In dedication to today's inauguration and our 44th president, here are a couple brief passages from Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers that I feel read well together.
First:
"The patience with which mankind suffers the authority of logic is simply inexhaustible and can be compared only to the imperturbable patience with which it submits to the art of medicine: and just as the human body confides itself to the most nonsensical medical cures, and is actually cured by them, so reality submits to the erection of the most impossible theoretic structures,--and so long as the theory does not itself declare its bankruptcy it will be supported with confidence, and reality will remain tractable. Only after bankruptcy has been openly declared does man begin to rub his eyes and look once more at reality; only then does he seek the source of knowledge in living experience instead of in ratiocination."
Then:
"We know too well that we are ourselves split and riven, and yet we cannot account for it; if we try to cast the responsibility for it on the age in which we live, the age is too much for our comprehension, and so we fall back on calling it insane or great. We ourselves think that we are normal, because, in spite of the split in our souls, our inner machinery seems to run on logical principles. But if there were a man in whom all the events of our time took significant shape, a man whose native logic accounted for the events of our age, then and then only would this age cease to be insane. Presumably that is why we long for a 'leader,' so that he may provide us with the motivation for events that in his absence we can characterize only as insane."
Here's to our newest leader and his accompanying furor--and, of course, to its inevitable bankruptcy. Let's hope for it to strike sooner rather than later, so that perhaps we can finally--after an increasingly disconnected and ethereal political unreality--find the ground upon which we can build a true foundation.
Sincerely,
Buzzkill Bill
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
On beauty...and its cruelty?
From Part 2 (Fire - The Descent) of The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch. The formatting you see here is the formatting in the book, as it was translated from the original German. The only formatting change I made was inserting a few partitions in the verses for ease of reading. Give it a try; it's an interesting read, even if I did a little splicing in parts, as indicated by the [...].
[...]: knowledge of beauty was lack of knowledge, perception of beauty was lack of perception, the one without vantage of thinking, the other without the full measure of reality, and in the rigidity of beauty's equilibrium--rigid the floating balance between thinking and reality, rigid the reciprocity of question and answer, of askable and answerable from which the world was born--the flood-scales of inner and outer worlds were brought to a standstill, becoming in this rigid balance the symbol of a symbol. [...]: illuminating the night, illuminating the world, beauty spread to the borders of unbounded space and, immersed with space in time, carried on with time through the ages, it became the ever-enduring now, giving boundaries to boundless time, the perfect symbol of earthly life limited by time and space, revealing the woe of limitation and the beauty of life on earth;
thus in mournful sorrow,
thus beauty was revealed to man,
revealed in its self-containment which was
that of the symbol and of equilibrium,
the self gazing at beauty and the beauty-filled world
enchantedly facing each other,
each a-float in the place allotted to it,
both limited, both self-contained, both in equilibrium
and therefore balanced in their apposition in the space common to both:
thus was revealed to man
the self-containment of earthly beauty,
the floating expanse and the magical beauty
of self-contained space, borne on and benumbed by time,
incapable of renewal by the question,
incapable of expansion by knowledge,
the constant completeness of space held in balance
by the influence of beauty within it, yet without renewal or expansion;
thus space in its completeness and self-containment
revealed itself in every one of its parts, at every point,
as if each of these were its innermost core,
revealing itself in every single figure, in every thing, in every human work
as the symbol of its own spatial finitude
at the innermost limit of which every created thing annuls itself,
the symbol annulling and subliming space, beauty annulling and subliming space
by the unity maintained between its inner and outer boundaries,
by the infinitude of the self-containing boundaries,
infinity--but bounded, the sorrow of man;
thus beauty was revealed to man as an occurrence on the boundary,
and this boundary, the inner like the outer,
the boundary of the remotest horizon or that of a single point,
was spanned between the finite and the infinite,
utterly remote while still on earth and within earthly time,
yea, bounding time itself and causing it to linger,
space lingering at its own border with time, but not annulling time,
this being but a symbol, an earthly symbol of time's annulment,
a mere symbol of death's abolishment, not the abolishment itself,
the boundary of human life that never reached beyond itself,
wherefore it was also the boundary of inhumanity--
thus it was revealed to man as an event of beauty,
revealing beauty for what it was, as the infinite in the realm of the finite,
as an earthly sham-infinity,
and hence a game,
the game of earthly men amidst their earthliness, playing at eternity,
the symbolic game on the periphery of earthly life,
beauty the essence of the play,
the game that man played with his own symbol in order that
symbolically--since otherwise it was impossible--he might escape his fear of loneliness,
repeating the beautiful self-deception again and again,
the flight into beauty, the game of flight;
thus there was revealed to man the rigidity of the beautified world,
its incapacity for all growth, the limitation of its perfection,
this world which survived only by repetition and
which, even for this sham-perfection, had always to be striven for anew,
it was revealed as the play of art in its service of beauty,
as art's despair, its despairing attempt
to build up the imperishable from things that perish,
from words, from sounds, from stones, from colors,
so that space, being formed,
might outlast time
as a memorial bearing beauty to the coming generations, art
building space into every production,
building the immortal in space but not in men--
wherefore it lacked growth,
wherefore it was bound to the perfection of mere repetition without growth,
bound to an unattainable perfection and becoming more desperate as it came nearer to perfection,
constrained to return constantly into its own beginning which was its end,
and hence pitiless,
pitiless toward human sorrow which meant no more to art
than passing existence, no more than a word, a stone, a sound, or a color
to be used for exploring and revealing beauty
in unending repetition;
and thus beauty revealed itself to man as a cruelty,
as the growing cruelty of the unbridled game
which promised the pleasure of infinity through the symbol,
the voluptuous, knowledge-disdaining pleasure
of an earthly sham-infinity,
hence thoughtlessly able to inflict sorrow and death,
as happened in the realm of beauty at the remote periphery,
accessible only to the glance, only to time,
but no longer available for humanity and the human task;
thus beauty revealed itself to man as the law that lacked perception,
beauty in its abandonment proclaiming itself as a law unto itself,
self-contained, inextensible, incapable of development or renewal,
pleasure the rule of the game,
self-gratifying, voluptuous, unchaste, unchangeable,
the beauty-saturated, beauty-saturating game in which
beauty was at play with itself,
passing the time but not annulling it,
playing out fate but not controlling it,
the game that could be repeated endlessly, continued endlessly,
yet one that had been destined from the beginning to be broken off,
because only humanity is divine;
and thus the intoxication of beauty revealed itself to man
as the game forlorn from the outset, forlorn
in spite of the eternal balance in which it is established,
in spite of the necessity which compelled it to be resumed again and again,
forlorn, because the unavoidable repetition brought with it
the unavoidable loss,
forlorn, because the intoxication of repetition and that of the game
were inevitably reciprocal in their affects,
both caught in the twilight,
both subject to lapse,
both without growth though assuredly waxing in cruelty--
whereas the truth growth
the increasing knowledge of perceptive mankind,
undeterred by lapse and freed from repetition, unfolded itself in time,
unfolded time to timelessness, so that
time, as it consumed all lapse by force of growing reality,
might break through and pass beyond boundary after boundary,
the innermost like the outermost, leaving behind symbol after symbol,
and even though it left the final symbolic nature of beauty undisturbed,
untouched the necessity of its consummate harmony,
yet the earthly quality of this game had nonetheless to be uncovered,
the inadequacy of the earthly symbol be revealed,
the sadness and despair of beauty laid bare,
beauty stripped of intoxication and sobered,
its perception forfeited and itself lost in impercipience,
and with it, the sobered self,
its poverty--,
[...] and in a flash he perceived that the bursting of the beautiful was caused by nothing but naked laughter and that laughter was the predestined explosion of worldly beauty, of which it had been an attribute from the first, inherent in beauty forever, shimmering out as a smile at the unreal borders of utter-distance, but bawling out noisily on that curving horizon which marked the turning point of beauty's duration, breaking out as the booming, thundering demolishment of time by laughter, as the laughing, demonic force of complete destruction, laughter being the necessary counterpart of world-beauty, the desperate substitute for the lost confidence in wisdom, the end of the intercepted flight into beauty, the end of beauty's interrupted game; oh sorrow for sorrow, making game with the game, pleasure in the very expulsion of pleasure, a doubling of sorrow, a doubling of the game, a doubling of pleasure, this was laughter, a constant flight from the haven of refuge, beyond the game, beyond the world, beyond perception, the bursting of world-sorrow, the external tickle in masculine gorge, the cleaving of beauty-fixed space to a gape in the unspeakable muteness of which even the nothing became lost, enraged by the muteness, enraged by the laughter, divine even this:
for
the prerogative of gods and men was laughter,
[...]
Then it goes on to discuss "laughter: the language of the pre-creation" and its provocation of "the final and ever-valid reversion, the reversion into a boundless realm without knowledge, without name, without speech, without connection, without dimension, the partitions tumbling down, the intuitions of the gods thrown in with that of men, breaking down their common creation but also laying bare the nature of the ageless pre-creation."
To add another (far more brief) perspective on beauty, even though it's not truly that consistent in theme, here is a snippet from The Man Without Qualities, written by Broch's peer, Robert Musil. The quote is spoken by Ulrich in Part 2, Pseudoreality Prevails:
"Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, cuts through to the point where the meaning of the world is tied to thousands of words in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns it into a balloon floating off into space. If this is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was."
Currently listening to: "Winter Wonderland" by Animal Collective
Previous activity: The Daily Show
Next thing on the agenda: maybe a little Robbins Pathology
[...]: knowledge of beauty was lack of knowledge, perception of beauty was lack of perception, the one without vantage of thinking, the other without the full measure of reality, and in the rigidity of beauty's equilibrium--rigid the floating balance between thinking and reality, rigid the reciprocity of question and answer, of askable and answerable from which the world was born--the flood-scales of inner and outer worlds were brought to a standstill, becoming in this rigid balance the symbol of a symbol. [...]: illuminating the night, illuminating the world, beauty spread to the borders of unbounded space and, immersed with space in time, carried on with time through the ages, it became the ever-enduring now, giving boundaries to boundless time, the perfect symbol of earthly life limited by time and space, revealing the woe of limitation and the beauty of life on earth;
thus in mournful sorrow,
thus beauty was revealed to man,
revealed in its self-containment which was
that of the symbol and of equilibrium,
the self gazing at beauty and the beauty-filled world
enchantedly facing each other,
each a-float in the place allotted to it,
both limited, both self-contained, both in equilibrium
and therefore balanced in their apposition in the space common to both:
thus was revealed to man
the self-containment of earthly beauty,
the floating expanse and the magical beauty
of self-contained space, borne on and benumbed by time,
incapable of renewal by the question,
incapable of expansion by knowledge,
the constant completeness of space held in balance
by the influence of beauty within it, yet without renewal or expansion;
thus space in its completeness and self-containment
revealed itself in every one of its parts, at every point,
as if each of these were its innermost core,
revealing itself in every single figure, in every thing, in every human work
as the symbol of its own spatial finitude
at the innermost limit of which every created thing annuls itself,
the symbol annulling and subliming space, beauty annulling and subliming space
by the unity maintained between its inner and outer boundaries,
by the infinitude of the self-containing boundaries,
infinity--but bounded, the sorrow of man;
thus beauty was revealed to man as an occurrence on the boundary,
and this boundary, the inner like the outer,
the boundary of the remotest horizon or that of a single point,
was spanned between the finite and the infinite,
utterly remote while still on earth and within earthly time,
yea, bounding time itself and causing it to linger,
space lingering at its own border with time, but not annulling time,
this being but a symbol, an earthly symbol of time's annulment,
a mere symbol of death's abolishment, not the abolishment itself,
the boundary of human life that never reached beyond itself,
wherefore it was also the boundary of inhumanity--
thus it was revealed to man as an event of beauty,
revealing beauty for what it was, as the infinite in the realm of the finite,
as an earthly sham-infinity,
and hence a game,
the game of earthly men amidst their earthliness, playing at eternity,
the symbolic game on the periphery of earthly life,
beauty the essence of the play,
the game that man played with his own symbol in order that
symbolically--since otherwise it was impossible--he might escape his fear of loneliness,
repeating the beautiful self-deception again and again,
the flight into beauty, the game of flight;
thus there was revealed to man the rigidity of the beautified world,
its incapacity for all growth, the limitation of its perfection,
this world which survived only by repetition and
which, even for this sham-perfection, had always to be striven for anew,
it was revealed as the play of art in its service of beauty,
as art's despair, its despairing attempt
to build up the imperishable from things that perish,
from words, from sounds, from stones, from colors,
so that space, being formed,
might outlast time
as a memorial bearing beauty to the coming generations, art
building space into every production,
building the immortal in space but not in men--
wherefore it lacked growth,
wherefore it was bound to the perfection of mere repetition without growth,
bound to an unattainable perfection and becoming more desperate as it came nearer to perfection,
constrained to return constantly into its own beginning which was its end,
and hence pitiless,
pitiless toward human sorrow which meant no more to art
than passing existence, no more than a word, a stone, a sound, or a color
to be used for exploring and revealing beauty
in unending repetition;
and thus beauty revealed itself to man as a cruelty,
as the growing cruelty of the unbridled game
which promised the pleasure of infinity through the symbol,
the voluptuous, knowledge-disdaining pleasure
of an earthly sham-infinity,
hence thoughtlessly able to inflict sorrow and death,
as happened in the realm of beauty at the remote periphery,
accessible only to the glance, only to time,
but no longer available for humanity and the human task;
thus beauty revealed itself to man as the law that lacked perception,
beauty in its abandonment proclaiming itself as a law unto itself,
self-contained, inextensible, incapable of development or renewal,
pleasure the rule of the game,
self-gratifying, voluptuous, unchaste, unchangeable,
the beauty-saturated, beauty-saturating game in which
beauty was at play with itself,
passing the time but not annulling it,
playing out fate but not controlling it,
the game that could be repeated endlessly, continued endlessly,
yet one that had been destined from the beginning to be broken off,
because only humanity is divine;
and thus the intoxication of beauty revealed itself to man
as the game forlorn from the outset, forlorn
in spite of the eternal balance in which it is established,
in spite of the necessity which compelled it to be resumed again and again,
forlorn, because the unavoidable repetition brought with it
the unavoidable loss,
forlorn, because the intoxication of repetition and that of the game
were inevitably reciprocal in their affects,
both caught in the twilight,
both subject to lapse,
both without growth though assuredly waxing in cruelty--
whereas the truth growth
the increasing knowledge of perceptive mankind,
undeterred by lapse and freed from repetition, unfolded itself in time,
unfolded time to timelessness, so that
time, as it consumed all lapse by force of growing reality,
might break through and pass beyond boundary after boundary,
the innermost like the outermost, leaving behind symbol after symbol,
and even though it left the final symbolic nature of beauty undisturbed,
untouched the necessity of its consummate harmony,
yet the earthly quality of this game had nonetheless to be uncovered,
the inadequacy of the earthly symbol be revealed,
the sadness and despair of beauty laid bare,
beauty stripped of intoxication and sobered,
its perception forfeited and itself lost in impercipience,
and with it, the sobered self,
its poverty--,
[...] and in a flash he perceived that the bursting of the beautiful was caused by nothing but naked laughter and that laughter was the predestined explosion of worldly beauty, of which it had been an attribute from the first, inherent in beauty forever, shimmering out as a smile at the unreal borders of utter-distance, but bawling out noisily on that curving horizon which marked the turning point of beauty's duration, breaking out as the booming, thundering demolishment of time by laughter, as the laughing, demonic force of complete destruction, laughter being the necessary counterpart of world-beauty, the desperate substitute for the lost confidence in wisdom, the end of the intercepted flight into beauty, the end of beauty's interrupted game; oh sorrow for sorrow, making game with the game, pleasure in the very expulsion of pleasure, a doubling of sorrow, a doubling of the game, a doubling of pleasure, this was laughter, a constant flight from the haven of refuge, beyond the game, beyond the world, beyond perception, the bursting of world-sorrow, the external tickle in masculine gorge, the cleaving of beauty-fixed space to a gape in the unspeakable muteness of which even the nothing became lost, enraged by the muteness, enraged by the laughter, divine even this:
for
the prerogative of gods and men was laughter,
[...]
Then it goes on to discuss "laughter: the language of the pre-creation" and its provocation of "the final and ever-valid reversion, the reversion into a boundless realm without knowledge, without name, without speech, without connection, without dimension, the partitions tumbling down, the intuitions of the gods thrown in with that of men, breaking down their common creation but also laying bare the nature of the ageless pre-creation."
To add another (far more brief) perspective on beauty, even though it's not truly that consistent in theme, here is a snippet from The Man Without Qualities, written by Broch's peer, Robert Musil. The quote is spoken by Ulrich in Part 2, Pseudoreality Prevails:
"Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, cuts through to the point where the meaning of the world is tied to thousands of words in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns it into a balloon floating off into space. If this is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was."
Currently listening to: "Winter Wonderland" by Animal Collective
Previous activity: The Daily Show
Next thing on the agenda: maybe a little Robbins Pathology
Monday, January 05, 2009
"This too was sleep"
...from Part 1 (Water - The Arrival) of The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch. I suppose this is what happens when someone truly feels driven to write.
In truth, nothing earthly might abandon sleep, and only he who never forgot the night within him was able to complete the cycle, to come home from the timelessness of the beginning to that of the end, beginning the orbit anew, himself a star in the constellation of time's orbit, arising from dusk and sinking into dusk, born and reborn nocturnally out of the night, received by day whose brightness has entered into the darkness, day, taking on the habit of night: yes, so had his nights ever been, all the nights of his life, all the nights through which he had wandered, the nights passed in wakefulness for fear of the unconsciousness that threatens from below the night, for fear of the unshadowed light from above, fearful of forsaking Pan, full of a fear that knows of the peril of twofold timelessness, yes, thus his nights bound to the threshold of the double farewell, nights of the obstinately enduring universal sleep, although people rioted on the squares, in the streets, in the taverns, blindly remaining the same in town after town from the very beginning, the sound of their tumult echoing here inaudibly from the reaches of time and therefore all the more keenly recognized, this too was sleep; although the mighty of the world were being toasted amid a surf of torches and music in hall after hall of feasting, smiled at by faces and more faces, courted by bodies and more bodies, they also smiling and courting, this too was sleep; although the bivouac fires were burning, not only before the castles but yonder too where there was war, at the frontiers, at the night-black rivers, and at the fringes of the night-murmuring forests beneath the rutilant roar of the attacking barbarians breaking out of the night, this too was sleep, sleep and more sleep, like that of the naked gray-beards who in stinking hovels sleep the last remnant of wakefulness out of themselves, like that of the sucklings who dreamlessly drowse away the misery of their birth into the sullen wakefulness of a future life, like that of the enslaved chain-gang in the ship's belly who lay stretched out like torpid reptiles on the benches and decks of coiled ropes, sleep and more sleep, herds and more herds, lifted out from the indiscriminateness of their ground-soil like the ranging mountings of the night at rest on the plains, set into the unchanging matrix, into the constant regression which is not quite timelessness but which reproduces it in every earthly night; yes these nights, so had they ever been, so they were still, and so this night also perhaps enduring forever, night on the tilted threshold of timelessness and time, of farewell and returning, of herd-solidarity and the loneliest utter-loneliness, of fear and salvation and he, thralled on the threshold, waiting night after night on the threshold, blinded by the twilight at the rim of night and by the dusk at the world's edge, knowing as he did the experiences of sleep, he had been lifted into immutability, and as he was taking shape there he was hurled back and aloft into the sphere of verse, into the interrealm of wisdom and poetry, into the dream that is beyond dream and touches on rebirth, the goal of our flight, the song.
Currently listening to: "Aenima" by Tool
Previous activity: A little reading in The Death of Virgil
Next thing on the agenda: Some premature boards review
In truth, nothing earthly might abandon sleep, and only he who never forgot the night within him was able to complete the cycle, to come home from the timelessness of the beginning to that of the end, beginning the orbit anew, himself a star in the constellation of time's orbit, arising from dusk and sinking into dusk, born and reborn nocturnally out of the night, received by day whose brightness has entered into the darkness, day, taking on the habit of night: yes, so had his nights ever been, all the nights of his life, all the nights through which he had wandered, the nights passed in wakefulness for fear of the unconsciousness that threatens from below the night, for fear of the unshadowed light from above, fearful of forsaking Pan, full of a fear that knows of the peril of twofold timelessness, yes, thus his nights bound to the threshold of the double farewell, nights of the obstinately enduring universal sleep, although people rioted on the squares, in the streets, in the taverns, blindly remaining the same in town after town from the very beginning, the sound of their tumult echoing here inaudibly from the reaches of time and therefore all the more keenly recognized, this too was sleep; although the mighty of the world were being toasted amid a surf of torches and music in hall after hall of feasting, smiled at by faces and more faces, courted by bodies and more bodies, they also smiling and courting, this too was sleep; although the bivouac fires were burning, not only before the castles but yonder too where there was war, at the frontiers, at the night-black rivers, and at the fringes of the night-murmuring forests beneath the rutilant roar of the attacking barbarians breaking out of the night, this too was sleep, sleep and more sleep, like that of the naked gray-beards who in stinking hovels sleep the last remnant of wakefulness out of themselves, like that of the sucklings who dreamlessly drowse away the misery of their birth into the sullen wakefulness of a future life, like that of the enslaved chain-gang in the ship's belly who lay stretched out like torpid reptiles on the benches and decks of coiled ropes, sleep and more sleep, herds and more herds, lifted out from the indiscriminateness of their ground-soil like the ranging mountings of the night at rest on the plains, set into the unchanging matrix, into the constant regression which is not quite timelessness but which reproduces it in every earthly night; yes these nights, so had they ever been, so they were still, and so this night also perhaps enduring forever, night on the tilted threshold of timelessness and time, of farewell and returning, of herd-solidarity and the loneliest utter-loneliness, of fear and salvation and he, thralled on the threshold, waiting night after night on the threshold, blinded by the twilight at the rim of night and by the dusk at the world's edge, knowing as he did the experiences of sleep, he had been lifted into immutability, and as he was taking shape there he was hurled back and aloft into the sphere of verse, into the interrealm of wisdom and poetry, into the dream that is beyond dream and touches on rebirth, the goal of our flight, the song.
Currently listening to: "Aenima" by Tool
Previous activity: A little reading in The Death of Virgil
Next thing on the agenda: Some premature boards review
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