These, of course, are the final words of The Return of the King, spoken by Samwise Gamgee. For those who feared that the bout of ‘nosocomial tedium’ might have been fatal, I am fine, merely quite busy.
I believe, however, that I can now find the time to return to regular writing here.
We were stuck in the doctor’s office for half the morning with a feverish Nathaniel.
He seems to be fine now, but the nosocomial tedium is harder to shake.
A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it.
Love’s Labour Lost, Act 5, Scene 2.
[The American] obsession with mobility, the urge to move on every few years, stands at odds with the wish to endure in a beloved place, and no place can be worthy of that kind of deep love if we are willing to abandon it on short notice for a few extra dollars. Rather, we choose to live in Noplace, and our dwellings show it. In every corner of the nation we have built places unworthy of love and move on from them without regret. But move on to what? Where is the ultimate destination when every place is Noplace?James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (New York: Touchstone, 1994), 173. Emphasis added.
On Friday, February 15, a San Francisco federal judge ordered that the domain registar Dynadot disable wikileaks.org and prevent the transfer of the domain name to another registrar. Wikileaks.org is a website dedicated to the publication of leaked materials documenting government and corporate abuse. It represents a courageous and needed contribution to the free flow of information.
The judge’s injunction was in response to a request for an injunction against wikileaks by a Cayman Islands bank stung by the publication of leaked documents demonstrating money laundering, asset hiding and tax evasion. Rather an issue an injunction against the publication of the banks’ documents, which would itself be an unacceptable act of censorship, Judge White shut down the entire website. This is a terrifying act of censorship.
In 1971 the bungling, authoritarian Nixon administration attempted to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers by the New York Times. This censorship was rejected by the US Supreme Court as unconstitutional prior restraint. No one, however, suggested, shutting down the New York Times. This is precisely what the disabling of the wikileaks.org website entails.
The censorship of the public flow of information to disguise corporate malfeasance must not be tolerated. This injunction must be reversed.
We are fortunate that wikileaks has numerous mirror sites. Here is one: http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Wikileaks
Wikileaks has published countless valuable documents, including the Guantanamo Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures Manual. This leaked manual proved that the repeated government claims that the International Red Cross was allowed access to all inmates were lies. It demonstrated the widespread use of techniques of psychological torture. And it demonstrated the petty brutality of prison life; if a prisoner damaged or destroyed a styrofoam cup provided with their meal, they were to be “disciplined for the destruction of government property (8-10 [12], page 8.6).
Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, from Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971).
Beautifully illustrated and eminently readable, Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity is a fascinating introductory text to the history of the Late Antique period. In a marvelous twist to dominant historiography, Brown traces the evolution of Late Antique society eastward, closing out the volume not with Charlemagne at Aachen but with Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad. This modification of regional orientation is one of several elements in his argument that allow him to shift historical perception from an account of ‘decline and fall’ to one of resilience and rebirth. The period of Late Antiquity has never felt quite so alive, or the implications of its history, culture, theology and art quite so pertinent to later periods of historical study.
Brown states that “[t]he most blatant feature of the society for both contemporaries and for the historian, was the widening gulf between rich and poor. In the western empire, society and culture were dominated by a senatorial aristocracy five times richer, on the average, than the senators of the first century.” (34) Brown uses several verbs to describe this process of maldistribution and expropriation of wealth: “the prosperity of the Mediterranean world seems to have drained to the top” (34) or “[b]y the fifth century, the wealth of the west had snowballed into the hands of a few great families.” (43) [emphasis supplied] While Brown highlights the growing inequality that characterized Late Antique society (”the most blatant feature”) he nevertheless uses passive verbs to describe the process whereby this was accomplished (”drained,” “snowballed”). G.E.M. de Ste. Croix points out the difficulty with such terms in his magisterial The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), “If I were in search of a metaphor to describe the great and growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the upper classes, I would not incline towards anything so innocent and so automatic as drainage: I should want to think in terms of something much more purposive and deliberate - perhaps the vampire bat.” (503)
Why is it that over the past century when artists have attempted to grapple with science the results have so often been disappointing?
Is it because the artists have not moved beyond evocation and into understanding? The evocation of that which is not fully comprehended results in work that is, at best, muddled and irrational; at worst, pretentious and obfuscatory.
Witness the current exhibit at Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern: Genesis - Die Kunst Der Schöpfung.
Klee’s own focus on Schöpfung|Creation was driven by his quest to deal with the complexities of modern reality through the exploration of certain basic ‘primal forms.’ Along with Kandinsky and Marc in Der Blaue Reiter group, he aimed to evoke the ’spiritual in art’ by means of primitivism and non-figurative work.
Der Blaue Reiter represented an uncoordinated attempt - the group coalesced in a non-programmatic fashion in response to an exhibit’s rejection of a work of Kandinsky’s - to depict the ’spiritual in art.’ For Kandinsky this was partly achieved by an eccentric fascination with the color blue; the deeper the shade of blue, the more spiritually evocative the work of art. For Klee this was bound up in the idea of pre-existence, of the primal. Klee wrote in his diary:
Art is like creation and is true on the first day and the last… My love is remote and religious. All that is Faustian is remote from me. I occupy a more distant, original point of creation where I presuppose formulae for human beings, animals, plants, stones and earth, fire, water, air and for all circling powers at the same time… Art is a parable of creation. God too did not give himself specifically by fortuitous stages in the present.
Paul Klee, Tagebücher 1898-1918, ed. F. Klee (Cologne, 1957), 196, cited in Karl-Josef Kuschel, Born Before All Time?: The Dispute over Christ’s Origin, trans. John Bowden (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 79.
Klee writes in a proto-Heideggerian preference for being over becoming. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit has been explicitly rejected. Being must be located in the mythical mists of pre-time, of Schöpfung. The artist manipulates pre-existing elements of creation, of being, evoking a primal past. There is here no history and no historical imperative.
The Blue Rider group’s yearning for the ’spiritual’ was at its base a counter-rational hankering after the medieval deus ex machina in the face of the daunting secularity of the twentieth century. It was the world-weary of shrug of the bourgeoisie in the years leading up to the first World War. In music, Schoenberg’s subjectivist serial system and Stravinsky’s hyper-objectivism are both products of the same impotent and anti-humanist impulse. Der Blaue Reiter existed from 1911 to 1914 and ended with the war. Klee painted camouflage on German imperial planes.
Genesis - Die Kunst Der Schöpfung opens with Klee’s Physiognomic genesis.
The year is 1929. Klee has reconstructed Der Blaue Reiter as Die Blaue Vier. His Angelus Novus was completed in 1920; twenty years later, Walter Benjamin, in yet another of his writings more Kabbalist than Marxist, would interpret Angelus as representing progress in history. His interpretation, in his Theses on History, flies in the face of Klee’s own sentiments. For Klee, it is not history, and thus not humanity, which fashions the present. Comprehension of the present and of the spiritual lurking somewhere beneath its surface rests upon our understanding the mythical aetiological elements of Being. We do not create, we are created.
There is thus something suspicious about an exhibit dedicated to genetics and art at the Zentrum Paul Klee. If we are honest, we must admit that for Klee such scientific pursuit is Faustian and not creative. Creation has already occured and we are left tinkering with its elements. We have long since moved from Schöpfung to Fall.
For an artistic understanding of science we must look elsewhere.
… there is a pale shade of bribery which is sometimes called prosperity.
George Eliot, Middlemarch.
My friend Isabel calls it “apologizing for not posting more.”
There are many reasons for the insubstantial and infrequent posts of late. One of them, at least, is interesting.
This past weekend I took Christian and Elizabeth up to a cabin near Lassen National Forest to visit their uncle, aunt and new nephew. We had a blast.
Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos by Eric J. Chaisson
A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey
My System: 21st Century Edition by Aron Nimzowitsch
Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky
