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Tag Archives: The Four Seasons

Anything and Everything

23 Friday Dec 2016

Posted by edward1793 in Uncategorized

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

The Four Seasons

theword

“Oh judgement! thou art fled to brutish beasts,

And men have lost their reason.”

(Shakespeare, Julius Ceasar, III.2)

 

Back in the 70s, at Indiana University, I took a class in symbolic logic. The professor I had for the class — let’s call him “Dr. C” for the simple reason that I can’t remember how to spell his long Italian surname — was an odd sort. An ex-Navy man, he sported a 17th century goatee and mustache, had his hair permed in an afro, and carried a good number of tattoos. He also had a bit of a reputation. Something to do with dating one of his graduate students, a no-no back in those days, there was a bit of a scandal — well let’s just leave it at that.

He also had a brain like a steel trap that I very much admired. And he didn’t try to hide it with false modesty. He was what I would later call a “confrontational” instructor. “Think!” he would yell at us across the classroom. We would kind of fidget at our desks, embarrassed. As well we should be. Thinking — thinking correctly — is never easy. Not happy with my grade at the end of the semester, not happy with having not learned enough in the class, I was to take the very same class with Dr. C  two years later. I only did slightly better. Yes, not easy to learn to think.

Perhaps the chief lesson I learned from him is something that he would drill into our heads the entire semester: “Never forget” he would shout, “anything and everything follows from a false proposition!” If proposition A is false, then conclusion B or C that follows from it may be false or may be true — the problem is that there was no real way of knowing.

No real way of knowing. And for a logician, that is like a deep dark well. It is darkness and death. It is not rational.

Having to deal with chronic free-floating anxiety since my 20s, how well and how many times have I gone back to Dr. C and his much stated sentence. Medication is certainly available to fight anxiety. But it is usually partially effective and almost always a double-edged sword that causes a flip-side reaction that creates depression. Logic and rationality, for me at least, has been more beneficial. No, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that people that suffer from anxiety should simply pull themselves up by their bootstraps. I’m just saying that as a therapeutic adjunct that in my case logic has been very beneficial.

Perhaps that is one reason why the state of our current culture bothers me so much. And why I have to spend so much of my time hiding from it. Looking outward, I see accusations, ill-defined terms, lies and deceits, gossip and imagined states of affairs posing as truth. I see that deep dark well, I am saddened by it and I want to yell “Just stop!”

So much talking, and talking about talking — including this post unfortunately. And I fear that also. Jesus of Nazareth said not to throw stones — but only he was qualified to say it. And so I reach out to words here, words that open up into the Universe, very carefully. As much as I respect Jacques Derrida, as much as I am prone to my own anxiety-launched deconstructions, I know that they can only be personal, and that the interpreter, as Umberto Eco said, is “a free detonator of what he himself produces.”  

But what I do feel safe in saying is that I fear that besides a return to the Nihilism of the 1930s, that we have entered into what Eco called the Kabbalistic Drift (one might as well say the Godless Kabbalistic Drift):

“Mallarme’s idea of a context made up by empty and white spaces can recall the rabbinical idea of a scroll where even the white spaces are to be read as letters, but this time there is no God to warrant (and to be named by) the combinatory game: The Book is not conceived by God to speak of Himself. On the contrary, the Book…only speaks of its infinite combinatorial possibilities.”

Interestingly, there is another area which deals in infinite possibilities — metaphysics. But if our current deconstruction of meaning — all the words, all the talking —  is tied to the metaphysics of Nihilism, then we are, essentially, saying nothing. I leave it to each of you to decide whether or not that is the current case. 

All I can say is that in the practice of charity, in mercy, compassion, and love, words are not really necessary. And it was not me that said that, of course. A being far greater than any said those things.

I read an interesting quote the other day by Jorge Luis Borges: “I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have ever read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved.” How certainly I have felt that over the past years. I am barely solid, so much of me is insubstantial, like a spirit on Prospero’s Island. Both sinner and saint, I flutter around in the storm as best I can.

And so this Christmas I would like to thank all those friends and family who have given me laughter, who have taught me, who have given me their hand when needed. And to you all I wish you this Holiday a peace that the world cannot give; I wish you Anything not dark; and Everything excellent that God may ordain.

 

Full Circle

20 Tuesday Sep 2016

Posted by edward1793 in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Monteverdi, Music, The Four Seasons

monteverdims

The only surviving manuscript of Claudio Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno di Ulisse in Patria  (1640).  From the Austrian National Library.

Contemporaries of this opera saw a parallel between Ulysses and Monteverdi, as the composer was “returning home” to opera (at an advanced age in fact) after being away from it for thirty years.

The first classical music I ever listened to were the selections on the album The-Well Tempered Synthesizer by Wendy Carlos. There was no doubt that her wonderful arrangement of the suite from Monteverdi’s Orfeo was the work that of all of them drew me in to that world of music.

And here I am, like Monteverdi, older and back again. It is a very special thing in life when things come full circle like that. It is as if the universe is shouting to you. 

Much more on all of this later. Because I am just getting started.

 

   

Abyss Has No Biographer

15 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by edward1793 in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Emily Dickinson, Poetry, The Four Seasons

Icebergs-1

Icebergs italicize the Sea — they  do not intercept it, and “Deep calls to the Deep” in the old way — To attempt to speak of what has been, would be impossible. Abyss has no biographer. 

— Emily Dickinson, Letter to Martha Gilbert Smith (1884).

 

Not Quite the Post I Intended

18 Saturday Oct 2014

Posted by edward1793 in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Technology, The Four Seasons

BATSLAP

Well I was finally doing it. My first blog post in two months. I can’t say that it was a really significant post. It was just one of those images where people write stupid or humorous stuff on maps. Nevertheless it was in fact time-intensive. And it was turning out nicely.

Well after about four hours work I was almost finished with it. All that remained to do were a few additions to southeast Asia. Unfortunately at that point I didn’t have the time to complete it. I had to make a trip to Idaho, and so I figured I would put the work away and come back to it the next day and finish it up and post it. I did a quick Merge Layers and then did a Save. Or at least I thought I did a Save. Yeah I was totally convinced that I had done that important and necessary step. 

But no. Something screwed up. When I came back today to finish the job, all I found was the blank map I had started with. Nothing of my work remained.

One of the differences between the Pixlr editor that I have been using on my Chromebook and Adobe Photoshop is that kind of thing would never have happened in Photoshop. If you forget to hit Save in Photoshop it assumes you are going to come back to the work later and saves the work anyway as an executable PSD document. Then you just go from there.

Not so with Pixlr, alas. You know I really do like Pixlr. It has most of the bells and whistles that I was used to on Photoshop. In fact the only thing I didn’t much care for in Pixlr was the Text function, which is needlessly complicated and kind of a pain in the ass. And of course you can’t beat the price of Pixlr — it is free, compared to Photoshop which you have to sell a kidney to buy and which won’t work on Chromebook anyway.

So all that work, lost. But I was bound and determined to get something out of it. Thus, this post. And a new Batman bitch-slapping Robin meme which never existed in the entire history of the world. So there.  

Old Dirty Things

17 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by edward1793 in Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Archaeology, The Four Seasons

Continue reading →

A Little Problem On the I.D. Front, Part 2

25 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by edward1793 in Uncategorized

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

The Four Seasons

Continue reading →

Hemingway Kicking a Beer Can

19 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by edward1793 in Uncategorized

≈ 20 Comments

Tags

Remember Me Good, The Four Seasons

Continue reading →

In Memory of Hans Tischler

27 Thursday Jun 2013

Posted by edward1793 in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Music, The Four Seasons

Continue reading →

The Edge of the World

28 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by edward1793 in Uncategorized

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

The Four Seasons

Continue reading →

Sasha and Her Baby

08 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by edward1793 in Uncategorized

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

Sasha, The Four Seasons

Continue reading →

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