Reflections

Travails in thought; nature, what I'm reading, and - with any luck - writing.

[hermitthrush]

I cannot bring myself to do other than despise Tiberius. At the center of his soul there is a bitterness that no one has fathomed, and in his person there is an essential cruelty that has no particular object. Nevertheless he is not a weak man, and he is not a fool; and cruelty in an Emperor is a lesser fault than weakness or foolishness. Therefore I have relinquished Rome to the mercies of Tiberius and to the accidents of time.

John Williams, Augustus (1972) | Book Three. Augustus on Tiberius and what faults are acceptable in a ruler. Reading Tacitus concurrently and it's cool to see how Williams depictions draw from the history.

[hermitthrush]

One does not deceive oneself about the consequences of one's acts; one deceives oneself about the ease with which one can live with those consequences. I knew the consequences of my decision to live within myself, but I could not have foreseen the heaviness of that loss. For my need of friendship increased to the degree that I refused it.

John Williams, Augustus (1972) | Book Three. Augustus writing about the isolation of becoming who he became.

[hermitthrush]

Hope you're having fun down in Jeo Jah, Little Bird

[hermitthrush]

Meanwhile the companies which previous to the mutiny had been sent to Nauportus to make roads and bridges and for other purposes, when they heard of the tumult in the camp, tore up the standards, and having plundered the neighbouring villages and Nauportus itself, which was like a town, assailed the centurions who restrained them with jeers and insults and, last of all, with blows. Their chief rage was against Aufidienus Rufus, the camp-prefect, whom they dragged from a wagon, loaded with baggage, and drove on at the head of the column, asking him in ridicule whether he liked to bear such huge burdens and such long marches. Rufus, who had long been a common soldier, then a centurion, and subsequently camp-prefect, tried to revive the old severe discipline, inured as he was to work and toil, and all the sterner because he had endured.

Tacitus, The Annals (Early 2nd Century AD) | Book One, "14 - 15 A.D". Better and funnier to make him march than killing him.

[hermitthrush]

The service did my heart and I hope my soul some good. It had been long since I had heard such an approach. It is our practice now, at least in the large cities, to find from our psychiatric priesthood that our sins aren't really sins at all but accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control. There was no such nonsense in this church. The minister, a man of iron with tool-steel eyes and a delivery like a pneumatic drill, opened up with a prayer and reassured us that we were a pretty sorry lot. And he was right. We didn't amount to much to start with, and due to our own tawdry efforts we had been slipping ever since. Then, having softened us up, he went into a glorious fire-and-brimstone sermon. Having proved that we, or perhaps only I, were no damn good, he painted with cool certainty what was likely to happen to us if we didn't make some basic reorganizations for which he didn't hold out much hope. He spoke of hell as an expert, not the mush-mush hell of these soft days, but a well-stoked, white-hot hell served by technicians of the first order. This reverend brought it to a point where we could understand it, a good hard coal fire, plenty of draft, and a squad of open-hearth devils who put their hearts into their work, and their work was me. I began to feel good all over. For some years now God has been a pal to us, practicing togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing softball with his son. But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me. He put my sins in a new perspective. Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity. I hadn't been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left. I wasn't a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it... I felt so relived in spirit that I put five dollars in the plate, and afterward, in front of the church, shook hands warmly with the minister and as many of the congregation as I could. It gave me a lovely sense of evil-doing that lasted clear through till Tuesday. I even considered beating Charley to give him some satisfaction too, because Charley is only a little less sinful than I am. All across the country I went to church on Sundays, a different denomination every week, but nowhere did I find the quality of that Vermont preacher. He forged a religion designed to last, not predigested obsolescence.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (1960) | Part One. Technicians of the first order. Also, makes me think of Emerson.

[hermitthrush]

Sunday morning, in a Vermont town, my last day in New England, I shaved, dressed in a suit, polished my shoes, whited my sepulcher, and looked for a church to attend.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (1960) | Part One.  "Whited Sepulcher" : a person inwardly corrupt or wicked but outwardly or professedly virtuous or holy : hypocrite.

[hermitthrush]

"He is a man like any other," he said. "He will become what he will become, out of the force of his person and the accident of his fate."

John Williams, Augustus (1972) | Book I, Chapter 4. Athenodorus, a childhood tutor of Octavius, has little to say about the Principate to Strabo.

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But William Stoner knew of the world in a way that few of his younger colleagues could understand. Deep in him, beneath his memory, was the knowledge of hardship and hunger and endurance and pain. Though he seldom thought of his early years on the Booneville farm, there was always near his consciousness the blood knowledge of his inheritance, given him by forefathers whose lives were obscure and hard and stoical and whose common ethic was to present to an oppressive world faces that were expressionless and hard and bleak.

John Williams, Stoner (1965) | Chapter XIV

[hermitthrush]

He had come to that moment in his age when there occurred to him, with increasing intensity, a question of such overwhelming simplicity that he had no means to face it. He found himself wondering if his life were worth living; if it had ever been. It was a question, he suspected, that came to all men at one time or another; he wondered if it came to them with such impersonal force as it came to him. The question brought with it a sadness, but it was a general sadness which (he thought) had little to do with himself or with his particular fate; he was not even sure that the questions sprang from the most immediate and obvious causes, from what his own life had become. it came, he believed, from the accretion of his years, from the density of accident and circumstance, and from what he had come to understand of them. He took a grim and ironic pleasure from the possibility that what little learning he had managed to acquire had led him to this knowledge: that in the long run all things, even the learning that let him know this, were futile and empty, and at last diminished into a nothingness they did not alter.

John Williams, Stoner (1965) | Chapter XI. Lomax-induced malaise at age 42.

[hermitthrush]

Long ago, I had a looking-egg. Peering in a little porthole at the end, I saw a lovely little farm, a kind of dream farm, and on the farmhouse chimney a stork sitting on a nest. I regarded this as a fairy-tale farm as surely imagined as gnomes sitting under toadstools. And then in Denmark I saw that farm or its brother, and it was true, just as it had been in the looking-egg. And in Salinas, California, where I grew up, although we had some frost the climate was cool and foggy. When we saw colored pictures of a Vermont autumn forest it was another fairy thing and we frankly didn't believe it. In school, we memorized "Snowbound" and little poems about Old Jack Frost and his paintbrush, but the only thing Jack Frost did for us was put a thin skin of ice on the watering trough, and that rarely. To find not only that this bedlam of color was true but that the pictures were pale and inaccurate translations, was to me startling. I can't even imagine the forest colors when I am not seeing them. I wondered whether constant association could cause inattention, and asked a native New Hampshire woman about it. She said the autumn never failed to amaze her; to elate. "It is a glory," she said, "and can't be remembered, so that it always comes as a surprise."

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (1962) | Part Two. As a native Vermonter, I sign-off vehemently on this sentiment.

[hermitthrush]

Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful. Apollo is law, history, tradition, the dignity and safety of custom and form. Dionysus is the new, exhilarating but rude, sweeping all away to begin again. Apollo is a tyrant, Dionysus is a vandal. Every excess breeds counterreaction.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 3. “Apollo and Dionysus”. Typification of the dichotomous energies at the core of human nature; ebb and flow, systole and diastole.

[hermitthrush]

Compared to dogs, slavishly eager to please, cats are autocrats of naked self-interest. They are both amoral and immoral, consciously breaking rules. Their "evil" look at such times is no human projection; the cat may be the only animal who savors the perverse or reflects upon it. Thus the cat is an adept of chthonian mysteries. But it has a hieratic duality. It is eye-intense The cat fuses the Gorgon eye of appetite to the detached Apollonian eye of contemplation. The cat values invisibility, comically imagining itself undetectable as it slouches across a lawn. But it also fashionably loves to see and be seen; it is a spectator of life's drama, amused, condescending. It is a narcissist, always adjusting its appearance. When it is disheveled, its spirits fall. Cats have a sense of pictorial composition: they station themselves symmetrically on chairs, rugs, even a sheet of paper on the floor. Cats adhere to an Apollonian metric of mathematical space. Haughty, solitary, precise, they are arbiters of elegance - that principle I find natively Egyptian. Cats are poseurs. They have a sense of persona - and become visibly embarrassed when reality punctures their dignity. Apes are more human but less beautiful: they posture but they never pose. Hunkering, chattering, chest-beating, buttock-baring, apes are bumptious vulgarians lurching up the evolutionary road. The cat's sophisticated personae are masks of an advanced theatricality. Priest and god of its own cult, the cat follows a code of ritual purity, cleaning itself religiously. It makes pagan sacrifices to itself and may share its ceremonies with the elect. The day of a cat-owner often begins with the discovery of a neat pile of mole guts or mashed mouse limbs on the porch - Darwinian mementos. The cat is the least Christian inhabitant of the average home.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 2. “The Birth of the Western Eye”. I love the way this woman typifies cats.

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The Egyptians were the first aesthetes. An aesthete does not necessarily dress well or collect art works: an aesthete is one who lives by the eye. The Egyptians had "taste." Taste is Apollonian discrimination, judgment, connoisseurship; taste is the visible logic of objects... The Egyptians lived by ceremony; they ritualized social life. The aristocratic house was a cool, airy temple of harmony and grace; the minor arts had unparalleled quality of design. Jewelry, makeup, costume, chairs, tables, cabinets: from the moment Egyptian style was rediscovered by Napoleon's invaders, it has been the rage in Europe and America, influencing fashion, furniture, and tombstones and even producing the Washington Monument... In their cult of the eye, Egyptians saw edges. Even their stylized gestures in art have a superb balletic contour. The Egyptians invented elegance. Elegance is reduction, simplification, condensation. It is spare, stark, sleek. Elegance is cultivated abstraction. The source of Greek and Roman classicism - clarity, order, proportion, balance - is in Egypt.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 2. “The Birth of the Western Eye”. Apollonian aesthetics and their birth in ancient Egypt; elegance and the cult of the eye (as typified earlier in the Pharaoh, Ra, Horus).

[hermitthrush]

The pagan dialectic of Apollonian and Dionysian was sweepingly comprehensive and accurate about mind and nature. Christian love is so lacking its emotional polarity that the Devil had to be invented to focus natural human hatred and hostility. Rousseauism's Christianized psychology has led to the tendency of liberals toward glumness or depression in the face of the political tensions, wars, and atrocities that daily contradict their assumptions. Perhaps the more we are sensitized by reading and education, the more we must repress the facts of chthonian nature.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 1. “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art”. See the reflexive expression so familiarly springing from middle class acquaintances confronted with the nuance of something like drone strike civilian casualty percentages or the collapse of state mental health services exacerbating the homelessness crisis. And cue up the Phil Ochs.

[hermitthrush]

Art is a shutting in in order to shut out. Art is a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature. The first artist was a tribal priest casting a spell, fixing nature's daemonic energy in a moment of perceptual stillness. Fixation is at the heart of art, fixation as a stasis and fixation as an obsession. The modern artist who merely draws a line on a page is still trying to tame some uncontrollable aspect of reality. Art is spellbinding. Art fixes the audience in its seat, stops the feet before a painting, fixes a book in the hand. Contemplation is a magic act.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 1. “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art”. Art cages the summoned daemon. That is essentially how I've described poetry's value to friends who have engaged me about mine. A thread here to Asher Lev.

[hermitthrush]

Historiography's most glaring error has been its assertion that Judeo-Christianity defeated paganism. Paganism has survived in the thousand forms of sex, art, and now the modern media. Christianity has made adjustment after adjustment, ingeniously absorbing its opposition (as during the Italian Renaissance) and diluting its dogma to change with changing times. But a critical point has been reached. With the rebirth of the gods in the massive idolatries of popular culture, with the eruption of sex and violence into every corner of the ubiquitous mass media... the latent paganism of western culture has burst forth again in all its daemonic vitality.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 1. “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art”. See the Virgin Mary and the Cult of Athena. Although, I realize writing that, that it's possibly the most G-rated example that could come to mind, relative to the work I'm quoting.

[hermitthrush]

Art is order. But order is not necessarily just, kind, or beautiful. Order may be arbitrary, harsh, and cruel. Art has nothing to do with morality... The artist makes art not to save humankind but to save himself.

Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae (1991) | Chapter 1. “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art”. Maximum Asher Lev.