The chaos of passion

"It is better for people to be like the beasts ... they should be more intuitive; They should not be too conscious of what they are doing while they are doing it".

 ... Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Chopin's lover

There’s an old adage (attributed to Herodotus) that says “a man calumniated is doubly injured—first by him who utters the calumny, and then by him who believes it". Certainly George Sand (1804-76) could be counted amongst those whose reputation has suffered such calumny both for her work and probably more for her relationship with Chopin. In her own time, she was lionized for her writings which have since fallen far short of being considered classics today even though her main subject was love (“All novels are love stories” she remarked), and her persistent theme the legal inequities for women in marriage. She wrote numerous novels (among them Indiana, Lelia, and Consuelo) as well as numerous plays, autobiography, political essays (Bakunin urged Marx to read her), travel books, journals and copious brilliant letters, the most celebrated to Flaubert, with whom she corresponded for years. Her admirers included Balzac, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and Charlotte Bronte. The last three thought her the greatest French stylist of her time.

Sand’s affair with Chopin, a younger man, was as unconventional at the time as it was illicit in which as a woman she brazenly approximated to equality with men, in social dignity and in public responsibility. Edouard Grenier (1819-1901), a contemporary French poet observed of her [pictured here in 1864 at age 60, some 15 years after Chopin's death]:

"She was short and stout, but her face attracted all my attention, the eyes especially. They were wonderful eyes, a little too close together, it may be, large, with full eyelids, and black, very black, but by no means lustrous; they reminded me of unpolished marble, or rather of velvet, and this gave a strange, dull, even cold expression to her countenance. Her fine eyebrows and these great placid eyes gave her an air of strength and dignity which was not borne out by the lower part of her face. Her nose was rather thick and not over shapely. Her mouth was also rather course and her chin small. She spoke with great simplicity, and her manners were very quiet".

A not so flattering assessment was proffered by Charles Baudelaire (1821-67), another remarkable French poet of the time who started the symbolist movement:

"She is stupid, heavy and garrulous. Her ideas on morals have the same depth of judgment and delicacy of feeling as those of janitresses and kept women.... The fact that there are men who could become enamoured of this slut is indeed a proof of the abasement of the men of this generation."

... a celebration of conviviality

If you want my apartment,

sleep in it

but let's have a clear

understanding:

the books are still free

agents.

If the rocking chair's arms

surround you

they can also let you go,

they can shape the air like a

body.

I don't want your rent, I want

a radiance of attention

like the candle's flame when we

eat,

I mean a kind of awe

attending the spaces between us—

Not a roof but a field of stars.

... Jane Cooper (1924-2007), American poet

Hopper's world ...

In Edward Hopper’s (1882-1967) world, everyone is lost in an unending rut of office overtime, rattling El trains, cheap fluorescent diners, and lonely matinees. Everything has fallen tensely quiet. And this anxious, itchy mood haunts even the urban landscapes — perhaps half his work — in which the only person around is you, the viewer. Here every man is an island.

Social inequality explained ....

So now we have it from the horse's mouth ... apparently, according to Alan Greenspan ("The Age of Turbulance: Adventures in a New World") rampant inequality is caused by lousy high schools.

The Family Idiot ... on estrangement

B: Many of your friendships have ended in estrangement … why are things like that?

S: Breaking off doesn’t affect me in the least. A thing is dead – that’s all.

B: Can you tell me why it doesn’t affect you?

S: I think I did not feel a deep friendship for some of the men who were among the closer of my friends.

B: But what do you mean when you say, “I didn’t feel a deep friendship”? Who have you had a deep friendship with?

S: With some women … but generally speaking, there weren’t deep sensitive elements between the other fellows and myself.

B: Do you mean that what existed was rather a certain intellectual understanding, and that this understanding came to an end either for political reasons or for others, then everything fell to pieces?

S: Yes, that’s right.

B: The emotional bond that makes one overlook certain divergences did not remain …

S: Exactly….

B: And on the whole you always prefer the present.

S: The present is concrete and real. Yesterday is not so sharp and clear, and I’m not yet thinking of tomorrow. For me there is a preference for the present over the past. There are people who like the past better because they attribute an aesthetic or cultural value to it. I don’t. In moving into the past the present dies. It loses its value of dawning life. It still belongs to life. I can refer back to it; but it no longer possesses that quality that is given to every moment insofar as I am living it and which it loses when I am living it no more.

B: No doubt that’s why you have never found it very hard to break with your friends

S: Yes. I began a new life without them.

B: Is that because as soon as a thing belongs to the past it is really abolished for you?

S: Yes. And as for the friends who are still left to me, still living, they have to have a fresh present immediacy so as not to be continually harking back to the same one. I mustn’t see them as they were yesterday or the day before, with the same worries, the same ideas, the same ways of speaking. There has to be a change.

... Jean-Paul Sartre (S) (1905-80) in conversation with Simone de Beauvoir (B) (1908-86) in late life.

Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long.

It's awfully easy to lie when you know that you're trusted implicitly. So very easy, and so very degrading."

... the movie "A Brief Encounter"

The last of the Symbolists

"God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through."

  ... Paul Valery (1871-1945)

Cynicism as an art-form ...

"la république démocratique et sociale!"

"To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost'' ... Gustave Flaubert (1821-80)

Photo above: The corpses of  Paris Communards (1871)
Photo below: Memorial Plaque (Paris)

Communards' Wall at the Père Lachaise cemetery

The piano player ...

''I love the piano and those who love the piano. The piano as a medium for expression is a whole world by itself. No other instrument can fill or replace its own say in the world of emotion, sentiment, poetry, imagery and fancy" ... Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938) [pictured middle]

http://www.leopoldgodowsky.com/

Voltaire smiles sarcastically upon Aquinas ...

 




Voltaire deathmask

Voltaire’s (1694-1778) quarrel with the Catholic Church it appears was that it was a self-serving institution … a worldly body, and not of or for God. As well, the bible to Voltaire was not a divine gift or the ‘word of God’, but rather by and large a metaphor that taught some good lessons. He famously observed "if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him".  On the other hand for Aquinas (1225-74) the bible was a sacred doctrine whose sources are self-revelations of God to certain 'select' individuals throughout history. Aquinas apparently denied that human beings have any duty to animals and plants because they are not persons, have no 'souls' and accordingly can be used freely with impunity for consumption. He encouraged people to reproduce with irresponsible abandon without limit viewing it as a basic god-given right. His tenets are still widely believed and practiced without reservation. Voltaire viewed this elitist view of man’s place in nature as profoundly evil. It has to do with choice and action, and the tension in which choices are made which are reckless, irresponsible, suicidal, and indeed ultimately godless.



animals have no 'souls'

Metaphorically speaking …

Metaphors are incredibly seductive: they effortlessly slot into the brain, allowing us to seemingly make quick sense of difficult ideas.



But we should heed Nietzsche's warning … that metaphors illuminate as they conceal:

“What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”

As much as could be said of Nietzsche’s sister, seen here as a vital old woman in her late eighties, wearing granny glasses and a bonnet welcoming Hitler to the Nietzsche Archives in 1934. She was a dupe to contrived hollow tribute and apparently not a reliable custodian of her brother's legacy.

Who cares?

"Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all ... the apathy of human beings"

    ... Helen Keller (1880-1968)

Tod and Verklarung

"A man lies half-conscious in a dim, little chamber, fever-tossed, awaiting death. A candle, flickering as uncertainly as the life that is in him, casts wavering shadows, and the book of life is turned back page by page as the exhausted man dreams.

He dreams of his childhood, of the battleground of youth, the torn banner of the ideal carried dauntlessly forward; the hopes, futilities, illusions that beset him, and the remorseless foes that confront him at every turn of the upward path. And death strikes, and out of blackness and void rises the music of apotheosis".

... observed of "Death and Transfiguration" composed by Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

1st movt [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHnFgmNWtfM&feature=player_embedded]
2nd movt [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvKP9jS-V7w&feature=player_embedded#!]
3rd movt [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7qSEGu3a78&feature=player_embedded]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pictured above is Strauss at 57 enjoying Paris with German opera singer (soprano) Elisabeth Schumann (1888-1952) during a break from an extensive music tour. She wrote in her diary for that day:

''After lunch we went at once to the Louvre - wonderful impressions - stood for ages in front of the Mona Lisa too - then by car to the Château de Madrid in the Bois - beautiful drive, coffee - elegant people - discreet music with modern dances - we sat outside "au soleil" - back by car as far as the Place de [la] Concorde from where we walked down to the Seine and enjoyed the view. Strauss spoke about architecture - I admire his many interests - we returned to the hotel - I announced that I had to go to bed or else I would keel over with tiredness. . . the Dr. . .has just shown me the separate entrance to his bathroom which he says I should use as well. He is so sweet'' (1921)

"Play it again, Sam!"

The big "c".

The velocity of light is not relative, space and time are. The velocity of light isn't just how fast light goes, it's a number somehow woven into reality itself — that is, space and time organize themselves around "c".

Survival of the fittest

The phrase “survival of the fittest” erroneously attributed to Charles Darwin (1809-82) [photographed below by his son in 1874 at 65] was coined by the English 19th century philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) [aptly caricatured left] to denote a biological “life force” at work in society having direction and an end-point. Spencer contended that the most intelligent, ambitious, and productive amongst us inevitably win out, and thereby, through some magical improbable serendipity, benefit all society in some vague way. This so-called “social Darwinism” adulterates Darwin’s genius and  makes a mockery of the vital mechanism he so carefully thought through and presented in The Origin of the Species. This social Darwinism speaks to the philosophical roots of the worst republican political dogma. The thinking is erroniously flawed. Favoring the rich and powerful does not benefit society at large.

Darwin at 65

The essential fallacy in Spencer's thinking is that Darwin's insight had nothing to do with a biological "life force" but rather focused on the major problem of biological complexity, namely how did this complexity arise? Francis Crick (1916-2004) [pictured below, right in 1953], 1962 Nobel Prize co-winner for his work in the molecular structure of DNA explains it succinctly as follows:



DNA discoverers

"Natural selection, Darwin argued, provides an “automatic” mechanism by which a complex organism can survive and increase in both number and complexity. I say “automatic” to mean that we need not involve a special “life force” or “intelligence” to direct this process.

How does natural selection work? The essential trick is to ensure that in favorable circumstances an organism will be able to multiply very greatly. This is usually done by a process of geometrical multiplication, by which one organism gives rise to several others, identical to itself, each of which in turn can produce identical descendents. The unavoidable “copying errors” in this process will make some of these descendents differ (usually rather slightly) from the original ancestor, and some of these must be capable of being copied exactly. As the population increases a time will come when the environment can no longer support such a large population. There will then inevitably be the elimination of some organisms, leaving others as survivors who alone will produce descendants -- will thus automatically be selected. A really beautiful mechanism, the discovery of which is one of the great intellectual triumphs of our civilization" ... "Of Molecules and Men".

Rear Window

Pegi Nicol MacLeod

Who's listening?

"There was never an uninteresting life ... inside the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy and a tragedy". Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Moving mountains

''Mahomet made the people believe that he would call a hill to him, and from the top of it offer up his prayers for the observers of his law. The people assembled. Mahomet called the hill to come to him, again and again; and when the hill stood still he was never a whit abashed, but said, 'If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.'”

   ... Francis Bacon (1561-1626)