"Tomoe" Noh Play

Charlotte Sternberg - Textron advertisement, 1947

Hmm

A Seascape from Tasso

 From Creation of the World, lines 675-689:

A gentle wind blows; a placid breeze, sweetly
murmuring, whispers and wanders about,
and ripples the waves, which look like
foamy silver among the rocks or by the
curved coasts; often with the color of shiny
sapphires the sea is tinged, and like
pyrope under the sun’s gentle rays.
Scattered sails fan out far away,
shining white in hundreds, in thousands,
faster than running horses and chariots;
painted ships unfold their old, famous
ensigns, and with pointed rostra furrow
their flat ways; all around, the wet fish
thrash, and often the swift dolphins 
show off their hunched backs in the air.

To view the Amazon description, click the cover image:

Antony Williams - "Cosmic Cosmic Marionette" oil on canvas

Antony Williams’ painting “Cosmic Cosmic Marionette” suggests discussions ranging from Gnosticism to science fiction to comparisons with Milton’s Paradise Lost and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” 

In the painting, Adam and Eve are puppets (marionettes), while Satan is a sort of sock puppet; all three characters being manipulated by a space alien. But for what purpose?

For Milton, that’s no alien but rather a just and loving God using the Fall as an instrument to advance his love and Grace.  Humans must experience a fall in order for Grace to have a subject to work upon.  As John Bunyan states:

Great sins do draw out great grace; and where guilt is most terrible and fierce, there the mercy of God in Christ, when showed to the soul, appears most high and mighty.

We can’t be saved unless we sin. God provides the “theatre” and cause of our sin, while also offering the path to redemption from that sin, though His Grace.  Do people have any free agency in this process? One might wonder that if sin, grace and redemption are foreordained and driven by God’s will, as it were, then what is the point?

The “science fiction” reading of the garden story drives the consideration of these difficult ambiguities, and readers are confounded as they entertain Gnostic notions of an “evil” (or anyway morally ambiguous) alien conducting mad scientist experiments—compare the Prometheus Alien film and Nathaniel Hawthorne's story “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Is God a mad scientist?  Indeed, is God… God?

Milton has been called “the first poet of space,” and Paradise Lost has been called the first modern science fiction story. Through his science fiction (if that’s what Paradise Lost is) does Milton advance orthodox, heterodox, Gnostic, or heretical exegeses of these matters?

Readers perplexed by these questions should do well to consider the ambiguities themselves—that is, rather the consideration of these ambiguities is the true subject of the “experiment.”  Considering the shifting medium of myth and language—let alone our precarious situation in the universe—can we hope to arrive at some kind of happy resolution in pursuing these questions? Little wonder in his sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent” Milton concludes, “they also serve who only stand and wait.” Simply existing in our curious spiritual state, moreover in our nearly imponderable situation in relation to space and time—these are materials of a fantastic cosmic adventure!

Meantime, to view one among many possible Highbrow insights into these matters, please click HERE.

Curious about helpful sociological distinctions that provide resolution? Please click HERE.

Emanations 11 in Mumbai

"Emanations has arrived bringing eyesight to the blind."

                                    - Vitasta Raina

from "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity"

XVIII

And then at last our bliss
Full and perfect is,
But now begins; for from this happy day
Th' old Dragon under ground,
In straiter limits bound,
Not half so far casts his usurped sway,
And wrath to see his Kingdom fail,
Swindges the scaly Horrour of his foulded tail. 

XIX

The Oracles are dumm,
No voice or hideous humm
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving.
Apollo from his shrine
Can no more divine,
With hollow shreik the steep of Delphos leaving.
No nightly trance, or breathed spell,
Inspire's the pale-ey'd Priest from the prophetic cell.

 

XX

The lonely mountains o're,
And the resounding shore,
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;
From haunted spring and dale
Edg'd with poplar pale,
The parting Genius is with sighing sent,
With flowre-inwov'n tresses torn
The Nimphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn. 

 

XXI

In consecrated Earth,
And on the holy Hearth,
The Lars, and Lemures moan with midnight plaint,
In Urns, and Altars round,
A drear, and dying sound
Affrights the Flamins at their service quaint;
And the chill Marble seems to sweat,
While each peculiar power forgoes his wonted seat. 

 

XXII

Peor, and Baalim,
Forsake their Temples dim,
With that twise-batter'd god of Palestine,
And mooned Ashtaroth,
Heav'ns Queen and Mother both,
Now sits not girt with Tapers holy shine,
The Libyc Hammon shrinks his horn,
In vain the Tyrian Maids their wounded Thamuz mourn. 

 

XXIII

And sullen Moloch fled,
Hath left in shadows dred.
His burning Idol all of blackest hue,
In vain with Cymbals ring,
They call the grisly king,
In dismall dance about the furnace blue;
The brutish gods of Nile as fast,
Isis and Orus, and the Dog Anubis hast. 

 

XXIV

Nor is Osiris seen
In Memphian Grove, or Green,
Trampling the unshowr'd Grasse with lowings loud:
Nor can he be at rest
Within his sacred chest,
Naught but profoundest Hell can be his shroud:
In vain with Timbrel'd Anthems dark
The sable-stoled Sorcerers bear his worshipt Ark.

 

XXV

He feels from Juda's land
The dredded Infants hand,
The rayes of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyn;
Nor all the gods beside,
Longer dare abide,
Nor Typhon huge ending in snaky twine:
Our Babe, to shew his Godhead true,
Can in his swadling bands controul the damned crew. 

XXVI

So when the Sun in bed,
Curtain'd with cloudy red,
Pillows his chin upon an Orient wave.
The flocking shadows pale
Troop to th' infernall jail,
Each fetter'd Ghost slips to his severall grave,
And the yellow-skirted Fayes
Fly after the Night-steeds, leaving their Moon-lov'd maze

 

                                                               --John Milton, 1629

Botticelli - Madonna of the Book

Abstract wave pattern, one hour duration

A mahogany jewel

M15, photo taken in 1976.  Pretty, but the owner says it didn't sail very well.

Summerhill, Suffolk, UK

Notwithstanding my subtle enthusiasms for liberty and freedom, I would spend maybe fifteen minutes in this looney bin before I went over the wall. 

When I was a teenage chap, the last thing I wanted was to associate with adults who considered themselves my "equals." Indeed, the school's fundamental pedagogical principle flies in the face of common sense and anthropological science, in my humble opinion. Ugh, and I have been through that private school ordeal of calling teachers by their first names; or even worse, calling teachers by soppy-sounding nick names.

"The oldest children's democracy in the world." Well, yes.  Of course it is.

René Magritte, The voice of space, 1928 (one of four versions)

 

 

 

 

Click HERE for more on this painting.

Highbrow profiles in conceptual analysis: Noam Chomsky noting things

Turn it over to the experts, los mach schnell!

also noted

noted

Willem de Kooning, Seated Woman, 1940

 

Michael Moorcock's New Worlds 60th Anniversary Issue

A new issue of New Worlds, the ground-breaking showcase of the British New Wave, has been published.

New Worlds has been a profound influence on many writers, artists and students of aesthetic theory.

For a penetrating review, I recommend Rob Latham's essay appearing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, paring the new issue with a discussion of a related work from the New Wave: Harlan Ellison's Last Dangerous Visions, the publication of which has been long-delayed, but is now available. Please click HERE.

The new issue continues the "mission" to present serious art and writing to a broad and keen audience.  Highly recommended. 

To view the Jayde Design order page, please click HERE.

New Measures of Contextual Understanding: #21 Post-childhood burn-out exercised as a constellation of professional relationships disabused of dysfunction, neuroses and awkward communications, or let's get this yuletide party on the step!

Salvador Dali - The Broken Bridge and the Dream (1945)

The operative dynamic is a stereo-parallax effect exciting the visual centers of the cerebral cortex, but the emotional effect is a kind of spatial discomfort, things pushed together in a discommodious fashion transgressing the commonplace norms of interior design, moreover an element of ceiling decor in a brutalist shopping mall in a bizarre motion picture

 by Marina Spollonio

Still from A Clockwork Orange

Colorful

Photograph by D. Harlan Wilson

Click HERE to view the Amazon description.

Edie Sedgwick: a real life Carroll Mallow?

 

Alas, Edie Sedgwick and Carroll Mallow compare in many ways.

Carroll is Bronson Bodine's love interest in the Invisible Tower trilogy. Refracted through dazzling patterns of cultural revelation, she drives much of the plot (as well as the aspirations of the hero) in We Reign Secure, then she bewitchingly evokes a panorama of esoteric themes in The Sky-Shaped Sarcophagus.  

Alas, poor Edie Sedgwick. There was no Bronson Bodine to rescue her!

It might be more apt to compare Edie to Jinx Misselbritches, the full-spectrum media project envisioned by Carroll Mallow, in which the fictional Jinx, a woman of the new New Age, would insinuate across geographic and social divides a "Bodineian revolution" in self-image and spirit. 

Large Industrial Apparatus, Gdańsk, Poland

Cold War Nostalgia: Snark and Mace

Intriguing antique mall found object, but is it highbrow?

Wittgenstein On Psycho Physical Parallelism - Dr Peter Hacker