Three in One

"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the
theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology
or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear.
The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern
art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious
search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing
that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it
is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be,
joined together, that we can reach them."

-- "The Relations between Poetry and Painting,"
by Wallace Stevens

Ideas, Stories, Values:
Literati in Deep Confusion

Joan Didion, The White Album:

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live....

We
interpret what we see, select the most workable of multiple choices. We
live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a
narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. 

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling."

Interview with Joseph Epstein:

"You can do in stories
things that are above those in essays," says Epstein.  "In
essays and piecework, you are trying to make a point, whereas in stories you are not quite sure what the point is. T.S. Eliot once said of Henry James, 'He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it,' which, I think, is the ultimate compliment for an author. Stories are above ideas."

Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers, Sept. 12, 2004:

"You are entering a remarkable community, the Harvard community. It is a community built on the idea of searching for truth... on the idea of respect for others....
 
... we practice the values we venerate. The values of seeking truth, the values of respecting others...."

Paul Redding on Hegel:

"... Hegel discusses 'culture' as the 'world of self-alienated spirit.' The idea seems to be that humans in society not only interact, but that they collectively create relatively enduring cultural products (stories, dramas, and so forth) within which they can recognise their own patterns of life reflected."

The "phantasmagoria" of Didion seems related to the "phenomenology" of Hegel...

From Michael N. Forster,  Hegel's Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit:

"This whole system is conceived, on one level at least, as a defense or
rational reworking of the Christian conception of God.  In
particular, its three parts are an attempt to make sense of the
Christian idea of a God who is three in one -- the Logic
depicting God as he is in himself, the Philosophy of Nature God the
Son, and the Philosophy of Spirit God the Holy Spirit."

and, indeed, to the phenomenology of narrative itself....

From Patrick Vert,
The Narrative of Acceleration:

"There are plenty of anecdotes to highlight the personal, phenomenological experience of railway passage...

... a unique study on phantasmagoria and the history of imagination. The word originates [in] light-projection, the so-called ghost-shows of the early 19th century....
 
... thought becomes a phantasmagorical process, a spectral,
representative location for the personal imagination that had been
marginalized by scientific rationalism....
 
Truly, 'immediate experience is [or becomes] the phantasmagoria of the idler' [Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.  Page 801.]....

Thought as phantasm is a consequence of the Cartesian split, and... a
further consequence to this is the broad take-over of perceptual
faculty.... What better example than that of the American
railway?  As a case-study it offers explanation to the
'phantasmagoria of the idler'....
 
This phantasmagoria became more mediated over time.... Perception became increasingly visually oriented.... As this
occurred, a narrative formed to encapsulate the phenomenology of it
all...."

For such a narrative, see
the Log24.net entries of

November 5, 2002, 2:56 AM,
November 5, 2002, 6:29 AM,
January 3, 2003, 11:59 PM,
August 17, 2004, 7:29 PM,
August 18, 2004, 2:18 AM,
August 18, 2004, 3:00 AM, and
November 24, 2004, 10:00 AM.

So Set 'Em Up, Joe

For Sinatra's birthday:


One For His Baby,
One More for the Road, and

The Twelve Steps of Christmas.

Gray Particular
in Hartford

From Wallace Stevens,

"The Rock, Part III:
Forms of the Rock in a Night-Hymn" --

The rock is
   the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which
   he rises, up--and--ho,
The step to
   the bleaker depths of his descents...

From this morning's
New York Times obituaries--

leve Gray, a painter admired for his large-scale, vividly colorful
and lyrically gestural abstract compositions, died on Wednesday in
Hartford. He was 86.

The cause was a massive subdural hematoma
suffered after he fell on ice and hit his head on Tuesday outside his
home in Warren, Conn., said his wife, the writer Francine du Plessix
Gray.

*******************************

Jackson Mac Low, a poet, composer and performance artist whose work
reveled in what happens when the process of composition is left to
carefully calibrated chance, died on Wednesday....

... in 1999 [he] received the
Wallace Stevens Award, which carries a $100,000 prize, from the Academy
of American Poets.

A Wallace Stevens Award,
in Seven Parts:

  I.  From a page linked to in
      Tuesday's entry White Christmas:

"A bemused Plato reasoned that nonbeing must in some sense be,
otherwise what is it that there is not? In our own day Martin Heidegger
ventured that das Nichts nichtet -- 'the nothing nothings' -- evidently still sensing a problem."

-- W. V. Quine in Quiddities

 II.  "As if nothingness
             contained a métier..."
      -- Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"

III.  "Massive subdural hematoma"
       -- Three-word poem
           performed on Tuesday
           in Connecticut

IV.  mé·tier n.

An occupation, a trade, or a profession.

Work or activity for which a person is particularly suited; one's specialty.

---

[French, from Old French mestier, from Vulgar Latin misterium, from Latin ministerium. See ministry.]

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  V.  "ho"

        -- Wallace Stevens, "The Rock"

 VI.  Francine du Plessix Gray...
       From the
       Archives of the
       New York Review of Books:

July 16, 1992: Splendor and Miseries, review of

Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850 by Alain Corbin, translated by Alan Sheridan

La Vie quotidienne dans les maisons closes, 1830–1930 by Laure Adler

Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France by Charles Bernheimer

Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era by Hollis Clayson

VII.   From an entry of April 29, 2004:

String Theory: 

The Devil Came Up
to Cambridge

From a Log24 entry of Friday, December 3, 2004:

"Anything
but the void. And so we keep hoping to luck into a winning combination,
to tap into a subtle harmony, trying like lock pickers to negotiate a
compromise with the 'mystery tramp,' as Bob Dylan put it...."
-- Dennis Overbye, Quantum Baseball,
    New York Times, Oct.  26, 2004

From this morning's New York Times:

In memory of Mr. Blizard:

24 Years Later: 

and Diamond Darrell Abbott

This time slot was reserved at noon on Wednesday, Dec. 8, but
this entry was made at about 4:35 PM on Thursday, Dec. 9.

"A dead shepherd brought
tremendous chords from hell
And bade the sheep carouse."

White Christmas

Starring W. V. Quine as
the Ghost of Christmas Past

"Birthday, death-day --
   what day is not both?"
   -- John Updike

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live....

We interpret what we see, select the most
workable of multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are
writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images,
by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting
phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I
began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself,
a common condition but one I found troubling."

-- Joan Didion, The White Album

0! = 1

-- Quine's
Shema