Oscar Wilde in the PALL MALL GAZETTE on "The Best Hundred Books by the Best Hundred Judges":

Books, I fancy, may be conveniently divided into three classes:

1. Books to read, such as Cicero's LETTERS, Suetonius, Vasari's LIVES OF THE PAINTERS, the AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Benvenuto Cellini, Sir John Mandeville, Marco Polo, St Simon's MEMOIRS, Mommsen, and (till we get a better one) Grote's HISTORY OF GREECE.

2. Books to reread, such as Plato and Keats: in the sphere of poetry, the masters not the minstrels; in the sphere of philosophy, the seers not the savants.

3. Books not to read at all, such as Thompson's SEASONS, Rogers's ITALY, Paley's EVIDENCES, all the Fathers except Augustine, all John Stuart Mill except the ESSAY ON LIBERTY, all Voltaire's plays without any exception, Butler's ANALOGY, Grant's ARISTOTLE, Hume's ENGLAND, Lewes's HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY, all argumentative books & all books that try to prove anything.

The third class is by far the most important. To tell people what to read is, as a rule, either useless or harmful; for the appreciation of literature is a question of temperament not teaching; to Parnassus there is no primer... But to tell people what not to read is a very different matter, and I venture to recommend it as a mission to the University Extension scheme.

Indeed, it is one that is eminently needed in this age of ours, an age that reads so much it has no time to admire, and writes so much it has no time to think. Whoever will select out of the chaos of our modern curricula "The Worst Hundred Books" and publish a list of them, will confer on the rising generation a real and lasting benefit.

After expressing these views I suppose I should not offer any suggestions...but I hope you will allow me the pleasure of being inconsistent, as I am anxious to put in a claim for a book that has been strangely omitted by most of the excellent judges who have contributed to your columns. I mean the GREEK ANTHOLOGY. The beautiful poems contained in this collection seem to me to hold the same position with regard to Greek dramatic literature as do the delicate little figurines of Tanagra to the Pheidian marbles, and to be quite as necessary for complete understanding of the Greek spirit.

I am also amazed to find that Edgar Allan Poe has been passed over. Surely this marvellous lord of rhythmic expression deserves a place? If, in order to make room for him, it be necassary to elbow out someone else, I should elbow out Southey, and I think Baudelaire might be most advantageously substituted for Keble. No doubt both in THE CURSE OF KEHAMA and in THE CHRISTIAN YEAR there are poetic qualities of a certain kind, but absolute catholicity of taste is not without its dangers. It is only an auctioneer who should admire all schools of art.

(seeking) (the elusive) negative capability

"To practice self-liberating thoughts, whatever thought arises in your mind, just look at it and let go and relax. Look straight at its essential nature and let go and relax; it will be self-liberated. Do not concern yourself with what you are thinking about. Do not concern yourself with the object of your thoughts, whether it is a person or a thing. Just look at the essence of the thought itself."

This is drama, story, our stepping outside of self to view the whole. And so we act them out, the same tales, embody them.

Embody them.

It seems the thing is, the trouble is, claiming ownership. On either side, ownership is slavery (non-liberating). Thoughts blamed, thoughts blaming us, me. What are they anyway, thoughts? Coming into being by taking our shape...

(Oh, good story!)

When I was a small child, I would be held in awe for hours by the jinns wrought of painted roses on my lampshade. I would wait, held watching, until a train went by in the distance, bringing the morning light. The light train, I called it.

Sinister flowers indeed. :)

+++++++++

Who is this doing the watching?

How very liberating

agalmata

The synoptic function of the myth whose circular structure duplicates that of the cosmos enables it to integrate in one vision the manifold experiences acquired by men through contact with things. As in a theater the representation of the invisible takes shape and puts rhythm into space. At the center of the enclosure built on a hill and opened to the outer world, the drama that holds together the lives of men with the lives of gods, as well as the forces of heaven with those of the earth, enacts the meeting point of all the perspectives to which it communicates its primal unity. Jean-Francois Mattei, "The Theater of Myth in Plato," in Griswold, Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings

The exercise of stepping outside, the need to observe, seems to be one of the main functions of art, tales and myths, it seems to me. I think of the "Pagans" (a late imposed pejorative: "country person"; "bumpkin") framing it out in plays, holding huge festivals and important competitions, leaving us some of the greatest and most complex (as in a grasping of paradox) works of wisdom that stand to this day.

The Christian Church would later similarly act things out in Mass in the sacrament of Transubstantiation. Very magical. The presence of the congregation, the church, the priest, the words in the rite: The conscious participation of all parties *collectively* imagining the material / physical "god" of the bread (earth /clay /flesh) and wine (spirit / blood) -- pure, essential magic, and all very Greek:

from Robert Lloyd Mitchell's Hymn to Eros A Reading of Plato's Symposium:
(from Alcibiades) :

 . . . Alcibiades speaks of Socrates by means of images. Socrates, he says, is like those figures of Silenus, made by craftsmen, which sit in carver's shops: the kind that portray the satyr with a pipe or flute in his hand, but are made so they can be opened, revealing images of gods within. . . .
. . . .Here the word for 'image' is *agalmata*: originally, images specifically of the gods, though eventually coming to refer to statues generally. But it did so out of an original meaning of 'praise', 'exultation', 'rejoicing'. In other words, these images do not just stand there like our 'sta-tues', 're-presenting' their object. Instead, they glory the gods, they rejoice them. * It is out of this activity that the gods come to visibility in these images. *

not as she is, but as she fills his dream

word cloud source

Corbin - Dante - i Fedeli d'Amore

This is so Rossetti*, who, like a priest, uses his art to consecrate the material.
link

*Heart’s Hope

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882)

BY what word’s power, the key of paths untrod,
Shall I the difficult deeps of Love explore,
Till parted waves of Song yield up the shore
Even as that sea which Israel crossed dryshod?
For lo! in some poor rhythmic period,
Lady, I fain would tell how evermore
Thy soul I know not from thy body, nor
Thee from myself, neither our love from God.
Yea, in God’s name, and Love’s, and thine, would I
Draw from one loving heart such evidence
As to all hearts all things shall signify;
Tender as dawn’s first hill-fire, and intense
As instantaneous penetrating sense,
In Spring’s birth-hour, of other Springs gone by.

___________________

From The Prophetic Meaning of Beauty. Henry Corbin on Ruzbehan Baqli of Shiraz:

There is, out of all human experiences, one unique event that leads to this union: human love for a being of beauty. Such a love is purified of all carnal, possessive instincts, all utilitarian ends, all obsessions and neurotic “needs.” Such a chaste love is an ecstasy before the revelation of divine beauty in a being of beauty, a theophany. This cult of Beauty was professed by Ibn ‘Arabi, and in Iran by Ruzbehan Baqli of Shiraz and all of his school. These Corbin calls the Fidèles d’amour in order to highlight their affinities with the Fedeli d’amore of Dante.
[...]
Beauty understood in this way is experienced as a sacred sign, a sacrament. At the limit of this experience of love, a love that “does not split,” is the esoteric experience of tawhîd: The Divine being is simultaneously the Loved, the Lover and the Love itself. (p. 17)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
background music:

wire in the blood

Been hooked the past 2 weeks doing something I've never done: hooked on a tv series that I watch on Netflix, the Robson Green thing, Wire in the Blood. He's Tony Hill, a psychologist who works with a police unit, profiling murderers. And a wonderful jungy brother. It's a great way to get ideas across, the realty of the psyche as it lives us and moves us.

Green of course is a lovable creature. Not sure who else could play this. Dan Radcliffe in 20 yrs. A bit of (my favorite) Robert Donat in them both. An underlying rock-hard benevolence.

I'm looking at the series as evidence of the way people are opening to negative capability. Needs that move us to look away from a stifling material existence. A material spirituality. (In America we don't have pubs. We have shopping malls. Mall church.) (When will I stop preaching?) But it's why I think I've been drawn to Wire in the Blood. The inner dialogue made external. It's me, you, all of us, what we really are. Something you only find in novels, or in films that are willing to risk narration (which is almost always risk, unless you're Jane Austen).

Of course the series started as a novel.

I wrote my first book from the objective angle, as if you were watching it. Very little internal. Was interesting to do. From teaching and nursing, writing all those "behavior objectives." Plan, Implement, and Observe the response. And if you can't observe it ----- does it not exist? Of course not. But that's the step-back social science has taken as it tries to free itself from its projections.

And that is how I am as I sit down and consider it at the moment. Not much about me; the me always seems to become you. Again -- like the character in Wire in the Blood.

Hm. So that's why I'm drawn to it.

Oh, and he has intimacy issues. Does he? I think our culture has the intimacy issues. Dr. Hill is mask-less.

The series is the perfect place for sexual commentary, because they're so often solving sex crimes, and it's that lack of intimacy, the way sex, which should be that ultimate acting out of *all that a relationship is at every moment*, has become distanced from one's whole being. A thing in itself. How fuckedup is that?

Hm.

ps. that stepping back from projections, trying to see things. that's what the blog has been about for me. my resilient boat a submarine. :)

"an enterprising mutiny mounted by beauty against repression"

Oh yeah.
review: beauty to be taken seriously

The NEW Aestheticism

I give you --
Peeps on a stick