A Hermaneutic Fantasy: Prolegomena to Any Past Zenoic Proverbialness (repost, from April 14, 2016)

And now dear friend, I shall ask you to consider it possible to travel back through time upon the sedan chair of the imagination, so passing through an infinite number of moments to at last settle into a clear picture of what it is Zeno is saying, moreover with true proverbialness. We move back from one moment to the next, but only to encounter another moment, so on forever, as the number of moments is infinite, and thus the proverbialness we seek remains perpetually an unobtainable carrot at the end of an infinitely long stick.

(Kind thanks to Professor Hodges for allowing me to derive from his theoretical work on one-line poems the neologism "Zenoic Proverbialness.")

Preparing to Meet Zeno

Can the Human Condition be allegorized effectively? To what end?

Antony Williams - Intergalactic Castaway - oil on canvas

John Geraghty: an acrostic in the Hymn to Hermes

For some time now, Professor John Geraghty has been using AI to explore acrostics in Paradise Lost. Recently, he has been identifying acrostics in Chapman's translation of the Homeric Hymns:

Medieval Philosophy - Bryan Magee & Anthony Kenny

The appearance (verb) of an invisible tower, and that tower's appearance (noun)

            Naivete

Afar off an orchid tower

   Purple prose arranging

Mounting expectations

  Distant, arising, a spectacle

Coaxing a young soul

  Earnest and wild and breathing

Grasping a known unknown

    Credulous colors coalescing

An adhering moment viewing the future

   Persistent impression, fostering dreams

More? Please click HERE.

If the Invisible Tower was Visible

More? Please click HERE.

The Paradise Lost Legacy - November 7-15, 2026 - Davao City, Philippines, curated by Bienvinedo Bones Bañez, Jr.

Bienvinedo Bones Bañez, Jr. has announced "The Paradise Lost Legacy" art show scheduled for this November in the Philippines.  The show will feature the work of Terrance Lindall, Mr. Banez, and forty-one Philippines artists. Several volumes of Emanations will also be part of the exhibition. Here is the latest announcement for the show and, below that, Terrance Lindall's remarks on a broad range of subjects relating to the exhibition.

Paradise Lost has been translated into Chinese. Various editions are available, including both classical and modern translations. Translations can be found in bookstores and online platforms in China.

 Paradise Lost has been translated into several African languages. Various editions are available in countries like Nigeria and South Africa. Online platforms provide access to digital copies across the continent. Literary festivals in Africa sometimes feature discussions on the work.

Southeast Asia nations altogether probably have many translations. What is unique about the upcoming presentation of Milton’s work in both art & literature is that art and interpretive versions in early 21^st century productions are presented. This is our time to celebrate the greatest work in the English language by some of the greatest proponents of this work in our time.

Philippine art combines indigenous folk art, East-Asian and classical traditions. During the Spanish colonial period, art was used to spread Catholicism mainly through paintings and sculptures. Victorio Edades, known as the father of Modern Philippine Art, popularized Modernism in the Philippines in 1920s and 1930s.

Bienvenido Bones Banez Jr. was born in 7. 1962 in Davao City, Philippines, and attended the Learning Center of the Arts (now Ford Academy of the Arts) in Davao, where he studied Drawings and paintings from Professor Calota Abellana de Pio, and Professor Victorio Edades.

Banez’s work revolves around the theme of Paradise Lost, the 666 Human Imperfection, the reign of spiritual darkness in the world, which expresses itself through psychedelic depictions of evil human nature and sub-human auras. The bible message in Matthew 4 :8 is the point of departure for his proposition. It is a proposition that stems from mythology and faith into the strong belief in the Tower of Babel, Christendom and in the Judeo-Christian metanarrative wherein the Devil's rebellion is an overarching end prevailing in the mundane world. Bones using jewel-toned colors, and human "evil" promulgating the idea of feelings that rise up in themselves when we are faced by wars, experimental vaccines, racism and environmental degradation.

 Between 2009 and 2014 several drawings and paintings of Banez were acquired for the Robert J. Wickenheiser John Milton collection at the University of South Carolina. In 2017 a portrait of John Milton was added to the Milton’s Cottage collection, and he was named to the editorial board of Emanations, a print anthology of poetry, fiction, essays and fine arts published by International Authors founded by Professor Carter Kaplan. In 2010 he was included in Lexikon Surreal and KunstHerz 2021 by Prof Gerhard Habarta.    

 

 The exhibit includes Terrance Lindall, as seen in Milton for Moderns:

https://issuu.com/lindall/docs/lindall_s_milton_for_moderns                
                                                                          -- Terrance Lindall

"This memory of the present passes human comprehension, and the Time-distortion factor spells frustration!"

Jack Binder, 1939

Wassily Kandinsky - "Brown Ray" (1924)

"Actually, right now I'd kind of like, um, to just get some knowledge like from some things that like... the stars and the sky, you know, and fire and things like that that have seen it all, man... and the sun and the moon because they just you know been here since the very beginning...

   

                                                  - Miss Lucy and Miss Johna

 

Zeus, a capacitor, a prose poem

"A warning horn wails. Then comes a 30-second delay during which a trapped electrician could hit one of the nine handy scram switches and stop further action. Putnam presses a button, and direct current from a roomful of transformers and rectifier tubes flows into Zeus."

More?  Click HERE.

Enigmatic? Why? Or, how is it engimatic?

 

Representative Highbrow Questions

  

  

 

Aesthetic "Phenonmenon"? Psychological "Artifact"? Beyond the discussion of semantic mysteries, is "it" pretty?

unknown artist

 

Liminal Disinformation

"Transfer Student" by artist known as Kiginobiru (Hayapi)

Leo Pellegrino plays the Contrabass Saxophone

Man Ray (American/French, 1890-1976) - The Eye That Sees Everything (1919) - Airbrush & brush & gouache on tan wood-pulp laminate board, 30.5 x 24.6 cm. - The Art Institute of Chicago (Gift of Mr. Frank B. Hubachek)

Haiku proceeds syntax?

the moon is gone wild

grammar am a lost ethos

specificity?

An interesting distinction

"Frustrated by being referred to as a mere "caricature" artist, William Hogarth produced this print in 1743 explaining the difference between characters and caricatures — which he saw as radically different — and demonstrating his style as being firmly aligned with the former." Source

The Beats... Philosophic Warriors? (pre-)Psychedelic Messengers?

I'm not sure what to make of the Beats. Easily parodied on TV and in the movies... an instrument of cultural and personal promotion...  obviously unsound (and unwholesome) lifestyle choices...  closely-related to consumer culture... interesting energy, fashions and forms... directly--obviously but also merely vaguely and superficially "counter-cultural"--indeed, how effective in this measure (as a cultural/counter-cultural "movement") and in what ways?

It's interesting how the Beats were so rapidly left behind by the culture they helped to foster. In the wake of Frank Zappa, Gentle Giant, Genesis, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Alice Cooper, Firesign Theatre... by the mid-70s the average "hippie" kid in the Midwest was in a position to possess a more sophisticated and appropriate "philosophical tool kit" and "psychedelic understanding" than the Beats ever achieved. Henceforth, the cup of trendy hipster hipness would runneth over into infinity...  (And along these lines, look at the unfortunate "insights" Michel Foucault came away with after his "famous" psychedelic experience at Zabriskie Point... and more on him, Zabriskie Point... and Antonioni's films in a forthcoming Highbrow post.)

Moving beyond the question of their interesting place--and it is interesting and it is a "place"--in the stream-of-culture: from academic and aesthetic perspectives, when I go back and read the Beats today, their work seems... hmmm? Weak/embarrassing?  Nihilistic?  Insipid? (Do they make of poetry a thing that it is not?  Hmm...) Along these lines, as I read Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in passages where Wolfe parodies "Beat writing", I am struck that his passages are more impressive than the originals. And as far as that goes, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe and John Milton have written things that are far more "psychedelic" and "cosmic" and "transgressive" than anything the Beats ever came up with. Indeed, most of the Beats' "transgressive" and "cosmic" insights are little more than either gauche exercises in staring at their own belly-buttons, or Dutch-angle encomiums to the Goddess of Self-Destruction.  And this goes for hippies, freaks, new wave'ers, grungesters, goths, emos, witches (and whatever trendy or hipster "bag" you might crawl into, wear, evoke, or "conjure") as well...