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