H/T to The Literary Man
“The lyfe so short, the craft so long to learne” (Aged Renoir painting–Photograph)
H/T to The Literary Man
A Tart, Cathartic Line
The christian wisdom requires us to rejoice in gifts given to others not only because they are given to others but because they are withheld from us.
(I found this in an old notebook and am sure I am not its author. Anyone know who is?)
Jane Greer (Photograph)
Jane Greer, taken during the filming of “Out of the Past”.
Dick Moran Keeps it Real
There’s much to profit from in Moran’s recent interview at 3am magazine. The section on Experimental Philosophy is a tour de force.
As to ‘experimental philosophy, I can’t claim to be very well versed in it, but it seems to be a research program in its early days. I think that by now, even its practitioners are beginning to realise that simply asking people, outside of any particular context, about their “intuitions” about some concept of philosophical interest is not really going to be informative since without any philosophical background to the question, the respondents themselves can’t really know just what question they are being asked to answer, what their responses are responses to. There are just too many different things that can be meant by a question like, “‘Was such-and-such an action intentional or not?”, for example. And without further discussion or further analysis, the experimenters themselves can’t know what answers they are being given by the respondents. It’s not good data. So I can imagine experimental philosophy evolving in a way to account for this, and starting to include some philosophical background to the investigation, perhaps even some philosophical history, to provide the needed context to the particular intuitions that they are trying to expose and test for. At that point, the experimental situation might also become less one-sided, with a researcher examining a respondent, and could allow for the experimental subjects themselves to ask questions of the experimenters, including questions of clarification and disambiguation, and perhaps even challenges to the way the experimenter has framed the questions.
Later it might be found useful to conduct such experiments in small groups rather than individually, with one experimenter and one subject, and instead the respondents could be encouraged to discuss the questions among themselves as well as with the experimenter. People could meet in these groups two or three times a week and perhaps some relevant reading could be assigned, to clarify and expand upon the question, and the respondents would be given time to do the reading, and asked to write something later on about the question in connection with the reading and the discussions they have had. Then the experimenter could provide “comments” on this writing for the experimental subjects themselves. I think grading the results would be optional in such an arrangement, and probably of no experimental interest, but other than that I think something like this could be the future of experimental philosophy. It’s worth trying anyway.
Footpath and Runway (Poem)
When we walk with the Lord
stumbling
along, words lightening my feet
pondering their path
rainy Chicago
airport tarmac baptized iridescent black
delayed from 1:43 to 2:08pm
stewardess gesticulates
her boredom
oxygen is flowing even if
the plastic bag does not inflate.
Who knew that following footsteps would lead
me here?
other men, smarter and more solidly educated
talk to me but I know my place
even if bootless ambition makes it pinch.
I resolve to turn my back on old goals
even if my hankering after them makes me
crane ’round,
Lot’s wife, to see my past destinations shrink
reversing their direction as I reorient myself.
What a glory He sheds on our way
I have chosen the sheep’s life by choosing
the Shepherd
but I have not chosen unreason
I choose to be a Logical sheep
a sheep of the Logos.
plane stalled on the runway almost to take-off
yellow signs order drivers to yield to aircraft,
wings matter now, having them,
or not.
Reliquaria–T. Crunk (Poem)
1. Found Hand-Painted on a Tin Flue Cover
Ribbon of black crepe
draped on a door knob
like broken strings
hanging from a loom
with the words: Weep not.
What do I need of this world?
2. S. P. Dinsmoor Describes His Tomb
I have made myself a coffin with a glass lid.
By the door of my grave house
I have set a cement angel and a stone jug.
When I see the hose coming down, the lid will fly open
and I will sail out into the air like a locust.
If I am called above, the angel will help me on my way.
If I have to go below, I will grab my jug
and fill it with water somewhere on the road down.
Meantime, every day I pray–O Lord
teach me that I am but earth,
a hollow vessel of clay,
only a wisp of breath against my emptiness.
3.
They have yet to figure out
the name of the church
two men driving in Barkley Lake
around Cain’s Mill a few years ago
found the whole steeple of
cross and all
half-buried in the mud shallows.
Gass on Philosophy as a Vocation
There are a few vocations (like the practice of poetry or the profession of philosophy) that are so uncalled for by the world, so unremunerative by any ordinary standards, so inherently difficult, so undefined, that to choose them suggests that more lies behind the choice than a little encouraging talent and a few romantic ideals. To persevere in such a severe and unrewarding course requires the mobilization of the entire personality–each weakness as well as each strength, each quirk as well as every normality. For any one of the reasons that a philosopher offers to support that principle he has taken in to feed and fatten, there will be in action alongside it, sometime in the shade of the great notion itself, coarse and brutal causes in frequently stunning numbers, causes with a notable lack of altruism and nobility, causes with shameful aims and antecedents. This has to be understood and accepted. Valery’s belief that every philosophy is an important piece of its author’s autobiography need not be rejected as reductive; for whatever the subliminal causes and their kind are like, the principle must stand and defend itself like a tree against the wind; it must make its own way out into who knows what other fields of intelligence, to fall or flourish there. –“At Death’s Door: Wittgenstein”
This Morning
Up this morning, before six. A bowl of cereal while water boils, listening to Vince Dynamic’s new EP. Then, a cup of red tea outside while my dogs, three pitbull terriers, terrorize a small ground squirrel hidden in a woodpile. It stays put and eventually they give up the siege, falling back on a chaotic triune wresting match, disturbing the throw rugs of leaves dotting the back lawn. Tea finished, the dogs settle down and I climb aboard my bike to ride to school, gloved and hatted and jacketed against the damp cool morning. My breath as I pedal looks like a strange reverse exhaust from the bike.
Later, I drink coffee, thick, and hot and hot, at the local coffee house. Feeling returns to my fingers. I read Gass essays, his acrobatic sentences limber my mind; the coffee chases my thoughts, forcing them to run. Yesterday’s puzzling over Marcel returns, and I work at distinguishing being from having, wondering if I can manage to get my students to see the relationship between Plotinus’ introspective understanding of embodiment and Marcel’s phenomenology of having a body. (Is Plotinus a metaphysician or a metapsychologist–and what is either of those?)
Still later, at the department office, friends and I gather, joking about using Gmail to set up emails to be delivered after you are dead. (Yes, they have Moses and the prophets, but what if someone sent them email from beyond the grave? G-mail, indeed.) Someone brings in an ancient nutcraker and matching pick–the pick to save the meat of pecans from the still co-dependent embrace of their opened shells. (There’s been a bag of pecans on the office counter, mostly unmolested, for weeks.) I haven’t seen a nutcraker like that since I was a boy.
One of my friends and I go out and smoke. We talk about King James’ “Counterblaste to Tobacco”. He tells me of missiles over Israel. Time to go to work.
Rilke to a Young Poet–For My Students
You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answers.
Literary Rigor–Re-blogged from Josh Blog (7 Nov ’12)
Scholars say that an author – usually of a philosophical text with literary dimensions – ‘invites’ us to do this or that, think of this or that, when they wish to treat the text as possessed of a sort of rigor, but also to avoid having to show how this rigor is essentially a matter of the literary dimensions of the text. This is like receiving an invitation, not accepting it, but passing it on to someone else.
‘We’ve been invited!’
‘Oh, how nice. Are you going?’
‘Well you’ve been invited! We all have!’
‘But what about you?’
I would like to say that this can’t be done halfway. To acknowledge the text’s rigor is to accept the invitation. The troublesome question should be, can it be accepted at all if one’s response is any less literary than the original? And more troublesome: how will one make one’s response just as literary, without loss of rigor?
Quantum Est In Rebus Inane 