June 24, 2007
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Primitive Roots:
Midsummer Night
in the Garden
of Good and Evil
“I Put a Spell on You”
– Nina Simone,
title of autobiograpy
“The voodoo priestess looked across the table at her wealthy client, a man on trial for murder: ‘Now, you know how dead time works. Dead time lasts for one hour– from half an hour before midnight to half an hour after midnight. The half-hour before midnight is for doin’ good. The half-hour after midnight is for doin’ evil….’”
– Glenna Whitley, “Voodoo Justice,” The New York Times, March 20, 1994Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974:
“But what’s happening is that each year our old flat earth of conventional reason becomes less and less adequate to handle the experiences we have and this is creating widespread feelings of topsy-turviness. As a result we’re getting more and more people in irrational areas of thought… occultism, mysticism, drug changes and the like… because they feel the inadequacy of classical reason to handle what they know are real experiences.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by classical reason.”
“Analytic reason, dialectic reason. Reason which at the University is sometimes considered to be the whole of understanding. You’ve never had to understand it really. It’s always been completely bankrupt with regard to abstract art. Nonrepresentative art is one of the root experiences I’m talking about. Some people still condemn it because it doesn’t make ‘sense.’ But what’s really wrong is not the art but the ‘sense,’ the classical reason, which can’t grasp it. People keep looking for branch extensions of reason that will cover art’s more recent occurrences, but the answers aren’t in the branches, they’re at the roots.”
Related material:
D-Day Morning,
Figures of Speech,
Ursprache Revisited.
See also
the midnight entry
of June 23-24, 2006:“Let the midnight special
shine her light on me.”
