Time gives gravity to prettiness where beauty emerges

---

Airy living, 15 years ago, “soothing W. H. Auden,” about extra-ordinary life.

That page hasn't been public. It was done for a beloved friend, Terese, whose eidetic memory penned Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" perfectly for me during a lunch.

to a literary scholar who felt stalked

---

Today, Americans are avoiding what Weimar couldn't prevent, I pray. 

No, praying won't exorcise preyers. We teach. That was Heidegger's "politics," i.e., his extending the emancipatory interest of Being and Time by exempli-
fying critical phenomenology through ways of therapeutic thinking. (Don't mistake critical mirroring for Self expression.)

I thought of you again when recently I read (re-read, I forget) Heidegger's 1949 "Introduction" to "What Is Metaphysics?" He writes that separating one’s sense of being from becoming is invalid (ref.2.10, p. 285). It’s symptomatic of the metaphysicalism which he variably deconstructs in terms of others’ phenomenality.

A feature of metaphysicalist “thinking” is that it destines itself, whereas authentic openness loves to see chances for re-thinking.

Therefore, Heidegger may have let others’ stubborn attachments (and academic vanity) have its way (groupthink)—there being schadenfreude, fer sure—while he continued his own precursory appeal for ones to come.

a hallowing day

---

A feature of the Classical mind, as well as Cartesian subject, was intolerance for irreverence. It insults the vanity of the traditional self (the lorded “subject”).

That kind of thought came back to mind today when I was looking at the Britannica article on “Romanticism,” which includes “…a predilection for…the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.”

writing life, a gain

---

For some persons, life becomes text: aural, visual, written.

So it went in the fabulous film, “Anatomy of a Fall” (2023) which is so French in concept: exhibiting a certified copy of an era of a marriage brought into cohering sense through “documentational” art.

The author overcame tragedy through finding narrative enclosure whose deeper, farther, higher implicature remains a mystery for listeners, viewers, readers to prospect: How love of one’s artistic partner betrayed itself.

marks, letters, history

---

email to an art exhibit reviewer:

I’m thrilled to see Heidegger remembered as inquirer into art, especially as entrance into your review [of an exhibit of ancient and contemporary ceramics in Malta]….

Heidegger implicitly distinguishes between the Work which eventually results in an artwork and the artwork itself. So, “the work of art” has the artist-at-work (the Work) in mind (“setting forth" toward the artwork). Indeed, the artwork doesn’t “set itself to work” [quoting reviewer] “The truth of an entity” [ibid.] is intentional, which only living “entities” show. (What may be the “truth” of a gloriously-colored bird showing, unwittingly, its evolved excellence?).

mis-addressed postcard

---

So, he says, “…I read myself as a narrative character, an authorship, who sometimes seems strange to me, and worthy of sardonic framing or dismissive meta-narrative….,”

O, don’t worry. You just want to imply some self-effacing postmodern plight. That was very well worn decades ago.

“So it goes for the conceptualist mind: a chronic sense of surreality.”

No, you actually love playing philological glyph.

resort

---

Everyone wants a good story: to be entranced, to be drawn into immers-
ion, forgetting oneself in being intently releasing attention so fully,
there’s no idea of given way to the appeal because one is the flow of immersion, like flying into a horizon is like the horizon overtaking
one’s unmoving position. “I’m lost to you, so wholly given I forget I
gave way into you I’ve become.”

In an immersive story, “you” (one) become the text narrating itself,
drawing you on as if there’s no you apart from the drawing.

here now the dead

---

a little sermon for the grand story

Marjorie Perloff, a notable literary theorist, died Sunday.

The New York Times had a long, substantive obituary ready Monday.

Creepy.

I said to the reviewer, Clay Risen, via email, that his admirable narrative surely required “a bit of scrambling for information,” normal for NYT obituaries. Monolithic sculptor “Richard Serra died yesterday,” I added. “and Roberta Smith got a first version online the same day. It’s as if the obit was largely done before death, waiting in draft. ‘She’s dead. Amend, edit, upload'.”

Next?

Marjorie Perloff is another instance, for me, of a grand person who may have been forgotten years ago, then is brought back to mind by their death—yet,
to be soon forgotten again—which calls for thinking about what lives are generally.

we invent each other here, to some degree

---

Jacques Derrida’s 1987 preface to Psyche: Inventions of the Other seems to express an essential aspect of his self-analytical sensibility, which places author and reader in a mirrorplay of discernment and invention, inevitably.