29052008

New old recycled balls ... (no thanks) ...
Exhausted. But there is no chance of a rest it seems.
Renaissance concepts ...
Town/City as Work of Art.
Existentialist concepts ...
Life as Work of Art.
Jean Paul Sartre entered beingness via the human condition 100 years
ago today, more or less. He is not nothingness yet, but I don't know
how much he is read these days.
Lives of the Philosophers ...
Len, who was one of the hardest core existentialists I have ever met,
though I am not sure how much Sartre he had read, had a child, or
perhaps it was a grandchild, called Jean Paul.
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.
Have not mentioned much how claustrophobic time spent with Miss
O'Kelly could be.
Knackered. But there is no chance of a rest it seems.
Patterning and Dramatizing.
Patterning gives a sense of order, but can be stifling.
Dramatizing gives a sense of freedom, but can be bewildering.
'Piecemeal social engineering.' Phrase from [Carl/Karl] Popper, I think [/seem to recall].
'Homeodynamics.' Steven Rose's suggestion instead of 'homeostasis'.
Much better because emphasises the fluid characteristics of feedback
systems, and also that the 'fixed point'/'norm' is never static.
Maintenance of relative stability through variations around fairly
stable 'optimal' state.
Goldilock's Variations ...
Too hot ... too cold ... just right ...
But 'just right' varies with time and other conditions ...
Thermodynamics ...
All the soups are cooling ... so in time the 'just right' soup
becomes another 'too cold' soup ... and the 'too hot' soup becomes
the 'just right' soup ...
Patterning and Dramatizing.
The Tempest is one of the great Renaissance texts - containing, in
concentrated forms, most of the Renaissance themes - disguized as a
frothy fairy tale.
Prospero is a Renaissance Person.
Microcosm and Macrocosm.
Layers of 'perspective shifts'.
Discontinuities ...
I am starving, but my appetite is weak ...
The play begins with a scene of disorder ... a tempest ...  that
renders almost meaningless the usual social order.
Tempests in the mind.
Tempests in the environment.
Feedbacks.
The environmental tempests give a sense of disorder to minds, which,
in tempestuous states create more environmental disorders.
But too much order can be stifling. Makes you feel like a puppet or a
robot or a prisoner, or some combination of these 'roles'.
Miranda is not naive and unworldly, but a see-er of better human
possibilities.
'O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous
humankind is! O brave new world that has such people in't!'
Every being can be judged by its potential metamorphoses: by what it
is capable of becoming - and how far it falls short of the limits of
its possibility.
The Renaissance Person is [as if] almost inevitably melancholic: aware of so
many possibilities that there will not be time to actualize in a
single lifetime; actuality is always disappointing in comparison
to/with limitless possibility.
The masque brings to a climax the theme of nature versus art that is
central to The Tempest. Nature is unified with art in the masque and
celebrated as a principle of order, inextricably intertwined with
human culture, including pure arts, the social arts of civilization
and the arts of ideas.
Microcosm and Macrocosm ...
Prospero opens a curtain at the back of the stage to reveal ...
Philip and Catherine playing chess ...
C. 'You play me falsely, because I am playing draughts/aka'checkers'!'
P. 'Not for the world!'
C. 'Yes! And however unfairly I play, I will call it fair.'
I Tire-Easily, old man with wrinkled shrugs, remember the scene as
part of her 'I am only doing a bit of time-travelling' cruel little
turn-up-out-of-the-blue charade, and fore-swear the rest cursingly.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. What are you thinking
Philip. I never know what you are thinking?'
'Dunno. Nothing much.'
'Nothing! How can you think nothing?'
'Dunno.'
It was an honest answer but was mistaken for evasion.
I always thought draughts/checkers a terribly reductive absolutist
game, but She seemed entranced by the dreadful black-and-white
win/lose absolutist simplicity of checkers/draughts. Chess seemed too
pluralistic, relativistic, variable and complex for her. And the idea
of an agreed drawn game made {or at least seemed to make}  absolutely no sense to her. There were, {or at lest seemed to be}
in her games, no compromizes except those that advantaged her.
New Balls Please ...
It being now in season, I recall that the crude dialectics of tennis
too were much more to her absolutist tastes than to my relativistic
ones.
I could never take to a game where 'love'='zero' either.
I think she preferred the tragic vision too, which I never did really.
Game, Set, and Match to the Ms. Mish-Matched.
Grime, Sot, and Milch to mal-echoes.
New old recycled balls, please ...