a hallowing day

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.