Log24

From a spring 2004 Michigan State University syllabus for the
T-Th course English 487, “The Twentieth Century English Novel”—

Tuesday, March 30: Murdoch
(her essay “ The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited “)

Thursday, April 1: Murdoch

Related material from this journal—

Posts of Tuesday, March 30, 2004, and of Thursday, April 1, 2004.

For a related reference to the mathematician Michael Harris from
the Free-Floating Signs link in this afternoon’s 4:30 post, see
the  posts of Wednesday, March 31, 2004, the day intervening
between the above two class dates.

Thesis —

A 1911 essay by T. E. Hulme,
"Romanticism and Classicism" —

"There is a general tendency to think that verse means
little else than the expression of unsatisfied emotion.
People say: 'But how can you have verse without sentiment?'
You see what it is: the prospect alarms them. A classical revival
to them would mean the prospect of an arid desert and the death
of poetry as they understand it, and could only come to fill the gap
caused by that death. Exactly why this dry classical spirit should
have a positive and legitimate necessity to express itself in poetry
is utterly inconceivable to them."

Antithesis —

A 1961 reaction against Hulme,
"Against Dryness" —

"Against the consolations of form, the clean crystalline
work, the simplified fantasy-myth, we must pit the
destructive power of the now so unfashionable naturalistic
idea of character.

Real people are destructive of myth, contingency is
destructive of fantasy and opens the way for imagination."

— Iris Murdoch, January 1961

Synthesis —

"Simone Weil said that morality
was a matter of attention not of will.
We need a new vocabulary of attention."

— Iris Murdoch, "Against Dryness"

* See the previous post's link Against Dryness.

(Continued.)

“I need a photo opportunity, 
I want a shot at redemption.
Don’t want to end up a cartoon 
in a cartoon graveyard.”

— Paul Simon

Photo opportunity
for the late John Bayley and Iris Murdoch —

From a cartoon graveyard, in memory of
a British artist who reportedly died yesterday: 

Against Dryness —

Cartoon by Martin Honeysett

Friday evening’s post Musement dealt with Iris Murdoch’s
phrase “the clean crystalline work.”

For dirty bloody work see the life of Don Reitz, who
reportedly died at 84 on March 19.

"Art indeed, so far from being
a playful diversion of the human race,
is the place of its most fundamental insight,
and the centre to which the more uncertain
steps of metaphysics must constantly return"

— Iris Murdoch, "On 'God' and 'Good,'" in
Existentialists and Mystics , Penguin Books,
1999, page 360

Related material —

Wendy Derleth

" 'In the West,' she observed, 'anything that must be hidden
is suspect; availability and honesty are interlinked. This clashes
irreconcilably with Islam… where the things that are
most precious, most perfect and most holy are always hidden….' "

— Pauls Toutonghi, review of a recent novel, Alif the Unseen

(page BR19, New York Times Sunday Book Review , August 12, 2012) 

"A devoted father, Smith passes on his philosophy of life to his children through chess, among other things.

'My father taught me how to play chess at seven and introduced beautiful concepts that I try to pass on to my kids. The elements and concepts of life are so perfectly illustrated on a chess board. The ability to accurately assess your position is the key to chess, which I also think is the key to life.'

He pauses, searching for an example. 'Everything you do in your life is a move. You wake up in the morning, you strap on a gun, and you walk out on the street– that's a move. You've made a move and the universe is going to respond with its move.

'Whatever move you're going to make in your life to be successful, you have to accurately access the next couple of moves– like what's going to happen if you do this? Because once you've made your move, you can't take it back. The universe is going to respond.'

Smith has just finished reading The Alchemist, by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho: 'It says the entire world is contained in one grain of sand, and you can learn everything you need to learn about the entire universe from that one grain of sand. That is the kind of concept I'm teaching my kids.'"

Homer

“No matter how it’s done, you won’t like it.”
— Robert Redford to Robert M. Pirsig in Lila

“The evening before Harriet injures Roy,
she asks him, in a restaurant car,
whether he has read Homer.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural

“Brush Up Your Shakespeare”
— Cole Porter lyric for a show that opened
on December 30, 1948

Judy Davis as Harriet Bird

                                        

Thine eyes I love…
Shakespeare, Sonnet 132

“Roy’s Guenevere-like lover is named Memo Paris,
presumably the face that launched a thousand strikes.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural 

Nicole Kidman
as Memo Paris

“Iris is someone to watch over Roy.”
— Oxford website on the film of The Natural 

Kate Winslet as young Iris Murdoch

From the second-draft screenplay
for The Sting,
with Robert Redford as Hooker:

HOOKER
(shuffling a little)
I, ah…thought you might wanna come out for a while.  Maybe have a drink or somethin’.

LORETTA
You move right along, don’t ya.

HOOKER
(with more innocence than confidence)
I don’t mean nothin’ by it.  I just don’t know many regular girls, that’s all.

LORETTA
And you expect me to come over, just like that.

HOOKER
If I expected somethin’, I wouldn’t be still standin’ out here in the hall.

Loretta looks at him carefully.  She knows it’s not a line.

LORETTA
(with less resistance now)
I don’t even know you.

HOOKER
(slowly)
You know me.  I’m just like you…
It’s two in the morning and I don’t know nobody.

The two just stand there in silence a second.  There’s nothing more to say.  She stands back and lets him in.

Iris Murdoch on Plato’s Form of the Good,
by Joseph Malikail:

“For Murdoch as for Plato, the Good belongs to Plato’s Realm of Being not the Realm of Becoming…. However, Murdoch does not read Plato as declaring his faith in a divine being when he says that the Good is

the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and the lord of light in the visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual; and that this is the power upon which [one who] would act rationally either in public or private life must have his eyes fixed (Republic…).

Though she acknowledges the influence of Simone Weil in her reading of Plato, her understanding of Plato on Good and God is not Weil’s (1952, ch.7)*. For Murdoch,

Plato never identified his Form of the Good with God (the use of theos in the Republic… is a façon de parler), and this separation is for him an essential one. Religion is above the level of the ‘gods.’ There are no gods and no God either. Neo-Platonic thinkers made the identification (of God with good) possible; and the Judaeo-Christian tradition has made it easy and natural for us to gather together the aesthetic and consoling impression of Good as a person (1992, 38)**.

As she understands Plato:

The Form of the Good as creative power is not a Book of Genesis creator ex nihilo … Plato does not set up the Form of the Good as God, this would be absolutely un-Platonic, nor does he anywhere give the sign of missing or needing a real God to assist his explanations. On the contrary, Good is above the level of the gods or God (ibid., 475)**.

Mary Warnock, her friend and fellow-philosopher, sums up Murdoch’s metaphysical view of the Vision of the Good:

She [Murdoch] holds that goodness has a real though abstract existence in the world. The actual existence of goodness is, in her view, the way it is now possible to understand the idea of God.

Or as Murdoch herself puts it, ‘Good represents the reality of which God is the dream.’ (1992, 496)**”

*Weil, Simone. 1952. Intimations of Christianity Among The Ancient Greeks. Ark Paperbacks, 1987/1952.

**Murdoch, Iris. 1992. Metaphysics As A Guide To Morals. London: Chatto and Windus. 

From the conclusion of Lila,
by Robert M. Pirsig:

“Good is a noun. That was it. That was what Phaedrus had been looking for. That was the homer over the fence that ended the ballgame.”