… Perhaps all magical objects are knottings together of objects and the subjects that conjure with them.

This is from Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things by Steven Connor (2011). Today’s paraphernalia (my choice) are Cards and Knots:

… There seem to be certain kinds of objects whose mission is to embody the powers of flatness, which we may identify as the tabulating power of abstracting and reshuffling the world. Such objects are always characterised by the duality of being objects that bring the world together into one place even as they are also objects in the world. They are outside the world which is also outside them. The most powerful, and the most widely disseminated, of the objects which undergo this oscillation is the card. Let us say that cards are the apotheosis of the flat, and the tabulating power that it gives.

The card has been at the centre of the automatic processes that govern the modern world. …

[ ... ]

… We are often told that the distinguishing feature of the human hand is its opposable thumb, and more specifically the fact that the thumb and index finger can be pressed together, enabling all kinds of actions from turning screws to the flipping of coins and the stitching of lace. The two dimensions of depth and length of the card both seem to figure this opposable relation. Held between finger and thumb, the thinness of the card is a minimal membrane, an all-but-nothing, that seems to be nothing but the difference between front and back, recto and verso. Held by its edges, the card suddenly reveals its spring and resistance, its unsuspected kinetic energy and coiled violence.

… Playing cards are … magical partly because they are meaningless in themselves; their power only comes from the signs they carry, and the meaning of those signs in relation to other signs. The meaning of the playing card is in part its arbitrariness, its flatness, its lack of intrinsic life or meaning, the fact that no card means anything on its own. Its flatness signifies this dry semioticity. Its life comes from contingency and adjacency, from what occurs when it is laid next to another card.

On to Knots:

… A knot is the magical image of time turned upon itself. There is an important difference between a knot and a loop, bow or circle. For these latter merely mark or suspend time, open up a nook or epoch in time, a passage of time in which time can appear not to pass. But a knot does more than merely remit the onward pressure of time, for it also turns it against or back into itself. A loop slackens the tension of ongoing time, but a knot makes that tension strive against itself, so that, the more one pulls on the two sides of a knot, the tighter it gets, time coagulating into space and space becoming ever more charged with time.

… The knot concentrates a power of unloosing, disperses a power of retention. The knot is a figure for the logical difficulty of paradox not because it simply makes the paradoxical relation plain or lays it open to view, but because it is itself paradoxical and self-confuting. A knot is a figure that offers to help us grasp all at once the idea of something that can neither quite be pulled apart or pull itself together. It is implicated in what it signifies.

The knot is the image of life itself, with man as the anastomosis of spirit and body, in which, as in John Donne’s ’The Ecstasy,’ is ‘knit / That knot, which makes us man.’* The dissolution of death is the untying of that knot.

… In a sense, the power of the knot is precisely that it images the empty self-relation of that which comes into being in turning or reflecting on itself, and is thus twin to the self-conjuring cogito. A knot is not so much a magical object in itself, as a magical form, or the precipitate of a magical practice. It is a way of doing magic with, and imparting magical possibility to, more mundane objects — laces, ribbons, hankies, wires and hair. Indeed, the definition of a magical object I offered earlier, as something that helps us credit our own powers to invest objects with magical powers, has something characteristically involuted and knotty about it. Perhaps all magical objects are knottings together of objects and the subjects that conjure with them.

[*Donne's lines are actually "Because such fingers need to knit / That subtle knot which makes us man,"]

My most recent previous post from Connor’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… We have arrived. The door opens. We don’t go in. Someone leaves through the door. Who is it? …

Last post from The Parasite by Michel Serres (originally published in 1980):

… History in general as it is written or told is a network of bifurcations where parasites move about.

… The  noise heard at the door temporarily stops the rats from eating the leftover ortolans. Why is it always the rats’ point of view? Why don’t we think of what happens to the host? He never sees that there are rats there. The door opens: no one is there. The table is immobile and the obscurity is quiet. Nothing has happened. The host closes the door and goes back to bed. The noise starts again, the noise of chewing, history. He gets up again. He opens the door suddenly. There will never be any rats.

The observer makes the observed disappear by bringing along his noisemakers. His sandals make the floorboards creak. He told his wife that he was going to see what was going on.

People always talk about the light that is indispensable for seeing and observing. Even Maxwell’s demon needs this light.

People hardly ever talk about the noise attached like a string to the tongue, indispensable for speaking; people hardly ever talk about the signal attached to the sign. Noise of the mouth, of the teeth, of the lips, so close to the repulsive noise of the eater.

[illustration from Wikipedia]

… Intuition speaks silently or speaks softly enough so as never to scare things, to tame them a bit. Oil the door and silence one’s steps to surprise the rats a bit before they leave. Perhaps film them among the bones and scraps. But only parasites have this genius for being invisible.

… The observer is perhaps the inobservable. He must, at least, be last on the chain of observables. If he is supplanted, he becomes observed. Thus he is in a position of a parasite. Not only because he takes the observation that he doesn’t return, but also because he plays the last position.

… From the beginning, we have moved from discourse to discourse, either written or told; we have gone from box to box; each is empty and contains the following; the explanation or the reading goes from implication to implication; we are out of breath, waiting, in suspense. Finally the black box is there, finally the true one, the true banquet, that of the gods, no longer that of ideas or of genres/genera, no longer that of allegories, of figures of style or speech, of useless words, but the banquet, where one really drinks the drink of immortality, where good really wins, where love is finally love and no longer a punishment, where wine is not drink for illusions and hangovers, but where ambrosia finally gives the invariability of what is. We have arrived. The door opens. We don’t go in. Someone leaves through the door. Who is it? The door itself. They made fun of us. The only information that comes out of the black box is that there is a channel through which information passes. The only message that comes out of the path is that there is a path by which messages pass. A thread comes out of the box. The only thing that passes in the channel is the name of the channel.

My most recent previous post from Serres’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… The “pleasure” afforded by the artwork, according to traditional doctrine, always also contains a hint of malicious joy, indeed of scorn, directed against the vanity of seeking access to the world through reason.

… the artist is … struck by the order that emerges from his own hand in the course of a rapidly changing relationship between provocation and possible response, problem and solution, irritation and escape.

Continuing through Art as a Social System by Niklas Luhmann (2000):

… In a manner that is matched neither by thought nor by communication, perception presents astonishment and recognition in a single instant. Art uses, enhances, and in a sense exploits the possibilities of perception in such a way that it can present the unity of this distinction. To put it differently, art permits observation to oscillate between astonishment and recognition, even if this requires worldly media such as space and time as a means of securing continuity. This is not a matter of indulging in the automatic recognition of what is already known — the kind of pleasure produced by the “culture industry” that was so arrogantly rejected by Horkheimer and Adorno. Rather, the pleasure of astonishment, already described in antiquity, refers to the unity of the difference between astonishment and recognition, to the paradox that both intensify one another.

… The imaginary world of art offers a position from which something else can be determined as reality — as do the world of language, with its potential for misuse, or the world of religion, albeit in different ways. Without such markings of difference, the world would simply be the way it is.

… Only within a differentiated distinction between a real and a fictional, imagined reality can a specific relationship to reality emerge, for which art seeks different forms — whether to “imitate” what reality does not show (its essential forms, its Ideas, its divine perfection), to “criticize” reality for what it does not want to admit (its shortcomings, its “class rule,” its commercial orientation), or to affirm reality by showing that its representation succeeds, in fact, succeeds so well that creating the work of art and looking at it is a delight. The concepts of imitation/critique/affirmation do not exhaust the possibilities. Another intent might address the observer as an individual and contrive a situation in which he faces reality (and ultimately himself) and learns how to observe it in ways he could never learn in real life. One thinks here particularly of the novel. The novel is an imitation that, rather than referring to reality directly, copies one imaginary reality into another such reality.

… The artwork commits the observer to fixed forms. Within the context of modern communication, however, this constraint leaves room for applying the formally established difference between imagined and ordinary reality in multiple ways. Because it embeds its forms in objects, art need not enforce a choice between consensus and dissent, or between an affirmative and a critical attitude toward reality. Art needs no reasonable justification, and by unfolding its power of conviction in the realm of perceptible objects, it demonstrates this. The “pleasure” afforded by the artwork, according to traditional doctrine, always also contains a hint of malicious joy, indeed of scorn, directed against the vanity of seeking access to the world through reason.

… In the twentieth century, one encounters artworks that seek to cancel the difference between a real and an imagined reality by presenting themselves in ways that make them indistinguishable from real objects. Should we take this trend as an internal reaction of art against itself? … No ordinary object insists on being taken for an ordinary thing, but a work that does so betrays itself by this very effort. The function of art in such a case is to reproduce the difference of art. But the mere fact that art seeks to cancel this difference and fails in its effort to do so perhaps says more about art than could any excuse or critique. Here, what we learn to observe is the inevitable and ineradicable rule of difference.

… Unlike philosophy, art does not search for islands of security from which other experiences can be expelled as fantastic or imaginary, or rejected as a world of secondary qualities or enjoyment, of pleasure or common sense. Art radicalizes the difference between the real and the merely possible in order to show through works of its own that even in the realm of possibility there is order after all. Art opposes, to use a Hegelian formulation, “the prose of the world,” but for precisely this reason it needs this contrast.

This leads us back to the ancient topic of astonishment, which affects not only the observer of art but also the artist. The observer may be struck by the work’s success and then embark on a step-by-step reconstruction of how it came about. But the artist is equally struck by the order that emerges from his own hand in the course of a rapidly changing relationship between provocation and possible response, problem and solution, irritation and escape. This is how order emerges from self-irritation, which, however, requires the prior differentiation of a medium of art to decide that this order differs in its stakes from what occurs elsewhere in reality.

My most recent previous post from Luhmann’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… He was listening to the speech of the everyday … — the speech of temporal eternity saying: now, now, now.

This is from the beginning of The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot (1993; originally published in 1969). He heads his introductory chapter with quotes from Nietzsche:

“Because, for us, something might appear in the heart of the day that would not be the day, something in an atmosphere of light and limpidity that would represent the shiver of fear out of which the day came?”

Speaking is a fine madness: with it man dances over and above all things. (Nietzsche)

Now to extracts from Blanchot’s text:

… You know very well that the only law — there is no other — consists in this unique, continued, universal discourse that everyone, be he separated from or united with others, be he speaking or silent, receives, bears, and sustains through an intimate accord prior to any decision; an accord such that any attempt to repudiate it, promoted or willed always by the very will of discourse, confirms it, just as any aggression makes it more sure and any arrest makes it endure. — I know. — You know, then, that when you speak of these interruptions during which speech would be interrupted, you do speak of them, immediately and even in advance returning them to the uninterrupted force of discourse. …

[ ... ]

… He was listening to the speech of the everyday, grave, idle, saying everything, holding up to each one what he would have liked to say, a speech unique, distant and always close, everyone’s speech, always already expressed and yet infinitely sweet to say, infinitely precious to hear — the speech of temporal eternity saying: now, now, now.

How had he come to will the interruption of discourse? And not the legitimate pause, the one permitting the give and take of conversation, the benevolent, intelligent pause, nor that beautifully poised waiting with which two interlocutors, from one shore to another, measure their right to communicate. No, not that, and no more so the austere silence, the tacit speech of visible things, the reserve of those invisible. What he had wanted was entirely different, a cold interruption, the rupture of the circle. And at once this had happened: the heart ceasing to beat, the eternal speaking drive stopping.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… The line can draw a boundary between musical sound and noise by being the threshold at which too much of the world is detected. In this way the line is a sonic buffer, a silencing device.

This is from Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts by Douglas Kahn (1999). As I noted in my first post from this book, this material can be read as analogous to photography (after a sonic to visual translation):

… Within the history of Western art music, noises were not intrinsically extramusical; they were simply the sounds music could not use. The determination of extramusicality rested not in a hard and fast materiality but in the power of musical practice and discourse to negotiate which sonorous materials will be incorporated from a world of sounds, including the sounds of its own making, and how.

… Although increasingly alienated from one another, acoustics and Western art music were both in the business of determining what was music and what was noise. Sometimes they agreed, and sometimes they did not, but even in disagreement they were usually complementary. Two lines played an important role in this determination — the graphic line, whether visible or figurative, inscribed by hand, mind, machine, and nature, and the conceptual dividing line between noise and music, between sound and musical sound.

The line between sound and musical sound stood at the center of the existence of avant-garde music, supplying a heraldic moment of transgression and its artistic raw material, a border that had to be crossed to bring back unexploited resources, restock the coffers of musical materiality, and rejuvenate Western art music. To make extramusical material musical, the sounds of the world were processed in numerous ways. First, the sounds of the world were to be themselves categorized, explicitly or implicitly, into referential sounds and areferential noises, such that a noise could be incorporated into the areferential operations of music. … Second, these privileged noises of the sphere of extramusicality would align themselves with already existing musical attributes and elements, such as dissonance, timbre, and percussion.

[paragraph break added here by me to make this easier to read online] Third, these noisy correspondences within music were emphasized as themselves bearing traces of the world of true extramusicality; this was the basis of what I call the practice of resident noises. Fourth, sounds were technologically selected or manipulated to render them suitable as musical material, as in phonographic practices such as musique concrète, and finally, sounds were processed through the operations of aurality, a feature of John Cage’s dictum to hear sounds in themselves. The underlying presumption of all these was that the nature of music was sonic, thereby the importation of worldly sounds into music meant diminishing or eradicating sounds that were too significant. Most important, this process displaced significance to music itself, such that the most common way to make noise significant was to make it music, but by doing so the significance of sounds was rendered insignificant.

Resolve against the mimetic ran up against the changed conditions of aurality in the latter half of the nineteenth century represented most significantly by phonography, the mimesis machine that incorporated all classes of sounds. … Phonography was associated with a number of crucial developments: it foregrounded the parameters of a sound and all sound, presented the possibility of incorporating all sound into cultural forms, shifted cultural practices away from a privileging of utterance toward a greater inclusion of auditon, placed the voice of presence into the contaminated realm of writing, and linked textuality and literacy with sound through inscriptive practices. The promise of phonography, before and after the actuality of the phonograph, added another player to older discourses and practices based on musical technologies, and when it pointed more toward the production and not the reproduction of music, phonography necessarily invoked the world of all sound. The pressure of worldly sound brought to bear on musical practice was exacerbated in the 1920s with the marked development of auditive technologies and institutions — particularly improvements in microphony and the phonograph and the development of sound film — as practiced within music, radio, and cinema. It was within this complex that dramatically new approaches to sound began to materialize.

To make my way through the entanglements of Western art music, noise, and phonography, I concentrate on the inscriptive practices involved through the concentrated figure of the line. The line can draw a boundary between musical sound and noise by being the threshold at which too much of the world is detected. In this way the line is a sonic buffer, a silencing device. The line can also inhere the world of all sound, the most familiar instance being the intensification of the world packed into the jagged phonographic line, replaying what it has heard to make the world thicker with sound. Or the line can do both, remaining within music or demarcating music from the world while being suffused with its own plenitude.

My most recent previous post from Kahn’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Previous bloopers are here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

A Crossbreed [A Sport]
by Franz Kafka

I have a curious animal, half kitten, half lamb. It is a legacy from my father. But it only developed in my time; formerly it was far more lamb than kitten. Now it is both in about equal parts. From the cat it takes its head and claws, from the lamb its size and shape; from both its eyes, which are wild and flickering, its hair, which is soft, lying close to its body, its movements, which partake both of skipping and slinking. Lying on the window sill in the sun it curls up in a ball and purrs; out in the meadow it rushes about like mad and is scarcely to be caught. It flees from cats and makes to attack lambs. On moonlight nights its favorite promenade is along the eaves. It cannot mew and it loathes rats. Beside the hen coop it can lie for hours in ambush, but it has never yet seized an opportunity for murder.

I feed it on milk; that seems to suit it best. In long draughts it sucks the milk in through its fanglike teeth. Naturally it is a great source of entertainment for children. Sunday morning is the visiting hour. I sit with the little beast on my knees, and the children of the whole neighborhood stand around me.

Then the strangest questions are asked, which no human being could answer: Why there is only one such animal, why I rather than anybody else should own it, whether there was ever an animal like it before and what would happen if it died, whether it feels lonely, why it has no children, what it is called, etc.

I never trouble to answer, but confine myself without further explanation to exhibiting my possession. Sometimes the children bring cats with them; once they actually brought two lambs. But against all their hopes there was no scene of recognition. The animals gazed calmly at each other with their animal eyes, and obviously accepted their reciprocal existence as a divine fact.

Sitting on my knees, the beast know neither fear nor lust of pursuit. Pressed against me it is happiest. It remains faithful to the family that brought it up. In that there is certainly no extraordinary mark of fidelity, but merely the true instinct of an animal which, though it has countless step-relations in the world, has perhaps not a single blood relation, and to which consequently the protection it has found with us is sacred.

Sometimes I cannot help laughing when it sniffs around me and winds itself between my legs and simply will not be parted from me. Not content with being a lamb and a cat, it almost insists on being a dog as well. Once when, as may happen to anyone, I could see no way out of my business problems and all that they involved, and was ready to let everything go, and in this mood was lying in my rocking chair in my room, the beast on my knees, I happened to glance down and saw tears dropping from its huge whiskers. Were they mine, or were they the animal’s? Had this cat, along with the soul of a lamb, the ambitions of a human being? I did not inherit much from my father, but this legacy is quite remarkable.

It has the restlessness of both beasts, that of the cat and that of the lamb, diverse as they are. For that reason its skin feels too tight for it. Sometimes it jumps up on the armchair beside me, plants its front legs on my shoulder, and puts its muzzle to my ear. It is as if it were saying something to me, and as a matter of fact it turns its head afterwards and gazes in my face to see the impression its communication has made. And to oblige it I behave as if I had understood, and nod. Then it jumps to the floor and dances about with joy.

Perhaps the knife of the butcher would be a release for this animal; but as it is a legacy I must deny it that. So it must wait until the breath voluntarily leaves its body, even though it sometimes gazes at me with a look of human understanding, challenging me to do the right thing of which both of us are thinking.

Previous Kafka short story is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

… modern views give a crucial place to our own inner powers of constructing or transfiguring or interpreting the world, as essential to the efficacy of the external sources. Our powers must be deployed if these are to empower us.

Continuing through Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity by Charles Taylor (1989). This chapter is ‘Visions of the Post-Romantic Age’:

… There is a kind of piety which still surrounds art and artists in our time, which comes from the sense that what they reveal has great moral and spiritual significance; that in it lies the key to a certain depth, or fulness, or seriousness, or intensity of life, or to a certain wholeness.

… The moral or spiritual order of things must come to us indexed to a personal vision.

… what we can’t escape is the mediation through the imagination; we are always articulating a personal vision. And the connection of articulation with inwardness remains for this reason unsevered and unbreakable. Just because we have to conceive of our task as the articulation of a personal refraction, we cannot abandon radical reflexivity and turn our back on our own experience or on the resonance of things in us.

Thus in one of the most successful of his New Poems, “The Panther,” Rilke beautifully evokes the animal pacing in his cage through its own inwardness: “It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.” The images which can enter him from this alien surrounding run through the “tensed stillness of his limbs,” but “cease to be” when they reach his heart. Rilke has indeed taken us into the panther, but this turns out to be inseparable from making the panther an emblem of our own alienated inwardness.

… This idea of nature as a great reservoir of amoral force, with which we must not lose contact, is one of the important bequests of the post-Schopenhauerian period to twentieth-century art and sensibility. We find echoes of it in a host of places, in Fauvism, Surrealism, D.H. Lawrence. But it is also a moral vision; and this too has had its effects, some of them catastrophic on a world scale.

Another important legacy, and here there is a convergence with the other negations/continuations of Romanticism, is the enhanced sense of our own expressive powers. It is through the articulation of the creative imagination that the will is tapped and transmuted into beauty. The power of the human imagination to refract and transfigure reality emerges magnified out of the Schopenhauerian turn. And in this is pushes in the same direction as the art of anti-nature and even ultimately as the transfigurations of realism. In different but parallel ways, they emphasize that the epiphanies of art involve a transmutation of what is there: despiritualized reality, or fallen nature, or the amoral will; rather than the revelation of a good which is ontically independent of us — even if it needs us to come to epiphany. This is not true of the Baudelaire who speaks of the ‘correspondences’; nor is it true of Schopenhauer himself, who sees the artist as contemplating the Ideas. But it is true of those who followed in their wake, as these vestiges of (neo)Platonism disappeared, encouraged in part by some of Baudelaire’s own poetic practice.

The temptation thus grows to an epiphanic art which will primarily celebrate our own powers, the self-centred and subjectivist art I spoke about above.

… We face an issue today which doesn’t have an exact precedent in earlier times. It is the issue of what I want to call self-affirmation.

… the world’s being good may now be seen as not entirely independent of our seeing it and showing it as good, at least as far as the world of humans is concerned. The key to a recovery from the crisis may thus consist in our being able to “see that it is good.”

… this idea may but doesn’t have to be given an atheist formulation. Whether it does or not depends on whether we go on seeing ourselves as dependent on God for this transformation. But those who affirm this dependence, like Dostoyevsky, just as those who do not, like Nietzsche, have a thoroughly modern conception of what the transformation involves. This conception has its roots in the post-Romantic notion of the creative imagination, which helps complete what it reveals.

… one of Dostoyevsky’s central insights turns on the way in which we close or open ourselves to grace. The ultimate sin is to close oneself, but one’s reasons for doing so can be the highest. In a sense, the person who is closed is in a vicious circle from which it is hard to escape.

We are closed to grace, because we close ourselves to the world in which it circulates; and we do that out of loathing for ourselves and for this world. But paradoxically, the more noble and sensitive and morally insightful one is, the more one is liable to feel this loathing. It is one of Dostoyevsky’s noble and deeply moral characters, Ivan Karamazov, who most strongly expresses this rejection. He wants to give God back “his ticket” to this world of unacceptable suffering; and he wants this so firmly because he has the moral sensitivity to feel that the ultimate happiness of the whole of mankind isn’t worth the tears of an innocent child.

… Dostoyevsky’s rejectors are “schismatics” (raskolniki), cut off from the world and hence grace. They cannot but wreak destruction. The noblest wreak it only on themselves. The most base destroy others. Although powered by the noblest sense of the injustice of things, this schism is ultimately also the fruit of pride, Dostoyevsky holds. We separate because we don’t want to see ourselves as part of the evil; we want to raise ourselves above it, away from the blame for it. The outward projection of the terrorist is the most violent manifestation of this common motive.

What will transform us is an ability to love the world and ourselves, to see it as good in spite of the wrong. But this will only come to us if we can accept being part of it, and that means accepting responsibility. Just as ‘no one is to blame’ is the slogan of the materialist revolutionaries, so ‘we are all to blame’ is of Dostoyevsky’s healing figures. Loving the world and ourselves is in a sense a miracle, in face of all the evil and degradation that it and we contain. But the miracle comes on us if we accept being part of it. Involved in this is our acceptance of love from others. We become capable of love through being loved …

[ ... ]

… Nietzsche wanted to put behind him the doctrine of aesthetic transfiguration which he drew from Schopenhauer, and which marks his early work. He wanted to go beyond “justifying” the world through its manifestation in art and really affirm it. But some aspect of aesthetic transfiguration remains. What in the universe commands our affirmation, when we have overcome the all-too-human, is not properly called its goodness but comes close to being its beauty.

… Part of the heroism of the Nietzschean superman is that he can rise beyond the moral, beyond the concern with good, and manage in spite of suffering and disorder and the absence of all justice to respond to something like the beauty of it all. Hence the affirmation cannot be fully separated from an aesthetic transfiguration. Zarathustra is inseparably visionary and poet.

… One could say that seeing good empowers, and that it thus functions as what I have been calling a moral source. We have here a further step in the process I have called the internalization of moral sources. Alongside the sense of our dignity as disengaged, free, reasoning subjects, alongside our sense of the creative imagination as a power of epiphany and transfiguration, we have also this idea of an affirming power, which can help realize the good by recognizing it.

Of course, none of these powers need to be seen as exclusively within. In particular, the second and third are frequently understood as related to nature as a source or to God. But unlike previous conceptions of moral sources in nature and God, these modern views give a crucial place to our own inner powers of constructing or transfiguring or interpreting the world, as essential to the efficacy of the external sources. Our powers must be deployed if these are to empower us. And in this sense the moral sources have been at least partly internalized.

My most recent previous post from Taylor’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

book 1, proposition 30

Previous propositions are here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Real and Half Real
by Robinson Jeffers

[ ... ]

But now consider
Something not human: — here the coast hills at Soberanes Creek sea-mouth, steep wedges and cones of granite
Thin-skinned with grass; their feet are deep in the flood-tide ocean, dark, heavy and still, calm in this trough
Between two storms; their heads are against the dark heavy sky. No life is visible but the bright grass,
And a gang of wild pigs, huddled and flank-to-flank, flowing up a swale
On the far slope; and that one eagle, wheeling and rocking, high and alone
Against the cloud-lid.

Here are no trivial artist-signatures, no puppet-play, no pretence of free will;
This is first-class reality. The human affair is half real, part myth, part art-work: this is in earnest.

I conclude
That men should play the parts assigned them and do it bravely, emulating
The nobility of nature, but well in mind
That their play is a play; it is serious but not important; what’s done in earnest is done outside it.

Previous poems by Jeffers are here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/