Unrelated

Our weather here is now as fine as can be, and although my impatience would prise open the buds yet unburst on the trees, the greenness is returning to this place and spring flowers are everywhere, jumbo bumblebees buzzing between the blooms. Cafés and bars have put out their canopied tables outdoors, and the harbours are witness to a resettlement of boats. The days are long and full of light and the nights rapidly narrowing away almost to nothing.

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I'm listening to Camper van Beethoven - one of my favourite bands from years ago. Their early LPs were re-released on CD a few months back under the collective title Cigarettes and Carrot Juice. There was always one word, and only one word in what is perhaps their most famous song (Take the Skinheads Bowling) that I could never quite discern. Now, a web-search reveals it to be ‘clocks’, and I find myself visited by a certain anticlimactic feeling: after all, I was uncertain about that word for fifteen years.

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Babying or management or revelry or dessert or gin: a recent search referral to this site that reads like a little poem.

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Once memory, desire and language have been conquered, could the Party still claim to have power? To elaborate: power here is the ability to direct memory, desire and language, to steer them where they need to be against their propensity to go astray. As long as steering is necessary, the power is not absolute: dissent is still possible, people haven’t been conquered. Yet as soon as the power becomes absolute, the need for it to be applied disappears. What good is power that can never be used? - Alex Baylin.

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On forgetting one’s homeland.

For a long time, you've neglected your homeland, and forgotten your own, those things whom blood or love gave to you. You live in Rome; nor do you give any thought to returning home, so much has the charm of the immortal city overcome you. Thus the band of Ithacans, who'd been sent ahead, abandoned their country for the delight of lotus, and abandoned their leader too - Alciato, Emblem 115.

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My favourite joke for a long time was the one about the dyslexic devil-worshipper who sold his soul to Santa.

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Etymology is not always useful in clarifying a concept. In this case it is. The Latin, absurdum, literally means out of deafness. A possible explanation is that the absurd is what people say who are deaf to reason. The term would in that case be more or less synonymous with the irrational. But a more interesting interpretation suggests itself: The absurd is a view of reality that comes out of deafness itself-that is, an observation of actions that are no longer accompanied by language. Such actions are, precisely, meaningless. Individuals with normal hearing can easily replicate this experience by turning off the sound on television: The actors on the screen now go on busily as before, but much of the time it is impossible to say what their actions mean. The effect usually is comic. By the same token, actions that had self-evident meaning when accompanied by language suddenly appear to be problematic. Deafness problematizes. Some psychologists have suggested that deaf people tend to he suspicious. They learn willy-nilly what Nietzsche recommended as a philosophical discipline: the ‘art of mistrust.’ If Nietzsche was right, one might conclude that deafness, because of its problematization of ordinary reality, carries with it a certain cognitive gain (which, of course, would not make the condition any less unfortunate).

The absurd is an outlandish, a grotesque representation of reality. It posits a counterworld-just what Zijderveld intended when he desscribed folly as ‘reality in a looking-glass.’ Not so incidentally, the etymology of the word grotesque is of some interest too. The word comes from the Italian, grottesca, and refers to strange paintings that appeared on the walls of grottoes. This etymology suggests a picture: One leaves the ordinary world of sun-lit reality and enters a dark grotto, and then, suddenly, one is confronted with startlingly strange visions. If this experience is of sufficient intensity, one is enveloped in this other reality and, at least temporarily, the ordinary world outside loses its accent of reality. The picture of a grotto graphically conveys what Alfred Schutz called a finite province of meaning. - Peter L. Berger.

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There is a man in the town where I live who goes by the unfortunate name (to an English-speaker), of Hans Glans. This is right up there with Fanny Tang on my all-time favourite amusing names list.

Posted by misteraitch at May 14, 2003 03:44 PM | TrackBack