Flotsam and Jetsam Covid and Post-Covid

                                            Fair Emelye gathering flowers. Stephen Haweis*
 

This post should probably still be in Drafts, (very short,) but I haven't published anything in a long time so please think of it as an Update in Progress....

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Still in isolation. I suppose you could call it Covid-related but it's more than that. Much more. I have withdrawn from life. It has always been a natural tendency but now it is a fully realized thing. A reality. From virtual to real. (That's Bergson influenced.) 

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Isolationist perusing: Elizabeth Kaye in Tibet; and etc. (see Goodreads); then back to perusing; Bergson....length and tedium of....there is the tedium of chapter lengths but that's really not tedium but an annoyance with my attention span limitations due in fact to lazyness, escapism, etc;  then, the continual perusal of Sharon Olds, the Diamond Sutra, and a textual reading of Barthelme's Snow White; is it homeopathic? (as opposed to homophobic..) etc.   

........at least, I keep everydayness at bay.   

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 Dot..., Dot..., Dot...,   (As Sylvester always said, for those of you who aren't familiar with my oeurve.) 

As the Covid International Emergency was developing, so was a nervous disorder which I attributed, probably rightly, to stress, [starts out with a Hives breakout] but which it turns out is also genetic, ...[developing]. And boy, how it has developed. The story is long and not attractive and the condition is also quite uncomfortable. I refer to my presently still galloping case of Psoriasis. Just in case you were thinking of coming to Florida to gaze fondly at my skin.   

                                                

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 Mercury in Retrograde

On second thought, Mercury seems to be in retrograde all the fucking time, so let's just scratch that. (...but not my skin!) Earlier today, (9/17/22), I saw somewhere on a news crawl that it and three planets are in retrograde all at the same time. What kind of Universe is that?  Infinite, I guess. (My Capricorn sun sign has three planets in Capricorn.)  Not that I believe any of that...oh well, you know.  

 

...imagined titles for someone's future fiction or non-fiction; (so far, just non-fiction, but you can change that), an open list: 

Where the Poo Comes Out

Otto Gross, 'The Prince of Bohemia'  

Lenin's Love of the Middle Classes  

A Brass Ring to Privilege, the Fictive Hamptons 

Cancel Culture as Performance Art 

More Cancel Culture as Performance Art

How to Cancel your Mother  

Psychical Corporiality, Susan Sontag, and your Mother

Etc.  .....(All above, below, and everywhere, copyrighted by me, natch.)  

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Pre-Columbian Flat Affect  Notes for a future post...

I'll be using Charles C. Mann's book, titled 1491, as metaphor, in a way, I guess; trying to draw some sort of parallel to his retelling of the European settlement of the Western Hemisphere, sometimes referred to Western Civilization's genocide of those Mongols who were the pedestrians who walked across the Bering Land Bridge before global warming turned it into the Bering Strait. 

"The Russians are coming," sort of thing, Only, with Columbus it was "The Spanish; ...and the Italians, ...are coming".  ...It kept happening, Scots-Irish mixing with Cherokee in Appalachia, German-Jewish cattlemen mixing with Vaqueroes in Mexican Texas........[Should I go on?]      

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A Trip up Creeley's Creek

Here is where I remind myself that I once helped out at a Robert Creeley reading at The Guild Hall of East Hampton, (N.Y.) ...by putting up the folding chairs. The Director of the event was my friend, poet and editor Hope Harris. I got to witness the excitement had by the mostly female audience of poets and readers. Then, at some forgotten time in what was then the future I noticed that he had been involved with a poetry and pictures book, pictures by one of my favorite artists of a certain late twentieth century period, Susan Rothenberg. So I suppose let us have this section [assuming it will be fleshed out] be a list of resentments, thoughts, and cracks that further expose my already bared soul.  

Creeley had real matinee idol cachet in that rarefied world of poetry. Here's a few of possible books about him. 

Throwing things that stick. 

Creeley's Remuda 

Creeley's Hill to Die On.

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Don't have Google Panic, Just Do it!  

[So I googled...] Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text, either through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody,^{[1][2][3][4][5]} or by interconnections between similar or related works perceived by an audience or reader of the text.^[6] These references are sometimes made deliberately and depend on a reader's prior knowledge and understanding of the referent, but the effect of intertextuality is not always intentional and is sometimes inadvertent. Often associated with strategies employed by writers working in imaginative registers (fiction, poetry, and drama and even non-written texts like performance art and digital media),^[7][8] intertextuality is now understood to be intrinsic to any text.^[9]

Intertextuality has been differentiated into referential and typological categories. Referential intertextuality refers to the use of fragments in texts and the typological intertextuality refers to the use of pattern and structure in typical texts.^[10] A distinction can also be made between iterability and presupposition. Iterability makes reference to the "repeatability" of certain text that is composed of "traces", pieces of other texts that help constitute its meaning. Presupposition makes a reference to assumptions a text makes about its readers and its context.^[11] As philosopher William Irwin wrote, the term "has come to have almost as many meanings as users, from those faithful to Julia Kristeva's original vision to those who simply use it as a stylish way of talking about allusion and influence".^[12]

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 ^{Yet more future possible projects;}   

1. A book or booklet, (bookette?)  entitled  How to Draw a Kreplach.  By me.  

(I'll explain the above at the appropriate time.)  

2. Article; (Paris Review?)  (The Nation?)  'How the word 'surreal' conquered the vernacular.'

   

*Stephen Haweis was the first husband of Mina Loy; more to come, eventually. (Severe work slowdown.) 

 

 

 

 

Reading Bergson, Part l

              AN ON-GOING REPORT 

 [Subject to change: ie; work in progress]  

 

Reading Bergson-

1. The plan: It being a difficult project, I won't force myself to completely wrap my mind around it, [the project], in one try.  If I feel like I "get it", even just a little bit, I'll go on. I'm assuming, in terms of my attention to Bergson, that everything he wrote requires more than one or two reads. I will hope that my brain can build on its understanding. How many readings is up to my brain and its future, and is not knowable at this time. (Will I be Straussian; or Bloomian?) 

2. Chapters and paragraphs are long. very long; need to resist the impulse to flip pages forward to see; "How long does this go on?"  

 

Process philosophy- 

From Wikipedia;  Process philosophy, also ontology of becoming, or processism,[1] is an approach to philosophy that identifies processes, changes, or shifting relationships as the only true elements of the ordinary, everyday real world. It treats other real elements (examples: enduring physical objects, thoughts) as abstractions from, or ontological dependents on, processes. In opposition to the classical view of change as illusory (as argued by Parmenides) or accidental (as argued by Aristotle), process philosophy posits transient occasions of change or becoming as the only fundamental things of the ordinary everyday real world.

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, classical ontology has posited ordinary world reality as constituted of enduring substances, to which transient processes are ontologically subordinate, if they are not denied. If Socrates changes, becoming sick, Socrates is still the same (the substance of Socrates being the same), and change (his sickness) only glides over his substance: change is accidental, and devoid of primary reality, whereas the substance is essential.

Philosophers who appeal to process rather than substance include Heraclitus, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Nail, Alfred Korzybski, R. G. Collingwood, Alan Watts, Robert M. Pirsig, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Charles Hartshorne, Arran Gare, Nicholas Rescher, Colin Wilson, Tim Ingold, Bruno Latour, William E. Connolly, and Gilles Deleuze. In physics, Ilya Prigogine[2] distinguishes between the "physics of being" and the "physics of becoming". Process philosophy covers not just scientific intuitions and experiences, but can be used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions among religion, philosophy, and science.[3][4][original research?]

Process philosophy is sometimes classified as closer to Continental philosophy than analytic philosophy, because it is usually only taught in Continental departments.[5] However, other sources state that process philosophy should be placed somewhere in the middle between the poles of analytic versus Continental methods in contemporary philosophy.[6][7]
 

Notes:  P. 219 - ......Consciousness Beyond the Body, 2016 Melbourne Centre for Exceptional Human Potential, Aus; edited by Alexander De Foe; coincides with p. 162, Bergson, Time and Free Will. 

 

Matter and Memory

Feel like I grasped the essentials to some extent; is that kind of vague?  Yep...  Next, I went to Wikipedia and here I'll print the first part of what they say: 

(French: Matière et mémoire, 1896) is a book by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Its subtitle is Essay on the relation of body and spirit (Essai sur la relation du corps à l’esprit), and the work presents an analysis of the classical philosophical problems concerning this relation. Within that frame, the analysis of memory serves the purpose of clarifying the problem.

Matter and Memory was written in reaction to the book The Maladies of Memory by Théodule Ribot, which appeared in 1881. Ribot claimed that the findings of brain science proved that memory is lodged within a particular part of the nervous system; localized within the brain and thus being of a material nature. Bergson was opposed to this reduction of spirit to matter. Defending a clear anti-reductionist position, he considered memory to be of a deeply spiritual nature, the brain serving the need of orienting present action by inserting relevant memories. The brain thus being of a practical nature, certain lesions tend to perturb this practical function, but without erasing memory as such. The memories are, instead, simply not 'incarnated,' and cannot serve their purpose.

(I wonder if that means alcoholic blackouts might be accessible in the spirit world? Bergson manages to keep such questions behind a door kept only slightly ajar. Awfully well done, Henri.)  


Time and Free Will      

Sensations as magnitudes- 

Location 8568 Kindle:  "Psychophysics merely pushes to its extreme consequences the fundamental but natural mistake of regarding sensations as magnitudes. In truth, psychophysics merely formulates with precision and pushes to its extreme consequences a conception familiar to common sense. As speech dominates over thought, as external objects, which are common to us all, are more important to us than the subjective states through which each of us passes, we have everything to gain by objectifying these states, by introducing into them, to the largest possible extent, the representation of their external cause. And the more our knowledge increases, the more we perceive the extensive behind the intensive, quantity behind quality, the more also we tend to thrust the former into the latter, and to treat our sensations as magnitudes. ..."

 
Subjective and Objective numbers- 

Location 8739: "The unit is irreducible while we are thinking it and number is discontinuous while we are building it up: but, as soon as we consider number in its finished state, we objectify it, and it then appears to be divisible to an unlimited extent.  In fact, we apply the term subjective  to what seems to be completely and adequately known, and the term objective  to what is known in such a way that a constantly increasing number of new impressions could be substituted for the idea which we actually have of it." .....


Qualitative and Quantitative-

Location 8955:  "Pure duration is wholly qualitative.  It cannot be measured unless symbolically represented in space."  

 

Laughter; an essay on the meaning of comic

Chapter l.  Page 446 of 747 . 59%

Location  "To sum up, whatever be the doctrine to which our reason assents, our imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every human form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it.  this soul imparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body it animates: the immateriality which thus passes into matter is what is called gracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate and resists. It draws to itself the ever-alert activity of this higher principle, would fain convert it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to mere automatism. It would fain immobilise the intelligently varied movements of the body in stupidly contracted grooves, stereotype in permanent grimaces the fleeting expressions of the face, in short imprint on the whole person such an attitude as to make it appear immersed and absorbed in the materiality of some mechanical occupation instead of ceaselessly renewing its vitality by keeping in touch with a living ideal.  Where matter thus succeeds in dulling the outward life of the soul, in petrifying its movements and thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves, at the expense of the body, an effect that is comic. If, then, at this point we wished to define the comic by comparing it with its contrary, we should have to contrast it with gracefulness even more than with beauty. It partakes rather of the unsprightly than of the unsightly, of RIGIDNESS rather than of UGLINESS."

 

Chapter 1.  Page 459 of 747 . 61%   ...on Kindle.  

......"Where did the comic come from in this case? It came from the fact that the living body became rigid, like a machine.  Accordingly, it seemed to us that the living body ought to be the perfection of suppleness, the ever-alert activity of a principle always at work. but this activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body.  It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a high principle and perceived through the body, as if through a glass. When we see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it is because we disregard in it the elements of weight, of resistance, and, in a word, of matter; we forget its materiality and think only of its vitality, a vitality which we regard as derived from the very principle of intellectual and moral life.  Let us suppose, however, that our attention is drawn to this material side of the body; that, so far from sharing in the lightness and sublety of the principle with which it is animated, the body is no more in our eyes than a heavy and cumbersome vesture, a kind of irksome ballast which golds down to earth a soul eager to rise aloft.  Then the body will become to the soul what, as we have seen, the garment was to the body itself- inert matter dumped down upon living energy." ......

 

Chapter 3, (Caricatures)  p. 446 .  %59. kindle.  

  ...."To sum up, whatever be the doctrine to which our reason assents, our imagination as a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every human form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it. This soul imparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body it animates: the immateriality which thus passes into matter is what is called gracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate and resists.  It draws to itself the ever-alert activity of this higher principle, would fain convert it to its own inertia and cause it to revert to mere automatism. It would fain immobilise the intelligently varied movements of the body in stupidly contracted grooves, stereotype in permanent grimaces the fleeting expressions of the face, in short imprint on the whole person such an attitude as to make it appear immersed and absorbed in the materiality of some mechanical occupation instead of ceaselessly renewing its vitality by keeping in touch with a living ideal.  Where matter thus succeeds in dulling the outward life of the soul, in petrifying its movements and thwarting its gracefulness, it achieves, at the expense of the body, an effect that is comic.  If then, at this point we wished to define the comic by comparing it with its contrary, we should have to contrast it with gracefulness even more than with beauty. It partakes rather of the unsprightly than of the unsightly, of RIGIDNESS rather than of UGLINESS.   To be continued...