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02 Nov 2009 23:39
November 03, 2009
Bebb's Oak
(Quercus bebbiana)Dominion ArboretumCentral Experimental Farm
a 500-hectare working farm in the center of Ottawa
In the 30th anniversary issue of The London Review of BooksThe Winemakers It wasn’t meant to stand for what it stood for. Only a puptent could do that. Besides, we were in a state called New York, where only bees made sense.
A Dry Black Veil Brian Dillon on dustCabinet Magazine
In the section of the Arcades Project entitled “Boredom, Eternal Return,” Walter Benjamin briefly refers to the role of dust in the nineteenth-century interior, a substance at once magical and mundane: “Plush as dust collector. Mystery of dustmotes playing in the sunlight. Dust and the ‘best room’.... Other arrangements to stir up dust: the trains of dresses.”4 In the decaying Paris arcades—the furred arteries of the modern city—dust both occludes and outlines the once-novel commodity and its slow desuetude. For Marcel Proust, too, dust was simultaneously to be feared (in the form of the lime-tree pollen that brought on his asthma, or the choking fumes of the coal fire in ?his bedroom) and welcomed for the physical and aesthetic veil it cast about him as he wrote; Proust lived his last decade in a cloud of medicinal powders, propped up among material remnants of his past—photographs, books, and furniture—that he refused to allow his servants to dust. And a few years after Proust’s death, in the pages of his journal Documents, Georges Bataille pointed out that the dominion of dust in legend and reality had not yet been properly acknowledged:
The storytellers have not realised that the Sleeping Beauty would have awoken covered in a thick layer of dust; nor have they envisaged the sinister spiders’ webs that would have been torn apart at the first movement of her red tresses. Meanwhile dismal sheets of dust constantly invade earthly habitations and uniformly defile them: as if it were a matter of making ready attics and old rooms for the imminent occupation of the obsessions, phantoms, spectres that the decayed odour of old dust nourishes and intoxicates. When plump young girls, “maids of all work,” arm themselves each morning with a large feather-duster or even a vacuum-cleaner, they are perhaps not completely unaware that they are contributing every bit as much as the most positivist of scientists to dispelling the injurious phantoms that cleanliness and logic abhor.
This grotesque and opaque effluvium, Victorian successor to the miasma that appalled John Evelyn, is for Ruskin a real meteorological phenomenon; his second lecture is for the most part a defense of the first against the disbelieving and even mocking reactions of the press. But we ought surely to read too in Ruskin’s anguished account of the way the cloud has overcome him in recent years an image of history that contends with Benjamin’s more celebrated motif of the “angel of history.” Like Benjamin, Ruskin sees the rubbish of the world accumulating about him; but where Benjamin’s angel looks dolefully at its feet, the Victorian prophet looks to the sky, because he knows that the atmospheric and historical catastrophe will emerge, like a swirl of dust, out of the air itself.
mystical geometryecuadorReligious ImageryPedro Meyer curated by Elizabeth Ferrer
...the moment you take for granted that a metaphor is the equivalent of the thing it describes or points to, is the moment when that metaphor is effectively dead. It's worse than useless for thinking with. But usually people go on using such metaphors long after they've ceased to generate any new ideas--which is one of the things a metaphor is supposed to help us do. People will just keep walking on in the resulting conceptual daze, because to think about it is like looking at the end of the world. Some will invest heavily in re-animating the corpse and blame the demise on the usual suspects: the all-powerful and infinitely devious upstart poor and other outsiders.
- Kia in a comment at the Gift Hub
The climate of history: Four thesesDipesh Chakrabarty
There is much in the debate on climate change that should be of interest to those involved in contemporary discussions about history. For as the idea gains ground that the grave environmental risks of global warming have to do with excessive accumulation in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases produced mainly through the burning of fossil fuel and the industrialized use of animal stock by human beings, certain scientific propositions have come into circulation in the public domain that have profound, even transformative, implications for how we think about human history or about what the historian C. A. Bayly recently called "the birth of the modern world". Indeed, what scientists have said about climate change challenges not only the ideas about the human that usually sustain the discipline of history but also the analytic strategies that postcolonial and post-imperial historians have deployed in the last two decades in response to the post-war scenario of decolonization and globalization.
Close Encounter Torbjørn Rødland
Dream and DerangementGeorg TraklNov. 3, 1914
In the evening the father became an old man; in dark rooms the countenance of the mother petrified and the curse of the degenerated race weighed on the boy. Sometimes he remembered his childhood, fulfilled with sickness, terror and eclipse, secret games in the star-garden, or feeding the rats in the dusking courtyard. From the blue mirror the narrow figure of the sister stepped and he fell as if dead into darkness. At night his mouth burst open like a red fruit and stars gleamed over his speechless grief. His dreams fulfilled the ancient house of the fathers.(....)
German original - Traum und UmnachtungDeep is the slumber in dark poisons, fulfilled with stars and the white countenance of the mother, the stony one. Bitter is death, the fare of the guilt-laden; in the brown branches of the family tree the earthen faces decayed grinning. But quietly the other one sang in the green shadow of the elderberry, when he woke from evil dreams; sweet playmate, a rosy angel, approached him, so that he, a soft deer, slumbered into the night; and he saw the star-countenance of purity. The sunflowers sank golden over the garden fence when the summer came. O, the diligence of bees and the green leaves of the walnut tree; the thunderstorms passing by. Silverly the poppy bloomed also, bore in green bud our nocturnal star-dreams. O, how silent the house was when the father passed away into darkness. The fruit ripened purple on the tree and the gardener moved his hard hands; o the hairy signs in the radiant sun. But silently in the evening the shadow of the dead man entered the grieving family circle and his step sounded crystalline over the green meadow before the forest. Muted ones, those gathered around the table; dying ones with waxen hands they broke the bread, the bleeding. Woe of the sister's stony eyes, when at the meal her insanity appeared on the brother's forehead, when under the mother's suffering hands the bread turned to stone. O, of the putrefied ones, when with silver tongues they silenced hell. Thus the lamps in the cool room died out and through purple masks the suffering humans looked at each other silently. The night long rain poured down, and recreated the meadow. In thorny wilderness the dark one followed the yellowed paths in the corn, the song of the lark and the soft stillness of green branches, so that he might find peace. O, you villages and mossy stages, glowing sight. But bonily the steps stagger over sleeping snakes at the forest edge and the ear always follows the raving scream of the vulture. In the evening he found a stony solitude, a dead man's escort into the dark house of the father. Purple cloud covered his head, so that he silently attacked his own blood and effigy, a moony countenance; stony sank away into emptiness, when in a broken mirror a dying youth, the sister appeared; the night engulfed the cursed race.
An Autumn EveningGeorg Trakl For Karl Röck The brown village. A darkness often treads Along the walls that stand in autumn. Mock- Shapes: man as well as woman, dead now, walk In the cold parlours to prepare their beds. Here young boys play. A heavy shadow spreads Over brown dung. Servant women walk Through the moist blue, and sometimes their eyes mock It, longing, as bells toll above their heads. An inn leans for the down and lonely there. Patiently it waits beneath dark arches, Moved by clouds of gold tobacco smoke, Yet always black and near. A stranger soaked In booze stands in the shade of older arches After the wild birds take to the air. - Translated from the German by Leo Yankevich
photo - mw
Hearing Heidegger and Saussure Elmer G. Wiens
According to Heidegger, Saussure's scientific theory of language cannot "bring us to language as language." While Heidegger helps to elucidate Saussure's semiology, Heidegger requests language as language speaking to grant "an abode for the being of mortals." Language that speaks merely the emotions of mortals, at most, repeats itself. As such, Heidegger calls on language speaking and Heidegger listening to direct his choice of an original poem that speaking purely will provide the learning experience for mortals to "live in the speaking of language." Poets such as Georg Trakl privileged with primal knowledge experience language speaking—calling mortals into the experience—an experience spanning the abyss of reason and language containing each other. Is primal knowledge awareness, a pre-experience of one's death hearkening to birth? The poet of Psalms writes, "I walk through the valley of the shadow of death," addressing his Lord. Unlike the Psalmist, Heidegger's poet absents his presence from the "place of arrival" of the poem, not having called himself there.
Trakl's poem, as text, is linear, a string of words. Writing as recorded speech is linear. Speech encountered verbally or thought is also linear. Saussure says speech and writing are one-dimensional. Trakl, responding to language speaking, imagines "A Winter's Evening," expressing linearly his non-linear experience. He writes, turning his learning into the stillness of the onefold's string of words. Though Heidegger posits a fourfold world in "A Winter Evening," he experiences the mental associations of the poem's string of words linearly in time. As Heidegger writes, he recursively deconstructs preceding sub-strings of his text, reconstructing his experiences encountering Trakl's poem. Trakl, acutely aware of the dif-ference between his original experience and the experience of reading linearly his poem, abnegates not only himself but also the poem's narrator. This alienation is the sign of mastery according to Heidegger. Trakl's self denial is absolute. Explicating the poem, Heidegger accepts his call into Being as the poem's narrator and involves himself in the text of "A Winter Evening."
A Winter EveningGeorg Trakl Window with falling snow is arrayed. Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid. Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earths cool dew. Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine.
The PennSound Anthology of Restoration and 18th-Century Verse edited and performed by John Richetti
Recovering Resentment:A Reflection on Disgust, Empathy, and Milton's Satan Brad D. Baumgartner
"To write is certainly not to impose a form (of expression) on the matter of lived experience. Literature rather moves in the direction of the ill-formed or the incomplete... always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any livable or lived experience." -- Gilles Deleuze
Resentment, like literature, reorders and challenges the opacity of the most familiar landscapes, opening and transforming them into fields of possibility, in which things do not appear firmly codified, but rather stand out as fluid and promising. It is under the influence of resentment that we come to understand that neither our identities nor the worlds we inhabit are fixed or stable--and thus it is little surprise that literature should so often return to this most central of themes. Oftentimes writers call into question the conventional conflict of resentment, in favor of a view of literature as an ecstatic movement towards comprehension--an expansion of its powers under the spell of personal livable or lived experience.Milton's account of Satan puts a complex series of observations into focus. According to Heidegger, "the artist remains inconsequential as compared with the work, almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge."[44] But the act of empathic re-appropriation sets up an alternating struggle of subject with object. Milton made an example of Satan; he was too far gone for redemption. Milton's work sculpts the psyche of the subjugated public, however, for a paradigm shift. Here's the push from Milton: seventeenth century readers will forget that they have failed time and time again, and will try once more as if subjugation never happened. In this way they strive to the conviction that there are infinite sources of strength from which they may draw. Again and again they will aspire to grace, which will lift them up and carry them onwards. And for this nudge to see fruition, the people must become capable of living into the future and not let hegemonic England displace their striving. The capacities by which a people gains freedom from bondage lie dormant within each and every one of us. Only a people who have passed through the gate of disgrace can fully ascend to the heights of liberation.
In the Blue Country or Colloque Sentimentale circa 1895Charles Conderb. Oct. 24, 1868
The Mood of Depression Georg Trakl translated by James Wright and Robert Bly You dark mouth inside me, You are strong, shape Composed of autumn cloud, And golden evening stillness; In the shadows thrown By the broken pine trees A mountain stream turns dark in the green light; A little town That piously dies away into brown pictures. Now the black horses rear In the foggy pasture. I think of soldiers! Down the hill, where the dying sun lumbers, The laughing blood plunges, Speechless Under the oak trees! Oh the hopeless depression Of an army; a blazing steel helmet Fell with a clatter from purpled foreheads. The autumn night comes down so coolly. With her white habit glittering like the stars Over the broken human bodies The convent nurse is silent.
Twenty Poems of Georg Trakl [pdf]Translated and Chosen James Wright and Robert Bly
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