Dear reader,
About two years after giving up regular posting, I've decided to archive all the old stuff on this blog. You may remember, if you read it way back at the beginning, that this blog was created to host a collection of disjointed and incorrect ramblings based loosely on what I was reading or watching at the time. The best things to come out of it were a series of film and TV reviews, and some translations of german poetry. Most of the rest can safely be consigned to the digital wastebasket with nothing lost but embarrassment down the road. That said, I still have all the articles, and if there's some piece you're interested in, drop me a line through the comment box below, and if I see your message I may send it to you.
Thanks for reading. I wish you all well.
Sincerely,
The Author
The Paraphasic
16 November 2016
Some Thoughts on the Act of Reading
06 November 2016
A Rumination on the Foundation of Civil Society
Perhaps, in life, people shouldn't be divided between the useful, who will help you achieve your desired pleasure or ambition, and the rest, who need to be tossed aside or derided for their inadequacy. Perhaps the division shouldn't be between the knowing in-group and the rest of the world, the promising and the unpromising, the interesting and the passé. Maybe there are just people, muddled and misguided, frequently wicked, yearning for something good, worthy of politeness and respect, even when their wits are cluttered, or they are stuck in a rut, or whatever.
What is the sine qua non of civil interaction, of affability? Benevolence and civility. What are the vices that offend against these necessities? Irony, malice, rudeness, narcissism. What does one get from immersing oneself in a culture without civility or benevolence? One becomes uncivil; one loses the ability to distinguish between acts of malice, indifference, and friendship. If one can maintain an affable demeanor in such a milieu, that is heroic virtue. But for the rest of us, we should remember the words of the psalmist:
Blessed is the man
who does not walk in the counsel of the impious,
or stand in the path of sinners,
or sit in the seat of scoffers;
but his will is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates by day and by night.
The distinction among men that should be drawn is the distinction between those whose company we can keep without traveling in consilio impiorum, and everyone else. Whatever other wickednesses there may be, whatever other virtues we may desire, civility and benevolence are at the foundation—if these are absent, whatever other goods we pursue will fail.
What is the sine qua non of civil interaction, of affability? Benevolence and civility. What are the vices that offend against these necessities? Irony, malice, rudeness, narcissism. What does one get from immersing oneself in a culture without civility or benevolence? One becomes uncivil; one loses the ability to distinguish between acts of malice, indifference, and friendship. If one can maintain an affable demeanor in such a milieu, that is heroic virtue. But for the rest of us, we should remember the words of the psalmist:
Blessed is the man
who does not walk in the counsel of the impious,
or stand in the path of sinners,
or sit in the seat of scoffers;
but his will is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates by day and by night.
The distinction among men that should be drawn is the distinction between those whose company we can keep without traveling in consilio impiorum, and everyone else. Whatever other wickednesses there may be, whatever other virtues we may desire, civility and benevolence are at the foundation—if these are absent, whatever other goods we pursue will fail.
19 October 2016
The King in Thule
A translation (my own) of Goethe's Der König in Thule.
There was once a king in Thule
Who was faithful to the grave,
To whom his dying mistress
A golden goblet gave.
To him was nothing dearer,
He drained it when he supped;
His eyes would overflow with tears,
As he tipped the golden cup.
And when the king was dying
He surveyed his domain,
Bequeathed it all unto his heir,
But the goblet he retained.
One day at royal repast
He sat among his knights
In the high hall of his fathers
In the castle on the heights.
There stood the old carouser,
Drained out his life's last glug,
And cast the sacred vessel down
Into the stormy flood.
He watched it, plunging, filling,
Sink deep into the main.
His eyes, with him, were sinking too;
He never drank again.
18 October 2016
The Text of Rhythm and Blues
A poem from peter handke's collection
Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt.
Everything is in order.
She walks down the street.
Do you feel well?
I would like to go home.
Come closer!
I will go home.
Everything is in order.
She walked down the street.
I feel well.
I am going home.
Don't run away!
She walks down the street.
Early in the morning—
I go home.
She walked down the street.
I feel better.
Here she comes!
Hurry!
Take me home!
Early in the morning—
Come closer!
At midnight—
I can sense it.
Don't run away!
I'm going home.
Come closer!
We are home.
Do you sense it?
At midnight—
Come!
Come over.
Hurry!
Early in the morning—
At midnight!
Do you feel it?
Hurry!
I am trying.
At midnight—
Do you feel it?
Here it comes.
Come closer!
I am trying!
Do you feel it?
Hurry!
I'm trying!
Do you feel it?
I'm trying!
Do you feel it?
Do you feel it?
Oh yes.
Die Innenwelt der Außenwelt der Innenwelt.
Everything is in order.
She walks down the street.
Do you feel well?
I would like to go home.
Come closer!
I will go home.
Everything is in order.
She walked down the street.
I feel well.
I am going home.
Don't run away!
She walks down the street.
Early in the morning—
I go home.
She walked down the street.
I feel better.
Here she comes!
Hurry!
Take me home!
Early in the morning—
Come closer!
At midnight—
I can sense it.
Don't run away!
I'm going home.
Come closer!
We are home.
Do you sense it?
At midnight—
Come!
Come over.
Hurry!
Early in the morning—
At midnight!
Do you feel it?
Hurry!
I am trying.
At midnight—
Do you feel it?
Here it comes.
Come closer!
I am trying!
Do you feel it?
Hurry!
I'm trying!
Do you feel it?
I'm trying!
Do you feel it?
Do you feel it?
Oh yes.
15 October 2016
The American Experience
PBS was an essential part of my childhood. The influence played on my intellectual development, interests, and personality by the programming made available on Chicago's WTTW is difficult to overstate. There are so many things that I know and was made aware of, curiosities inspired, landscapes opened up, because of the different children's and documentary series shown there.
In the past eight years, PBS has morphed into something different. There is still good programming, but it tends much more often to follow some political or ideological trend line. WTTW has split into four separate sub-channels, one of which is frequently devoted to mutliculturalist programming with heavy social justice themes. I do not know why the change has happened. I don't know why, when Jim Lehrer was still running The News Hour, it was a beacon of impartiality and intelligent commentary (the last light in the TV news establishment), but now that he has left, Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff have more or less destroyed it. I don't know why Nova spun off "Nova ScienceNow" with the awful Neil DeGrasse Tyson, or why Bill Moyers was given so many different weekly talk shows for a Sunday platform, or why Chicago Tonight manages (despite its long broadcast window) to be the worst local news program in Chicago.
What can I say? We live in a decadent age. Even PBS can't stay good.
Of course, there is still a lot of good programming. Some of the cooking shows are still quite good, (although Barbecue University was never among them), there are still some great travel programs (Globe Trekker!), and above all the core news magazine and documentary series (American Experience and Frontline) remain excellent. They may have killed Arthur by extending the series ten years too long, transforming the characters into degenerate millennials, and cycling out the old voice actors with shrill replacements, but at least they're still making excellent 5+ hour documentaries about the lives of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan.
Which brings me to the very modest point that motivated this post. I can't help but feel very intense nostalgia when I watch the old opening sequence from American Experience. It manages, in the space of a minute, to make me feel a kind of piety for this country, and a love for its history. It is beautifully done.
In the past eight years, PBS has morphed into something different. There is still good programming, but it tends much more often to follow some political or ideological trend line. WTTW has split into four separate sub-channels, one of which is frequently devoted to mutliculturalist programming with heavy social justice themes. I do not know why the change has happened. I don't know why, when Jim Lehrer was still running The News Hour, it was a beacon of impartiality and intelligent commentary (the last light in the TV news establishment), but now that he has left, Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff have more or less destroyed it. I don't know why Nova spun off "Nova ScienceNow" with the awful Neil DeGrasse Tyson, or why Bill Moyers was given so many different weekly talk shows for a Sunday platform, or why Chicago Tonight manages (despite its long broadcast window) to be the worst local news program in Chicago.
What can I say? We live in a decadent age. Even PBS can't stay good.
Of course, there is still a lot of good programming. Some of the cooking shows are still quite good, (although Barbecue University was never among them), there are still some great travel programs (Globe Trekker!), and above all the core news magazine and documentary series (American Experience and Frontline) remain excellent. They may have killed Arthur by extending the series ten years too long, transforming the characters into degenerate millennials, and cycling out the old voice actors with shrill replacements, but at least they're still making excellent 5+ hour documentaries about the lives of Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan.
Which brings me to the very modest point that motivated this post. I can't help but feel very intense nostalgia when I watch the old opening sequence from American Experience. It manages, in the space of a minute, to make me feel a kind of piety for this country, and a love for its history. It is beautifully done.
26 July 2016
On the Need for Beautiful Things
The other night, before falling asleep, I started reading Moby Dick. Let me be more precise: while trying to fall asleep, I started listening to a free audiobook recording of Moby Dick. (This one.) It was beautiful. Having picked up the novel in bookstores and libraries perhaps dozens of times during the course of my life without ever making it past the first page, the unveiling of Melville's description of the "Island of the Manhattoes" and everyman's impulse to go to sea was stunning.
What other experiences of this sort have I had lately? Little lines in Rilke: "Ich glaube an Nächte." or "Du, Nachbar Gott, wenn ich dich manches mal in langer Nacht mit hartem Klopfen störe..." (Such meter!)
The harmony of a well-designed page with good fonts.
What is the beautiful? A tedious question, because it is too easy—better to ask what is beautiful? Knowing in abstract what constitutes beauty enables us to find the links between things that are beautiful and their higher causes. But because beauty in things is the manifestness of their interior order, which discloses to us what they are, while directing us to something higher than what they are—it is more enriching to learn by beholding what is beautiful than by thinking in the absence of beautiful things about the structure of aesthetic delight.
What other experiences of this sort have I had lately? Little lines in Rilke: "Ich glaube an Nächte." or "Du, Nachbar Gott, wenn ich dich manches mal in langer Nacht mit hartem Klopfen störe..." (Such meter!)
The harmony of a well-designed page with good fonts.
What is the beautiful? A tedious question, because it is too easy—better to ask what is beautiful? Knowing in abstract what constitutes beauty enables us to find the links between things that are beautiful and their higher causes. But because beauty in things is the manifestness of their interior order, which discloses to us what they are, while directing us to something higher than what they are—it is more enriching to learn by beholding what is beautiful than by thinking in the absence of beautiful things about the structure of aesthetic delight.
On the Notion of Soullessness
In college and after, i used to talk a lot about "soulless" diversions and professions. If asked to define the notion, I would have said something like this: "Something is soulless to the extent that it detracts from the pursuit of higher things—philosophy, contemplation, and the ordered pursuit of the good." In application, though, the notion of soullessness was more narrowly targeted. Certain things were definitely soulless, because of their decadence or (more often) their materialism. Finance and management consulting, economics and related subjects were all harshly condemned for their lack of "soul".
Lying in bed tonight, trying to fall asleep, I wondered what it meant to be soulless—I wondered whether, despite my best intentions and hopes, I am slowly becoming soulless, simply through the gradual transformation of my character over the past ten years. The question is an echo of one of the great anxieties of the boomer generation—the fear of selling out, of being assimilated by "The Man". But for me "The Man" isn't the concept of authority in general, it's the conversion of the mind into a tool. Soullessness isn't obedience, nor is it cheating oneself out of the spontaneity of individual genius or talent—it's the instrumentalization of the intellect in such a way that the mind's habitual occupation is neither ipsum esse (whether merely esse commune or esse per se subsistens), nor the truth, but the accomplishment of tasks so minute that their ordination can exist in a state of perpetual suspension, without reference to the ultimate good.
One experiences a certain delight in accomplishing tasks. There's the delight of accumulation (a materialist pleasure), and the delight of the imposition of will (Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή), but there is also a basic delight in the preoccupation lent to the mind by the process of accomplishment.
Goethe's Mephisto warns that ars longa, vita brevis. It is true, but also in a different way—work draws out and fills time, for better or worse, depending on the occupation. Mann complements and completes this insight: Work that is truly ars fills time in a way that enriches it, slows and suspends it, drawing nearer to the eternity which is the plenitudo perfectionis. But work which occupies the mind without directing it toward a higher end, which truly diverts the soul from its life, work which is too much for its own sake by virtue of being for the sake of who knows what invisible or undirected end—this work leaves time barren, and while it may leave one short of life, it does not fill it.
What is needed for good work is not merely a sense of the dignity of labor or the importance of perfection—what is needed is an orientation from the work one accomplishes to a higher end, not merely material, but transcendental—not simply quantifiable or relative or contextual in its claim to value, but stemming somehow from what is absolute. In the absence of that, I think, soullessness sets in.
Lying in bed tonight, trying to fall asleep, I wondered what it meant to be soulless—I wondered whether, despite my best intentions and hopes, I am slowly becoming soulless, simply through the gradual transformation of my character over the past ten years. The question is an echo of one of the great anxieties of the boomer generation—the fear of selling out, of being assimilated by "The Man". But for me "The Man" isn't the concept of authority in general, it's the conversion of the mind into a tool. Soullessness isn't obedience, nor is it cheating oneself out of the spontaneity of individual genius or talent—it's the instrumentalization of the intellect in such a way that the mind's habitual occupation is neither ipsum esse (whether merely esse commune or esse per se subsistens), nor the truth, but the accomplishment of tasks so minute that their ordination can exist in a state of perpetual suspension, without reference to the ultimate good.
One experiences a certain delight in accomplishing tasks. There's the delight of accumulation (a materialist pleasure), and the delight of the imposition of will (Διὸς δ᾽ ἐτελείετο βουλή), but there is also a basic delight in the preoccupation lent to the mind by the process of accomplishment.
Goethe's Mephisto warns that ars longa, vita brevis. It is true, but also in a different way—work draws out and fills time, for better or worse, depending on the occupation. Mann complements and completes this insight: Work that is truly ars fills time in a way that enriches it, slows and suspends it, drawing nearer to the eternity which is the plenitudo perfectionis. But work which occupies the mind without directing it toward a higher end, which truly diverts the soul from its life, work which is too much for its own sake by virtue of being for the sake of who knows what invisible or undirected end—this work leaves time barren, and while it may leave one short of life, it does not fill it.
What is needed for good work is not merely a sense of the dignity of labor or the importance of perfection—what is needed is an orientation from the work one accomplishes to a higher end, not merely material, but transcendental—not simply quantifiable or relative or contextual in its claim to value, but stemming somehow from what is absolute. In the absence of that, I think, soullessness sets in.
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