I think that one of the reasons that I love art is that it makes the current moment beautiful, and I’m always rushing on to the next thing.

Aside

“Academics, like art, gives us a framework for expanding our ways of seeing to give us an intensified way of experiencing whatever it is that we experience.”

I’m drinking rooibos and eating almonds as I sit on my bed and look out at this afternoon’s wetness and work on my research proposal. I’m getting closer on the proposal, but right now I’m more excited about the almonds than I am about writing.

I came across the passage below in an article that one of my professors recommended, and it confirmed a pet theory of mine — that academics and art are interrelated. It’s been a thought I’ve been fond of for some time (ever since I wrote what I quoted above), but I didn’t think that I would find that someone had written about it explicitly. This author (Rodowick) just reasoned out my thoughts on learning and slid them, comfortably (and succinctly), into an article:

“In this manner, art relates to philosophy in that images and signs involve preconceptual expression in the same way that the image of thought involves a protoconceptual expression—they prepare the terrain for new concepts to emerge. The cinema may be best able to picture thought and to call for thinking because like thought its ideas are comprised of movements, both spatial and temporal, characterized by connections and conjunctions of particular kinds. Every instance of art is expressive of an idea which implies a concept, and what philosophy does with respect to art is to produce new constructions or assemblages that express or give form to the concepts implied in art’s ideas. It renders perspicuous and in conceptual form the automatisms that make a necessity of art’s generative ideas.” (D. N. Rodowick, An Elegy for Theory)

It’s all I have to bring today —

It’s all I have to bring today—
This, and my heart beside—
This, and my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure you count—should I forget
Some one the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.

                                                            

— Emily Dickinsen

“Max Larabee”

Discovered that Network‘s (as in, the film I analyzed for my thesis) William Holden is the very same who played David Larabee in Sabrina. I can see why I’m shocked, but I’m not sure why I feel so horrified. I suppose that it’s fortunate that Max Schumacher never had a scene in which he was made to sit in a hammock.

July 5th

There are fireworks over D.C. tonight.

I’m working on the rooftop, and from where I’m sitting under the trellis, I can see sparkles on the skyline.

The soul selects her own society . . .

THE SOUL selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.

Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.

I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

(Emily Dickenson)

Ernest Ferlita

“It is of the greatest importance, we believe, to rediscover a whole mythology, if not a theology, still concealed in the most ordinary, everyday life of contemporary man; it will depend upon himself whether he can work his way back to the source and rediscover the profound meanings of these faded images and damaged myths.'”

— Ernest Ferlita (quote via Mircea Eliade)

Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore.
Faithful friends who are dear to us gather near to us once more.

Kenny Loggins’ “All the Pretty Little Ponies” began to play in the middle of the Christmas carols we have playing for Epiphany. I’m drinking very milky chai, and thought that I could hear crickets outside my window, but now I think that may have been the music. Daddy came in dancing to the Neverland medley or something of the sort, and tried to tell me what to do in case of a toilet paper shortage if I ever decided to become a Boy Scout . . . I stopped him. I’ve heard this story before, and I know that it doesn’t end in a way that I want to hear.

I think that we all have had a beautiful Christmas, with one another and with our friends: those that matter. This Christmas was about togetherness, about gratitude. We’re together right now, and I think that we’re peaceful.

I can’t think the way that I want or describe it in the way that I want, but I’m glad to be home, to hold the rest and the peace and the togetherness.

Travels At the Base of a Mountain…

I’m re-reading Umberto Eco’s “Travels in Hyperreality” for my undergraduate thesis, and had forgotten that he goes up and down the California coast, including the Hearst Castle and the Madonna Inn. His description made me smile, not least of all because it’s true:

“The poor words with which natural human speech is provided cannot suffice to describe the Madonna Inn. To convey its external appearance, divided into a series of constructions, which you reach by way of a filling station carved from Dolomitic rock, or through the restaurant, the bar, and the cafeteria, we can only venture some analogies. Let’s say that Albert Speer, while leafing through a book on Gaudi, swallowed an overgenerous dose of LSD and began to build a nuptial catacomb for Liza Minnelli. But that doesn’t give you an idea. Let’s say Arcimboldi builds the Sagrada Familia for Dolly Parton. Or: Carmen Miranda designs a Tiffany locale for the Jolly Hotel chain. Or D’Annuzio’s VIttoriale imagined by Bob Cratchit, Calvino’s Invisible Cities described by Judith Krantz and executed by Leonor Fini for the plush-doll industry, Chopin’s Sonata in B flat minor sung by Perry Como in an arrangement by Liberace and accompanied by the Marine Band. No, that still isn’t right.

[. . .] The Madonna Inn is the poor man’s Hearst Castle; it has no artistic or philological pretentions, it appeals to the savage taste for the amazing, the overstuffed, and the absolutely sumptuous at low price. It says to its visitors: ‘You too can have the incredible, just like a millionaire.’” (25)

In spite of all of that, I still fully plan to re-live my childhood and be a visitor there this Christmas.

God-complex

Marking up my printed outline-draft with a pen, and I feel like God – going outside the scope of linearity to restructure my paper-world.

Now I see why writers have a reputation for thinking that they know everything –
because you can construct your own little world. And, when you’re done structuring it, it’s complete.

“I hate writing. I love having written.” — Dorothy Parker