Nietzsche

Nietzsche in Basel, c. 1875

I just finished reading my first full work of philosophy: On the Genealogy of Morality by Friedrich Nietzsche from a to z.

I noticed Nietzsche’s liberal use of italic type, almost as if the text was meant for oration.

For example:

“To talk of intrinsic right and intrinsic wrong is absolutely nonsensical; intrinsically, an injury, an oppression, an exploitation, an annihilation can be nothing wrong, inasmuch as life is essentially (that is, in its cardinal functions) something which functions by injuring, oppressing, exploiting, and annihilating, and is absolutely inconceivable without such a character.” –tr. Horace B. Samuel

The above dictum echoes Marquis de Sade’s “cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all,” both Sade and Nietzsche speaking of innate cruelty.

However, Nietzsche never read Sade.

Nietzsche’s writing is so appealing and so strong that form and content are indissoluble. I can’t imagine what his philosophy would have been like if he had been a bad writer.

Only minor point, towards the end, I got the impression that Nietzsche himself was the resentment-man.

RIP Jean Rustin

(gallery, click for images)

Jean Rustin (1928– 2013) was a French painter, and an important figurative artist.

Beginning in the early 1970s, he created a bizarre world of human figures, where an existential dead-end is transformed into fright, darkness abhorrence, without much pity nor relief.

In his own words:

“I realize that behind my artistic creation, behind the fascination for the naked body, there are twenty centuries of painting, primarily religious, twenty centuries of dead Christs, tortured martyrs, gory revolutions, massacres and shattered dreams […] I realize that history and maybe art history are engraved on the body and flesh of men.” (‘Jean Rustin : A corps perdu’[1], collected in Vanités contemporaines)

Battle of the books

The Bookworm (c. 1850) by Carl Spitzweg

I’m reading Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino which I recently purchased at Het Ivoren Aapje in Brussels.

“What Is a Classic?” you may wonder.

That question alone is the title of three well-known essays.

All three explore the nature of a classic book.

Why don’t we let the books fight it out for themselves?

Goya: gruesome and grotesque

Look how solemn they are![1] from Los Caprichos by Francisco de Goya

Once again I am reminded of “To Every Man His Chimera,” one of the darkest prose poems of Charles Baudelaire.

The previous time Baudelaire’s unlucky men came to my recollection, trudging through the dust carrying upon their backs an enormous chimera as heavy as a sack of flour or coal, was while reading Joko’s Anniversary[2] (perhaps my finest reading experience of 2013, along with the many Cortázar‘s short stories I’ve had the pleasure to read).

This time the occasion is my recent acquisition of Goya : Caprichos, Desastres, Tauromaquia, Disparates (1982, Fundación Juan March), a complete set of all the engravings by Goya.

“Look how serious they are!” is number 63 from 80 prints of the Caprichos and it depicts “two demons taking a little exercise, and riding on grotesque beasts. One demon has the head of a bird, the other of a donkey.” (^source) The pack animals, the grotesque beasts, look like bipedal donkeys with faces half human, half donkey.

Creatures with the head of a bird are frightening. The wattle!, the comb!

The reverse motif, creatures with the feet of birds, has been employed in Un priape marchant sur des pattes de coq, with a far less frightening — yes, even ludicrous — effect.

Knowledge for knowledge’s sake

The Death of Socrates (1787) by Jacques-Louis David

Please contrast:

‘While the hemlock was being prepared, Socrates was learning a melody on the flute.

“What use will that be to you?”, he was asked.

“At least I will learn this melody before I die,” he answered.’

—Drawn and Quartered by Emil Cioran

‘There are those who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge; that is Curiosity.

There are those who seek knowledge to be known by others; that is Vanity.

There are those who seek knowledge in order to serve; that is Love.’

–Bernard of Clairvaux in De gradibus humilitatis et superbiae

We can always count on the good old Church Fathers to put things in perspective, can’t we?

Absurd bad news: RIP Colin Wilson (1931 – 2013)

Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, Panther Books edition.

I first read Colin Wilson in 2004 when I found The Outsider in a tiny second-hand bookstore about five hundred meters from where I live. This unrecognized — yet extremely prolific — author is very likable for several reasons: his autodidacticism; his love of the outsider and the misfit; his nobrowness and his dislike of pessimism and the pessimist existentialism of Sartre et al. He put the latter this way in a 2004 interview:

When I was in Paris in the early 1950s, Samuel Beckett had just been discovered. Waiting for Godot was on in Paris and I thought ‘What fucking shit! Who is this half-witted Irishman who’s going around saying life’s not worth living? Why doesn’t he just blow his brains out and shut up?’ I felt the same about Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, and later on others such as William Golding. I had always had a passionate feeling that certain people I deeply approved of – like G K Chesterton, who spoke of ‘absurd good news’, for example – and people like Thomas Traherne… the mystics in general, that they were saying that we’re basically blind.

The Misfits is the book of Wilson which made the biggest impression on me. Among other things, it observes how John Cleland in Fanny Hill succeeded in slowing down time (and for me defined the concept of slow motion in literature): “the time it takes to read [some scenes] is obviously a great deal longer than the time it took to do.”

I’ve given attention to Colin Wilson on numerous occasions. At Jahsonic.com[1], on this blog[2].

On display?

Trojan Horse (1700) by Arcimboldo, in the collection of National Portrait Gallery (Sweden)

In 2005 Il Giornale Nuovo [1] reported that the above painting was lost, someone even offered 500 USD for information on its whereabouts.

Last week, I bought the book Les Tentations de Bosch ou L’éternel retour. On page 111 it states that the painting is located in Sweden’s National Portrait Gallery.

Is the painting on display there?

Anyone?

What’s in words: Lovecraft’s vocabulary

Howard Phillips Lovecraft in 1915 [image source]

In 2011, blogger Cthulhu Chick [1] counted American author H. P. Lovecraft‘s favorite words:

One of the things any fan of Lovecraft discovers early on is that Lovecraft was very attached to certain words. We either laugh or groan every time we hear something described as “indescribable” or called “unnamable” or “antiquarian” or “cyclopean.” And sometimes we wonder how many times he actually used the words.

This is the list:

Abnormal – 94, Accursed – 76, Amorphous – 19, Antediluvian – 10, Antiqu (e/arian) – 128, Blasphem (y/ous) – 92, Cat – 46, Charnel – 20,Comprehension – 9, Cyclopean – 47, Dank – 19, Decadent – 32, Daemoniac – 55, Effulgence – 4, Eldritch – 23, Faint (ed/ing) – 189, Foetid – 22,Fungus/Fungoid/Fungous – 54, Furtive – 60, Gambrel – 21, Gibbous – 9, Gibber (ed/ing) – 10, Hideous – 260, Immemorial – 25, Indescribable – 25, Iridescence – 2,Loath (ing/some) – 71, Lurk – 15, Madness – 115, Manuscript – 35, Mortal – 27, Nameless – 157, Noisome – 33, Non-Euclidean – 2, Proportion/Disproportionate – 53,Shunned – 54, Singular (ly) – 115, Spectral – 60, Squamous – 1, Stench – 59, Stygian – 6, Swarthy – 14, Tenebrous – 9, Tentacle(s) – 28, Ululat (e/ing) – 4,Unmentionable – 16, Unnamable – 22, Unutterable – 13

Appearing and disappearing

It’s funny how Venus Rising from the Sea — A Deception (c. 1822, above) by American painter Raphaelle Peale relates to the Veil of Veronica by Francisco de Zurbarán of the previous post.[1]

The Veil of Veronica is about appearing (the face of Jesus in a handkerchief), the Venus deception about hiding and disappearing (Venus hiding from sight).

Finger of the Holy Spirit, snout of the seraphim, nail of a cherubim, phial of Saint Michael’s sweat and Jesus’s sweat in Veronica’s handkerchief

Veil of Veronica by Francisco de Zurbarán (1598 – 1664), Bilbao Fine Arts Museum version

I love the bodiness and sheer ‘physicality’ of relics (lit. remains, often of body parts).

The French protestant satire Apologie pour Herodote (1566) was one of the first texts to poke fun at the Christian obsession with relics:

“A monk of St. Anthony having been at Jerusalem, saw there several relics, among which were a bit of the finger of the Holy Ghost, as sound and entire as it had ever been; the snout of the seraphim that appeared to St. Francis; one of the nails of a cherubim; one of the ribs of the verbum caro factum (the word made flesh); some rays of the star which appeared to the three kings in the east; a phial of St. Michael’s sweat when he was fighting against the devil; a hem of Joseph’s garment, which he wore when he cleaved wood.”–(tr. via Curiosities of Literature).

Apologie pour Herodote (1566, English: The Apology of Herodotus) is a protestant satire of catholicism by French printer and classical scholar Henri Estienne.