CCXVI - what is life

It's hard to learn about the universe, the grand physics ordering all these swathes of gas, cosmic oddities, powers and chunks of rock, that immense sphere of prolific fusion energy, our star, our ancient blue planet, out of the immaculate conditions of iterative solar and terrestrial formation, the mysterious, bewildering, brilliant start of biological L I F E, its grubby attempts to endure and survive through all the turmoil and skulduggery its host land musters out of its own nature, its tremendous, single-minded persistence, its collective ancestral will to live and will to power, spanning cycles of generations, life and death, its devastatingly wonderful machinery powering evolution of familiae, genera, species, and the meagre skinflint of that ape, homo sapiens' trampling on this earth, and not be blown away, just blown away by it all.

I've said this before, yet this always takes my mind away: one part in two billion of the sun's energy falls on the earth. Out of that sliver of juice, all of life as we have it is given. I honestly can't deal with that knowledge.

CCXV - snowflake

I was at the National Gallery on Saturday. I actually find the National Museum more ... lovely in its old timey way (they also had an exhibit with impressionist art in 2012). It was my second time to this exhibit with the National Gallery. They brought in paintings from the Musée d'Orsay. The interesting thing about this particular style of painting, the so-called impressionists, is that originally, most of their kind were rejected by a kind of uppity panel of Parisian art jurists, who were more used to the classical style of the great David. So Napoleon III, nephew of that Napoleon, started a Salon des Refusés for these rejected artwork. And you know, by and large, the public became enamored with this slightly surreal new style of painting, more dreamy than the romantics, a little bit less stark than the realists, a kind that went after essences and spirits of things, presented in a little haziness, melding life and mystery, all in a painterly style, giving up slightly the high techniques of the old masters, but only to escape their stuffiness, to present better their ideas of the imprecise interplay of light and shadow, a more fluid interpretation of the elements in a scene. They had the great geniuses on their side, Delacroix (perhaps he wouldn't mind being lumped with this lot!), Manet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir, Signac, Monet (I don't personally like Monet, but he is definitely one of this group). I find that I think about the art better when I went this second time. The first time, I kinda was a little driven to making sure I traversed every corner, taking photos of everything I liked. It was like chasing Pokémon. I enjoyed just being a goer-thinker this time. You know, there's a little in every painting that reveals new things to you. Everything is important, everything fits into the composition, makes the ghost in the machine. And so often you realise it's you that kinda wakes up to the magic of the painting, like you can feel yourself growing up as the painting shows you who you are, what you know about life, beauty and art, skill, love and technique. Art, books, music ... you have to take out something deep inside your soul to grasp their deep architecture, rhythms and resonances.

Take this painting (Gustave Caillebotte, Rooftops in the Snow [Snow Effect]), 1878). I didn't think much of it at first, and to be honest, I think you'd forgive me, with all the other artwork that was on (there were what, three Manets and three Cezannes?). But you know, it kinda occurred to me that this was a view of reality for someone out there. People lived in this world, going about their business, occupying these homes, working their little occupations, building their little lives. Once in a while, waking up to cold, dark snowbound days. What if there was a war, yeah they'd have to gather as conscripts, fight to defend their towns and cities, go far, far places to die to a cruel, remorseless bullet, bleed to death on a hill, or in a mud filled gutter. What if you were a snowflake falling on this city, and that snowflake became a man. Could you do it, could you shoot another man in this picture, his blood spilling out onto the snow, forever changing the fabric of this painting, the strings that weave together into this world? I don't know, I don't think I could. Whatever the casus belli.

CCXIV - guesswork

How do you learn a new word? Say a word you've never heard of before. Rubric. Parse. Jargon. Juxtaposition. God, when I read Augusto Roa Bastos' I, the Supreme, he's literally making up new words, part English, Spanish and indigenous Guarani. It's confusing. But he leaves hints as to what they mean. That's the secret. You guess what the words mean by their context, and you think, ok, maybe a similar word or phrase could be substituted there. Framework. Break down into little pieces, like a computer processor. Technical language. Side by side comparison. And so on. And by that process you apply the mental understanding of those concepts to the new word. You apply the mental characterisations, the potential uses and abuses, the possibility for doublespeak, hidden mirth, cryptic humor and subtextual intent. It evokes appropriate measures of memory, fear, anxiety, outrage, annoyance, envy, or perhaps the lighter elements. You understand.

That incidentally is what Steven Pinker warns about when he warns of the power of euphemisms (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, 2011). When you use a euphemism, such as "collateral damage" instead of "civilian casualties", you're not only making it sound more palatable. To some extent, you're avoiding the natural way that people apply their mental, empathetic, contextual faculties. The message misses them by. Of course, add a healthy dose of cognitive dissonance reduction (a healthy tendency to avoid thinking horrible thoughts if possible), and these things just don't register. That's the true danger of doublespeak (shoutout to the great, and truly immortal, Orwell), censorship, re-shaping language, and so on.

I think it was Wittgenstein that reformulated, in his mildly absurd way, that words are equivalent to ideas.

"The move to thought, and thereafter to language, is perpetrated with the use of Wittgenstein’s famous idea that thoughts, and propositions, are pictures—“the picture is a model of reality” (TLP 2.12). Pictures are made up of elements that together constitute the picture. Each element represents an object, and the combination of elements in the picture represents the combination of objects in a state of affairs. The logical structure of the picture, whether in thought or in language, is isomorphic with the logical structure of the state of affairs which it pictures."
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#TracLogiPhil)

CCXIII - why not now

Today, for the briefest, shining instant, I realised that I was happy.

I don't think I could capture the moment again, or the essence of that spontaneous realisation. It seems almost childish now to try to picture the moment. Like a mutt grinning to itself, you know? A little goofy, a little simple. A moment of simple joy, of heedless gaiety. Followed by catching myself, and in a glimmer it slipped away from me. I don't even know if I could fully revisit the magnitude of that moment, the significance of being aware of something almost unattainable, yet dimly, unintuitively, within reach. To be happy, it doesn't seem that hard, but it's actually almost impossible, or maybe it's the illusion that you have to kind of jedi mind trick yourself. Why aren't I happy, after all, why Shouldn't I be happy, after all, and then it's down some kind of rabbit hole. It's a jedi mind trick all right. You have to buy it to believe it. Can you convince yourself that you're happy, or is the realisation ever true? It's such a vulgarly constructed paradox. It's completely, completely Sisyphean. Joy is leaving the apex and running after the stone, even if that seems utterly pitiful. Or is that happiness? Is happiness being able to spend time the way you want to? WHY CAN'T WE? Nothing's stopping us from that, but our own minds, and this world, and other people, and Things! That's why we're never "happy". It's so lame. But you can't run from the stone of scepticism in your belly that something is going to fuck up, not today, not tomorrow, but very soon, just around the corner. Going to come up and completely rain on your parade, you know? That's probably why. The more we live, the more time weighs upon us. It's enough to send shivers down your spine. Take that, present self.

CCXII - not even then

It came to me today, I realised that there was nowhere I could hide, nowhere I could shut off some vestige of myself, to console some inconsolable sliver of my soul, to say that somewhere it could be beautiful.

In no other universe would it have worked out, and that's the truth. I can't hide from that reality any more. In no other world would I hold your hand as we listen to liszt. You will never be mine. And still I love you.

Nice try, Ian. Oh, I guess it was. In any other universe I'd still have to. It is a funny thing it being so fatalistic and all. But at least I know, and that doesn't change anything. You make me glow deep, deep inside. That's all there is to it. I don't have to believe in the universe ultimately working itself good to know that I'd have tried in every other damn universe. Oh, I really guess it was.

CCXI - ever everland

Where have I gone? I find myself circling around and back to this a little lately. Where is that almost mystical, slightly deranged, quixotic questing, the bizarre zealotry, the fanatic puristic, single minded, insatiable self delusion for believing in what must surely be, while fending off the twin wolves of futility and dreadful purposelessness, alienation, no direction home, where has all that youthful madness gone? I don't know. I've lost it. I can barely get out of the house lately. Where's the old yearning, the wistfulness, the embracing of loneliness and fierce despair? I don't know. The lunacy, the silliness, the pride in being alone, grinning at the madness, the sadness, it's all gone. It's given up the ghost. I'm so boring. If I've given up all that old stuff, then I must have decided somewhere along the way: I guess I'd rather be boring. I guess I'd rather be ... Meter Man, than Peter Pan. Meter Man and the soft boys of ever everland. None of us a shadow. I'm sorry, Wendy Darling, Peter's taken his briefcase and gone off to work. 3rd street to the right, and straight on till evening. Best shut the window on the way out. You won't recognise him at first, but a little flicker in the browns of his eyes and I think you'll know it. A dim sort of grasping, and then nothing. A Mister Man, again.

CCX - go on, brother

But come ye back when summer's in the meadow,
Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow.
And I'll be here in sunshine or in shadow,
Oh Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so.