personification

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.


"I'm jealous of the old generation that has social skills and role models instead of TV and computer screens!"

Figure of speech in which human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object. An example is "The Moon doth with delight / Look round her when the heavens are bare" (William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," 1807). Another is "Death lays his icy hand on kings" (James Shirley, "The Glories of Our Blood and State," 1659). Personification has been used in European poetry since Homer and is particularly common in allegory; for example, the medieval morality play Everyman (c. 1500) and the Christian prose allegory Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan contain characters such as Death, Fellowship, Knowledge, Giant Despair, Sloth, Hypocrisy, and Piety. Personification became almost an automatic mannerism in 18th-century Neoclassical poetry, as exemplified by these lines from Thomas Gray's "An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard": Here rests his head upon the lap of earthA youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown:Fair science frowned not on his humble birth,And Melancholy marked him for her own.

truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are

- most media are dominated by acting ... people watching people act ... a flimsy surrogate for the real thing, at best.
- idiosyncracies of the actor; certain mannerisms contrived or inherent
may intrigue the viewer but are an adulteration of the “truth”, the thing
immitated.
- there’s a gap between a sense of what is real and what is contrived
- the gap in itself is innocuous , unless it shrinks to nothing, as the act
becomes reality in peoples mind

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kamtekar/papers/personification.pdf


[Note: this entry is a work in process ... exploring the concept of personification as all perversive/Plato's identification of it/dramatic arts and acting/social interaction and communication/language structure and evolution/peer pressure behaviour/etc]

terrible passions in red and green ...

Night Café

"I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green" van Gogh wrote. Yellow walls give on to blood-red walls that lead to an obtrusive green ceiling, and lining the walls are the locals at the bar tables, hunched over in late-night stupor. Lamps hang from the ceiling, surrounded by Vincent's wheels of curving yellow strokes. A stark black and white clock looms in the background, impossible to miss. It is almost a quarter past midnight in this desolate scene.

"Night Café" painted in Arles in 1888 is, in the artist's own words, "…one of the ugliest I have ever done" ... a collection of clashing colors in the dreariest atmosphere with fully two-thirds of the painting the floor of the café, executed in sulphuric yellow with exaggerated lines of perspective that yank the eye into the painting. A green billiard table, outlined in heavy black, stops us cold. Beside the table stands a figure in a light-colored coat, staring out at us without expression, perhaps the cafe owner for whom allegedly the painting was made to pay off a debt.

A case of superficial vitality ...

"He projected a superficial vitality; both women and men were drawn to him by that alone. Closely observed, however, one sensed a secret fatigue, a lack of any real optimism. His wife was severely aware of it, and why not? She was its principal cause."

      ... Music For Chameleons, Truman Capote (1924-84)

Rememberance of things past and the chaos of clear ideas ...

When a drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over sessions of sweet silent thought, and to pervade every nook and cranny of a mind in repose, I marvel at the vividness of  early childhood memories, and the immediacy of their intricately woven sensations ... a chaos of clear ideas that form the very essence of being and consciousness. The recall, for example, of summer languidness on the last day of a school year in an empty classroom, windows flung open to the enticing bright sunny freedom of a cooling breeze, mingled with the sharp anguished lonely dismay of sudden release from routine. These memories linger as vivid mood pictures imbedded in the mind, involving feelings which in manifold variety shape individual personalities. The subtle nuances and flavors of a whole culture and way of life long past, essentially permanent archetypes of human character and experience, can and do haunt the cavernous corridors of a vast unconsciousness  curiously shaping en masse the character of a whole community.



uncanny musical genius



Czech composer Dvorak (1841-1904) [pictured with his wife in 1886] captured with uncanny musical genius the sense of such a time past … wide open country settings languishing under vast cathedralic canopies of  pale blue skies and billowy wisps of pure white clouds, coalescing with the rapturous intricacies of simple rural life. His music conveys a sense of this bucolic past with such delicate knowing intimacy that tears might easily well up in one's eyes … for there is profound sadness in this music, a compelling intuition that Dvorak was driven to capture a thing of wondrous beauty knowing full well it was fleeting:
 
"https://www.youtube.com/embed/PbNWuTC4n_8"
 

This was a time of ancestors long gone and forgotten, their remnants buried in little country church cemeteries, slowly succumbing to nature’s inexorable disintegrating forces:

nature’s inexorable disintegrating forces: