and perhaps all of them are wrong.

And it is all too likely that legends of lost colloquies of intellectuals are true; all it takes is a few plagues and a couple of military invasions, and a lot of masters of wisdom can get wiped out, especially given their frequent lack of street smarts. (Hence the practical incentive to invent social psychology and the sociology of knowledge a few thousand years early. You need the community-liaison guys to keep the pure theoreticians from getting themselves killed, and the Companions of Complementary Disciplines do seem to have worked synergistically on occasion. Right time, right place, right people. The Lodge of the Nine Sisters may have had improbable precursors…said Lodge having once been described as “the UNESCO of the eighteenth century,” which some would not take as a Good Thing, though the historian meant it as a compliment.)

Whoever may or may not have been able to put the pieces together once in a while in past centuries, there don’t seem to be any comparable types on the scene in those latitudes in the postmodern moment. Too bad.

I title this essay as I do because thanks to an accidental convergence of homages to Pete Seeger on “Thistle & Shamrock” and on “Fresh Air,” I have heard “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” twice in less than a week, after not having heard the song for decades.

An Edgewood Nativity: or something of that sort

2009-12-01T21:25:24Z

I have been convinced at last to become a Magus. No, really.

Shana Robbins has been the driving force behind Susan Bridges' presentation of Glittersquadt Presents a Nativity Living Tableau (a living tableau with a contemporary urban-visionary edge, to be presented in a greenhouse on the grounds of 814 Edgewood during the opening of the next Whitespace Gallery exhibition behind the house itself).

I have asked to be the myrrh-bearer, but since the Gospel text itself does not corroborate the legend, I may also bring what the package from an Indian company charmingly calls "Frank Incense." (The three magi who are the patron saints of epileptics are a later inference from the fact that there were three gifts and the assumption that if there had only been two, surely the number would have been mentioned.)

The event is scheduled for December 11 at eight p.m. promptly. Be there if you happen to be changing planes in Atlanta that evening or are otherwise somewhere between the downtown end of Edgewood and the residential part where Edgewood deadends into the Inman Park MARTA station.

more interim images

2009-11-30T21:53:50Z

Okay, so actually the younger Rem Koolhaas's Parc de la Villette might have been intolerably silly, with its giant figures of the planets and its biomorphology or whatever it is. But it would still have been very interesting:

okay, okay...pictures, at least

2009-11-24T17:43:16Z

Although I have been up to a certain amount of mischief on Counterforces, I have been stalled out on this blog by several problems: including an inability to define the reasons behind the conceptual discomfiture that led so many hardheaded types in the nineteenth and twentieth century to begin in skepticism and end up somewhere considerably over the edge of not just credulousness but outright delusion—our intrepid explorer Colonel Fawcett, for example, having come to believe at the very end that he was looking not just for an archaeological site but the New World equivalent of Madame Blavatsky's Tibetan or Afghan home of the Masters. (I considered going to see The Men Who Stare at Goats when it opened in Atlanta theatres but never got round to looking up the schedule. It relates more than one might think to Michael Murphy's novel which I often cite, An End to Ordinary History. Such goings-on actually took place. Whether history became less ordinary due to a league of extraordinary gentlemen, however, is a topic open to serious skepticism, or perhaps outright ridicule.)

Anyway, since I have nothing new to say I thought I might post a picture relating to my favorite visual topic, things that should have existed but that unfortunately never did. In this case, it is Rem Koolhaas' Parc de la Villette, which had the inside edge for construction but was then un-chosen in favor of Bernard Tschumi's famous collaboration with Jacques Derrida, about which Derrida spoke in his legendary 1985 interview with Robert Cheatham and yours truly (well, legendary in some rather limited circles, anyway).

belaboring the point

2009-11-11T17:51:33Z

I tend to cite, enigmatically I’m sure, the most elementary suppositions of anybody’s field of specialization. This is because I, not being a part of anything, remain astonished at the fact that what is assumed as the starting point for one discipline is denied categorically by another, even when they deal with the same subject matter, e.g., the writing of fiction, or the structure of human society, or what have you. (“What have you” includes some fields involving the study of phenomena far outside human interactions, but I’m not going to go there.)

A point I was making earlier is that advisers of would-be writers of genre fiction need to explain the elements that go into a narrative that is both complex and plausible when it comes to alternate ways for human beings to do things. This means that except when they just parrot prevailing academic doctrines, they see what the dominant doctrines do not: that certain tendencies are much more cross-cultural than academicians tend to notice, but much more culturally specific than average folks tend to think.

So writers of alternative fictions are all over the place because some of them think it’s enough to project their own ways of doing things onto some imaginary place, except to drop in a few unicorns amid the Oxford dons and middle-class householders (I don’t have any actual writer in mind here); or others think it’s sufficiently hilarious to go nod-nod, wink-wink while they place in Lost Lemuria a society that is transparently that of the South Side of Chicago, for purposes of comic exploitation.

So such misguided folks have to be slapped around and taught How It Really Works.

And it’s amazing to realize how much was understood over the centuries about How It Really Works, in places where cultures collided and intellectuals had time to think about the process, and to set down their observations in one form or another (but not always forms that we would recognize, nor would we recognize the observations as being about what remains and what perishes in terms of human societies).

It’s even more amazing that the academic disciplines fight one another about “essentialism” and “relativism” and what have you without looking at what is actually being written in other academic disciplines and in the imaginative expressions of the time in which we live.

Grann’s The Lost City of Z shows us a Victorian gentleman explorer colliding with cross-cultural realities, unhappy with his own restrictive society, adopting alien metaphysical beliefs when they coincided with his own preferences. Percy Fawcett not only followed his novelist brother into Buddhism, at least briefly, he took up Theosophy and spiritualism as modes of empirical investigation into the structural truths behind the delusion-ridden British social order—from which order he nevertheless adopted a code of gentlemanly and just plain manly behavior. As Grann points out, Fawcett was bewildered by encounters with Amazonian groups that didn’t fit the prevailing racial models of evolutionary development, and kept adjusting his suppositions and speculations accordingly.

And I suppose some of this complex reality, of the rapid evolution of multiple academic disciplines 1870-1940, has found its way into the more recent fantasy stories that exploit the conventions of 1930s adventure fiction; at least I hope it has. It would be depressing to think that fiction of that sort continues to do a less adequate job than history in terms of depicting the complexity of reality. Grann has done a remarkable job of internalizing the findings of a fair number of academic disciplines while himself becoming obsessed with Fawcett’s story. Fawcett could, as I wrote earlier, be studied as a test case in cultural transition, and as an extraordinary thinker ahead of his time who got as far as he could, given the necessity of literally crashing through the underbrush to find the relevant data—and eventually getting killed in the process. (It is hard not to romanticize the academic disciplines in which one works up all the relevant comparative documentation, studies the competing theories, and then sets out armed with a snakebite kit.)

And Grann’s own legwork has cast light on so many different academic problems that I wonder at the shallowness of the reviews that, nonetheless, got me to read the book, a few months behind schedule, as usual.

glossing the more than slightly demented foregoing posts

2009-11-10T22:58:58Z

I need to read Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy closely...one of many books I own and am not reading more than sporadically. I was just now reading around in a discussion on theinferior4 regarding that other genre, speculative fiction, and its self-congratulatory rhetorics regarding what it does that mainstream fiction cannot, and that mainstream writers are likely to get wrong when they attempt to work within the genre. Here again, the internal discussions are sophisticated, and I do not wish to get enmeshed in them.

Using Grann's book about Fawcett's quest to get at basic questions of human behavior is, of course, quite a lunatic thing to do. And it may be only in America that so many theorists seem baffled by the transmission of ideas and what human beings do with those ideas once they have acquired them. I just see so many writers reinventing the wheel in this regard, or engaging in mystification because they are writing about emotionally exciting topics rather than, say, humdrum hobbies, that I felt impelled to engage in a misguided effort to clear the air, with the result, I'm sure, that the whole area is left more befogged than ever.

museums of innocence

2009-11-09T16:51:17Z

I never posted the upshot of a friends-only query asking for information on the existence of Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence. It was answered not only with the discovery that Pamuk was about to deliver a lecture on the topic that an LJ-Friend attended and reported on to me, but with a feature story in the New York Times the following Sunday. As was said of a certain novel's publication date, timing is everything.

And having posted a serious note unrelated to the Berlin Wall anniversary, I feel compelled to copy here the relevant closing paragraphs of my friends-only post, which LJ-Friends have seen already:

"In December 1989, I took my own Wings of Desire tour of Berlin, taking photographs of the real-life sites I had identified from clues in the movie. I was seized with the desire to do the same with Paris when I saw Amelie years later, but it seemed pointless and beyond my diminished financial resources.) (I assume the then-already-shuttered Antiquitäten shop where Damiel buys what the shooting script puckishly calls his Gastarbeiter coat is long gone, but I wonder if the stretch of Wall where Damiel falls was preserved for its cinematic associations. Probably not.

"I was wearing the successor to my famous black raincoat and a black neck scarf as I wandered silently around the city then adjusting to its sudden destiny of breached boundaries.

"Ignoring like everyone else the injunction that the land within a dozen feet of the Wall belonged to the German Democratic Republic and not to the allied occupation zones of Westberlin, I snoopily looked over the shoulders of Berliner families assiduously chipping away at the surface of the Wall. The adults acted as though I weren't there, but the children greeted me.

"When they went away, I scooped up a tiny painted chunk of Wall they had left behind. Photograph on request.

"You will have to believe me when I say that the photograph shows exactly what I say it reveals. Spectrographic analysis would prove the truth of my narrative.

"I think the Tahir Shah story will have to wait for another time. It is most curious, and is what got me to wondering about Pamuk's."

on never getting it quite right

2009-11-09T16:00:43Z

I had to look up the phrase I had slightly misremembered, of course. I shall let you figure out what it actually was.

"Why haven't I seen this before," as long-suffering joculum readers will already know, are the words of Doctor Edward Morbius when the practical-minded Commander has figured out, from the enigmatic words of his ship's physician, what the monster of Forbidden Planet really is, and the light dawns in Morbius' hitherto self-deceiving brain.

I only occasionally use it for belated realizations in my ongoing Theory of the Theory of Everything, a.k.a. "A Firm Grasp on the Perfectly Obvious."

"Why Haven't I Seen This Before," take number one hundred eight

2009-11-09T15:52:01Z

“Why Haven’t I Seen This Before,” Take Number 108

I’ve written many times that philosophers, anthropologists, novelists, political scientists, psychologists, economists, and intellectual historians should hang out more with one another. (Poets, designers, artists, and architects should chime in when appropriate. Everyone should be made to shut up when appropriate, which is the hard part.)

The creators of courses for fledgling fantasy writers are probably the best theorists of human behavior without quite realizing what it is that they are doing. (Few human beings ever realize what it is that they are doing, so this is not to be held against them. Note that “what it is that they are doing” is not quite “what they are doing,” incidentally. Editors to the contrary, the slight awkwardness of phrase keeps us from lapsing into the inattention of overfamiliar wording. Novelists know this. Academicians do not; indeed they insist upon using the right Magic Words of the Season.)

Those who advise would-be fantasy writers are the right kind of academician because they have to expand the imaginations of their students in plausible ways. This entails realizing the sheer diversity of human behavior, for starters, alongside the variables that keep human behaviors from being infinite.

In the area of torture or of certain forms of forced labor, for example, it is indisputable that, as poet Carolyn Forché wrote in The Country Between Us, “There is nothing one man will not do to another.” But the physics and biology of human existence means that there are some things that one man cannot do to another. The fantasy writer Dante Alighieri, however, was able to invent some excellent variations on human torment by placing them outside of ordinary life, and eventually outside of Time. In the Divine Comedy, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise have rules that limit them, but they aren’t the same rules.

I bring this up, as someone who notoriously is unable to tolerate most fantasy fiction, because the vast subject matter of intellectual history is best understood as a subset of fantasy fiction. Human beings are trying, again and again, to imagine that, in the words of the current activist slogan, “another world is possible.” But most of us behave as though we live in the only possible world, and that we understand this world as fully as it is possible to understand it.

A look at how other people do things quickly demonstrates that our world is certainly not the only possible world, if “world” means how we do things and understand things. And it is a pious belief, at least in certain circles, that our ways of understanding are not to be imposed on others as the only ways of understanding.

But as I’ve said, some ways of doing things are so destructive or self-destructive that they only occur at the margins. And some ways of doing things are so difficult and so contrary to ordinary biological urges that they only occur at the margins. But they occur at the margins in a huge variety of differently organized societies. So theorists of fantasy insist that creators of alternate worlds include food production and defense against sociopaths (usually in the form of the mutual sociopathy known as warfare), and then address the question of when commerce comes in, and burial of the dead, and political power, and eventually such luxuries as madmen and saints.

I had better explain here that where I am going, eventually, is to the question of how ideas are spread. Academics are like the rest of us; they look at what currently is, and they generalize to what they think must always be. But it isn’t so.

In this regard, I recommend reading, against the grain, David Grann’s book about the South American explorer Percy Fawcett The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. Read in the right way, it is most instructive.

I shall have to skip, for now, what can be learned from the biography of the explorer Percy Fawcett, or actually from the background information that Grann has chosen to give us to explain why Fawcett was who he was. I shall explain this in a separate essay, for once.

What is germane here, as fans of the late anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss know, is Fawcett’s belief in a lost civilization in the Amazon, versus the received opinion that the Amazon is a “counterfeit paradise” incapable of generating a complex society (which is what we mean by “civilization”).

Lévi-Strauss unpacked the incredibly complicated structural underpinnings of tribal mythologies, and suggested that human rationality organizes the world in similar ways the world over. We just don’t recognize the structures of reason at work.

I would suggest the old-fashioned term “imagination” instead, as encompassing abstract reason, emotion, materially purposive behavior, depending on the circumstances and the job to be done or the problem to be solved. But this only works well in English, and most of the fights over how to define the human condition seem to depend on whether one is thinking about the human condition in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese. (This means that the rise of global theorists who think in other languages has been immensely helpful.)

Anyway, in the Amazon we see humanity up against it; there are groupings so totally engaged in the struggle for getting enough to eat that they haven’t developed art, religion, social hierarchy, or burial of the dead. In another bizarre case they seem to have fulfilled Richard Brautigan’s joke about a tribe so primitive that “they didn’t bury their dead or give birth to their children”: they keep up the population by kidnapping children from neighboring groups and raising them, not as slaves, but as fully-fledged group members.

This kind of not-quite-society is hugely appealing to Regular Guys from the English-speaking countries, and it forms the basis of reality-TV shows. It also forms the background structure of a good many post-apocalyptic novels in which society has reverted to good old Hobbes’ “state of nature.”

But most Amazonian groups (I do wish “tribes” weren’t a cuss word these days) aren’t like that. They have art, and they have social hierarchies, and they have in general a complicated mental life apart from the job of figuring out the most efficient way to find a sufficient quantity of food that won’t kill them one way or another.

And this is where the history of the history of ideas comes in: it seems plausible, if not provable, that the various structures were communicated by a now-lost civilization, via the same types of intellectual communication that we find spread across the planet.

In other words, the various skills and preferences aren’t necessarily all derived directly from the aforementioned civilization, but they aren’t independent manifestations either.

Anthropologists going against the received wisdom (okay, one anthropologist, mostly, according to Grann) have found evidence of an Amazonian city built without the use of stone, and thus leaving only the foundation holes and flattened-out causeways and roads that were reclaimed by the jungle after the population succumbed to disease and their wood and thatch architecture decayed. Agricultural techniques for enriching soil appear to have been used extensively, providing a material basis for all this rain-forest urbanism.

We mostly use this information to goose ourselves pleasurably. (“Wow, cool!”) But we ought to look at it as a specific instance of a general case.

Because what survives of “the lost civilization” in various circumstances over the millennia is communicated invisibly and always has been. Ways of thinking, rules for doing things the right way, as in today's small groups scattered around Amazonia.

And those sorts of ideas spread in all sorts of ways, but except in the most rigid and rule-bound of societies they give birth to the same sorts of Invisible Brotherhoods. Invisible brotherhoods don’t have to involve esoteric knowledge; the same structures form around dog-breeding, viticulture, amateur astronomy, et cetera: in ways that are not entirely dissimilar from the distribution of styles of pottery among groupings in the ancient Americas.

I bring this up because it has suddenly struck me as incredible that specialists are astonished every time they discover and begin to describe the distribution of any given subculture. It has most recently come into the news for intensely practical reasons: subcultures that are doing assorted mean nasty ugly things that we don’t want them to be doing. But subcultures doing lovely compassionate cleanly things work by the same rules of (dis)organization, and so do subcultures practicing this or that “potty little enthusiasm,” as some 1900s-1930s Brit like G. K. Chesterton wrote once but that only I seem to remember in exactly those words.

This does get pointed out frequently enough, but writers seem so engrossed with the continuity of institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Communist Party and the Freemasons and the World Health Organization that nobody seems to notice enough of the time that the ideas surrounding such solidified structures are spreading and being freshly organized all the time, in similar ways regardless of the century we are talking about…so that the basic impulses are probably at work as far back as the fabled Paleolithic caves, as only certain fantasy writers seem capable of seeing.

Historians and sociologists waste huge amounts of time looking for subterranean direct linkages between identical-looking organizations and independent thinkers. But there aren’t any. As we now see, ideas and images are viral; the internet gives us a hugely accelerated laboratory in which to observe the workings of imagination, as someone or other takes on what they imagine to be the job that some organization that may or may not exist wants them to do. And then real organizations come into being because they want to fulfill the mission of that other imagined organization. And the multiple organizations resemble one another because they spring from similar structural sources, but not necessarily through the same channel.

It makes for messy linkages and methods for describing them, but it is how human society has operated for millennia. Systematizers just slap overly restrictive grids on the process in their attempts to make sense of it. And when philosophers like A. N. Whitehead or Gilles Deleuze try to spell it out in terms of process or rhizomes or flow or what have you, folks like you and me can’t make heads or tails of it. But it’s how it is.

And it usually takes exasperated instructors of would-be fantasy writers to notice it, usually without noticing what it is that they are noticing.

And yes, if you look at specific studies and areas of specialization in any of the academic disciplines with which I began this essay, every one of them knows this already. So I expect a slew of comments that begin with, “For heaven’s sake, that’s been the foundation of [fill in the blank] for generations!”

Yes, it has, but thousands of pages of academic prose seem to get written in which other intellectuals don’t know that this is the case. Hence my suggestion that all these folks need to hang out more frequently and talk about more than which campus watering hole has the cheapest beer.

on the boundaries between scholarly worlds

2009-11-05T16:55:00Z

I have just written an essay that I may never post to Counterforces regarding the role of the critic in navigating the various effectively autonomous (visual) artworlds—and the degree to which the work of the critic of artworlds is alien even to highly educated inhabitants of other social worlds that don't overlap the assorted artworlds.

I am productively enlightened regarding the latter—the extent to which we who communicate with one another do not inhabit even remotely overlapping conceptual worlds or universes of discourse—by an LJ-Friend's link to a particular graduate student's summaries and critiques of recent scholarly essays on the work of China Mieville. I don't feel comfortable linking to it here because it comes from a friends-only post. However, its subject is the scholarly commentary to be found in: Extrapolation, Volume 50, no 2 Summer 2009: The China Mieville Special Issue, guest edited by Sherryl Vint.

I had been refraining in recent days from a post on The City and the City praising Mieville's adroit combination of a huge variety of actual borders and boundaries: the Green Line in Nicosia; the pre-unification maps of Berlin Hauptstadt der DDR with the city on the other side of the boundary simply a blank space on the map; the Berlin U-Bahn lines running beneath forbidden zones and emerging at an international boundary in Friedrichstraße station; the state lines in America in which drinking is reported to be legal on one side of a building and forbidden on the other (this one may be a rural/urban myth, though I lived in an Atlanta neighborhood in which the line between wet and then-dry counties ran down the middle of the street, resulting in a slew of bars and liquor stores directly across from the public library and doctors' offices); not to mention Mieville's deft use of the actual characteristics of various cities and countries in his fictional territories, each element readily recognizable as having been borrowed almost intact, right down to the title of essays. I would then most likely have gone on to discuss the relationship of Mieville's main conceit in the novel to the psychologies of consciousness I have spent so much time discussing on the joculuum blog.

But now that I have seen what sort of theory-laden Mieville scholarship is out there in worlds of which most of us have no knowledge whatsoever, I think I shall remain silent. Like Charlie Brown when he saw a duckie and a horsie in the clouds where his companions saw elaborate and subtle tableaux.

Two or Three Ideas: Actually, Maybe Only One, re an Earlier Post

2009-11-03T15:25:49Z

The New York Review of Books has the irritating tic of charging its print subscribers extra to access the online edition, so I can do no more than offer you the table of contents: http://www.nybooks.com/contents/20091119

However, the November 19 edition contains a review by Dan Chiasson that buttresses some of my assertions regarding Wallace Stevens in my post of ten or twelve days ago, to the point of making use of the same quotation I used to demonstrate Stevens' relationship to the world via individual visual perceptions rather than extended social interactions. (In fact, Chiasson goes considerably further than I went in that blog post, and I would now go still further, based on lines I've used before from "The Man with the Blue Guitar," section XXXII. But I'll spare you.)

Chiasson's most remarkable revelation, which I can't quote in detail because I can't access the text, is that a number of paintings and sculptures that belonged to Stevens are currently for sale for $2.2 million, and that a Kandinsky lithograph is among them. The Tal Coat painting that Stevens retitled "Angel Surrounded by Peasants" is also one of the works for sale. The poem "Angel Surrounded by Paysans," which introduces Stevens' "necessary angel" of reality, has a completely oblique relationship to the still life: Stevens wrote of the painting that "Now that I have had the new picture at home for a few days, it seems almost domesticated. Tal Coat is supposed to be a man of violence but one soon becomes accustomed to the present picture. I have even given it a title of my own: 'Angel Surrounded by Peasants.' The angel is the Venetian glass bowl on the left with the little spray of leaves in it. The peasants are the terrines, bottles and the glasses that surround it. This title alone tames it as a lump of sugar might tame a lion."

This is a fairly bizarre response to a painting. But it illustrates Stevens' need to perceive intensely and then to transmute physical perception into something manageable via the verbal and visual imagination. He truly is looking at "pictures" (as he always called paintings in his letters) and "throw[ing] away the lights, the definitions," and saying that what he sees is this or that, without using "the rotted names," as in the section of "The Man With the Blue Guitar" cited above.

And I am astonished, though literary critics knew it all along and put it in books such as the Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens, to find that "the necessary angel of earth" started life as a Venetian glass bowl in a painting by Tal Coat. In the angel/bowl's "sight, you see the earth again," just as we see it in a jar placed in Tennessee, round, upon a hill, in "Anecdote of the Jar."

Or in the places where old Neal got off the train in California, to return to my original post about Jack Kerouac and his improbable companions in ecstatic/eks-tatic perception.

But what did Stevens make of Kandinsky's abstract brand of ekstasis? I must return to the collected letters.

And one wonders whether Stevens or Kerouac are ever "standing outside" themselves in this perception of the physical object or its depiction, as it is translated at once into inwardness in a form that Rilke would have recognized. See the Duino Elegies. Or, better, get on with the day's tasks, and stop reading.