Transcendentalism and its appeal

Thoreau, Walden (order rearranged):

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can callreality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui,(27) below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer,(28) but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter,(29)and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.

via Althouse 

And:

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry — determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses.(26) If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like.

And:

 Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining-rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

Note the glimmers of a more mundane focus, though: "if we are alive, let us go about our business", or "I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born" (even if "wise" isn't quite the right word -- it's the craving "only reality" that underlies his regret). 

Radical architecture

From Mark Dow, "Span: A Remembrance" (NYTimes, Opinionator, Dec 22/10):

Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) believed the pier, the lintel, and the arch to be the basic elements of architecture. He called these “the three physical facts, the three symbols, I might say the three letters, which constitute the alphabet of our art.” One might imagine pier and lintel to have come first, and the arch to have followed, but Sullivan felt that all three arrived together as the result of a single imperative: span.

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Proposition: One has no right to move until one can say why, why what, or at least account for it all, from the chair one was sitting on to the floor underneath it, back in time to the beginning, and forward from his getting up, if I ever did, into all contingencies. Can each thing depend on the preceding and on the subsequent thing, and be independent of them, too? The same sound will sound different according to the notes that follow and precede. Goes something like this. Preceding one: one: one subsequent to. Till eventually, after pursuing philosophy a ways into its own willful removal from what supposedly mattered to it, or had, and where it did, in my mind, do me well, I realized I was always left wanting. Needed to try to articulate the underneath of the mattering, of which I felt more certain than of anything, though I didn’t have exact words for it, or did I. Now I think I must have been paralyzed first, and that the philosophy only came afterward to justify or bind or slip me down its rope-ladder toward exactitude and escape.

Late into the early morning, in the red brick of Connecticut Hall, a student sat scrutinizing each clause’s passage of Aristotle in English out of the preceding one into the next. Metaphysics doesn’t mean esoteric or philosophical. It means “after physics.” It was called that because it came after his chapter on physics and there was no other name for the stuff. The building, oldest in New Haven, its construction financed in part by the colonies’ sale of a captured French ship, floated on the illusion of a rectangle of lawn inset into a larger lawn. Sidewalks joined at right angles, passed under stone archways into which steel gates had been set. Unsupported assumptions and flawed links, tiny knots in the grain planed flush by repeated but abandoned curiosity, hiccuped in the passageways. The student had no way of seeing that teasing the tiny knots to the surface and scratching at them until they came undone would set nothing free, or did he. He picked at his fingernails to minimize himself and get the damn world aligned.

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Liberal guilt

A pervasive theme in Elementory -- the association of moral uncertainty with ontological uncertainty. It's a peculiar re-emergence at a time when the draining away of traditional religious "faith" has left people more exposed than ever, and when science only seems to spiral down into ever more incomprehensible and alien, even artificial, non-human "realities". The old religions, of course, had guilt aplenty to dispense, starting with Original Sin -- a concept insulting to the modern notion of the individual, but useful to a traditional social matrix as a way of asserting a kind of universal equality in compensation for hierarchy. But that was a taught guilt -- liberal guilt, on the other hand, is a free-floating, self-generating phenomenon, kind of like what happens to a flywheel when its load is removed. (But also consider Trillings' comment re: Freud, that his resort to a "death instinct" stemmed from a desire to find a source of moral gravity again, in the absence of religion; both metaphors, however -- flywheel and gravity -- may operate here.)

Let's say that such guilt constitutes a theme of Elementory, where it's especially pertinent to the first half -- in fact it becomes a lever in the hands of the main antagonist. To quote from some earlier notes:

And now consider how such a theme might relate to the larger theme of contrasting appearance-as-screen with appearance-as-foundation. The issue is complex, but free-floating, as opposed to specific, guilt acts as a source of moral gravity for those perpetually troubled by the sense of an abyss over which they hover -- i.e., specifically for those lacking a sense of a foundation or bedrock on which to stand.

This is the explanation for that bien pensant "concern" that so often manifests itself in these circles. In the second half, then, would be nice to contrast real or substantive guilt.


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Kung fu and practice

Intriguing essay by Peimin Ni -- "Kung Fu for Philosophers":

An exemplary person may well have the great charisma to affect others but does not necessarily know how to affect others. In the art of kung fu, there is what Herbert Fingarette calls “the magical,” but “distinctively human” dimension of our practicality, a dimension that “always involves great effects produced effortlessly, marvelously, with an irresistible power that is itself intangible, invisible, unmanifest.”[2]

Consider the protagonist of Blood as one who, having a natural charisma, learns how to affect others.

And, more deeply, consider this philosophical turn, from a metaphysical/epistemological/ontological pursuit of truth, to a more aesthetic pursuit of a kind of beauty -- but beauty in the form of something done well, even a life done well.  Note too the link to speech as act as distinct from communication, referring to Austin's "performative" function of language.

All of which, however, is just a part of the Inversion -- to this Eastern emphasis on the practice of living we need to bring back, reintegrate a Western emphasis on knowledge, but constructed rather than discovered knowledge, and constructed on the basis of practice.


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The Inversion illustrated

Start with the Flammarion woodcut:

Only think of it as, in a sense, reversed -- with the figure turned around and poking his head into the real world on the right.

I know, of course, that that doesn't quite work -- the point of the Inversion isn't the discovery of some other level or realm of the real, but rather the difference between discovery and construction. But note how the realm on the left might be taken as either the spiritual or scientific "reality" that lays behind or beyond the embodied life-world. Perhaps, then, the real usefulness of this famous woodcut is simply to illustrate an ironic similarity in outlook of fundamentalist (to some degree) religion and a positivist science -- little wonder the two are so often seen as at war.

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The world, the flesh, and Merleau-Ponty

Which, I suppose, suggests that M-P is in some sense associated with the Devil -- well, at least in the sense of a rejection of the rejection of the world and flesh. That's important, but it isn't what distinguishes M-P himself. Here's an attempt to explain just that:

Merleau-Ponty's masterpiece, Phenomenology of Perception, was a bold, internally coherent attempt to overcome the problems of empiricism and rationalism in the Cartesian tradition of modern philosophy. As Dillon has shown in his Merleau-Ponty's Ontology, it is pedagogically instructive to introduce Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology as an attempt to resolve Meno's paradox. Meno's paradox, of course, is from the dialogue between Meno and Plato in Plato's Meno. Meno poses a dilemma to Plato: "But how will you look for something when you don't in the least know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don't know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come right up against it, how will you know that what you found is the thing you didn't know?"

Merleau-Ponty's existential-phenomenological epistemology and ontology can be seen as resolving the problem of Meno's paradox, and it does so by relentlessly demonstrating how both empiricism and rationalism fail to do so. Merleau-Ponty writes: "Empiricism cannot see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not be looking for it, and intellectualism (rationalism) fails to see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or equally again we should not be searching." (Phenomenology of Perception)

...

Merleau-Ponty begins his phenomenology by giving primacy to perception. The phenomenologist, says Merleau-Ponty, returns "to the world which precedes (scientific description), (the world) of which science always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific characterization is an abstract and derivative sign language as is geography in relation to the countryside."

... In order to understand how Merleau-Ponty understands this subject-object dialogue, we first need to understand a new idea, something which Merleau-Ponty brought to phenomenology: the idea of the lived body.

For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness is not just something that goes on in our heads. Rather, our intentional consciousness is experienced in and through our bodies. With his concept of the lived body, Merleau-Ponty overcomes Descartes' mind-body dualism without resorting to physiological reductionism. Recall that for Descartes the body is a machine and the mind is what runs the machine. For Merleau-Ponty the body is not a machine, but a living organism by which we body-forth our possibilities in the world. The current of a person's intentional existence is lived through the body. We are our bodies, and consciousness is not just locked up inside the head. In his later thought, Merleau-Ponty talked of the body as "flesh," made of the same flesh of the world, and it is because the flesh of the body is of the flesh of the world that we can know and understand the world (see The Visible and the Invisible).

...

The idea of the lived body allows Merleau-Ponty to resolve Meno's paradox. The body is both transcendent and immanent. It is the "third term" between subject and object. I know that transcendent things exist because I can touch them, see them, hear them. But most importantly, I never know things in their totality, but always from an embodied perspective.

... I know when I've found what I'm looking for because the world is already pregnant with meaning in relation to my body. Things begin as ambiguous but become more determinate as I become bodily engaged with them. On the other hand, I do not already know what I am looking for, because the world transcends my total grasp. At any given time, the world as it is given includes not only what is revealed to me, but also what is concealed.

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"Touch"

This is the connector between the two parts of Elementory. So it needs to focus on the Inversion, as much as possible within the limits of this fictional context. Why not make an Escher print, then, the focus of the story? Because it's a connector, it's already out of the narrative pattern of the rest, and can be more free in its structure -- like to find a way to move in a spiral-like trajectory, starting from a very high altitude (where the preceding, "Earth", left off), and circling down into a self reference of some sort. Perhaps opening out again on the "other side" -- i.e., the inverted side -- in preparation for "Skin" that follows. ("Touch", of course, referring to the contact of self and world, flesh and earth.)

Could Nick (Air) be the protagonist, making him a sort of central figure for the whole, perhaps the only character who actually goes through the Inversion?

Consider an incident: the discovery of mind over matter (memory/flashback of an early acid trip) -- by a mere exercise of will, the grasping hand on the end of an arm can be raised and extended, its fingers opened and then closed around the cylinder of a glass, and the glass thereby brought to the table.... Ghost in the machine, and also ghost as machine, machine as ghost.

As for the Escher print, see "Print Gallery" for an example of a spiral at least, with its enigmatic blind spot at its impossible center:

Here's the that center itself, animated -- a kind of fractal perhaps:























P.S.: What's the difference between this and simply putting an exact copy of the same print in the gallery -- a print within a print? That too, obviously, has potentially infinite depth, but it's banal. What distinguishes this is that the print in the gallery is not a copy but is the same print as the one we're looking at. Escher has found a way of taking a part and merging it with the whole. It's impossible on a literal level, of course, which is why there's a hole in the center -- but it's a visual display of an idea that wholes and parts are mutually implicative.

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Elementory and the nature of narrative

Time for a fundamental rethink of what the short story collection is about. Still like the title, and the story titles themselves, though the latter are a bit throw-away. And still like the the overall structure -- four sets of paired stories, told and re-told, and one connector ("Touch"), for a total of nine. But the elaborate architecture built around Frye may be a layer of arbitrariness too many. Really want to just focus on the notion of the Inversion and its consequences, as manifested on a kind of micro-level -- the interactions of individuals. Also some experimenting with just fiction and narrative per se. So, some possible themes:

• The notion of the "dirty earth" (re: the Bergman quote) as opposed to world-spurning. (Fire/Bone perhaps)
• The notion of the world's "unfairness" as opposed to those who deal with what they're given. (Water/Blood)
• The most subtle or difficult of all perhaps is the combination of a kind of Darwinian fatalism (or, perhaps better, acceptance) coupled with a sense of embedded engagement (related to the compatibility argument re: free will and determinism). (Earth/Flesh)

The first pair, Air/Skin, may allude to all of the above, first as preview, then as recap.

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"The opaque civilization"

That's the name of an exhibition at the Guggenheim back in 1984, by a "theoretical" architect named Will Insley. From the review in the NYTimes:

''ONECITY,'' the chief project in the show, has, the artist says, ''very little to do with advanced planning theories of the present'' or with the ''utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity.''

An imaginary labyrinth 650 miles square, symbolized by a floor plan that paces off at about 30 feet, it is ''situated'' between the Mississippi and the Rockies and consists of many 2 1/2-mile-square structures, each divided into an ''Over-building'' and an ''Under-building'' and each containing nine arenas. Like the ''Star Trek'' scripts, the artist omits the logistical nuts and bolts, making paraphrase difficult.

It's clear, however, that the city's inhabitants are segregated into day people, wholesome types who study at home with their children by means of electronic devices, and night people. ''Tattered ghosts in phosphorescent clothing,'' the night people sound a lot like the more Felliniesque denizens of the Lower East Side, being given to masks and elaborate makeup; they ''mutter a lot'' and ''often carry around personal abstract structures'' that they exchange ''according to mysterious rituals.'' And while they have homes in the Over-building, they frequently sleep in the cubby holes of the Under-building, ignored by day people going about their business.

Alluding to New Yorkers' apparent obliviousness to bag ladies, Insley makes plain that while he himself may be without morals, his fantasy is replete with them as well as with ironic wit. Criminals, by the way, are sequestered in the ninth arena (Dante's?), where they are free to do what they will, including playing team sports like football.

Here's an example taken from the BLDGBLOG:



Which goes on to say:

Courtesy of a comment left a while back on the sorely-missed site The Nonist, we learn that Insley once quipped: "what was absent from the ruin is often less marvelous than we imagine it to have been. The abstract power of suggestion (the fragment) is greater than the literal power of the initial fact. Myth elevates.’"

And finishes:

ONECITY is a "masonite labyrinth," the article concludes, complete with "Wall Fragments" that have been "gridded with white or yellow lines and shaped like garment sections waiting to be sewn together." It's the city as dystopian clothing that we tailor to fit our future selves. Imagine a dusty third-floor walk-up in the Garment District of Manhattan, where precise plans for megastructures are produced on massive looms, needles and yawn moving to a hypnotic drone in semi-darkness. Architectural invention by way of sewing diagrams.

More images, expandable, are available at the nonist (a moribund blog/site).

Intrigued by the gridlines particularly -- the rectilinear characteristic of the architectural/engineering drawing, of the blueprint, the draught. These are not maps, partly in that they have a different purpose, partly in that they refer always to the made, the consciously willed, as opposed to the so-called "natural". But, like maps, they are a representation of information. (Contrast maps/blueprints with knowledge of any kind, which is not a representation of anything.)

With the Game, looking to fuse various forms of visual information, including both map-type and blueprint-type. Interesting to think of being able to adopt different forms or instances of forms as one would put on clothes....

Think too of the idea of an imaginary architecture overlaid on a real city -- an imaginary complete with imaginary denizens, like "day people" and "night people". Overlaid, themselves, on the real people? "Unreal city", mythical city, ....

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The moving world

What this is about

Some themes:

• Utopia, of course
• Which includes Dystopia
• and which includes all other bullet points
• and contains an inherent ambiguity:
• on the one hand, the impossibility of utopia and the folly/evil of utopian attempts
• on the other, the Nozick/Rand utopia
• and on the third hand, the imaginative reach for a New People (see Cherneyshevsky, Gibson's "Blue Ant" trilogy, even possibly Pynchon, and see the Inversion theme below)

• Conspiracy -- the concept, as distinct from the plot (see Art-narrative below)

• The inversion and its consequences
• Epistemological ontology -- this is the central idea (if Utopia stands for the encompassing idea, this is the core): that what is is determined by what's known, not the other way around (and "what's known" is determined by what works -- i.e., a relational as opposed to a representational epistemology)
• "Inversion" describes the switch from let's say a "realist" ontology to the epistemological ontology noted above -- that is, from reality being something out there that we can only painstakingly discover to reality being, literally, right before our eyes (and nose, and ears, and touch, etc.)

• Art
• and religion
• and Utopia
• and narrative
• Elementory
• Conspiracy as plot (see below)
• The plot, as distinct from the concept (see above)
• the notion of "revelation" 
• as distinct from "epiphany" -- i.e., it's exogenous
• also as distinct from "solution" (of a mystery) -- this is a change in your understanding of the world
• A multipart series (say, 5) -- larger revelations at the climax of each?
• Space fiction
• 3000 AD (the 1000-year future)
• The Utopia Project itself
• architecture/urban design/planning
• The game
• of Utopia
• board/screen design
• layers
• fractal depth
• and the social network
• avatars

• Space colonization
• and utopia
• Getting off the planet
• the moon
• Mars
• Open space
• Commercializing space

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