Rilke, "Lament"

Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.
A clock has stopped striking in the house
across the road...
When did it start?...
I would like to step out of my heart
an go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is--
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city...

Jonathan Edwards on love:

How soon do earthly lovers come to an end of their discoveries of each other's beauty; how soon do they see all that is to be seen! Are they united as near as 'tis possible, and have communion as intimate as possible? how soon do they come to the most endearing expressions of love that 'tis possible to give, so that no new ways can be invented, given or received. And how happy is that love, in which there is an eternal progress in all these things; wherein new beauties are continually discovered, and more and more loveliness, and in which we shall forever increase in beauty ourselves; where we shall be made capable of finding out and giving, and shall receive, more and more endearing expressions of love forever: our union will become more close, and communion more intimate.

More and more. Is this a alternative view of love to the solipsistic "unconditional" love so often sought? Love as asymptotic process?

Everything is both affirmative and negative, pregnant with its contrary. The universe incessantly engages in on going agonistics

--Floyd Merrell

A typically difficult passage from Peirce, who often seems to take the tortured syntax of 19th century intellectual writing to new heights. Nevertheless, it forcefully demonstrates his brilliance and the all-encompassing wholeness of his thought.

The supreme commandment is to complete the whole system even until continuity results and the distinct individuals weld together. Thus it is, that while reasoning and the science of reasoning strenuously proclaim the subordination of reasoning to sentiment, the very surpreme commandment of sentiment is that man should generalize,…should become welded into the universal continuum, which is what true reasoning consists in. But this does not reinstate reasoning, for this generalization should come about, not merely in man’s cognitions, which are but the superficial film of his being, but objectively in the deepest emotional springs of his life. In fulfilling this command, man prepares himself for transmutation into a new form of life, the joyful Nirvana in which the discontinuities of his will shall have all but disappeared.

I feel like I could write page after page on this passage, but what most concerns me now is that phrase "the discontinuities of his will." I like this idea. We are torn in opposite directions, wanting things that we can't have and would never make us happy even if we had them. The discongruous desires for meaning, diversion, adventure, and comfort. Maybe we don't want to know the meaning of life, because what if it conflicts with our other desires? What if it's bad news? Do we still want to know? Maybe we'll settle for what gets us through the day, the week, the year.

But Peirce has a vision here in which opposite don't quite dissolve, but manage to find a balance, in which the "whole" I wrote about a few posts down becomes visible. Do we ever get to see that whole in this life? Or is it always fleeting, just out of sight, forever pursued? As I said, I like this idea because it suggests that the space between the opposites I am pulled in, the space in which I exist, forever between and torn, is the space of an accessible higher plane. If only I can be reconciled to that liminal space, if only I can reconcile those discontinuities by accepting them all together.

Is this the sense I get of a lack of "feeling" in our times? An inability to feel? A constriction of the range of emotions? Are we protecting ourselves, keeping life at arm's length? Is this what it means to grow up, historically and emotionally?

The tendency is from tacitly sense, felt, relatively immediately experienced, visceral, corporeal, concrete images toward that age-old ideal of hyperconsciously logicized, properly reasoned, cogitated, cognized, and abstracted intellection. The transformation is from sensed and experienced sign-events largely 'out there' to experienced and cognized thought-signs largely 'in here.'

--Floyd Merrell

Michel Serres:

But I want to say that there is something divine in this world, divine things. What I am saying is really beside the real, direct question: God is a noun, a name; divine is an adjective, thrown to the side. The world is divine and is full of divine things. This sea, this plain, this river, the ice floe, the tree, light and life. I know it, I see it, I feel it, I am illuminated by it, burning. The wine-dark sea and divine life. The adjective, placed to one side, at a distance from the names and notions of philosophy is enough for me as a parable. Yes, the divine is there; I touch it; these things are improbable miracles; I never stopped loving the world and seeing that it is beautiful. Yes, my philosophy is adjectival; it is awe-struck. The real is not rational; it is improbable and miraculous.

Never cease seeking to be surprised at the existence of anything at all.

Peirce's Innovation

Traditional concept of a sign: an object that refers to something else.

Peirce's concept: an object that refers to the version of itself then coming into being, and so on. Self-referential.

On Our Myopia

On what assurance, what promise, do I affirm this pain? On the arrival of what future can I accept my present suffering? Is there any higher whole right now in which to dissolve this agonizing single part? Is the part, fallen from the whole, the form and content of my suffering as well?

Theme Post: The Ocean

Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Moby Dick:

Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea- mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides.

But had Stubb really abandoned the poor little negro to his fate? No; he did not mean to, at least. Because there were two boats in his wake, and he supposed, no doubt, that they would of course come up to Pip very quickly, and pick him up; though, indeed, such considerations towards oarsmen jeopardized through their own timidity, is not always manifested by the hunters in all similar instances; and such instances not unfrequently occur; almost invariably in the fishery, a coward, so called, is marked with the same ruthless detestation peculiar to military navies and armies.

But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb's boat was now so far away, and he and all his crew so intent upon his fish, that Pip's ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had leeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.

The Awakening, Kate Chopin:

The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water.

Emerson, "Experience":

Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with.

And in "Fate":

I seemed, in the height of a tempest, to see men overboard struggling in the waves, and driven about here and there. They glanced intelligently at each other, but 'twas little they could do for one another; 'twas much if each could keep afloat alone. Well, they had a right to their eye-beams, and all the rest was Fate.

Charles S. Peirce on the meaning of life, the universe, and our ideals:

Thus, whether you accept the opinion or not, you must see that it is a perfectly intelligible opinion that ideas are not all mere creations of this or that mind, but on the contrary have a power of finding or creating their vehicles, and having found them, of conferring upon them the ability to transform the face of the earth. If you ask what mode of being is supposed to belong to an idea that is in no mind, the reply will come that undoubtedly the idea must be embodied (or ensouled; it is all one) in order to attain complete being, and that if, at any moment, it should happen that an idea,--say that of physical decency,--was quite unconcieved by any living being, then its mode of being (supposing that it was not altogether dead) would consist precisely in this, namely, that it was about to receive embodiment (or ensoulment) and to work in the world. This would be a mere potential being, a being in futuro; but it would not be the utter nothingness which would befall matter (or spirit) if it were to be deprived of the governance of ideas, and thus were to have no regularity in its action, so that throughout no fraction of a second could it steadily act in any general way. For matter would thus not only not actually exist; but it would not have even a potential existence; since potentiality is an affair of ideas. It would be just downright Nothing.

It so happens that I myself believe in the eternal life of the ideas Truth and Right. I need not, however, insist upon that for my present purpose, and have only spoken of them in order to make my meaning clear. What I do insist upon is not now the infinite vitality of those particular ideas, but that every idea has in some measure, in the same sense that those are supposed to have it in unlimited measure, the power to work out physical and psychical results. They have life, generative life.

Doubt



I feel like there's about 20 different threads here I could pick up on, but there's one in particular that seems often overlooked in most of the reviews I've read. Doubt, as the first scene of the movie makes clear, indicates our common humanity, as distinct from Divine certainty. And there we encounter an uncomfortable paradox that seems to define the movie: the farther we are from Grace, the closer we are to our fellow humans. Is it any wonder that the questionable ethics of the Priest go hand in hand with being the movie's most sympathetic character?

But the movie is about Meryl Streep's nun, more than anything else. And it's made clear that her certainty of the Priest's sin takes her "a step away from God"--and so it's a certainty that is in stark contrast to the religious certainty of the simple and naive Amy Adams character. What are we to make of this? Is Streep's nun sacrificing her own salvation for certainty? The movie doesn't tell us who's right and who's wrong, who's bad and who's good--not because it wants to be pretentious, but because the concern of the movie falls directly into that abyss, and if we had that information it would let us off the hermeneutic hook, as the audience.

Ultimately, I'm inclined to think the tragedy of this movie is not really an epistemological one, nor the dehumanizing and abstract theological codes that demand certainty of fallible human beings. The tragedy is that in the face of the dizzying metaphysical uncertainty that Streep's nun faces she can only respond by trusting her own intuition. Paradoxically, in the terms of the movie, distancing herself from her fellow human beings in both her certainty and her doubt. And thus she is denied even the comforting human community available to us in God's absence. The despair in that final scene is infinte.

I came across the following quote from John Dewey a long time ago, but I've been thinking a lot about it lately. Here it is.

When we have used our thought to its utmost and have thrown into the moving unbalanced balance of things our puny strength, we know that though the universe slay us still we may trust, for our lot is one with whatever is good in existence. We know that such thought and effort is the condition of the coming into the existence of the better. As far as we are concerned it is the only condition, for it alone is in our power.

I think it's the phrase "unbalanced balance of things" that sticks with me just as must as the Job reference. It suggests, I think, that odd feeling that our lives are out of sorts. That we're weighing down only one side of the scale, rather than both, and that the larger "balance" isn't ours to see or to feel, but belongs to the universe alone. We are only a part of it, and perhaps apart from it. Parts of a whole we can't see.

It's something I often come back to. Stanley Cavell says that "the universe exists for its own reasons"--not ours. How do you embrace this wisdom without nihilism, without wanting to surrender? It's been suggested that human beings, and all life, exist so that the universe may observe itself. We are means to that end. That is to say that what we see, what we feel, are not simply phantoms of our minds but real properties of the universe that realize themselves through us. There is dignity in this. And it suggests that the meaning we feel, the importance of our own lives, is real too, and not merely confined to petty "human" affairs.

So the universe may exist for its own reasons, but we contribute to those reasons. And the infinite depths of feeling that we seem to be capable of, that sadness or joy, isn't just stuck isolated in your head. It's part of the world.

Revolutionary Road

There is a scene, about 3/4s of the way through, involving a hand on a car window during a moment of passion that reminded me of Titanic. Except it's more like a reversal of that moment, or better yet a desperate attempt to reclaim something like passion.

One wonders how sympathetic we are to feel towards these characters. When I was trying to explain to a friend an odd theme in the movie I said that they were caught playing a role even when they didn't want to. He remarked that the self-awareness must be like another role itself, ad infinitum.

I think that "ad infinitum" actually captures exactly what I was thinking. To use a wildly pretentious phrase, it's the "infinity of boredom"--the "emptiness and hopelessness" as it's said in the movie. Even the despair is a hollow put-on, a show more than substance. And so that "emptiness" escapes from a simplistic attack on suburban tedium to become something much larger, much more intrusive and threatening for the audience. Something we can't condescend to (which the audience I saw it with seemed eager to do--as if things happening in the 50s are funny just by virtue of being in the 50s!). There would seem to be no way out, no way to be real, to "really feel things" as Frank puts it. The true tragedy of the story becomes evident in their descriptions of what "really feeling things" would be, it's either cliched or vague and undefined. Soon it becomes obvious that they've never really felt anything at all. Even their means of escape (dashing off to France, a banal cliche to everyone who hears it) is somehow staged, phony, just another example of bad acting...