At a few different points it's like the camera is asking, "Where is this wondrous sound coming from?" and nosing around it like a dog. Ah, the Smiths.
I was enjoying The Life of Henry Brulard, by Stendhal, the other evening, and I came across a passage that seemed to me to be a curious synthesis of Aristotle's & Kant's notions of happiness (mentioned in the footnote of the Nicomachean post). In an aside, Stendhal remarks, "I call a man's character his habitual way of going in pursuit of happiness," (italics mean the English word rather than French was used in the original). They both hint at this, but Stendhal distills the concepts into something that can have meaning.
I spent my evening finishing Walter Pater's Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, instead of working on my final essay for the semester -- an expansion of my as of yet unveiled ;) Jacob's Room essay, and I think it was the wiser choice. I'd like to share the entire book with you, but since that's not really possible I'll say this about Pater's book -- mainly, that though it might be dismissed as nothing more than art criticism, it is a little book pulsing with passion and soul and wisdom on how art meets life, and may verily be the finest book I've read all year and is easily one of the finest I've ever read -- and share this tiny quote with you (forgive me, i don't feel like typing more):
Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject or material.
I blew my speakers a few weeks ago. I still use 'em. they crackle, they groan, and sometimes they sound okay.
I discovered that one record was completely unaffected by the crushed cones, no matter how far past 12 o'clock I went. It was this record:
Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell
Of a spent day - to wander the cathedral lawn
From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.
Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps
Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway
Antiphonal carillons launched before
The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?
The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;
And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave
Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score
Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!
Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping
The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!
Pagodas campaniles with reveilles out leaping-
O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thighs embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope - cleft to despair?
The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) -or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-
And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure…
And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip
Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip
The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.
--
This poem shatters me. There is no daemon near enough to allow me to delve into these words in any meaningful way. I turn to poetry, especially this piece, for an anguished sublime -- anguished because it is an art that, when I attempt to face the fiercer, perhaps more esoteric, poets, I am overwhelmed by. Oh, but to only read and reread this aloud is a thing of great beauty. I must always pause and repeat what is one of my most favorite groupings of symbols (letters, words) in the English language:
Often it makes my eyes go dry.And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.
Edit: on a whim i quickly recorded the poem for you fine folks. ;)
And thus declared the Frenchman,
All unreflective passions push one to great, fleeting efforts rather than to continuity of efforts.
It lately occurred to me that these three words quite often appear in the words I write -- from essays to reveries to journal ramblings to notes at work. Heard from without it's like a single on repeat, ad nauseam.
I can be a funny cat when it comes to writing essays. I like to take my time. I like to let ideas simmer. I let my gaze explore an idea as if I were a fixating stoner, and I don't mind if my mind goes off on tangents -- I note them down as I'm able and get back to where I was, if I feel the need. Sometimes these tangents are enough to embody whole essays, and I know I'm kind of wasting time or energy by allowing myself to enjoy the writing of an essay so much, but I think this sort of pleasure must come first, I mean why write the essay unless the process (if not the end product) allows you the possibility of hearing yourself sing along with the vibrations and melodies of your own heart?
Sometimes I come across a passage or a line in the text I'm writing an essay on, and I think to myself, I simply must fit this in the essay. I must make it appear to be stroke of beauty in the essay even if it doesn't really have a clear connection to the essay. I don't know if I end up misconstruing the text or discovering a precious insight. I've been known to scrap an entire essay and start again just to be able use the passage I'm enamored with. Take this essay I'm writing on Jacob's Room, by Virginia Woolf, for example.
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us. To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have -- positively -- a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang -- there is no getting over the fact that this desires seizes us pretty often.
And yet, and yet . . . when we go to dinner, when pressing finger-tips we hope to meet somewhere soon, a doubt insinuates itself; is this the way to spend our days? the rare, the limited, so soon dealt out to us -- drinking tea? dining out? And the notes accumulate. And the telephones ring. And everywhere we go wires and tubes surround us to carry the voices that try o penetrate before the last card is dealt and the days are over. "Try to penetrate," for as we lift the cup, shake the hand, express the hope, something whispers, Is this all? Can I never know, share, be certain? Am I doomed all my days to write letters, send voices, which fall upon the tea-table, fade upon the passage, making appointments, while life dwindles, to come and dine? Yet letters are venerable; and the telephone valiant, for the journey is a lonely one, and if bound together by notes and telephones we went in company, perhaps -- who knows? -- we might talk by the way.
"I suppose the important thing to do is to not let yourself dig a hole so deep they'd need a shotgun to get pinto beans to you."
I like the way that puts it.
