Vittorio Zecchin: From the cycle Thousand and One Nights, 1914**
PLEASE FORGIVE
Please forgive my leaving before
the reading even started, furious, almost
foaming at the mouth like a holy fool
or a character out of Dostoyevski.
I regret not having stayed. I regret
being a character out of Dostoyevski:
a God-obsessed atheist. Raskolnikov
is my lost tenth cousin. We have long
conversations, Rodya and I,
and Ivan Karamazov. And Svidrigailov,
who says, But suppose eternity
is like a grimy Russian bathhouse,
with dried-up spiders in the corners?
who calls suicide “going to America” —
he’s my secret love. Unable to see me
across the Neva, ignorant that he is loved,
he chooses to go to America —
That’s my luck with men, though sometimes
before they go, they say Remember only
the beauty. And Fyodor, my Fyodor,
sweeping the dried-up spiders
from the corners of eternity,
says through the mouth of Myshkin,
“the idiot”: Beauty will save the world.
~ Oriana
That surprising statement in The Idiot remains little known. It speaks deeply to someone like myself who doesn’t really separate beauty from goodness, and who understands that Oscar Wilde wasn’t merely joking when he said, “I know why there is so much violence in America: it’s because their wallpaper is so ugly.”
I also understood Thomas Moore, author of The Care of the Soul, when he said that a church need to be immaculately clean: “A dirty church doesn’t work.”
But I wouldn’t go so far as to argue that the idea of beauty was central for Dostoyevski. His big theme, aside from the question of religious belief, was the primacy of kindness, of human values, as opposed to any rationalist ideologies that end up becoming totalitarian catastrophes, attracting charismatic psychopaths (The Devils).
And this is of course the writer adored by the Existentialists because of Notes from the Underground (1864), the Underground Man being perhaps the first modern anti-hero, a bitter, isolated man who ridicules utopian idealists. But besides the Underground Man, Dostoyevski also gave us the Ridiculous Man who ends up yearning for paradise — understood as a place where everyone is kind.
Your opening poem and discussion of Dostoyevski is irresistible to me. I read Crime and Punishment first as a teenage girl who found herself unable to pray, unable to even pretend to pray, when it was required and expected as part of the day's routine at my all girls Catholic high school.
The problem of suffering, in particular the suffering of the innocents, grounded in my own experience of childhood abuse, but expanding to include more and more of humanity as I became more aware of the pain in the world, at first led me to anger at a god so cruel and indifferent. This was followed by contempt — what sort of thing is a god less kind and compassionate than his creatures? A useless impossibility.
So already a "god-obsessed atheist," I was thunderstruck by Raskolnikov's struggles — captivated by his questions — felt he was indeed a long lost cousin, maybe a brother, whose extreme actions resulted from the extremity of his thinking, the dangerous and forbidden thoughts that were nevertheless undeniable, irresistible, unshakable. I felt at home with him there, at the apostate's table. My friends were writing "Ralph" and "Johnnie," their boyfriends names, on their notebooks and book covers, I covered mine with "Raskolnikov," as though Rodya was a friend I might meet at a local dance.
I felt at home in Dostoyevski's world, where people lived with fevered intensity, concerned with the essential, terrible question at the heart of life — not the question of good and evil, the question of suffering.
The why and how of it in a world where the worst pain is often visited on children — Raskolnikov opened the door for me, then The Brothers Karamazov blew the roof off. No matter how kind we can be, how loving, Ivan's argument goes unanswered. The children are crucified, the horse is beaten to death, and gentle Myshkin is "The Idiot," finally succumbs to the damage of his seizures. For me the questions Dostoyevski raises are more powerful than his answers, although I have nothing better to replace them. The glory and wonder of the world is in its richness, its particulars, the vulnerability and lovability of each and all. The possibility of kindness is perhaps our best and most important sacrament.
When I think of those times now I must admit I am far from all that 'fevered intensity." I think it may be one of those lovely perks of aging . . . things are calmer, slower, less frantic, more measured. There is room here for beauty, and kindness, curiosity and wonder, and we know now how useless and wasteful are guilt and regret.
Oriana:
I love the way you put it and I agree: kindness is indeed “our best and most important sacrament.” And it stems from empathy, not religious commandments or ideological doctrines.
Dostoyevsky vacillated all his life between belief and non-belief, but after writing Ivan’s speech in Brothers Karamazov, he boasted that no one has ever presented a better case for atheism. And this was long before Auschwitz, and before I, for one, understood that if god allowed Auschwitz, god will allow anything — and certainly couldn’t care less about the suffering of one abused child.
But to me the main part of Dostoyevski’s genius was his compelling arguments against blind devotion to any abstract cause — be it ideology or religion — ahead of the importance of human beings — even if that human being is a “useless old woman.”
View fom Raskolnikov's window in St. Petersburg; Inge Morath, 1967*
DOSTOYEVSKI’S “THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN”
~ “One November night in the 1870s, Fyodor Dostoyevsky discovered the meaning of life in a dream — or, at least, the protagonist in his final short story did. The piece explores themes similar to those in Dostoyevsky’s 1864 Notes from the Underground, considered the first true existential novel.
The story begins with the narrator wandering the streets of St. Petersburg on “a gloomy night, the gloomiest night you can conceive,” dwelling on how others have ridiculed him all his life and slipping into nihilism with the “terrible anguish” of believing that nothing matters. He peers into the glum sky, gazes at a lone little star, and contemplates suicide; two months earlier, despite his destitution, he had bought an “excellent revolver” with the same intention, but the gun had remained in his drawer since. Suddenly, as he is staring at the star, a little girl of about eight, wearing ragged clothes and clearly in distress, grabs him by the arm and inarticulately begs his help. But the protagonist, disenchanted with life, shoos her away and returns to the squalid room he shares with a drunken old captain, furnished with “a sofa covered in American cloth, a table with some books, two chairs and an easy-chair, old, incredibly old, but still an easy-chair.”
As he sinks into the easy-chair to think about ending his life, he finds himself haunted by the image of the little girl, leading him to question his nihilistic disposition. Dostoyevsky writes:
~ I knew for certain that I would shoot myself that night, but how long I would sit by the table — that I did not know. I should certainly have shot myself, but for that little girl.
You see: though it was all the same to me, I felt pain, for instance. If any one were to strike me, I should feel pain. Exactly the same in the moral sense: if anything very pitiful happened, I would feel pity, just as I did before everything in life became all the same to me. I had felt pity just before: surely, I would have helped a child without fail. Why did I not help the little girl, then? It was because of an idea that came into my mind then. When she was pulling at me and calling to me, suddenly a question arose before me, which I could not answer. The question was an idle one; but it made me angry. I was angry because of my conclusion, that if I had already made up my mind that I would put an end to myself to-night, then now more than ever before everything in the world should be all the same to me. Why was it that I felt it was not all the same to me, and pitied the little girl? I remember I pitied her very much: so much that I felt a pain that was even strange and incredible in my situation…
It seemed clear that if I was a man and not a cipher yet, and until I was changed into a cipher, then I was alive and therefore could suffer, be angry and feel shame for my actions. Very well. But if I were to kill myself, for instance, in two hours from now, what is the girl to me, and what have I to do with shame or with anything on earth? I am going to be a cipher, an absolute zero. Could my consciousness that I would soon absolutely cease to exist, and that therefore nothing would exist, have not the least influence on my feeling of pity for the girl or on my sense of shame for the vileness I had committed?
From the moral, he veers into the existential:
It became clear to me that life and the world, as it were, depended upon me. I might even say that the world had existed for me alone. I should shoot myself, and then there would be no world at all, for me at least. Not to mention that perhaps there will really be nothing for any one after me, and the whole world, as soon as my consciousness is extinguished, will also be extinguished like a phantom, as part of my consciousness only, and be utterly abolished, since perhaps all this world and all these men are myself alone.
Beholding “these new, thronging questions,” he plunges into a contemplation of what free will really means. In a passage that calls to mind John Cage’s famous aphorism on the meaning of life — “No why. Just here.” — and George Lucas’s assertion that “life is beyond reason,” Dostoyevsky suggests through his protagonist that what gives meaning to life is life itself:
One strange consideration suddenly presented itself to me. If I had previously lived on the moon or in Mars, and I had there been dishonored and disgraced so utterly that one can only imagine it sometimes in a dream or a nightmare, and if I afterwards found myself on earth and still preserved a consciousness of what I had done on the other planet, and if I knew besides that I would never by any chance return, then, if I were to look at the moon from the earth — would it be all the same to me or not? Would I feel any shame for my action or not? The questions were idle and useless, for the revolver was already lying before me, and I knew with all my being that this thing would happen for certain: but the questions excited me to rage. I could not die now, without having solved this first. In a word, that little girl saved me, for my questions made me postpone pulling the trigger.
Just as he ponders this, the protagonist slips into sleep in the easy-chair, but it’s a sleep that has the quality of wakeful dreaming. In one of many wonderful semi-asides, Dostoyevsky peers at the eternal question of why we have dreams:
Dreams are extraordinarily strange. One thing appears with terrifying clarity, with the details finely set like jewels, while you leap over another, as though you did not notice it at all — space and time, for instance. It seems that dreams are the work not of mind but of desire, not of the head but of the heart… In a dream things quite incomprehensible come to pass. For instance, my brother died five years ago. Sometimes I see him in a dream: he takes part in my affairs, and we are very excited, while I, all the time my dream goes on, know and remember perfectly that my brother is dead and buried. Why am I not surprised that he, though dead, is still near me and busied about me? Why does my mind allow all that?
In this strange state, the protagonist dreams that he takes his revolver and points it at his heart — not his head, where he had originally intended to shoot himself. After waiting a second or two, his dream-self pulls the trigger quickly. Then something remarkable happens:
I felt no pain, but it seemed to me that with the report, everything in me was convulsed, and everything suddenly extinguished. It was terribly black all about me. I became as though blind and numb, and I lay on my back on something hard. I could see nothing, neither could I make any sound. People were walking and making a noise about me: the captain’s bass voice, the landlady’s screams… Suddenly there was a break. I am being carried in a closed coffin. I feel the coffin swinging and I think about that, and suddenly for the first time the idea strikes me that I am dead, quite dead. I know it and do not doubt it; I cannot see nor move, yet at the same time I feel and think. But I am soon reconciled to that, and as usual in a dream I accept the reality without a question.
Now I am being buried in the earth. Every one leaves me and I am alone, quite alone. I do not stir… I lay there and — strange to say — I expected nothing, accepting without question that a dead man has nothing to expect. But it was damp. I do not know how long passed — an hour, a few days, or many days. Suddenly, on my left eye which was closed, a drop of water fell, which had leaked through the top of the grave. In a minute fell another, then a third, and so on, every minute. Suddenly, deep indignation kindled in my heart and suddenly in my heart I felt physical pain. ‘It’s my wound,’ I thought. ‘It’s where I shot myself. The bullet is there.’ And all the while the water dripped straight on to my closed eye. Suddenly, I cried out, not with a voice, for I was motionless, but with all my being, to the arbiter of all that was being done to me.
“Whosoever thou art, if thou art, and if there exists a purpose more intelligent than the things which are now taking place, let it be present here also. But if thou dost take vengeance upon me for my foolish suicide, then know, by the indecency and absurdity of further existence, that no torture whatever that may befall me, can ever be compared to the contempt which I will silently feel, even through millions of years of martyrdom.”
I cried out and was silent. Deep silence lasted a whole minute. One more drop even fell. But I knew and believed, infinitely and steadfastly, that in a moment everything would infallibly change. Suddenly, my grave opened. I do not know whether it had been uncovered and opened, but I was taken by some dark being unknown to me, and we found ourselves in space. Suddenly, I saw. It was deep night; never, never had such darkness been! We were borne through space and were already far from the earth. I asked nothing of him who led me. I was proud and waited. I assured myself that I was not afraid, and my heart melted with rapture at the thought that I was not afraid. I do not remember how long we rushed through space, and I cannot imagine it. It happened as always in a dream when you leap over space and time and the laws of life and mind, and you stop only there where your heart delights. ~
Through the thick darkness, he sees a star — the same little star he had seen before shooing the girl away. As the dream continues, the protagonist describes a sort of transcendence akin to what is experienced during psychedelic drug trips or in deep meditation states:
Suddenly a familiar yet most overwhelming emotion shook me through. I saw our sun. I knew that it could not be our sun, which had begotten our earth, and that we were an infinite distance away, but somehow all through me I recognized that it was exactly the same sun as ours, its copy and double. A sweet and moving delight echoed rapturously through my soul. The dear power of light, of that same light which had given me birth, touched my heart and revived it, and I felt life, the old life, for the first time since my death.
He finds himself in another world, Earthlike in every respect, except “everything seemed to be bright with holiday, with a great and sacred triumph, finally achieved” — a world populated by “children of the sun,” happy people whose eyes “shone with a bright radiance” and whose faces “gleamed with wisdom, and with a certain consciousness, consummated in tranquility.” The protagonist exclaims:
Oh, instantly, at the first glimpse of their faces I understood everything, everything!
Conceding that “it was only a dream,” he nonetheless asserts that “the sensation of the love of those beautiful and innocent people” was very much real and something he carried into wakeful life on Earth. Awaking in his easy-chair at dawn, he exclaims anew with rekindled gratitude for life:
Oh, now — life, life! I lifted my hands and called upon the eternal truth, not called, but wept. Rapture, ineffable rapture exalted all my being. Yes, to live…
Dostoyevsky concludes with his protagonist’s reflection on the shared essence of life, our common conquest of happiness and kindness:
All are tending to one and the same goal, at least all aspire to the same goal, from the wise man to the lowest murderer, but only by different ways. It is an old truth, but there is this new in it: I cannot go far astray. I saw the truth. I saw and know that men could be beautiful and happy, without losing the capacity to live upon the earth. I will not, I cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of men… I saw the truth, I did not invent it with my mind. I saw, saw, and her living image filled my soul for ever. I saw her in such consummate perfection that I cannot possibly believe that she was not among men. How can I then go astray? … The living image of what I saw will be with me always, and will correct and guide me always. Oh, I am strong and fresh, I can go on, go on, even for a thousand years.
And it is so simple… The one thing is — love thy neighbor as thyself — that is the one thing. That is all, nothing else is needed. You will instantly find how to live.
A century later, Jack Kerouac would echo this in his own magnificent meditation on kindness and the “Golden Eternity.” ~
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-day-dostoyevsky-discovered-the-meaning-of-life-in-a-dream-762477006
Nepal. Who doesn’t love the story of Shangri-La?Oriana:
What this summary omits is the middle part of the story, in which the narrator lives among the innocent inhabitants of the Edenic planet — and somehow teaches them to lie (it’s a little unclear how this happens —he’s being playful rather than malicious). Lying leads to other transgressions, including the first murder, and eventually war. The narrator blames himself and asks the corrupted former innocents to kill him, the real culprit — but they won’t do it. He wakes up a changed man, decides to try to find the little girl, and to dedicate himself to practicing kindness and preaching brotherhood.
I remember how my mother remarked during a party that ultimately it all comes down to simply being kind to one another. There were some extremely bright people in the room, mostly scientists. One said, “Isn’t it disappointing — centuries of searching for an answer, and it’s no more than that.” But others said, “Disappointing or not, that is the best answer and the greatest wisdom: the most important thing is to be kind.”
I also remember that someone said, on a different occasion, “Heaven is a place where everyone is kind.”
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“When he died in the railway station at Astapovo, Tolstoy had two books with him — "The Brothers Karamazov" and Montaigne’s "Essays." Try to think of two more dissimilar writers, or less compatible texts. This makes sense, of course. Tolstoy was the ultimate fideist, human embodiment of consistent inconsistency and self-contradiction at the level of genius in his thinking.” ~ M. Iossel
“Alyosha's hymn affirming the resurrection of the dead on the last pages of The Brothers K. is a fideist leap into the void. Dostoyevsky's unbelievers, like Ivan K., are much more credible.” ~ Peter Heinegg
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The only queer people are those who don’t love anybody. ~ Rita Mae Brown
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I don’t know what the inscription says, but 1) I love the script, and 2) it’s possible that says “I don’t walk; the road walks.” It's time someone gave some credit to the road!
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~ “May the last convulsions of the Rebel South and the emotionally crippled Fifties’ American male may not be the last convulsions of humankind.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
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DICTATOR SHIC: THE ESTHETICS OF TOTALITARIANISM
~ “Presenters would languish unironically over the Versailles-inspired design of Trump’s New York penthouse, a gilded, gross thing bedecked with some art and lots of replicas. Faux rococo. Much was made of his tremendous concern with aesthetics. “Tremendous” and “beautiful,” I’d learn in 2016, were some of his favorite words, along with “huge” and “classy”—a furore of superlatives, reflecting him, the objects he likes, the towers he built, his image. Very dictator-chic.
Hitler and his obsession with size immediately came to mind. “Why always the biggest? I do this to restore to each individual German his self-respect,” he once said. The Third Reich was a project of national remaking and re-dignifying, after all, and while most dictators seek to remold “their” country in their image, Hitler and Trump are remarkably similar in the way aesthetics take prime place in their lives and policies.
If Trump had a Pinterest board, it would be full of images from Louis XIV’s Versailles; Hitler’s was ancient Greece and Rome. Architecture and aesthetics were central concerns of both men, who favored structures that would exemplify absolute power: the former as the gaudy manifestation of luxury in a time where citizens were dying of poverty (in 2018 as in the 1700s), the latter embodying the strict, towering totalitarian ideal that demanded absolute subservience and absolute fear. It is no coincidence, either, that both nationalists have aesthetic ideals that stem from foreign cultures of a lost time. These symbols of grandeur are not homegrown: they are part of a project of white European myth-making, and myth—in Trump’s America and in Hitler’s Germany—is everything.
Myth was the narrative that enabled Hitler to meld aesthetics with politics and technology—Jewish liquidation was part of the Third Reich’s “beautifying project,” after all, to purge the mythical Germanic land from contamination, and in so doing remake the German state and sublimate the German people. Trump is engaged in the same triple blending: migrants are a (racial) threat to (pure, beautiful) Western civilization, which Trump will protect (beautiful, white) America from by building a Beautiful Tremendously Big Wall.
This commingling of aesthetics, politics and science wasn’t original to Hitler: he had simply inherited a 200-year-old cultural and historical legacy.
That legacy stretches back to the German Enlightenment. Its proponents believed that progress was attainable through education and science and that everything could be measured, controlled, and planned. One could master nature. There was an objective truth that could be discovered. There was the sense that Germany could move past the shame caused by the devastating Thirty Years’ War.
Romanticism emerged as a counter-movement, claiming that Enlightenment had disenchanted the world through science, technology, efficiency. Romantics preferred intuition, the unconscious, transcendence, the idea of free will, creative genius, irrationalism. They cherished Kant’s diktat, where a free man was one who obeyed the laws of his own making. They believed that to be “German” was to have a particular “ethnic soul” and that folk tales and songs would allow them to access it. They would elevate those tales into mythology.
Later, Nietzsche, believing the Romantics soft, called for an Übermensch, a superman who would fuse politics with aesthetics and rise above the herd through sheer will to power. His writings would be transmuted into Nazi ideology after his death; his aphorisms—“the weak and unsuccessful must perish,” “the courage to do what is forbidden”—would become mantras.
Hitler needed an architecture to exemplify Third Reich ideals, German myth wasn’t enough. The country was lacking in prestige. There needed to be a greater origin myth for the Volksseele, so he turned to ancient Rome and Greece. When Alfred Ernst Rosenberg and Hitler claimed the Greeks as a “Nordic people” they were saying that the Greeks, Romans and Germans all belonged to a supreme Aryan race, from which Western civilization had descended. One of the most stupefying examples of this heritage mythos manifested as the Zeppelinfeld stadium, designed by the Third Reich’s architect of choice, Albert Speer. The stadium, which could hold about 340,000 people and which hosted the Nürnberg parades, was surrounded by 152 anti-aircraft searchlights that formed immense luminous pillars, a “cathedral of light.”
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The new age of Enlightenment in America—its fierce technological power, its systems of control, production, and consumption—has been waiting for a Romantic Übermensch to come along and repudiate its values of reason, science, and progress (values that are always declared but never maintained, whatever the epoch); a man who embodies Enlightenment domination—a neoliberal billionaire, a man set on the subjugation of humans and nature—who claims he is not a product of “the system.” America has been waiting for an irrational man who promotes irrationalism, who says “I will never tell you something I do not believe,” because what he believes supersedes truth.
His mythologizing grew stronger the more he gained power. By 2016 he’d call for a return to “traditional,” regressive values, an “American heartland” branded and commodified in T-shirts and red caps. He continues to sway a white electorate with calls of an ethnic national identity. He embodies mythology as white supremacists, growing in number and in power, value his sanctified Aryan blood: his presence conjures the return of European royalty. They find meaning in the blend of aesthetics and scientifically inaccurate claims, which elevate them and the white European identity that they so cherish. Neo-Nazis today see Prometheus in Trump; a populist demigod bringing power to (white) people.
And he has appointed himself the defender of Western civilization, battling those “from the south or the east, that threaten … to erase the bonds of culture, faith, and tradition.” America won’t let those from “shithole countries” in, while Norwegians and [others] of beautiful Nordic descent are, of course, welcome. He has now hinted that he’d like to un-Americanize those born of immigrant parents: the Constitution prevents him from doing so, but this is a man who believes he can scribble all over it. If it were only up to him, “national essence” would be law again, signed by a man who sees himself—and is seen—as a mythical European white knight.” ~
https://lithub.com/the-aesthetics-of-the-dictator/?fbclid=IwAR1_I_ZCmR3vlDovwb7Di-QaEcYg4WbVrFdV4QcdznoQiWYK1T-zx0IPag4
A model of Hitler's plan for Germania (Berlin) The articles rambles, but its best paragraphs are a reminder that dictators tend to share a taste for grand display and extravaganzas such as torch-lit rallies and military parades. Hitler didn’t go for gilded interior design, but sheer size impressed him — that seems to be the major mark of “dictator chic.”
And this is not confined to the West. Kings and emperors everywhere and throughout history all knew that ostentatious display was of essence, part of their claim to have the “mandate of heaven.”
I am somewhat reminded here of the contrast between the American and the Russian (Soviet, back then) embassies that I immediately saw when I lived in Warsaw. The Russian embassy was shabby — well, they were not going to waste their limited resources on impressing the Poles. But the American embassy, omg — talk about a grand display, starting with spectacular size (no other country had such a huge embassy in Warsaw). And looking at the two embassies, I knew that the Soviet Union was deep down a third-world country and no threat to the US. Appearances count.
Finally, let’s not forget the arguably most enduring dictatorship in history: the Papacy. The Pope is an absolute ruler, and the Vatican too has been well aware of the esthetics of grandeur and splendor.
Pope Innocent X by Diego Velasquez, 1650. How come I'm vaguely reminded of Lenin? “Innocent” is a particularly ironic papal name.But Velasquez concentrates mainly on the Pope’s shrewd face. Here is a better display of the Vatican esthetics — now being toned down by Pope Francis. This is probably a mistake, just as Vatican 2 was a mistake, leading to less splendor and uglier, “Protestantized” churches. The only excuse for Catholicism is the esthetics of excess.
John-Paul 2 on the papal throne. *
Leonard Kress shared a sign in his neighborhood: “Alternate side parking suspended in observance of the Immaculate Conception.”
Juan de Valdez Leal: The Immaculate Conception with Two Donors*
“Do sheep and cattle owe civility to the butcher?” ~ Matt Flumerfelt
ABSTRACTION AND EMPATHY IN VISUAL ART
~ “Abstraction is often considered a Modern invention—and certainly, abstraction was reborn in the early 20th century—and yet abstract art existed alongside representational art in Paleolithic caves. Throughout history, representation and abstraction have generally alternated as modes of artistic expression, based on how a society felt toward the outside world. This is a point the art historian Wilhelm Worringer made in his groundbreaking book Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, first published in 1908.
Although Worringer’s book was the first serious assessment of what would become known as Modern art, it did not address Modern and abstract art per se. Worringer completed the text, as his doctoral dissertation, in 1906 (Picasso invented Cubism around 1907). Worringer was attempting to come to grips with why the artists of some cultures, such as ancient Greece and Rome, and some periods, such as the Renaissance, worked representationally, while others—the artists of ancient Sumer and Egypt, and of the Byzantine era and the Middle Ages, as well as of many primitive cultures—worked abstractly.
Worringer realized, while studying the ethnographic objects in the collection of what is now Paris’s Musée de l’Homme, that those earlier pared-down and abstract primitive artworks must have been thought of as beautiful and functional by their societies, and that we were wrong to force our own post-Renaissance European preferences about what art should or shouldn’t look like on art from other cultures, just because their artworks differed from the representational art we valued and called beautiful. Worringer, alongside many Modern artists, was questioning long-held received beliefs about aesthetics, psychology, sociology, and what was and wasn’t beautiful—what was and wasn’t “art.”
In accepting and acknowledging the mastery of those primitive objects—as Picasso did while looking at the same artworks in the same museum—Worringer came to believe that they were admirable works of abstract art and expressed a worldview, just as the representational art of the Renaissance also expressed a worldview. Worringer classified these two stylistic polar opposite views as abstraction and empathy. He argued that when we are comfortable in the world and our surroundings—as people were in ancient Greece and Rome and during the Renaissance—we tend to want to empathize with the world: to idealize it, and to re‑create the look, and especially the three-dimensional space, of that world in our artworks; we want to make objects that objectify our delight in the self. And when we feel uncomfortable, uncertain, and anxious in the world—as people did in ancient Egypt, during the European Middle Ages, and during the Modernist era—we tend toward a will to abstract from that world: to create artworks that suppress the look and space of our surroundings, that honor our inner unrest; these eras produce a state of alienation that we might describe as “an immense spiritual dread of space.”
The ancient Egyptians focused their whole lives on building their tombs in preparation for the afterlife, and ancient Egyptian artists worked basically abstractly for over 3,000 years. Ancient Egypt was the epitome of a culture focused elsewhere, living in a state of unrest. The art historian Erwin Panofsky, discussing the Egyptians’ obsession with the afterlife, wrote: “If we were, God forbid, sociologists, we might say that the entire Egyptian civilization tended to be ‘death-oriented’ rather than ‘life-oriented’; Diodorus of Sicily expressed the same contrast much better in the sentence: ‘The Egyptians say that their houses are only hostelries, and their graves their houses.’” This existential feeling of discontent and unrest reared its head again during the Industrial Age, when Modern European artists didn’t actually invent, but rather reinvented, abstraction.
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Artists often discover that, in their personal engagement with the language of art, they arrive at similar places. Consider Picasso’s linear images of bulls, created in the early 20th century, and those Paleolithic bulls drawn and painted 40,000 years ago on the walls of the Lascaux and Altamira and Chauvet caves.
Both Picasso and those Paleolithic artists convey the same writhing line, the same gait of the animal, the same paradoxical swelling between flatness and illusionistic volume. Both prioritize not necessarily the look of the bull, but the animal’s energy, movement, and life. Picasso and those anonymous cave artists wanted us to know that we are looking at a bull, but, more importantly—using the expressive power of line—they sought to convey to viewers the animal’s motion, volume, weight, strength, and grace; the rhythm and speed of its running legs; the shifting of its massive body, like ballast, within its skin. They wanted to capture something of its power and quickness, something closer to the bull’s life-force and spirit.
It may very well be apocryphal, but Picasso is often said to have told his guide, upon exiting the Lascaux caves, in France, or the Altamira caves, in Spain: “We have invented nothing new.” Of course, Picasso, who was among the most inventive of Modern artists, knew he had invented something new. But he also realized that, through his own journey of discovery and invention, he had arrived exactly where other artists had arrived before him. These discoveries, I imagine, both reassured and humbled him.” ~
https://lithub.com/abstract-art-didnt-begin-with-picasso/?fbclid=IwAR3TLY1baMjYuNR7GdkVXXqAnTc75Ic6JhLKUXuvpZ5FgVA3JIvZr6YbBFY
Oriana:
I’m not sure if the degree of being comfortable with the world can truly account for the prevalence of realism versus abstraction in art, but it's an interesting theory. A different theory about modern art is that the development of photography created a pressure for artists to offer something different, and thus they became non-representational. But that doesn't account for non-Western art, or archaic Greek art etc. What makes more sense to me is that the early "abstract" artists wanted to emphasize certain symbolic features. The article does mention that — the expressive aspect of art, trying to render meaning rather than to imitate nature.
Whistler: Symphony in White, 1883*
THE REAL STORY OF HANUKKAH
~ “In 200 B.C., the powerful Seleucid empire took over Judea, an area encompassing parts of what is now known as Israel and the Palestinian territories. The Greek-centric kingdom was founded by Seleucus, one of Alexander the Great’s top military officers, and had steadily expanded outward from its capital of Antioch in modern-day Syria.
Some Jews embraced aspects of the Seleucids’ Hellenic culture. But when Antiochus IV Epiphanes ascended to the Seleucid throne in 175 B.C., he initiated an explicit program of Hellenization in the Jewish territory, promoting the values of worldly knowledge, physical beauty, hedonistic indulgence and polytheistic spirituality.
Antiochus’ measures were welcomed by some local Jews.
“The initiative and impetus for this often came from the locals themselves,” said Shaye J.D. Cohen, professor of Hebrew literature and philosophy at Harvard and author of From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. “They were eager to join the general, global community.”
For example, the Jewish high priest, who served as religious leader and political ruler of the semi-autonomous Judea, welcomed the construction of a gymnasium in Jerusalem, where Seleucid military officials practiced traditional Greek exercise in the nude alongside local Jews, including priests. Antiochus also encouraged the development of the Greek educational system in Jewish society.
A growing number of Jews began worshiping Greek gods, too.
The rising influence of Hellenism was not immediately a source of open conflict within the Jewish community. In fact, Hellenism permeated even the most traditional circles of Jewish society to one degree or another. A typical Judean would have worn Greek robes and been proficient in the Greek language, whether he was urban or rural, rich or poor, a pious practitioner of the Mosaic faith or a dabbler in polytheism.
“Becoming more Hellenized didn’t mean they were less Jewish as a result,” said Erich Gruen, an emeritus history professor at University of California, Berkeley, and author of Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans. “Most Jews didn’t see Hellenism as the enemy or any way compromising their sense of themselves as Jews.”
So, What Went Wrong?
Eventually, Antiochus and his Jewish allies, including the high priest Menelaus, pushed the more pious Jews too far.
Menelaus embarked on a campaign of radical Hellenization in 167 B.C., prohibiting fundamental Jewish practices, such as circumcision, on pain of death. He also introduced foreign rites into the Jewish Temple, forcing Jewish pilgrims to sacrifice pigs, which are profane in Judaism. He built an altar to Zeus on top of the sacred altar to the Jewish god, Yahweh. Prostitutes were allowed to solicit their services freely on the Temple grounds.
It’s unclear whether Menelaus acted of his own volition with the Seleucids’ backing, on Antiochus’ orders, or some combination. Some scholars believe Antiochus’ efforts in Judea were part of an empire-wide attempt to consolidate his power by uniting the disparate territories under a common Hellenist banner.
Others argue that the king’s courtiers, most likely including Jewish officials such as Menelaus, put him up to it. Those officials may have sought to “reform their religion in the name of the king,” Cohen said.
But one way or another, the tyrannical measures were too much for traditional Jews, prompting them to fight rather than acquiesce to the authorities’ demands.
Cohen characterized these Jews not as zealots, but as “realists.” Until then, they had embraced many Hellenistic norms in their own lives and accommodated the spread of practices to which they objected ― such as foreign worship ― among their co-religionists.
Broadly speaking, the Jews of Judea can be divided into two camps based on their reaction to the prohibition of ancient Jewish rituals and the desecration of the Temple. The first camp, the pietists, were unwilling to comply with the radical measures and supported armed resistance against the high priest Menelaus. The second camp, the Hellenists, either welcomed the changes or did not care enough to fight them.
Pietist Jewish militants coalesced under the leadership of the Hasmoneans, a clan of Jewish priests that fled Jerusalem for the Judean town of Modi’in. Starting in 167 B.C., Judah, the third son of the Hasmonean patriarch Mattathias, led a guerrilla war against the Seleucids and their Hellenist Jewish sympathizers, along with his four brothers.
The Hasmonean brothers’ military successes earned them the nickname “Maccabees,” likely derived from the ancient Hebrew word for hammer.
It is not clear how many Hellenist Jews fought alongside the Seleucid forces in opposition to the Hasmonean-led militias, but the pietists certainly did not enjoy the support of all Judeans. Though the civil war did not break down along purely geographic lines, the Hasmoneans had a base of support in the countryside.
There were even some observant Jews who did not side with the Hasmoneans. Years into the war, the Seleucids appointed a new high priest in an attempt to calm tensions. A group of pious Jews accepted his leadership, prompting the Maccabees to malign them in their account of events.
Thanks to a series of cunning Hasmonean military maneuvers and setbacks for the Seleucids elsewhere in their empire, the pietist militias conquered the city of Jerusalem in 164 B.C. They restored the ancient Jewish rites of the Temple, tearing down the altar to Zeus and other pagan gods.
The word “Hanukkah” means dedication in Hebrew, referring to the Maccabees’ re-dedication of the Jewish Temple, which is believed to have taken place around this time on the Jewish calendar.
Judah the Maccabee chose to celebrate the re-dedication of the Temple for eight days, the same length of time that King Solomon celebrated the consecration of the First Temple.
The eight-day festival was an attempt to “refurbish [Judah’s] image in the light of the heroes of the past,” Berkeley’s Gruen said. “Putting himself in the mold of Solomon at the time of the building of the First Temple is part of the image that Judah Maccabee wanted to deliver.”
What About The Miracle Of Oil?
The miracle of oil ― the inspiration for most of the contemporary holiday’s key rituals ― did not even become a part of Hanukkah’s mythos until centuries after the military win of the Maccabees rebel army.
The traditional Hanukkah story is that when the Maccabees arrived to re-consecrate the Temple, it was in such disarray that there was only enough olive oil to keep the sacred seven-branch candelabrum (or menorah) lit for one day. Instead, the oil miraculously lasted for eight days.
Jews celebrate Hanukkah for eight days to commemorate this miracle, lighting an additional candle on a special Hanukkah menorah ― or Hannukiah ― each night of the holiday. That is also why it is customary on Hanukkah to eat foods fried in oil, like potato latkes and doughnuts.
In reality, the rabbis likely developed the miracle-of-oil narrative several centuries after the events of Hanukkah took place. The first mention of the miracle is in a passage of the Babylonian Talmud dating to some time between the third and fifth centuries A.D.
Harvard’s Cohen said he believes that the rabbis of the Talmud came up with the miracle of oil in order to “demilitarize” Hanukkah.
“It gave the rabbis, who were uncomfortable with the Maccabees, a way to say they respected Hanukkah,” Cohen said. “Military victory and upheaval was not a good lesson for Jews to have living under the Roman empire. They didn’t want little Jewish boys to grow up and try to be Judah the Maccabee and try to attack the Romans.”
The use of oil lamps, however, was a component of the holiday almost from the start. Jews celebrated the holiday with the lighting of lamps, according to Maccabees II, a pro-Hasmonean, second-century account of events included in some versions of the Christian Bible.
Josephus Flavius, a Roman-Jewish historian in the first century A.D., also refers to “festival lights” in his description of the holiday’s observance.
Contemporary Hanukkah
Hanukkah remains a relatively minor holiday for Jews. It is far less important than Rosh Hashanah and Passover, for example.
But it has an outsize status in diaspora Jewish communities, the largest of which is in the United States, where Jewish religious devotion often takes a back seat to a sense of cultural pride. That Hanukkah typically falls around the same time as Christmas has also raised its profile.
For many Jewish Americans, it is the quintessential example of that old adage said to summarize many Jewish holidays: “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/real-history-of-hanukkah_us_585ea38ae4b0d9a594587fd3?fbclid=IwAR2M52t4DzocJux3U-1ChZAXuojQg0iULcfHUjbPS0-khOC5Qb81rIre3OA
Tilford Bartman:
If you read what historians say about this chapter of history, they paint it largely as a very nasty civil war between Jews who were largely from rural areas and had less contact with the Hellenists, and they wanted to keep pure. They wanted to practice and live a Jewish life relatively unaffected culturally or politically by the Hellenistic civilization that took root over that part of the world after Alexander the Great.
On the other hand you had Jews who tended to be more concentrated in Jerusalem and other more urban areas , and they were not opposed to political "collaboration" with the Seleucid Hellenists, and many of them were culturally radically assimilationist in regard to universal Hellenistic culture. Antiochus had many Jewish supporters, and Jews who fought with him. These people were deemed apostates.
This was a very nasty conflict, and people way back then, well over 2000 years ago, did not behave any better, and in fact sometimes in some ways worse than people do today who engage in such conflicts. One thing people did back then was boil people in water.
One way to look at it is that the people of Judea had to decide whether the universalistic culture of the Hellenists constituted a danger to their ancestral Jewish religion and its concept of God, or was it just a more modern way of progress and could be in some way merged with the practice of Judaism. My assumption is that almost all of my Jewish family and friends would have been among the latter not the former. So in Hanukkah they are in effect celebrating a victory by people who likely would have regarded them as apostates and subjected to them to some real nastiness.
Oriana:
Obviously modern mainstream Judaism is very different from the ancient Orthodox Judaism; it has adapted to modernity. If time travel were possible, the fans of the Maccabees would be appalled by it. On the other hand, historical Maccabees would probably strike us as ISIS-like fanatics.
~ “According to historian Elias Bickerman, Jason and Menelaus wanted to preserve aspects of Judaism that fit with Greek ideals, like a universal God, but to remove those parts of Jewish practice that separated Jews from others: dietary laws, Sabbath observance, circumcision. Some Hellenists continued to worship the Jewish God, but moved their worship to outdoor sanctuaries and sanctioned the pig as a sacrificial animal. It is interesting, however, that even in Second Maccabees, which is considered an anti-Hellenist tract, envoys representing Jerusalem at the quinquennial games in Tyre [the ancient version of the Olympics] “thought it improper” to purchase a sacrifice for Hercules. Instead they decided to fit out a ship and donate it to Tyre (II Maccabees 4:18-20). Although these Hellenists were willing to participate in the athletic contests, they appear to have been squeamish about doing something completely counter to Torah law.
The Maccabean struggle was also driven by issues of social class. Because only the wealthy — the urban ruling class and large landowners, led by the priests — were citizens, the “democracy” of the Hellenized Jerusalem polis oppressed the vast majority of Jews, who were powerless. Even before the Antiochan persecutions, social antagonisms existed between the zealots of the traditional faith — the urban craftspeople and village dwellers — and the free-thinking Hellenizers, suggesting that the Maccabees may have been liberators, but that they were also driven by some degree of self-interest.
In the end, the Maccabees must be judged to be both liberators and zealots. Like many figures in the Bible, these apocryphal heroes are multi-layered, and their meaning is unraveled by successive generations based on their own needs and experiences. In the world today, we may identify with the Maccabean fight to preserve Judaism in the face of assimilation and anti-Semitism, while at the same time working to mitigate religious zealotry that threatens to turn Jew against Jew.” ~
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-maccabees-heroes-or-fanatics/?fbclid=IwAR0IsPa603nAJskftuY2EfqCy6KzYW6DDJ-39Cc_zoWVkSH6a3xKkGtfXs8
“Spirituality isn't about what's real but what's comforting.” ~ Jeremy Sherman
*
Maria
Callas at the ancient theater of Delphi, 1959. “Why should I be ashamed
to get more than President Eisenhower for a whole month for a concert?
Let him sing for God’s sake!”*
FEWER CARBS, MORE FAT: HOW TO PREVENT ALZHEIMER’S
~ “In a recent extensive study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the two most commonly prescribed medications for Alzheimer’s disease not only don’t work, but actually may worsen brain function. . . . Researchers from the Mayo Clinic revealed that deriving most of dietary calories from carbohydrates was associated with an 89% increased risk for either mild cognitive impairment, or full-blown dementia. In their study, those consuming the highest levels of fat actually demonstrated a 44% reduction in risk. And this is in-line with a New England Journal of Medicine Study showing how Alzheimer’s risk is increased in lockstep with blood sugar measurements, a reflection of dietary choices.
Higher levels of physical exercise translate into lower risk for Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease as well. Even having good levels of vitamin D seems to be associated with a significantly reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
Eating few carbs, lots of healthy fat. Our dietary choices are hugely influential in our overall health, and perhaps nowhere else is this as evident as it relates to brain health. I limit my net carbs to around 30 to 50 g a day, and add in a lot of terrific fat in the form of extra virgin olive oil, nuts and seeds, and wild fish. I also supplement with the omega-3, DHA, 1000mg each day, as well as MCT oil, 1-2 tablespoons daily. This diet, along with the MCT oil, helps to create ketones, a specific type of fat that’s extremely beneficial for brain function and protection.
Supplementing here and there. Other supplements supported by good science include vitamin D, whole coffee fruit concentrate, turmeric, a good probiotic, and B complex.
Working out daily.” ~
https://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/a25350420/alzheimers-prevention-tips
Coffee fruit, aka coffee cherry, extremely rich in antioxidants. It stimulates the production of Brain Derived Neurotropic Factor (BDNF), a protein essential for maintaining healthy cognition and a host of other brain-related processes such as sleep and mood
“Coffee fruit is hand-picked on coffee farms—as it has been done for over 1,000 years—and it is known by the farmers that the fruit is rejuvenating…and those who pick it have younger looking hands. This is because the fruit is high in polyphenol compounds: proanthocyanidins, chlorogenic acid, quinic acid, ferulic acid and caffeic acid. The fruit has been found to be higher in antioxidants than tea, vitamin C and E, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries and pomegranate.”
Oriana:
I don't take a probiotic, but I do eat fermented foods every day, and foods that contain resistant starch (pressure-cooked yams are my staple, and I'm always on the lookout for greenish bananas). Good fats — plenty. And I've lowered my protein — excess protein is turned into glucose, which is one reason why Atkins' diet doesn't work after a while.
This neurologist's diet is based on the idea of keeping blood sugar and insulin as low as possible. One clue is that Alzheimer's is sometimes called “brain diabetes.” Note also MTC oil — this is "liquid ketones." I prefer to use coconut oil, but have been looking into MTC as well . . . don't terribly like what's out there (plastic bottles, for one thing). There's also the yummy Irish grass-fed butter for the beta-hydroxy-butyrate.
But diet isn’t everything. We need to keep mentally active, and hardly anything does it so well as 1) creative work 2) socializing, especially if it includes giving and receiving affection.
ending on beauty:
At the cape, I stood alone on a platform
watching swans gather, mallards and herons,
and below me, a single hare, feeding itself
in the twilight on soft, newly mown grass.
~ Anya Silver, Cape May
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