"The personalities come and go in kaleidoscopic succession,
many changes often being made in the course of twenty-four hours."
"By a breaking up of the original personality at different moments
along different lines of cleavage, there may be formed several different
secondary personalities which may take turns with one another."
— Morton Prince, The Dissociation of a Personality ,
Longmans, Green, and Co., 1906, pages 2 and 3.
Related reading . . .
From Martin Heidegger's
Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning) ,
Translated by Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly,
Indiana University Press, 1999 (first published in German
in 1989 as Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) but
written in 1936-1938 —
"The 'between' [das Zwischen ] is the simple 'bursting open'
that enowns be-ing to a being, which up until then is held back
from what is ownmost to it and is not yet to be named a being.
This 'bursting open' is the clearing for the sheltered. But the
'bursting open' does not disperse. and the clearing is not a mere
emptiness.
The 'between' [das Zwischen ] which bursts open gathers
what it removes into the open of its strifing and refusing
belongingness, moves unto the ab-ground , out of which everything
(god, man, world, earth) recoils in swaying into itself and thus leaves
to be-ing the unique decidedness of en-ownment."
— 270, "The Essential Sway of Be-ing" (p. 341)
"Enownment and enstrifing, historical grounding and decision,
uniqueness and the onefold, what has the character of
the between [Zwischenhafte ] and the cleavage [Geklüft ] —
they never name the essential sway of be-ing as properties
but rather in each case the whole essential swaying* of its essential
sway."
— 270, "The Essential Sway of Be-ing" (p. 342)
* For "swaying" as "unfolding," see (for instance)
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and
also George Kovacs, Thinking and Be-ing in Heidegger's
Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) ,
Zeta Books, 2015.
From a poem by Frances Frost—
"The upper peak, the shattered rock that cleaves the northward sky
remains alone untaken by the darkness"
— "From a Mountain-Top," The North American Review ,
December 1939 (Vol. 248, No. 2, page 301)
For some material related to the Frost poem,
if only by verbal coincidence, see shattered + rock in this journal.
See also rock + cleavage.
For the relationship to Eve, see New Year's Eve, 2012,
and the following image by Karolin Schnoor, who also
illustrated the New York Times op-ed piece "Catholic
Education, in Need of Salvation" published online on
Epiphany 2013 (see last evening's Log24 post)—
For some context, see Establishment of the Talented.
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Update of 1:28 PM ET on November 19, 2024 —
"The decadent legacy of Berlin between the World Wars,
and that of the American speak-easy era, have left their marks
on fashion, of course. At the Golden Globes on Sunday night,
Nicole Kidman incarnated the steamy eroticism of the Weimar
years in a clingy 20's-style gold-spangled dress by Tom Ford for
YSL Rive Gauche. Ms. Kidman's illusion top, with its suggestion
of nudity, set tongues wagging well into the next day."
— By Ruth La Ferla, The New York Times, Jan. 27, 2004
Metaphysics for the damned —
|
From the 1979 film "A Little Romance" —
Reading something you It's just a book. I used to read those too. What is it?
An Introduction to Metaphysics,
School has changed I'm just reading it for fun.
Fun?
Most people think anyone
I don't. But I have to admit
Heidegger.
Heidegger isn't all that hard.
Like, "Why is there something |
… And for the not so damned —
The Source —
https://www.bard.edu/library/arendt/pdfs/
Heidegger-EinfuhrungMetaphysik.pdf
The actress playing the teen reading Heidegger in the 1979 film
"A Little Romance" was Diane Lane. The film was set in Venice.
Later in Venice . . .
Ben Affleck and Diane Lane at the 2006 Venice Film Festival
premiere of "Hollywoodland" :
An antidote to Hollywoodland . . .
The classic novel Under the Volcano :
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
The McCormack of the title is the current owner
and editor-in-chief of The New Republic .
Note the separatrix between
Stoppard and Nichols.
Related cleavage art —
Alternate title: Art for Suckers.
Related material — See Cleavage .
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 118-119 —
| 118. | Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand. |
| 119. | The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These bumps make us see the value of the discovery. |
A death last Sunday —
Meanwhile . . .
Amy Adams attends the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party
at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on
Sunday, February 24, 2019, in Beverly Hills, California.
This post was suggested by the phrase "Froebel Decade" from
the search results below.
This journal a decade ago had a post on the late Donald Westlake,
an author who reportedly died of a heart attack in Mexico on Dec. 31,
2008, while on his way to a New Year's Eve dinner.
One of Westlake's books —
Related material —
From a New York Post review of "Clouds of Sils Maria,"
a film that opened yesterday —
"Assayas [the writer-director] evidently thinks he’s
being daring and original and avant-garde in leaving
so much open-ended. But you can tell what really
interests him isn’t doing the work of a serious artist
but the comfy trappings of one — the swank dining
rooms, the posh cars with drivers always at the ready.
What’s French for bourgeois? Never mind.
'Clouds' isn’t a film but an idea for a film —
unfinished, unsatisfying, undergraduate."
From this date last year:
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
For the Feast of Epiphany:
A trip back to December 1955—
Meditations for Three Kings Day (Feast of Epiphany)—
"Show me all the blueprints." — Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes
"The Tesseract is where it belongs: out of our reach." — Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!" — Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947)
Click images for some background.
"I am a skeptic to whom the idea that a benign God
created us and watches over us is something between
a fairy story and a bad joke."
— The late art critic Robert Hughes in Things I Didn't Know*
A followup to this afternoon's previous Amy Adams post—
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
* Vintage paperback, December 2007, page 7
From "Crude Foyer," a Wallace Stevens poem—
In which we read the critique of paradise
And say it is the work
Of a comedian, this critique….
Related comedy — Finality and Cleavage.
* TV series starring the above actors. See Wikipedia.
Last night's Saturday Night Live —
Related material— See Cleavage.
Background— Yesterday evening's Star Quality as well as earlier posts on Horseness and Mysteries of Faith.
A search in memory of Gerry Rafferty,
a talented singer-songwriter who died today at 63.
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Related— Rosetta Stone, today's Google Doodle, and Rock of Ages.
Intercultural Documentation
From this date four years ago—
Cleavage Term
“… a point of common understanding
between the classic and romantic worlds.
Quality, the cleavage term
between hip and square, seemed to be it."
this year goes to the author
of The Golden Notebook
and The Cleft.
Related material:
The Golden Obituary
and Cleavage —
Log24, Oct. 9, 2007 —
Wheel
Quoted by physics writer
Heinz Pagels at the end of
The Cosmic Code:
“For the essence and the end
Of his labor is beauty… one beauty,
the rhythm of that Wheel….”
— Robinson Jeffers
|
“The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it. The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine. Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he’d been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country…” — Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15) Comment by Stephen Spender: “There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell. But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ. The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel.” — Introduction to Under the Volcano Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI — Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as “… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….
William Golding: “Simon’s head was tilted slightly up. His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him. ‘What are you doing out here all alone? Aren’t you afraid of me?’ Simon shook. ‘There isn’t anyone to help you. Only me. And I’m the Beast.’ Simon’s mouth labored, brought forth audible words. ‘Pig’s head on a stick.’ ‘Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!’ said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. ‘You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close, close!’ “ “Thought of the day: — Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004 Anne Francis,
“Here was finality indeed, — Under the Volcano |
For further details of
the wheel metaphor, see
Rock of Ages
“Who knows where madness lies?”
— Rhetorical question
in “Man of La Mancha”
(See previous entry.)
Using madness to
seek out madness, let us
consult today’s numbers…
Pennsylvania Lottery
Nov. 22, 2006:
Mid-day 487
Evening 814
The number 487 leads us to
page 487 in the
May 1977 PMLA,
“The Form of Carnival
in Under the Volcano“:
“The printing presses’ flywheel
marks the whirl of time*
that will split La Despedida….”
From Dana Grove,
A Rhetorical Analysis of
Under the Volcano,
page 92:
“… a point of common understanding
between the classic and romantic worlds.
Quality, the cleavage term between
hip and square, seemed to be it.”
— Robert M. Pirsig
Rebecca Goldstein
The 8/14 entry also deals with
Rebecca Goldstein, who
seems to understand
such cleavage
very well.
(See also today’s previous entry.)
* Cf. Shakespeare’s “whirligig of time“
linked to in the previous entry.)
Cleavage Term
Snow is mainly remembered as the author of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959).
According to Orrin Judd, we can now see “how profoundly wrong Snow was in everything except for his initial metaphor, of a divide between science and the rest of the culture.”
For more on that metaphor, see the previous entry, “The Line.”
I prefer a lesser-known work of Snow– his long biographical foreword to G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology. The foreword, like the book itself, is an example of what Robert M. Pirsig calls “Quality.” It begins with these words:
“It was a perfectly ordinary night at Christ’s high table, except that Hardy was dining as a guest.”
Wallace Stevens,
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Part III:
“The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two…
hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic…and the split is clean. There’s no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.”
See also the discussion of
subjective and objective
by Robert M. Pirsig in
Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance,
Part III,
followed by this dialogue:
Are We There Yet?
Chris shouts, “When are we
going to get to the top?”
“Probably quite a way yet,”
I reply.
“Will we see a lot?”
“I think so. Look for blue sky
between the trees. As long as we
can’t see sky we know it’s a way yet.
The light will come through the trees
when we round the top.”
Related material:
The Boys from Uruguay,
Lichtung!,
The Shining of May 29,
A Guiding Philosophy,
Ticket Home.
The philosophy of Heidegger
discussed and illustrated
in the above entries may
be regarded as honoring
today’s 100th anniversary
of the birth of Heidegger’s
girlfriend, Hannah Arendt.
See also
— Obituary of Lawrence J. Sacharow at Fordham University, a Jesuit institution
“Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!”
— Under the Volcano
| Cleavage Term
“… a point of common understanding between the classic and romantic worlds. Quality, the cleavage term between hip and square, seemed to be it. Both worlds used the term. Both knew what it was. It was just that the romantic left it alone and appreciated it for what it was and the classic tried to turn it into a set of intellectual building blocks for other purposes.”
For such building blocks, see
A Trinity for Rebecca (4/25/06) and yesterday’s lottery |
|
| In memory of Kermit Hall, college president, who died Sunday, August 13, 2006: Square
|
In memory of Duke Jordan, jazz pianist, who died Tuesday, August 8, 2006:
|
Square and hip may each have a place
in heaven; for a less pleasant destination,
see the previous entry.
__________________________________
* Update of 3 PM 8/14/06:
See Forrest Gump on God
in an Aug. 11 entry and
the related paper
| Renegotiating Chinese Identity: Between Local Group and National Ideology, by Kristen Parris:
The paper is found in Related material |
Today's birthday:
Harrison Ford
"The forest here at the bottom of the canyon is mostly pine, with a few aspen and broad-leafed shrubs. Steep canyon walls rise way above us on both sides. Occasionally the trail opens into a patch of sunlight and grass that edges the canyon stream, but soon it reenters the deep shade of the pines. The earth of the trail is covered with a soft springy duff of pine needles. It is very quiet here.
Mountains like these and travelers in the mountains and events that happen to them here are found not only in Zen literature but in the tales of every major religion."– Robert Pirsig
Related material:
"Canyon Breeze" as played at
myspace.com/montanaskies
"… a point of common understanding between the classic and romantic worlds. Quality, the cleavage term between hip and square, seemed to be it. Both worlds used the term. Both knew what it was. It was just that the romantic left it alone and appreciated it for what it was and the classic tried to turn it into a set of intellectual building blocks for other purposes."– Robert Pirsig
The background music there
is the same, by Montana Skies.
The Line
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ch. 6 (italics are mine):
“A classical understanding sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. A romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.”
STRANGER – We are far from having exhausted the more exact thinkers who treat of being and not-being. But let us be content to leave them, and proceed to view those who speak less precisely; and we shall find as the result of all, that the nature of being is quite as difficult to comprehend as that of not-being.
THEAETETUS – Then now we will go to the others.
STRANGER – There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on amongst them; they are fighting with one another about the nature of essence.
THEAETETUS – How is that?
STRANGER – Some of them are dragging down all things from heaven and from the unseen to earth, and they literally grasp in their hands rocks and oaks; of these they lay hold, and obstinately maintain, that the things only which can be touched or handled have being or essence, because they define being and body as one, and if any one else says that what is not a body exists they altogether despise him, and will hear of nothing but body.
THEAETETUS – I have often met with such men, and terrible fellows they are.
STRANGER – And that is the reason why their opponents cautiously defend themselves from above, out of an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas; the bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not essence, but generation and motion. Between the two armies, Theaetetus, there is always an endless conflict raging concerning these matters.
THEAETETUS – True.
— Translated by Benjamin Jowett
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ch. 18:
“The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two…
hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic…and the split is clean. There’s no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.”
What Pirsig means by “quality” is close to what Yagoda means, in the previous entry, by “style.”
Harrowing
"The Ferris wheel came into view again, just the top, silently burning high on the hill, almost directly in front of him, then the trees rose up over it. The road, which was terrible and full of potholes, went steeply downhill here; he was approaching the little bridge over the barranca, the deep ravine. Halfway across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he'd been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city of Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country …"
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947. (Harper & Row reissue, 1984, p. 15)
Comment by Stephen Spender:
"There is a suggestion of Christ descending into the abyss for the harrowing of Hell. But it is the Consul whom we think of here, rather than of Christ. The Consul is hurled into this abyss at the end of the novel."
— Introduction to Under the Volcano
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXI —
Gibbon, discussing the theology of the Trinity, defines perichoresis as
"… the internal connection and spiritual penetration which indissolubly unites the divine persons59 ….
59 … The
or 'circumincessio,' is perhaps the deepest and darkest corner of the whole theological abyss."
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."
William Golding:
"Simon's head was tilted slightly up. His eyes could not break away and the Lord of the Flies hung in space before him.
'What are you doing out here all alone? Aren't you afraid of me?'
Simon shook.
'There isn't anyone to help you. Only me. And I'm the Beast.'
Simon's mouth labored, brought forth audible words.
'Pig's head on a stick.'
'Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!' said the head. For a moment or two the forest and all the other dimly appreciated places echoed with the parody of laughter. 'You knew, didn't you? I'm part of you? Close, close, close!' "
"Thought of the day:
You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar… if you're into catchin' flies."
— Alice Woodrome, Good Friday, 2004
Anne Francis,
also known as
Honey West:
"Here was finality indeed,
and cleavage!"
— Under the Volcano
From the official
Anne Francis Web Site:
Come into my parlor….
For some background,
see the use of the word
"spider" in Under the Volcano:
by Patrick A. McCarthy.
See, too, Why Me?
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