Off the Top of My Head

What is an idea? An idea is a portent, an echo, an aura, a scent, an indication, a clue.

Philosophers are sleuths.

Artists are executioners.

Three Conversations, circa 1989

if you want to live in South America   a $25 an hour job   remember I was telling you   sure   a jiggle   relationship should   shamefully   and you’ve got the competition on the weekend   it just it just blows my mind away how much material   there is not a disagreement   as long as they’re advertising   I suppose it’s for the same reason   we have also fought very hard to execute   in their description of it   kill all your children   this is a danger   invited   we all we actually   we have to also fight with people   therefore you didn’t   my mother   uh and   exactly   this is the logical gap I never   see we couldn’t   had a good time   I mean   demonstration   the indigineous people of the rainforest   maybe they’re related by male bonding   differences   destroy the entire foundation   his father had at the same time   to me I think that   I don’t generally   let’s look ahead to what this demonstration   if the Americans   also swearing thank god you’re allowed to do that   Anti-Fascist   they don’t know any better   but he gives the you know the essential   basis for a United Front   Exxon and all the other people responsible   you know   we have people   would your name go down in history?   then again   that capitalism can be reformed   #3 was Will It Burn? by   it’s ok   this demonstration   stock-in-trade phrases for the year   everything is moderation but the thing is you don’t think of it in terms of moderation anymore   Democratic   couple of great shows on CBC radio   the other one   a chance to   whatever my Walkman is stuck at   I’ve got a Classics   South America   really? AM?   got a class cancelled today   well what I see   wanna hear something funny?   is there any one company that would truly offend you?   join the Demonstration   it’s not gonna be outstanding or anything   without getting into that whole male thing   some people to serve during the time of the Demonstration   put in 70 or 80 hours a week   an innocent muffin   people from 12 to 4 well one thing I’ll say is there is a phone number on the other side should we require Marshalls thing is Hezbollah is no friend of ours or friend of yours in front of the United Nations Joint Defense of the United Front Demonstration Common Enemy similarly in our Anti-Fascist Demonstrations people who are very different from us politically do you want to formally endorse something of an attempt make a note here Resolution Organization would you care to take to take a copy of this with you show your Comrades give the Press would you like to War of the Cities

Retrieved from File 13

Where interests converge, no conspiracy is necessary.

Humans Are

1. Animals. This world made us and we are made of it. Our first circumstance and our last is physicality, extension in an extended world, being in a hard, resistant, recalcitrant, unjustified and unforgiving existence. I do not call this existence intractable, however. We manipulate it constantly and may end it at any time.

2. Subjects. We are aware of the world and, if marginally mature, aware of this awareness, self-conscious. With this come identity and distinction, time, place, wish and regret, near, far and never, totem and other, the concept of life and the meaning of death. The hands at Lascaux are our hands.

3. Talkers. Articulated, rule-governed systems of signs allow us a vast range of expression and communication, storage and development, and with these the cultural wherewithal to withstand and manipulate the unforgiving, primarily through the invention of ourselves as:

4. Users. By extending ourselves through levers of every shape, size, constitution and design, we expand our reach, and the purposes it serves, exponentially.

5. Choosers. Intention informs our every act. No goal is necessary, no success or failure mandated, no value guaranteed, no reference transparent once refracted through the prism of human attitude. Whether willing to admit it or not, people decide the course of their animal biographies.

6. Creators. A free, conscious, communicative and utilitarian animal will make what it wants, want what it needs, and need what it makes for as long as the world sustains this circle. When the circle breaks, we will decide to want, need and make different things. When creation is impossible, we will have been destroyed.

7. Cowards. Undetermined, we invent determinism. Unfounded, we demand foundations. Unrestrained, we shackle ourselves and each other. There is no value so small, no act so ineffective, no distinction so subtle nor decision so raw that we will not attempt to justify them transcendentally as necessities, as things imposed upon us, demanded by a will or power or logic or understanding or being greater than our own. We are the littlest gods ever made.
 

De Anima

"The Abbot gently stroked the supple leather of the book he was reading. He fancied it yielded beneath his palm like the flank of some peaceable grazing creature. Could leather be cured of its curing? Could the sightless hides be reassembled, clasps turn to bells, the branded spines grow tails again?

"He would lose first those books bound in vellum, for the bindings would turn back to stomachs and digest the contents. Or the shelves would grow into a hedge and keep out the hand that reached for knowledge.

"He replaced the book while he still had access to the shelves, before its covers might twist from his grasp with new-born awkwardness, trailing from embryonic gums a voided spittle of silent language."

                                                --John Fuller, Flying to Nowhere, p.76

A Visit from Aunty Metaphysical

Monet captured, utilized, mourned the tragic gap between the phenomenal and the noumenal. He stirred his hands childishly in appearances at the expense of reality. He mistook the apparent for the real. He discovered the reality of appearance. He preferred sensuous experience to objects because the sensuous is pleasant or easy or because he was too sophisticated or stupid or vile to appreciate permanent and fundamental values. Monet found wisdom in considered reflection on otherwise fleeting impressions. Monet needed glasses. Monet saw through the myth of the noumenal to the organizing function of human perception. He painted the very structure of the human brain. He painted souls.

What does Aunty say?

Monet painted pictures.

Gravity's Pull

An arch is thrown. Apex reached, it falls again. It can never transcend. Thrown at a building, with apex and wall in mutual support, the buttress is said to fly, though with obvious imperfection. The Romans too threw arch from column, allowing it to fall within a second column, then perhaps a third and more. They piled layers of arches over the first to raise the structure to a level at which a smooth, continuous motion could be maintained from one end of the aquaduct to the other. Long series of stacked interjections still fly over European valleys: failure latticed into glory, irresistibly flawed.

From the Staffordshire Hoard

Its elements forever twined, interlocked, forcibly bent into a static social beauty, this and like stylings ring tragic with me. They bespeak not only the necessity of relation, but necessary relations. With those, the individual is made a node, and his creation, like the metalsmith’s, an accident of immanent utility. At least polyphony can be groaned, panted, beaten out in the subject’s precious time, even improvised. This bird cannot sing.

Of Course

“So wild it was when first we settled here” –Thomas Hardy, Domicilium

I think of nature as whatever lives and happens in the absence of human agency. Culture at root refers to husbandry, the care of living, growing things. Somehow, the moment we cultivate them, things cease to be natural. People, the most artificial, the most cultivated, of beings, can go native, but this consists of no more than doing in Rome whatever Romans do. Unable to decide what to do, we are encouraged to do what comes naturally, meaning what occurs to us unbidden and without calculation. We answer nature’s call, on the other hand, with manufactured paper, molded porcelain and plumbed water. Where I come from, bidets are expensive and optional.

Not only does nature host our several growths, but each growth is said to have a nature. Yet not a single one of us can begin to describe what we were born to be, unless it were a howling, helpless infant. Paradoxically, human nature involves an element of indeterminacy. Adequately cultured, we might fulfill our better natures by actively and consciously shaping what we are, husbanding ourselves into what we want to be. People who manage this feat easily however, without paroxysm or paralysis, are said to be naturals. Maybe they're not people at all.

Theme

speak unspoken

break unbroken

close and open

still in motion

The Halo and the Punch

Consider 'The Man in the Golden Helmet', now thought to have been painted by one of Rembrandt’s school, rather than by the master himself. Portrayed is an old man, or a man old before his time, moustached, cheek scarred, eyes open though not fully, head tilted slightly downward and about 45° to his right. He wears a gilded and ornately decorated military helmet topped with feathers. A cheekguard hangs over the stiff collar of a tunic or breastplate.

The helmet is a badge of rank and thereby of honour and power. He had it specially made in his first proud flush of authority, or on his highest appointment. It was given to him as reward for victory, for miscellaneous services rendered, as a pledge of faith in his surpassing reputation, by his city, state or sovereign, by his commander, by his wife, by his father, by his troops. It was presented to him by a defeated general out of respect for his military art, his magnanimity, his noble soul. It was looted from a baggage train. The decoration depicts Achilles mourning Patroclus, Achilles avenging his dearest friend’s death, Achilles in his chariot dragging Hector’s body by its pierced heels around Troy’s moaning walls.

The man’s face is sternly set, evincing stoic discipline, its scars unfelt. A father remembers what his children will learn. A soldier meditates on impossible peace, on lost oportunities, on hollow glories, the finality of defeat. A clever man plots his next move. An officer pauses before a fateful command, a Rubicon to cross. A good man shoulders Christian shame for the sins of the world, or merely for his own. The man in the golden helmet must rule or be ruled. He listens unmoved to an underling’s report, he listens intently, he listens with gradually dawning dread, with boredom. Whatever he is looking at, he surely sees himself.

Wrought with skill and perception, a work of visual art can instantiate a sophisticated point of view, a fraught moral, a complex tale, revealing to its audience in the standard flash an argument the piecemeal articulation of which would take many sentences and please no eye at all. What is more, by showing rather than stating its wisdom, the piece retains both the concentrated punch of immediacy and the broader halo of ambiguity that equally inform its decisive moment. Now, it urges, choose.

Content with Form

Let us short circuit the philosophers and define form as means or method of delivery. Content gets delivered. Undelivered content is unimaginable, since imagination itself is a means of delivery. Is an empty form possible, a void delivery? Even ‘Grey Field’ delivers a uniform colour within discretely framed two dimensional space, not to mention a title: Feldgrau was the colour of German army uniforms during the world wars.

If a representation delivers something that is conventionally recognizable, nothing we can slap on a wall, a plinth or a computer monitor will fail to represent. It might fail to represent lilies, or a prime minister, or the Christ’s passion, but it will speak at the very least of whatever it is. Something gets delivered; form is never empty.

The distinction of form from content is a propadeutic, its value exhausted by its utility. What carries meaning in one context is our subject in the next. To master this interchange of functions is to learn the art of saying something.

Suspicion

Lost in ecstasy, we are insane. Locked in discipline, we are miserable. Yet measures of the two are anything but incompatible.

Discipline implies suspicion. People who control their drink are aware, almost invariably, of those who don’t. The sensitive see louts, the generous meet greed, the chosen or elect find the damned on every corner. It is often fear that drives our disciplines, but not always. Positive values too can bend us to effort and sacrifice. And suspicion.

Some people place a certain sort of experience at the top end of their scale of values, a rapturous and unlimited joy or sense of well-being. An ecstatic state or experience is decidedly undisciplined, and likewise removed from suspicion. But if no defined discipline or craft is necessary to the achievement of this experience, how does it differ from the bliss produced by opiates, mere smiling hap or manna? I prefer to think of joy as an achievement of craft and pleasure intermixed. It will be limited and compromised, but it will subsist. Of anything absolute, unlimited or easy, I am suspicious.

The Tempest

Independent and bestaffed, our gentleman watches from a safe distance what might and might not be his child suckling at the breast of what might and might not be his mistress or wife. He might be enticed or repulsed, protective or careless, but he is certainly anxious. Of what? The woman is powerless, cemented to her biology and its offspring, and alone with both but for the interest, conscience or otherwise of her potential master. In this traditional idyll of father and flock, there is reason to fear. Any circumstance that denudes the woman and child of guidance and protection will destroy them, that prevents their guide from fulfilling his responsibility will ruin him, at least morally.

I’d like to think that Giorgione was enough of an artist to see past the obvious, to find poles within poles, as it were. The looming tempest of the painting’s background threatens to bookend the idyll itself with personal freedom, sexuality uncoupled from role, standing or conscience. Is it better to be cemented or alone? Some quiet mean would be sensible, but are not these the terms of our relational scale? There is no middle without ends. And of course there are more dimensions to this subject than two.

The View from There

Without difference, nothing is the same. Without them, there is no me. Wrongs and rights generate each other as surely as inventions generate necessities. Likewise power and outrage, treasure and destruction.

Let's gander, at whiles, the little poles round which our tensions ease or thicken, the mincing logics of our local madness.

Taken in measure, something gives.

Simple

All the great issues of our time, distilled to a gnomic and rhetorical essence:

Should women be allowed to wear pants?

Here Come the Cavalry

Here's what I dreamed one night. I was in another city for some reason, in a hotel room, but the room was very small and crowded with books and bric-a-brac. Wellington was there too. Some time passed and it seemed I had fallen asleep, then woken up. But I hadn't really woken up; I was actually dead. I suspected I had died violently, perhaps stabbed by a robber. I looked in my wallet and saw wads of coloured paper there, but it wasn't real money. I had been robbed and the thief had replaced my good money with worthless junk. I thought that if I had been stabbed, there would be lots of blood everywhere, and I didn't want Wellington to get it on him. I looked down to see him stepping carefully around a small pool of watery liquid tinged a light pink. I looked in a mirror to find an open knife wound, perhaps two inches long but quite dry and clean, on the left side of my chest. It amused me that I should take all this so calmly. I was relieved that I didn't have to care.

We are strangers always, we insist on it, in a sort of twilight. And our strangeness is not supernatural. It is rooted in self-deceit. Its half-lit world is fear.

Fancy

If you were omnipotent, if you could do anything imaginable, what would you do? I would do absolutely nothing. To act in this circumstance would be to cheat. What's the point of that?

God cheats.

Soul Discretion

Actions might be soulless, music played with soul, earnest reflection soul-searching, the pith or model of something its very soul, a lover one’s soul mate. Upon my soul!, one wants to say, What a useful word! Notice, however, that when “soul” is applied in these ways, it can also be paraphrased sensibly. Actions are robotic, uninspired or insensitive, music rhythmically infectious and emotionally intense, reflection honest and thorough, the very soul of something a surpassingly fit example of it, a lover or mate extremely close and well matched. A pretty word, and a useful one, but hardly mysterious.

What are people saying when they talk about immaterial alter egos or souls? These souls don’t think or speak, cannot live or act at all except vicariously through their owners’ lives. For that reason they cannot be said to have the least effect on or in the world. A soul is created entire at the moment the person is, and disappears entirely at the person’s dissolution. It cannot be sensed, improved, expanded, damaged or manipulated. No ascription of responsibility can be made to souls. No communication can be transacted with them. Outside the religious fantasy, any application of the word “soul” and its varieties that we might make to people will not refer to souls, but to people, as do the instances cited above.

So why do people cling to their immaterial, metaphysical souls? Habit, dogma, pride? Perhaps as a direct and intimate link to an immaterial, metaphysical God? People believe in all sorts of funny things for all sorts of funny reasons, I suppose.

The Act of Being

Is it so strange to suggest that personality is shaped, meaningful selfhood undertaken, individuation achieved, through the manipulation of varied, complex and ramifying relations to a larger neighbourhood or family or world? Not just words, but people too, make sense only in a context or setting. And this setting does not have to be static. As much as any person, one's personal setting, place or function can and will be altered, refined, expanded, fitted, shaped, balanced, harmonized, electrified, and authenticated through action.

Actions are guided by values. Yet received, conventional, neighbourhood values are actively culled, sorted, weighted and shaped by individuals. This routine is circular, of course, but the circle is integral and alive: integral because it cannot be avoided, and alive because its content changes constantly.

I don't claim that this is how things should be; this is how they are.

In all this complicated process of acting, the play writes itself, constrained and undetermined.

Never say to someone, “Be what you are.” That isn't possible.