I prefer Kirsch's "Space Babel" (Tablet , Dec. 4, 2020).
An image we may regard as illustrating
the group-identity symbol "e" for "Einheit" —
Some context:
Wednesday, August 25, 2021
Space Symbol
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Tuesday, August 10, 2021
Ex Fano Apollinis
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Margaret Atwood on Lewis Hyde's "Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists." (159) What is "the next world"? It might be the Underworld…. The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie– this line of thought leads Hyde to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation and art all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning "to join," "to fit," and "to make." (254) If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist. Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart. |
"As a Chinese jar . . . ."
— Four Quartets
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Rosalind Krauss "If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art or The Non-Objective World , for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter. They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit. From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete. Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."
"He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle,
"And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune
The nine engravings of The Club Dumas
An example of the universal— or, according to Krauss,
"This is the garden of Apollo, |
The "Katz" of the August 7 post Art Angles
is a product of Princeton's
Department of Art and Archaeology.
ART —
.jpg)
ARCHAEOLOGY —
"This pattern is a square divided into nine equal parts.
It has been called the 'Holy Field' division and
was used throughout Chinese history for many
different purposes, most of which were connected
with things religious, political, or philosophical."
– The Magic Square: Cities in Ancient China,
by Alfred Schinz, Edition Axel Menges, 1996, p. 71
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Saturday, April 17, 2021
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Metaphors
A rose on a Harvard University Press book cover (2014) —
A Log24 post's "lotus" (2004) —
A business mandorla (2016) —
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Wednesday, March 2, 2016
A Defense of Meaning
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"In certain moods the horror of a word is the meaning it defends against all comers; so metaphor is the device by which one undermines that defense. In Stevens’ 'Someone Puts a Pineapple Together,' the someone contemplates 'A wholly artificial nature, in which / The profusion of metaphor has been increased.' If you put a pineapple together and see metaphors becoming more profuse, you release yourself from psychological determinations, you become a performative gesture and are happy to find yourself in that state. But then a scruple may assert itself:
Presumably a bad metaphor murders a good one: bad in the sense of telling lies, ignoring the truths that can’t honorably be ignored."
— Denis Donoghue, "The Motive for Metaphor," |
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Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Motives for Metaphor
This post is a scholium for Joyce Carol Oates, who has
written a very readable essay in the current New York
Review of Books titled
Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature.
Oates mentions three times, without attributing it to the late poet
Wallace Stevens, the phrase "the motive for metaphor."
The following paragraphs are by Denis Donoghue, from
a piece titled "The Motive for Metaphor" in the Winter 2013
issue of The Hudson Review —
Related material in this journal: Copleston and a fellow Jesuit.
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Saturday, August 2, 2014
Bard Speech
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The Warrenpoint Puzzle
From a review of Metaphor , by Denis Donoghue
(Harvard University Press, 2014)—
“Donoghue brings a lovely confessional element to his analysis.
As a student, he says, he
loved Latin, the foreignness of it….
In Warrenpoint I sang the syllables….”
“Donoghue concedes points, finds faults, develops his own memories
to arrive at hybrid personal-critical museum-piece definitions of metaphor.
Interrogating Richards’s tenor/vehicle distinction, Donoghue observes
that ‘metaphor is the mutual relation of tenor and vehicle,
a relation achieved by holding the two simultaneously in one’s mind’ –
but, he points out, ‘How that is done is a puzzle.'”
— Lianne Habinek in Open Letters Monthly
See also Log24 posts of June 26, 2014.
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Sunday, November 2, 2003
Sunday November 2, 2003
All Souls' Day
at the Still Point
From remarks on Denis Donoghue's Speaking of Beauty in the New York Review of Books, issue dated Nov. 20, 2003, page 48:
"The Russian theorist Bakhtin lends his august authority to what Donoghue's lively conversation has been saying, or implying, all along. 'Beauty does not know itself; it cannot found and validate itself — it simply is.' "
From The Bakhtin Circle:
"Goethe's imagination was fundamentally chronotopic, he visualised time in space:
Time and space merge … into an inseparable unity … a definite and absolutely concrete locality serves at the starting point for the creative imagination… this is a piece of human history, historical time condensed into space….
Dostoevskii… sought to present the voices of his era in a 'pure simultaneity' unrivalled since Dante. In contradistinction to that of Goethe this chronotope was one of visualising relations in terms of space not time and this leads to a philosophical bent that is distinctly messianic:
Only such things as can conceivably be linked at a single point in time are essential and are incorporated into Dostoevskii's world; such things can be carried over into eternity, for in eternity, according to Dostoevskii, all is simultaneous, everything coexists…. "
Bakhtin's notion of a "chronotope" was rather poorly defined. For a geometric structure that might well be called by this name, see Poetry's Bones and Time Fold. For a similar, but somewhat simpler, structure, see Balanchine's Birthday.
From Four Quartets:
"At the still point, there the dance is."
From an essay by William H. Gass on Malcolm Lowry's classic novel Under the Volcano:
"There is no o'clock in a cantina."
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