Margarete Kubicka - Der Weltenwanderer (The World Wanderer) - ca 1923

 

The Wonderful WAH Tribute: period rooms, a view of the galleries, dance: an appeal to raise funds for building restoration

Contemporary themes in the Invisible Tower Trilogy, an overview (technological acceleration, ethical confusion, narratological problematics)

Echoes

In “Cold Echoes,” the seventh chapter (or episode) in Echoes, Bronson Bodine offers his thoughts on Human Nature:

“…personality isn’t that important. What really matters is character.” He smiled as he arrived at some kind of resolution. “And you have to be autonomous to possess character, don’t you?”

Traits of personality are “psychological” manifestations: psychological typologies and environmental imprints.  Nature and nurture are important sources for describing personality—actions, emotions, dispositions, patterns of response, “mystique,” affect, and so on.  However, traits of character are matters of a different and more important order. In Bodine’s worldview, who we are as unique individuals attends our flexibility, our honesty, our knowledge, and our ability to respond to the world around us—our ability to respond to what Wittgenstein calls “the stream of life”. We should—we must—exercise emotions, thinking and actions in appropriate ways.  Throughout Echoes, Bodine and his team are challenged by a variety of circumstances that challenge their ability to analyze their situation, and then quickly—often precipitously—arrive at an appropriate response. It is not surprising that their various secret missions, scientific investigations and clashes with rival spies often are inner struggles to overcome personality and exercise character. 

 

We Reign Secure

 

The “blurb” on the back of the novel, “The institution is the message,” is inspired by the title of Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated book, The Medium is the Massage. The line is directly quoted from the novel itself, as it is articulated by a character who is reflecting on the attenuation and corruption of traditional cultural and ethical institutions attending the proliferation of 21^st Century corporate organization and the “hyperactive” proliferation of electronic communications, algorithmic social programming, and artificial intelligence. Complicating matters in this “space” of information overload, the pronounced decay of traditional ethical understanding produces further confusion, as well as providing the author with a narratological “tool” for producing strange and disturbing effects.

 

The Sky-Shaped Sarcophagus

 

Although the agents of the Invisible Tower prevail (evidently) in their struggles and conquer the present, the legacy of the past and the uncertainty of the future remain significant and perhaps insurmountable challenges.  The task of understanding and responding to these challenges are daunting, to say the least, and Bronson Bodine is confronted with struggles that test him to the utmost limits of his ability to see, to think, and to endure. The effects of narratological inquiry and moral decay so prominent in the second book, are in this third book pushed into the background, though they are in this way intensified; in new and subtle ways, the reader is stimulated into realms of epistemological un-reality.  The idiosyncratic character of the narrative alternates among recognizable forms of modernist narrative, surrealism, and “pulp” fiction sensationalism. An uncanny “history” of “true” events, the shifting narrative enhances (but also veils) the presentation of thought and “stream-of-consciousness” in a world forcefully stripped of traditional cultural, moral and theological understanding.

 

Click individual titles above or the following image to view Amazon descriptions and reviews:

Title, epigraph and opening paragraph from Chapter Three of Tally-Ho, Cornelius!

 Chapter Three

De sa Condition Présente et de sa Destinée

Remon. No one Clergie in the whole Christian world yields so many eminent scholars, learned preachers, grave, holy, and accomplish’d Divines as this Church of England doth at this day.

 

Answ. Ha, ha, ha.

 

—John Milton, Animadversions upon the Remonstrants Defense against Smectymnuus

 

One theory that does much to explain the efficacy of the Reverend Dr. Cornelius’s trademark preaching style, in particular the unique experience of his sermons, proposes that a shepherd and his flock—the person in the pulpit delivering the sermon and the worshippers patiently attentive in the pews who listen to it—form a temporary though unique interpretive community—mediated by the institutions of the church and promoted by the especial architectural vernacular of its buildings—and bound together in worship by the participants’ shared assumptions about what constitutes a truly inspired sermon. Thus, in accordance with institution, tradition and shared interpretive conventions, the community of devotion is joined together by an internalized theological competence that allows them to respond appropriately to their scripture lessons, and indeed to any worshipful concept they encounter. By this formulation, any sermon (so long as it satisfies the congregation’s internalized conventions) is empowered to advance the most outlandish claims even as the preacher operates the most peculiar stage effects, so that even in challenging the rules—so long as the architecture is right—bizarre representations, even awkward manners, satisfy the congregants’ expectations and sets them free to emotionally celebrate the priest’s simply being there and saying what amounts to nothing.  Such a church virtually rattles with released tension as all just authority and reasonable truths are dismissed, as if thrust up and out the metaphoric “spout” of the church steeple, so that hallucinatory identifications with the poor, the suffering, the displaced, and the marginalized create within the sanctuary a temporary political alliance that can be as swiftly concluded as it was convened—through the simple expedient of banging an iron bell.

 Click the cover image to view the Amazon reviews:

British/Analytic Philosophy vs. Continental Philosophy, a Summary

While the following dichotomy requires further detailed description and explication, the scientific, moral, political and institutional distinctions described here are essential to our understanding of the transformations evident in the 20^th and 21^st century university, and provide useful characterizations of the various trends shaping the institutional context and the political tenor of a variety of contemporary academic discussions.

 

I Abbreviated Summary:

 

British/Analytic Philosophy vs. Continental Philosophy

British/Analytic Philosophy:

 

Skeptical-Empirical: “The senses put us into contact with a mind-independent reality. Morality and politics: Morality and politics are legacies of history, and over that history effective and “ethical” methods have emerged to shape and modify governing practices, policies and law.  Politics: Rights are natural, self-evident. Constitutional, rule-of-law, equality under the law, common law, democratic-republican structures and checks and balances. Philosophers:  Socrates, Plato(?), Aristotle, Locke, Jefferson, Wittgenstein.

 

Continental Philosophy:

 

Idealism: “Reality” is a mental construction. Philosophers are the “scientists” of the mind, and therefore philosophers are the scientists of everything. Politics: Power is invested in the sovereign/the state.  The state gives people their rights. Authoritarian, relativistic, statist, socialist, police state, corporate. Philosophers: Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Sartre…

 

 

II Summary in More Detail:

British/Analytic Philosophy vs. Continental Philosophy

British/Analytic Philosophy:

 

Method: Skeptical-Empirical: “The senses put us into contact with a mind-independent reality. Morality and politics: Morality and politics are legacies of history, and over that history effective and “ethical” methods have emerged to shape and modify governing practices, policies and law.  Political philosophy: Power is invested in “the people.” Rights are natural, self-evident. Constitutional, rule-of-law, people are equal under the law, common law (magisterial authority of the commons, “the people”—peer juries, precedent, and elected judges and sheriffs) democratic-republican structures, and checks and balances. Representative Teachers: Moses, Socrates, Plato(?), Aristotle, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Ockham, Francis Bacon, Locke, Franklin, Jefferson, Wittgenstein. Programs: Liberal education. Open negotiation. Legislative, legal and utilitarian regulation of markets, production and distribution; magisterial, legal, regulating and cultural protections of individuals and property. Real pluralism. Circumspect individualism—assumption of a fixed human nature, inviolable, unfolding, and separate from abstract or “authorized” definitions. Cultivated, practiced, sophisticated and tentative skepticism of authority. Cultivated, practiced, sophisticated and tentative skepticism of individualism.

Continental Philosophy:

 

Method: Idealism: “Reality” is a mental construction (analysis: reality is a collection of disparate and/or coherent mental and social constructions—or construction (singular)). “Culture,” morality, law and political philosophy are “constructions.” Philosophers are the “scientists” of the mind, and therefore philosophers (credentialed proxies for corporations) are the scientists of everything. Political Philosophy: Power is invested in the sovereign/the state.  The state gives people their rights. Authoritarian, relativistic, statist, “socialist”… police state… corporate. Representative Teachers: Marquis de Sade, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Heidegger, Sartre…. James, Dewey… Confucius(?)… the Prussian Junker class… Plutocracy, Technocracy… Programs: postmodernism, deconstruction, intersectionality, identity politics, corporate language/speech management, globalism, medical autocracy… Cultivation of the managerial complex. Managed pluralism, no individualism. Education is a management function. Human nature—the Human Condition—is a managed construction, is relative to perception, is relative to authorized definitions, like everything else. 

Friedrich Hegel mit Studenten - Franz Kugler

More?  Please click HERE.

Does Emily Dickinson merit a posthumous honorary MFA degree in Creative Writing? (Ah! Ah... Ahhhh... is taking a position on such a question even remotely highbrow?)

Hope is the thing with feathers 

That perches in the soul 

And sings the tune without the words 

And never stops at all. 

                          

                          ― Emily Dickinson

 

"... there stood in division of conflict ..."

The Rage of Achilles - by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Athena prevents Achilles from killing Agamemnon) 

 

What god was it then set them together in bitter collision?

Zeus’ son and Leto’s, Apollo, who in anger at the king drove 

the foul pestilence along the host, and the people perished...

                                             -- The Iliad Book I: 8-10

Highbrow Hiatus

Off on a voyage. Highbrow will return in a couple of weeks.

Choreographic Isolations: taste, tincture, delicate sensationalism, stinging descriminations, and tertiary impressions writ large

Max Ernst - "Birds" or "Birds, Fish-Snake and Scarecrow" - 1921

Bestiary of Philosophical Conceptions #277: Remedium Concupiscentiae

Giancarlo Botti - Charles Bronson and Jill Ireland, 1969

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 More?  A few lines from Milton... 

The Mystery Man came over an' he said: "I'm outa-site!"

  

George Harrison caught up in the drama

Vitasta Raina's Writer's Block is now available on Kindle

 Click HERE or the cover image to visit the Amazon sales page.

(An experiment in "digital publishing," and a way to get the book into the hands of more readers, especially India. The mission of International Authors remains encouraging an off-line, non-electronic lifestyle.)

Cover and six pages from Goethe's Faust, Classics Illustrated #167 (Aug. 1962), art by Norm Nodel

Max Ernst - "La Mer aux Oiseaux" (The Sea Birds/The Sea of Birds), 1925

Clever gate, but is it highbrow and how so?

Answer: No. The gate is not highbrow. It is not a portal distinguishing one space from another--it is not a "real" gate, as such. If it was a functioning portal, it would be set in a hedge, a wall, or a fence. It would separate one area from another: a promenade from a croquet green, a drive from a house, a garden from a lawn. Lacking function, it is simply a sculpture. The stunning "3-D" effect is quashed in the realization--and this realization is so sudden as to be jarring--that the gate is no gate at all, and the viewer is disappointed to see the optical effect actually leads to nothing but illusion, rather than announcing, as it properly should, excitement and anticipation for the separate space beyond. Indeed, the illusion is not even an illusion reflecting the passage into new spaces, but is a mere freak of design--an arrant academic inscription. Even the delightful variations in the framework are constricted to mere foppish affectation, drawing too much attention, too rapidly, and the allusion we properly seek suggesting latitudinal shifts, "other" spaces and the multiplicity of place and time, are rendered as mere puffs of folly and affectation--distracting, over-done, half-baked, and thus burdensome.

"King Trunion's telepathic mind had picked up the alarming news"

Literary Witches - of Virginia Woolf, and a brief dissertation

Ms. Woolf's observation--mmm, query I should say--hints at the subject of my current novel project.  Of course this is assuming novels have subjects, which I very much doubt.

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

                            ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Citizens of the Highbrow Commonwealth will of course raise the right (or left) eyebrow of circumspection.  Virginia Woolf! She is hardly one of us--we who eschew depression and certainly disapprove the imp of self-destruction in our authors. Yet nevertheless, she represents an instructive authoress whose enchanting warps and woofs can't fail to impress upon our imaginations, if not our prose styles (see for example Tally-Ho, Cornelius! Chapter 47,461: “The Lamentations of the Lost Corsairs”). It is not for me to intrude upon Ms. Woolf's private struggles, which ran deep through her psyche, but I would be remiss if I failed to suggest that an "Anglican" point-of-view, as  it were--which ironically incorporated her free thinking views, but more importantly remained unchecked (or was left unguided) by a tincture of Calvinist understanding as to the vagaries of the course of Providence (and with sensible modernist and Armenian qualifications thoroughly wringing out this crazy formation)--I say, such a world view can encourage symptoms of neurasthenia, or something like it (see for example Michael Knox Beran's tireless documentation of the phenomenon in his book WASPs, which describes the travails of upper-crust American Episcopalians in the 19th and 20th centuries). To return. Of course, it would be stupid to distance ourselves from other aspects of Anglicanism that do so much to assure the continuity of a communion with the Godhead.  What to do? Consider, there are things we can depend upon from God, but there are also things that we MUST do for ourselves; a good example is assuming responsibility for oneself through piecing together economic stability. Indeed, putting together that stability crowns the spiritual experience of earning independence.  Ms. Woolf had such independence from her birth. She did not have to scratch and crawl her way to it.  Had she gathered those inevitable scars and callouses, her depression possibly wouldn't have conquered her; such anyway is my conjecture. I might add, too, a bit of wisdom from John Milton.  After Adam and Eve fall from God's grace, they consider suicide.  Adam correctly and wisely dismisses the proposition, perfectly observing that if God was capable of driving (or duping) them to their Fall, then what might he have in store for them were they to kill themselves and so further deepen their alienation from his plan; and even though that plan might seem somewhat dodgy, if not fully absurd.  Meanwhile, I take it their love for each other (and as difficult as that was) served as ample encouragement, moreover serving to consolidate their spiritual identities into something God could fully love, His Son could rescue, and furthermore represent something that the angels could marvel at with much spiritual animation, intellectual speculation, pure emotional amazement, and song. 

Bernard Bailyn – 'The Living Past: Commitments for the Future' - The Millennium Lectures No. I

Click the cover image to view the Amazon description and reviews:

 

Bailyn's book can be read straight though, but once readers get the gist of it and otherwise have a smattering of 18th Century American History under their belt, they can flip through to any page and understand what he is talking about and learn something interesting. It is an entertaining book packed with all sorts of "fun" stuff.