Juxtapostion: Surreal or The Dada?

 

 

Answer: The Dada

Halloween viewing: Sorcerer (1977) a curious film

Doubtful substance, yet compelling... Why? Can a film be compelling while remaining "uninteresting"? Can a film be "well-made", excite curiosity, effectively operate exotic imagery, garner praise from filmmakers, yet come across as empty? Can a film be excellent as film qua film, yet found lacking against the well-developed aesthetic criteria that have emerged from our understanding of good novels, moving poetry, insightful philosophical myth and uplifting philosophical understanding?

Grotesque, curious, edgy, provocative, tense... Could it be director Friedkin is provoking anthropological-psychological apprehensions about "What happens next?" Here do we find "true" human typologies? That is, could "hypnosis" be the defining approach to understanding Sorcerer? Not surprisingly sensationalism drives the spell.

In any event, there is ample material for critical analysis. An "excellent" subject for a paper, surely.  

The Aorounga Crater in northern Chad

The 7.8-mile-wide scar from an asteroid impact 345 million years ago. Photographed from the ISS, May 10, 2021. NASA

Apotheosis of the Industrious Imagination in the 20th-Century (with a passage from the Invisible Tower)

Arbeiterstadt ~ Working-Class City aka City of Workers by Hans Baluschek, 1920 Oil on Canvas 123 cm x 92,1 cm Milwaukee Art Museum

 

The moon followed them until the sky grew light. Morning seemed to come rather quickly. Bronson noticed, however, that he had feelings neither one way or another about how soon morning came. He didn’t care when morning came—so long as he didn’t have to work that day.

 

       - The Sky-Shaped Sarcophagus 

 

The Politics of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Gray Champion"

      Having rejected basic conceptions of social subordination along with the lawfulness of established church institutions, the English religious sectaries of the 1640s were free to entertain political and religious ideas that were variously fanciful, enthusiastic, utopian, and, significantly enough, modern.  In their analysis of the origins of political power, the limits of power, and the rights of human beings, the Independents and sectaries gave birth to the basic principles of the modern liberal state. At the same time, of course, the sectaries embraced the very un-modern belief of seeing themselves as part of a divine mission. As Christ’s elect, they sought to remove social and institutional hindrances to Christ’s rule on earth. They believed God intended man to live a better life and, to this end, they believed that men could understand this purpose and cooperate with God to bring about His will. In 1651 Milton writes in A Defense of the People of England, “God changes circumstances, assigns kingdoms, and takes them away . . . through the agency of men.” Victories in Parliament and upon the battlefield were to the radicals confirmation that God was supporting their actions. By this logic, however, failure might also reflect God’s disfavor. When confronted with the breakdown of the Protectorate and the Restoration of Charles II to the throne of England, the radical’s idealism and Millennial hopes turned to disillusion, and there was by the 1660s a retreat into quiet nonconformity and skepticism.  Christian utopians looked for their Promised Land in the next life. The Quakers became pacifists.  Realizing the Good Old Cause must be left to future generations, Milton resorted to writing a vigorous and lawless modern poetry in the guise of religious epic. With the aid of politicians like Shaftsbury, however, the torch was passed successfully. Locke’s First Treatise on Government not only contains polemics against the patriarchal absolutism of Sir Robert Filmer and the authoritarian materialism of Hobbes, but also looks to Milton as a source for observations and rebuttals. 

     When considering the English Bill of Rights and the ascension of William and Mary (which, incidentally, was facilitated by people like Locke), the historical connections drawn together in Hawthorne’s short story “The Gray Champion” come to mind. Hawthorne tells the story without irony or subtlety, and his politics are clearly evident. The story is set in 1688 at the end of the reign of the Popish King James II. An old veteran of Cromwell’s wars (perhaps he is a ghost) is a recurring presence in the American colonies where, in the episode presented by Hawthorne, he witnesses the arrogance of the Episcopalians in church and government. Hawthorne opens the story with a description of the procession of James’s colonial government filing down the main market street in Boston. Magistrates, soldiers and Popish ministers—wearing crucifixes, no less—march arrogantly down the street.  The tension is palpable as the American colonists view the governor and his soldiers. Suddenly an old veteran, the gray champion, appears on the scene. Hawthorne describes his martial bearing, and “the solemn yet warlike peal . . . [of the man’s] . . . voice, fit either to rule a host in the battlefield or be raised to God in Prayer.”  He is dressed in “an ancient garb [that] could only belong to some old champion of the righteous cause.”  He challenges the governor and the procession stops. From horseback, a member of the procession scoffs, pronouncing the old man “some old round-headed dignitary, who hath lain asleep these thirty years, and knows nothing of the change of times[.] Doubtless, he thinks to put us down with a proclamation in Old Noll’s name.”  During the English Civil War, Royalists applied the epithet “Old Noll” to Oliver Cromwell.  The allusion to the haircut is also plain. The old man is an exponent of the Good Old Cause of the Independents in the English Civil War. 

     The Gray Champion denounces the Governor and his party, indicates that James II is no longer King in England, and promises that the Governor and his men are to be thrown into prison the next day. “Back!” he exclaims, “lest I foretell the scaffold!” 

     The story resolves accordingly. James II flees England, William of Orange replaces him on the throne, and meanwhile the governor of the colony, his administration, and his clergymen are thrown into prison. The story of the Gray Champion celebrates the Glorious Revolution and the ascension of William and Mary as the rebirth of the Good Old Cause. In this story Hawthorne is neither subtle nor ironic, and the closing lines of the tale are unequivocal: 

His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. But should domestic tyranny oppress us, or the invader’s step pollute our soil, still may the Gray Champion come, for he is the type of New England’s hereditary spirit; and his shadowy march, on the eve of danger, must ever be the pledge that New England’s sons will vindicate their ancestry.

Click HERE for the text of "The Gray Champion."  

 

More on Hawthorne and Highbrow Consciousness?  Click HERE.

The Prisoner, episode 8, "Dance of the Dead" - A philosophical essay of "institutions" (a moral sociology of institutions: the anthropology of institutionalized persons, institutional hierarchies and the institutions of interdependent human-institution relationships)

"Night" by Terrance Lindall, Son of Heavy Metal Magaine, 1984

A recent discovery: Terrance advises me that he was unaware this piece had been published.  He writes, "I don't remember getting paid for it.  I guess I sold the paintings..."

What follows is my edit/ordering, with the panel text appearing below each of the paintings. The cover of the magazine appears at the end of the piece.

Of my dejected soul I have made this domain wherein I spend my days. / In the shadows of lonely places a heavy weight of hours has bowed and tamed me.

Pursued by doubts I flee. The face of Earth has maddened me.

And in my darkest hour, I summon Night! For evil has no power to those that sleep and rather than live I would sleep... / ...Lulled in soft slumber and caresses as dark as death, to be held in Night's eclipse. The stream of Lethe issuing from his lips.

And in dreams more wild than were ever known, we will rise in graceful bounds upon the incensed breath of night to touch the face of God. / All gratitude to Byron, Keats, and, especially... Baudelaire.

I especially like the combination of pointillist textures and the forms suggesting Eves Tanguy, moreover expressing Terrance's characteristic "paleo-life form" surrealist creatures. Acknowledging Byron, Keats and Baudelaire is a nice touch, as it points readers away from the magazine and toward a critical-historical context that transcends the sensational and commercial factors that otherwise (and usually in this particular publication) constrain the possibilities for enriching the reader's understanding of emotions, emotional content, emotional correlatives... and taste. Terrance's paintings place fine art into the hands of a large audience, which can only be good.

Highbrow advice from Dwight Eisenhower

 

More?  Click HERE.

H. P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountians of Madness" - two narrative interpretations and a historical synopsis

Emanations 12 and Michael Butterworth's book on St Christopher School mentioned in the St Christopher Club newsletter

In the latest St Christopher Club Newsletter, Club Secretary David Cursons gives  Emanations 12 a mention. The book presents the first part of Michael Butterworth's St Christopher school memoir: Driven by Anger, Part I "The Little Arundalean".

 

   

Mr. Butterworth's piece is remarkably fluent and detailed, belying the extraordinary efforts he took reconstructing the past.  

In Part Two, Mr. Butterworth will provide further accounts of his life at the school (to be published in Emanations 13, of course). In Part Three he will explore the philosophical background of the school, including its initial founding rooted in the educational concepts of the Theosophical Society--which I anticipate with much curiosity.

The St C Club Newsletter is not affiliated with the school.

Do mental properties emerge as novel properties of complex material systems? How is this question altered when "emerge" is removed from the formulation? And so on.

Are mental properties properties of complex material systems?

Are mental properties complex material systems?

Is mentality--or are mental processes--complex material systems?

Is mentality material? A system? Is mentality mentality, as in mentality qua mentality? Or do we mean something else by "mentality"?

Could mentality be a concept?  And, if so, what kind of a concept is it? And how is this concept employed? 

How should--or how could--we explain "mentality" to a child? For the purposes of our investigation, let's say he or she is an intelligent child ten years old.  If such an exercise proves rewarding, consider a series of children decreasing in age.  At what points do our strategies for explaining mentality alter, and how so?

If the child was trans or identified as an animal, how would this alter our strategies for explanation?

Imagine a far away planet with a complex civilization, and the beings there do not possess mentality. Contrast this with a distant planet with a civilization whose member beings do possess mentality.

More in this vein? Click HERE for a note on methodology.

Defamiliarization or "Art as Device" after Shklovsky

 

As you are now, once were we... As we are now, so you shall be

  

Corrected transliteration:

  

adalamŋinmenzen

udba menden 

adalamŋinmenden 

zae hemen