The Discovery of Chance

I'm currently reading this book about the Russian Alexander Herzen, and it's holding my attention:

amazon.com

Here's a review:

The Living Truth

*    *    *

03 - 10 - 2017

Okay. I finished reading this book. I think it is a well-written and interesting thing. My only real complaint is that Herzen doesn't come to vivid presence. So much is about ideas, to the point that the subject himself seems diffuse, hard to grasp as a solid being.

earliest post of the latest year

Artaud's Error

Antonin Artaud's “theater of cruelty” was more theory than theater, more influence than event. It involves the dismal notion that life and being operate according to principles of terror and agony. Behind the curtains of normality (forms of experience metabolized into culture) brood implacable energies that propel stuff through tortures of time, pathologies of space. Hence the new theater – spectacle as stimulation of and participation in brute awareness. Life and art in a frenzied marriage of anti-ecstasy. God not only dead but a dangerous psychopath.

Speaking of influence, Artaud wouldn't have had very much to get himself worked up about if not for Schopenhauer. I find it striking that Kant still reverberates into so-called philosophy – Continental directly, Analytical indirectly – while Schopenhauer's thought echoes through actual philosophy (music, literature, film, poetry – possible venues of extant wonder). So it seems fitting that Artaud would recast Schopenhauer into a form of art – theater. The problem is that both Schopenhauer and Artaud are wrong about aesthetics.

For Schopenhauer, the experience of art is for transient moments of equanimity – a calm distraction from the chronically blistering absurd of undifferentiated noumenal force (whether creator or auditor, a prophylactic zen trance). For Artaud, the experience of art is for mirroring the horror of the situation.

Neither approach to art is artistic. The former is about therapeutic coping, the latter agonistic mimesis.

Yes, life and being tend toward the sucking, stinking maws of pain and death. But human beings happen to be very strange creatures. We are potential transformers of the hopeless macabre into the unsettling beautiful. There is something mystic afoot that contradicts the rotting regions of despair and darkness. Where would we find the deepest impressions of this mystical afootedness? Let's go to Poland!

Frederick Chopin and Karol Szymanowski in music. Bruno Schulz in literature. Wojciech Has in film. Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, and Adam Zagajewski in poetry. Why is Poland an incubator of aesthetic transformation? I really don't know. I live in Arkansas.

Chopin's music is pure sublimation. He inhaled the deathly, diseased hours after midnight and turned them into quietly ecstatic melodies, beatified the darkness into pensive waiting:

Szymanowski's own Song of the Night (Symphony No. 3) expresses mysterious fantasy rather than harrowing nausea from the netherfolds of consciousness: 

Schulz's story "Tailor's Dummies" from The Street of Crocodiles is an alchemical working of language and yesterday into an infinite mythology. Via hilarious melancholy and metaphysical stupefaction, the reader is made skeptical of a claim that the world is merely quotidian principles, merely cruel manifestations.



Has's film The Saragossa Manuscript -- a large tale of nested tales -- is also imbued with visionary humor. Life as curvaceous adventure:

Miłosz's poems question the environment of memory to the extent that loss itself is crowned with a halo of spiritual beauty:


Encounter

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Szymborska's poems explore the uncanniness of mere presence and the privilege of mere experience:

Miracle Fair

Commonplace miracle:

that so many commonplace miracles happen.

An ordinary miracle:

in the dead of night

the barking of invisible dogs.

One miracle out of many:

a small, airy cloud

yet it can block a large and heavy moon.

Several miracles in one:

an alder tree reflected in the water,

and that it's backwards left to right

and that it grows there, crown down

and never reaches the bottom,

even though the water is shallow.

An everyday miracle:

winds weak to moderate

turning gusty in storms.

First among equal miracles:

cows are cows.

Second to none:

just this orchard

from just that seed.

A miracle without a cape and top hat:

scattering white doves.

A miracle, for what else could you call it:

today the sun rose at three-fourteen

and will set at eight-o-one.

A miracle, less surprising than it should be:

even though the hand has fewer than six fingers,

it still has more than four.

A miracle, just take a look around:

the world is everywhere.

An additional miracle, as everything is additional:

the unthinkable

is thinkable.

Zagajewski's poems are like no other poems being written these days. They are jaw dropping in their subtle spiritization and aesthetization of time and being. This from his book Unseen Hand: Poems:

Improvisation 

You must take up the world’s whole weight 

and make it easier to bear.

Toss it like a knapsack

on your shoulders and set out.

The best time is evening, in spring, when

trees breathe calmly and the night promises

to be fine, elm twigs crackle in the garden.

The whole weight? Blood and ugliness? Can’t be done.

A trace of bitterness will linger on your lips,

and the contagious despair of the old woman

you spotted in the tram.

Why lie? After all rapture

exists only in imagination and leaves quickly.

Improvisation – always just improvisation,

great or small, that’s all we know,

in music, as a jazz trumpet weeps happily

or when you stare at the blank page

or try to outwit 

sorrow by opening a favorite book of poems;

just then the phone usually rings, 

someone asking, would you like to try

the latest model? No thank you.

I prefer the proven brands.

Grayness and monotony remain; grief

the finest elegy can’t heal.

But perhaps there are things hidden from us,

in which sorrow and enthusiasm mix

non-stop, on a daily basis, like the dawn’s birth

above the seashore, no, wait,

like the laughter of those little altar boys

in white vestments, on the corner of St. John and Mark,

remember?

What's disheartening is that today you find music, literature, film, and poetry still under the conscious or unwitting influence of Artaud. Consciousness is considered a curse, life a toxic extract, abjectness the persistent cool. Today, you find music as aggression, literature as smirkingness, film as violence, poetry as abyssal complaint. What's so silly about all this “profound” artistic misery is that it preens with such egoistic gusto. Apparently, you can become famous if your avant-gardism is rebellious, doomy, and pretentious enough. There's something out of kilter about that.

If the world is a cruel and reckless berserking, then it's best not to dwell on that stuff. Better to sublimate and reconfigure. Better to transform our dystopian tears into aesthetic substance. Real art lives and breathes in the quizzical region, in moments that modify the actual into a symbolic otherness – space and time become perplexed rhapsody. Frowning while holding up a theatrical mirror to the vicissitudes of chemical and organic immanence is anti-art; actual art is a gesture toward paradox and transcendence.

Artaud presumed to impose his view of a nihilistic reality on the audience via scene and sound. To shake people awake. That's megolomania and guruism rather than art. Real art suggests and is uncertain. Real art is a transmutation of dark materials into evocative shadows, into substrates of possible light.  

1896 - 1948

on sincerity

The spectrum of human feelings covers a complex range, from the writhing shriek of a sick or injured child to the discombobulation of the amorous to the autumnal melancholy of some old geezer. Many other perturbations, excitations are found along the array of stimulated homo sapiens.

But the transference of emotion to forms of art should involve a movement not simply linear (compulsion, saturation, confession) but also vertical (metaphysics, symbolism, dubiety). 

Big context. Actual peculiar. Deep sincerity.



Bob Dylan - Highlands by perostoppogno


Highlands
Bob Dylan

Well my heart's in the Highlands gentle and fair
Honeysuckle blooming in the wildwood air
Bluebelles blazing, where the Aberdeen waters flow
Well my heart's in the Highland,
I'm gonna go there when I feel good enough to go

Windows were shakin' all night in my dreams
Everything was exactly the way that it seems
Woke up this morning and I looked at the same old page
Same ol' rat race
Life in the same ol' cage.

I don't want nothing from anyone, ain't that much to take
Wouldn't know the difference between a real blonde and a fake
Feel like a prisoner in a world of mystery
I wish someone would come
And push back the clock for me

Well my heart's in the Highlands wherever I roam
That's where I'll be when I get called home
The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme
Well my heart's in the Highland,
I can only get there one step at a time.

I'm listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound
Someone's always yelling turn it down
Feel like I'm drifting
Drifting from scene to scene
I'm wondering what in the devil could it all possibly mean?

Insanity is smashing up against my soul
You can say I was on anything but a roll
If I had a conscience, well I just might blow my top
What would I do with it anyway
Maybe take it to the pawn shop

My heart's in the Highlands at the break of dawn
By the beautiful lake of the Black Swan
Big white clouds, like chariots that swing down low
Well my heart's in the Highlands
Only place left to go

I'm in Boston town, in some restaurant
I got no idea what I want
Well, maybe I do but I'm just really not sure
Waitress comes over
Nobody in the place but me and her

It must be a holiday, there's nobody around
She studies me closely as I sit down
She got a pretty face and long white shiny legs
She says, "What'll it be?"
I say, "I don't know, you got any soft boiled eggs?"

She looks at me, Says "I'd bring you some
but we're out of 'm, you picked the wrong time to come"
Then she says, "I know you're an artist, draw a picture of me!"
I say, "I would if I could, but,
I don't do sketches from memory."

"Well", she says, "I'm right here in front of you, or haven't you looked?"
I say,"All right, I know, but I don't have my drawing book!"
She gives me a napkin, she says, "you can do it on that"
I say, "Yes I could but,
I don't know where my pencil is at!"

She pulls one out from behind her ear
She says "All right now, go ahead, draw me, I'm standing right here"
I make a few lines, and I show it for her to see
Well she takes a napkin and throws it back
And says "That don't look a thing like me!"

I said, "Oh, kind miss, it most certainly does"
She says, "You must be jokin.'" I say, "I wish I was!"
Then she says, "You don't read women authors, do you?"
Least that's what I think I hear her say,
"Well", I say, "how would you know and what would it matter anyway?"

"Well", she says, "you just don't seem like you do!"
I said, "You're way wrong."
She says, "Which ones have you read then?" I say, "I read Erica Jong!"
She goes away for a minute and I slide up out of my chair
I step outside back to the busy street, but nobody's going anywhere

Well my heart's in the Highlands, with the horses and hounds
Way up in the border country, far from the towns
With the twang of the arrow and a snap of the bow
My heart's in the Highlands
Can't see any other way to go

Every day is the same thing out the door
Feel further away then ever before
Some things in life, it gets too late to learn
Well, I'm lost somewhere
I must have made a few bad turns

I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes
They're drinking and dancing, wearing bright colored clothes
All the young men with their young women looking so good
Well, I'd trade places with any of them
In a minute, if I could

I'm crossing the street to get away from a mangy dog
Talking to myself in a monologue
I think what I need might be a full length leather coat
Somebody just asked me
If I registered to vote

The sun is beginning to shine on me
But it's not like the sun that used to be
The party's over, and there's less and less to say
I got new eyes
Everything looks far away

Well, my heart's in the Highlands at the break of day
Over the hills and far away
There's a way to get there, and I'll figure it out somehow
But I'm already there in my mind
And that's good enough for now

Schelling's CLARA

One of the characters in this book says:

Oh, the true ruins are not those of ancient human splendor which the curious seek out in Persian or Indian deserts; the whole Earth is One great ruin, where animals live as ghosts and humans as spirits and where many hidden powers and treasures are locked away, as if by an invisible strength or by a magician's spell.

And this:

Even in your own opinion nature is suffering from a hidden poison that she would like to overcome or reject, but cannot. Doesn't she mourn with us? We are able to complain, but she suffers in silence and can talk to us only through signs and miens. What a quiet wistfulness lies in so many flowers, the mourning dew and in the evening's fading colors.

written in 1811

the mysterium of aesthetics

 
The good, the true, and the beautiful are, I think, three related or complementary ideas. I further think they are three sides of an aesthetic pyramid. What is the fourth side and what constitutes the bottom, the foundation square?

Might it be that the fourth side represents our struggle with or our probing of the unknown, the mysterious, the numinous? And could the unknown itself be pictured as that bottom, that foundation square upon which all phenomenal experience rests or issues from?

The friction of our experiences brushing up against textures of the unknown can spark off religious belief and philosophical construction. But the deepest, most interesting forms of combustion happen as modes of artistic expression -- painting, sculpture, music, dance, poetry, stories.

Further down the scale of temperature one finds tepid mentations concerned with politics and science. From an atmosphere of stochastic particles of consciousness in a flurry of heated aesthetic movement, a contrasting torpor of soul makes politics and science -- focused on relational and material quiddity -- shapes of sleepwalking. The obscuring secretions of law and theory lead to spiritual amnesia. With those things, the Real has become so ordinary as to be drained of wonder and the perplexing reverberations of melancholy.

I was led, in part, to this musing after reading about Johann Georg Hamann (1730 - 1788). What an odd duck. 

In Königsberg, his translation of Hume made its way into the hands of his acquaintance Kant and inspired the latter's awakening from "dogmatic slumber." Hamann said some interesting things from his own head about language and what is beneath language. I'm especially curious about the linguistic aspects of aesthetics, so Hamann's head must be examined and tapped for any possible profundity. My interest is piqued because I'm infatuated with good poetry -- poems that are implicitly metaphysical, that indirectly probe a possibility of the noumenal, that contain an element of the uncanny, that refelct something of the mysterious within the everyday.

I've been fascinated with the problem of aesthetics for quite some time. I've even tried my hand at impromtu guesses about the nature and significance of aesthetics. But these guesses always have a hollowness about them. Or better to say, they end up being tautological, looping or mirroring back on themselves. I'm still searching for a kind of first principle -- a how come? -- for aesthetics. I tend to suspect that aesthetics is our deepest approach to the unknown ground (or Ab-grund, the abyss behind presence).

Gurdjieff once created a music-and-movement thing titled The Struggle of the Magicians. That's how I see the poems written by great poets -- brilliance or genius grappling with invisible materials, with what must always remain unsaid behind the said. Even the cadence of these poems is a symbolic gesture of strange dance toward the mystic dream of being. Consider the lines of poet Adam Zagajewski, how they move with a pensive and wondering grace, how the unsaid is as important as the pronounced -- the unspoken folded into dynamic figures of speech. 

Metaphor is the aesthetic shadow of the receding, what forever remains on the tip of the tongue. 

Everything profound loves masks.

~ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Schopenhauer said that the noumenal is pure undifferentiated urge and that the phenomenal is its expression as substance in time, space, and causality. According to him, we can't suppose anything about the noumenal, only suspect it as being undifferentiated urge or force. That intuited fact -- the aggression of matter via mindless energy -- leads to human pessimism and spiritual despair. Our only existential relief is to become narcotized and lost from thought while experiencing works of art. 

But prior to Schopenhauer was Hamann. Instead of the noumenal causing bleakness and misery of outlook, it inspired in him an ironic spiritual humor, which later impressed Kierkegaard. He somehow intuited a God within the noumenal. That's interesting. And I can't figure out how he made such a blithe leap. I do know that for myself, an ambivalence is afoot -- I look upon the possible numinous as darkly macabre yet also darkly attractive. An affective leaning toward anything is an aesthetic orientation or disposition. 

What is behind all possible experience in which aspects of the good, the true, and the beautiful might be sourcefully located? That enigma continues to vibrate.

Hamann thought and wrote about how language has its source in the non-linguistic and the non-rational. Language is a form of life and as such doesn't belong to any of its own categories. Hence, language is a mysterium. So is life itself an unthinkable and radically free manifestation. Free from even the idea that it's radically free. The closest to the real of life we come is imagination -- the infinite dark flowing of aesthetic possibility. Can we call that "holy"? Heck if I know.

Regarding Socrates, Hamann said:

But perhaps all history is more mythology than this philosopher thinks, and is, like nature, a book that is sealed, a hidden witness, a riddle which cannot be solved unless we plow with another heifer than our reason.

According to Hamann, our language -- the spoken life -- is "from the tongue of angels," which eludes exegesis.  Our speaking is always already a translation beyond foundation and into metaphor. Who are the symbolists par excellence? -- the poet, the painter, the composer. Aesthetic beings.

In Keats's "To Autumn," he shows us life and nature, via personification. He knew instinctively that being and beings can't be defined or rationally analyzed. 

It seems like a hundred years ago that I read Robert Pirsig's Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The main thing I remember is his statement that the real (even the pleonasm "ultimate reality") has to do with Quality as such. I'm going to let that sit here for a little while and resonate through your eyeballs:

The abyss of the Real is a question of Quality as such.

Okay. I'm back again. Pirsig's realization nearly drove him crazy. I like the sound of that. Instead of the noumenal being Schopenhauer's undifferentiated, it might be an exact opposite. It might be instead the a priori (primal) reservoir of taste -- a Tao of Savor. From which a gnostic spectrum of discretion is extruded into our phenomenal world. In other words, the Real is an aesthetic ocean, its morphological waves our criteria of judgement and appreciation. At its most heartful depth is purest Quality.

F.W.J. Schelling (1775 - 1854) in his lecture course titled The Philosophy of Art wrote: 

I construe therefore in the philosophy of art not art as art, not as something particular. Rather I construe the universe in the form of art and the philosophy of art is the science of the All in the form or potency of art.

And from his System of Transcendental Idealism:

The fundamental character of the artwork is an unconscious infinity.

One thing about creativity, about aesthetic impulse and reception is that it takes place within the infinite freedom of imagination. Maybe the Real -- what brings anything at all to presence -- is also a kind of imagining into the vast "space" of thisness-is-better-than-thatness.  


Wittgenstein said:

It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

To which I would add:

That anything is mystical is an aesthetic intuition.

The Birth of the World
Joan Miró, 1925

PS: One cool thing about the topic of aesthetics is that it allows a guy to string a bunch of words together with the mere semblance of having said something coherent or significant. It's like a loose goose dripping with uncatchable cooking oil. 



~ TB, 2013

Hannah Arendt said:

"Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being."

Who would win in a swordfight...

...the probabilistic Blaise Pascal or the cognitively dissonant Miguel de Unamumo?

Pascal wagered on belief -- just in case there's a God on the other side of reality. Unamuno suggested paradoxical faith -- live as if there's a God, even though there isn't.

I think the Spaniard would win, because Spaniards are hot-blooded and tilty. I mean, would you really choose a lisping Musketeer with a feathered hat over Inigo Montoya?

No contest.

It is extremely important...

...that someone rhapsodize an essay about Rilke's attraction to Schopenhauer's thought. I will wait calmly, yet with a certain impatience, for someone to write what Schopenhauer meant to Rilke and how that influence might have affected the nature of his poems, thematically and tonally.

Schopenhauer sometimes knocks...

...on my door at odd hours. I always let him in for a little visit. If I had cognac, I would pour him a glass. I try not to say very much. I just let him pace and muse. He soon grows weary of my blinking presence and then exits the premises, with a raised imperious eyebrow and a muttered farewell.

While he's here, I always fall into a trance of wonder.

I think he would frown on me if I told him about the impression his thought makes on me. As I understand it, he was a metaphysician, a technician of ultimate reality. But when I use the word "metaphysical," I mean something looser, more informal, something not exactly related to philosophical technique. And the word signifies for me a resonant quality of beyondness that is ambiguously edifying. Whereas for Schopenhauer, whatever is beyond (the noumenal) is undifferentiated urge, an intuition of which should stimulate spiritual despair. 

Maybe "mystical" would be a better word choice than "metaphysical" for me. I've always been hesitant to suggest to him that there might be a quality of magnetic, attractive strangeness about the veiled world his conceptions indicated. Perhaps I should muster the gumption to ask him about that on some future visitation.

Because isn't there something Schopenhauer-esque in the hypnotic macabre of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, in the subtle Romantic ambience or "aura" of Walter Benjamin's essays, in the fatalistic hilarity of Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles, in the darkly transcendent sound of Mahler, the cathartic symphonic disquiet of Allan Pettersson? 

Whatever the freak it is that Schopenhauer uncovered for me as the possible interpenetration of the noumenal is a "thing" that nevertheless challenges all categories of conception and semantics.

His "will" or morphological force is farther than gods and language. A kind of spiritual empyrean. I sometimes think its texture is implicit in the vast melancholy of our dreams, the primal wild of our nightmares.

But maybe I've ensnared myself within a many-years-long misreading of the great philosopher. Maybe he was merely speaking toward and into a kind of hyper-quiddity as such. And not, as I make of it, a speaking toward and into depths beyond even despairing substance. Depths that I would, with a kind of semantic wantonness, signify with the word "metaphysical."

amazon.com

Ha! -- philosophical G-Men

From Prospect Magazine:

"The FBI files on being and nothingness"

Man with Cuboid

If I'd been asked to provide a title for this engraving:

Form, Consciousness, and the Tangled Paradox

M.C. Escher

1958. Wood engraving. 64x64 cm

The religious attitude...

...is psychological circumscription. It's drawing around oneself a circle of exclusion -- a protective gesture to ward off the Unthinkable. 

Whereas, psychological nobility requires the attempt to think the Unthinkable (an attitude of wonder). The only tool of leverage for this attempt is poetry, not the inscribing compass of complacent dogma.

thinking for and being oneself

An intellectual runs the risk of disappearing into his fascination with exemplars of the cultural mosaic -- whether of art, music, literature, film, whatnot.

The quality manifestings of great sensibilities are implicit forms of questioning. One mustn't get so transfixed by and identified with the aesthetic interrogations of reality by others than one forgets to question the questioners, so to speak. One should make the effort to glimpse beyond the fine probings of others.

One should stand just a little outside of outstandingness. 

Quality manifestings of great sensibilities should become the foundation for a possibility of having a unique metaphysical thought, emotion, question.

Occasionally, you come upon an especially peculiar shape of non-questioning -- the intellectual hipster. 

He unwittingly or intentionally has folded himself into an edgy Beat role or style of being. As if life is only This Way of considering it -- an extravagance of phenomena, a spectacle of relations, a peyote immanence. In doing so, he not only blinds himself to unexplored worlds (the non-hipster visions of, say, Bruno Schulz), he also becomes a walking, talking amalgam of the already-thought. Such role playing of radical outlook is, to the outside observer, a wincing-yet-boring contradiction.

In the manner of. 

No, tell me something in the manner of yourself. I'd prefer, occasionally, to not read about your reality as strained through the mesh of others' impressions, others' questions. I'd prefer, occasionally, to read about your unique manifesting under the vast field of impossible stars and paradoxical fate.  

Benjamin's way of thinking poetically

Yesterday, I read again Hannah Arendt's introduction to the Walter Benjamin book Illuminations. I was especially struck by some things near the end:

To him, therefore, language was by no means primarily the gift of speech which distinguishes man from other living beings, but, on the contrary, "the world essence...from which speech arises." 

Thus there is "a language of truth, the tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate secrets which all thought is concerned with." 

What else does this mean than that he understood language as an essentially poetic phenomenon? 

All of which says no more, though in a slightly more complex way, than what I mentioned before -- namely, that we are dealing here with something which may not be unique but is certainly extremely rare: the gift of thinking poetically.

amazon.com

Okay. This especially struck me not only for its putting Benjamin into deep perspective but also for its possible application to my thoughts about the art of poetry.

There are some -- rare -- poets out there in time and space whose poems are very strange and wonderful things. Those poems are as different from most poems as night is to day. Not different approaches but different species or something.

Certain remarkable poems seem to implicitly -- subconsciously -- acknowledge the Arendt-Benjamin view of language -- how it's not the same as speaking or writing. Rather, language is the silent essence of the world. Behind words -- nouns in particular -- is the fathomless and mysterious vibration of whole tones, so to speak. This unheard sounding of the world takes place, as Benjamin put it, within a "metaphysical acoustic."

So, we have a few poets whose work stands out for its special relation to language, for its reaching into metaphor as an act or expression of (even despairing) wonder. These poets allow the world to "sound" through trance-moments of refined figures of speech and through the open, questing attitude of their lines.


From March 1979
by Tomas Tranströmer

Weary of all who come with words, words but no language
I make my way to the snow-covered island.
The untamed has no words.
The unwritten pages spread out on every side!
I come upon the tracks of deer in the snow.
Language but no words.


trans. Robert Fulton

time is crazy-weird

This -- from Gurdjieff's book Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson -- is very strange, almost impossible to interpret, therefore it makes much more sense than physicists' opinions about the nature or essence of time:

Only Time alone has no sense of objectivity because it is not the result of the fractioning of any definite cosmic phenomena. And it does not issue from anything, but blends always with everything and becomes self-sufficiently independent; therefore, in the whole of the Universe, it alone can be called and extolled as the ’Ideally-Unique-Subjective-Phenomenon.’ 

Thus, my boy, uniquely Time alone, or, as it is sometimes called, the ‘Heropass,’ has no source from which its arising should depend, but like ‘Divine-Love’ flows always, as I have already told you, independently by itself, and blends proportionately with all the phenomena present in the given place and in the given arisings of our Great Universe.

those old dead Greek guys

All those old dead Greek guys -- they must have been smoking something powerful while they lounged on marble steps. 

The ideas emerging from their heads were preposterous and shockingly brilliant, like bolts of lightning into a darkened sea.

The word "epiphany" is too soft sounding. Some other word is required, something fractal and jagged and language-exploding. 

Since then, it's been mere elaboration, billions of words lacking the luster and sizzle of that originary voltage. 

All those old dead Greeks guys -- wow! And that briefly extended moment of the truly extraordinary! The move from here-we-are to what-the-hell seems like trespass across a hidden and illicit threshold. Some drunken god must have been dozing, had let down his guard.

What it must have seemed like to them is beyond my imagination. To have first glimpsed or brushed up against the possibility of the real. The quality and texture of that first trespass or immersion as a never-to-be-repeated experience.  

I'm less concerned with the substance of their thought than with the poetry of those brilliant arching moments. To have moved from the Greek into the Freak. Yes, moments like bolts of lightning that shattered the surface of a dreaming sea of consciousness. 

Surely, Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides went on to write some weird, surreal poems that haven't been recovered.

Yes, the Axial Age also saw Indians and Chinese being profound and stuff. But for me, they weren't as intriguingly odd as those Greeks.

Those old dead Greek guys -- what can I say?  

Maurice Blanchot

1907 - 2003

From Wikipedia about his thought on language:

Literary language, therefore, is a double negation, both of the thing and the idea. It is in this space that literature becomes possible where words take on a strange and mysterious reality of their own, and where also meaning and reference remain allusive and ambiguous.

Blanchot himself:

And what language is (not what it means, not the form in which it says what it means), what language is in its being, is that softest of voices, that nearly imperceptible retreat, that weakness deep inside and surrounding every thing and every face - what bathes the belated effort of the origin and the dawnlike erosion of death in the same neutral light, at once day and night.  

There's something about what was inside this fellow's head that is interesting to me and that warrants further pondering by me.

Here's a book:

SUNY Press

Here's an article:

Maurice Blanchot : The Infinite Conversation : The Absent Voice

Sir Francis Bacon said this:

Nevertheless if any skillful Servant of Nature shall bring force to bear on matter, and shall vex it and drive it to extremities as if with the purpose of reducing it to nothing, then will matter (since annihilation or true destruction is not possible except by the omnipotence of God) finding itself in these straits, turn and transform itself into strange shapes, passing from one change to another till it has gone through the whole circle and finished the period.

~ from Proteus 

1561 - 1626

It quietly alarms me...

...when I come across people who think they understand reality. I can think of nothing more preposterous, arrogant, deluded.

toward art and simple wonder

Philosophy, as a world-grasping and world-ordering milieu, eventually gives way to deep music, unusual poetry, and the mapless condition of dream. Thought, given enough time, gradually releases itself from the brain's algorithmic, relational neurosis and begins to feel its way toward and into the abyss behind symbols, which is the mystical (or whatever).

I'm tired, and I'm babbling like a drunken platypus.