READIN

Friday, June 18th, 2004

Today I picked up and started reading Untimely Meditations -- specifically reading the second essay, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History in Life", which John Holbo made reference to a few days ago. I must say I'm blown away by the writing! Far from intimidatingly abstruse, this essay is positively engaging! This is the Cambridge edition, I'm not sure who the translator is because the book is not to hand right now, but it sure is well done.

My plan is to write a paper comparing the role of forgetting for Nietzsche's happy man, with the tribal groups in The Myth of the Eternal Return, who use forgetting as a way of turning their history into myth. (When I say this is my plan, be sure to take it with a grain of salt -- I have not written anything much longer than a page in years.) I have this idea that I've been working on since 1987 or so, about two different ways of visualizing time, that I think Nietzsche and Eliade may be good representatives of the two ways.

posted evening of June 18th, 2004: Respond
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Wednesday, June 9th, 2004

John Holbo has an interesting post up examining Bookslut's laws of adaptation, in which he includes this passage from Nietzsche's On the Use and Abuse of History for Life:

The person who cannot set himself down on the crest of the moment, forgetting everything from the past, who is not capable of standing on a single point, like a goddess of victory, without dizziness or fear, will never know what happiness is. Even worse, he will never do anything to make other people happy. Imagine the most extreme example, a person who did not possess the power of forgetting at all, who would be condemned to see everywhere a coming into being. Such a person no longer believes in his own being, no longer believes in himself, sees everything in moving points flowing out of each other, and loses himself in this stream of becoming ... Or, to explain myself more clearly concerning my thesis: There is a degree of insomnia, of rumination, of the historical sense, through which living comes to harm and finally is destroyed, whether it is a person or a people or a culture. In order to determine this degree of history and, through that, the borderline at which the past must be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, we have to know precisely how great the plastic force of a person, a people, or a culture is ...

It seems to me like this could tie in pretty well with Eliade's stuff about transformation of history into myth as a way of forgetting. Though I am still not sure quite what Eliade (or Nietzsche) is getting at... -- and sorry, yes, about posting such cryptic notes on my reading of this book -- I am finding it kind of mystifying. In particular I can't really get a sense of the book as an essay -- he is cataloguing a lot of disparate observations that seem somehow to be related but is not (as yet) doing the work of pulling them together in a way that I can recognize. But perhaps in the last half of the work it will start to cohere. I do find the disparate observations quite intriguing.

posted afternoon of June 9th, 2004: Respond

Thursday, May 27th, 2004

The Myth of Eternal Return -- Eliade's take on ritualistic behavior (or at least a subset of same) is that by reenacting segments of their culture's creation myth, people can extend the scope of their "created" cosmos to a new element of their reality -- e.g. a marriage or a new baby. On p. 24 he says, "... it is not merely a question of imitating an exemplary model... the principal consideration is the result of that hierogamy, i.e. the Cosmic creation." This seems like an interesting distinction to me.

posted afternoon of May 27th, 2004: Respond

Wednesday, May 26th, 2004

The set went ok. It was about 15 minutes long, I had a lot of energy throughout but my fingers started losing track about 2/3 of the way in. I missed a lot of notes on "Rag Mama" and by the end of the song it seemed like I had fallen apart almost completely. But, the audience liked it so who am I to judge? Other guitar players tend to be a pretty forgiving audience.

Passing the time before the music started, I took Underworld idly off the bookshelf there and started reading it on a whim -- I found the language most easy on my ears. So I borrowed it and will see how I do reading it over the next few months. It is too big for me to really carry it around conveniently so I imagine it will be mostly evening reading.

posted evening of May 26th, 2004: Respond
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🦋 Reading with expectations

As noted below, my memory of reading the book from 15 years ago suggested that the whole body of the story is Marlowe's journey upriver, and the final scene is his arrival at the Inner Station to find Kurtz dead. In this fantasy Heart of Darkness, the final sentence of the novel is "Mistah Kurtz, he dead."

Needless to say, the actual book goes a little different -- I spent a little time while reading the middle third or so of it, trying to reconcile my expectations to the plot that was unfolding. I did not abandon them entirely until Marlowe actually met Kurtz; until then I was holding on to a thin thread of hope that his talk about their meeting was some kind of metaphor. This shows, I think, the danger of rereading something with expectations when your memory of it is so far gone, and suggests that I should reread it a second time -- it is after all quite short. So I think I will keep it along with me for a while yet. I am going to turn my attention to The Myth of the Eternal Return; but when that drags (as it will) I will have some backup reading on hand.

posted evening of May 26th, 2004: Respond
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Heart of Darkness -- I had forgotten that Kurtz is alive when they get to the Inner Station.

posted morning of May 26th, 2004: Respond
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Sunday, May 23rd, 2004

I have been distracted, a bit, from Heart of Darkness by the book which Ed Antoine gave me for my birthday present; it is The Myth of the Eternal Return: or, Cosmos and History, by Mircea Eliade. I can't quite tell yet, what is the nature of the book; its prose is the very dense essay style that makes me reluctant to read philosophy (though I believe its genre is probably sociology). But this is a book that I am judging by (a) its cover and (b) the fact that Ed gave it to me, as worth spending some time being puzzled by.

The moment I saw the title I had a pretty fully formed thought along the lines of, "Cool -- he is going to investigate how different early cultures came up with the idea of a cyclical cosmos, and how that relates to being human." -- I know -- a lot to come up with from 10 words, 5 of which are articles, conjunctions or prepositions -- still, Ed assured me that I was on the right track with that supposition. And that investigation is interesting to me; so I am trying to get on board with Eliade's difficult prose.

So far, a lot of what he is saying seems like pretty intuitive ideas backed up with historical research. One thing that I liked: he was talking about how cultures would tend to think of unknown territory as being part of the chaos that preceded creation, and when they conquered or explored new territory would perform rituals that made it part of the created universe; at one point on page 15, he writes, "...the temple or sacred city is always the meeting point of the three cosmic regions: heaven, earth, and hell." And that made me start thinking about how if "hell" is the chaos outside our knowledge, and "heaven" is Platonic forms, i.e. pure knowledge, then "earth" is the imposition of forms onto the unknown, is reality which we can dominate by naming.

posted afternoon of May 23rd, 2004: Respond

Thursday, May 13th, 2004

🦋 Found the answer

Heart of Darkness -- I was wondering yesterday what was with Marlowe's journey by foot to the Central Station -- the introduction explains that the Central Station was in Kinshasa, at Stanley Falls, and reproduces a map of the overland route (a trek which Conrad made in 1890). Clearly the falls would be an obstacle to shipping so the steamer had to stop there; not quite clear to me why another boat could not run from there to the coast.

posted evening of May 13th, 2004: Respond

Tuesday, May 11th, 2004

I read the first chapter of Heart of Darkness last night and this morning -- but I think I will start over this evening. I seem to be reading a little too fast and missing some detail. Nice imagery though.

I'm a little perplexed by Marlowe's 20-day hike to the Central Station: why would the company not build the Central Station at the mouth of the river where it would be accessible by ship? The station is certainly on the river, I guess at a point where it is not navigable by ocean-going vessels. But why? If the whole point of the station is to serve as a transfer point between freshwater craft and ocean-going vessels, wouldn't it make more sense to build it further down the river? Maybe there is a long stretch of the river that no boats can navigate -- I can't quite picture this though.

posted morning of May 11th, 2004: Respond

Monday, May 10th, 2004

This thread on Brad DeLong's site reminded me that I have not read Heart of Darkness since college -- in the same class indeed where I first read Don Quixote -- and that I have very little memory of it. Time to go back and reread; I picked up a copy of this newly topical book at Coliseum today.

posted afternoon of May 10th, 2004: Respond
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