Art

Where art is concerned, tradition and originality are incompatible. Or perhaps a better word would be immiscible: for some of the best avant-garde art has precisely that oil-and-water-y quality.

Philosophical gas

We can think, perhaps, of philosophy as such as a metaphorical air: which is to say, not as the medium through which ‘concepts’ or ‘truth’ are carried, but as the possibility of concepts themselves. Schopenhauer said: “I have never professed to propound a philosophy that would leave no questions answered. In this sense philosophy is actually impossible; it would be the science of omniscience. But … there is a limit up to which reflection can penetrate, and so far illuminate the night of our existence, although the horizon always remains dark. This limit is reached by my doctrine of the will-to-live that affirms or denies itself in its own phenomenon. To want to go beyond this is, in my view, like wanting to fly beyond the atmosphere. We must stop here.’ [Schopenhauer, vol II, p.591-2]. It can be agreed that the philosopher flies on the air, and cannot fly without the air. But what if the air does not come to an end, only thins to one degree or another? Can a Philosopher fly this infinitely attenuating medium – to the moon?

Non-paradox

‘Can you tell me who won the losers’ race?’ only looks like a paradox. Why should the losers, gathered together into one race, want to make a virtue of their failing? Which one of them wouldn’t think to themselves, ‘now, in this company of losers, I have my best chance yet to transform myself into a winner …’

Criticism of Poetry

Lyric criticism. The ideal of a poem as a brief text that must be unpacked into much greater verbiage by the critic. Platonic form: the haiku that generates Gibbon’s-Decline-quantities of prose exposition. Like an airbag; or one of those inflatable life rafts that explodes into stiffness and into which dozens of survivors can wriggle. As if literary criticism were a form of explosion inflation …

‘The mystic obscurity of illumination…’

Sun cataracts a whiteness
across the mirror’s glare:
all light and all blindness
folded together there.

The mortality of space

'Time is money'. Why has no equivalent adage been coined, 'space is money'? Is it because, although we know from practical experience how limited space is--how in other words demand always exceeds supply for property, real estate, freedom from crowds and so on--nevertheless our sense of space is shaped by a fundamentally metaphysical understanding of space as infinite? Whereas time is inflected by our purely personal understanding of time as finite, as bounded by our individual deaths? Why this should be I don't know. Perhaps we do think of ourselves residually as plains apes, with the whole world spatially before us; as Natty Bumppos, as Tennysonian Ulysses forever roaming with a hungry heart, moving across a landscape 'whose margin fades forever and forever as we move'. It would be cannier, surely, to think in terms of the mortality of space, a separate, unanological but just as real equivalent to the mortality of time.

It puts me in mind of the last lines of Paradise Lost, a poem that ends almost with a metaphysical trade-off of, on the one hand, topographical containment and unbounded time; and on the other temporal finitude and 'the world was all before them ...' spatial openendedness. To put it another way, when the infinite time is lost to mankind via Adam's sin, the boundedness of Edenic space is rescinded. Metaphysically speaking, time and space are together a zero-sum, or infinite-sum, game.

Two contrary positions

1. My strength is not your weakness. My weakness is not your strength. A strength that finds itself only by taking advantage of my weakness is no real strength. A grown man does not prove himself by boxing with an infant.

2. Strength is a relative, and not an absolute, term. It is always strength to do such-and-such, or strength in relation to such and such. My arm is strong compared to an infant's but weak compared to a steam-hammer. To say so is to make more than a literalist or merely descriptive statement; because understanding that there is no such quantity as a reified 'perfect strength' (any more than there exists 'perfect goodness', 'perfect love', or 'ultimate evil' -- all of these being relative terms) frees one from the tyranny of hating one's own weakness. One's weakness is a necessary part of one's strength, and vice versa.