POMPEO BATONI, ATALANTA CRYING OVER THE BODY OF MELEAGER (CA. 1750). PRIVATE COLLECTION
"In Nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it, and over it"--Goethe
THE FOREST & THE FAUSTIAN SOUL TIC June 13, 2014
"It has been said that the Northern soul and the forest are one and the same thing: the mythological Forest that contrasts the splendid isolation of man in his solitude against the infinity of nature. Only this kind of soul could have such a word in its language as Waldeinsamkeit—”Forest-loneliness”—just as one of the most moving passages in Western literature is the Easter scene in Goethe’s Faust: 'A longing pure and not to be described/drove me to wander over woods and fields/and in a mist of hot abundant tears/I felt a world arise and live for me.' Northern legends have been built around certain species of trees—firs, ash, oak, elm—and in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the representative of German Romanticism at its height, dense walls of magnificent trees dwarf a lone Napoleonic soldier—a metaphorical relationship that is withdrawn, fortress-like, dark and impenetrable. The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm all took place in the woods, while Siegfried, Parsifal, Tristan, Hamlet, Faust—those quintessentially Northern heroes—all longed for the woods in which their inner lives were awakened...
"The Forest: so invigorating and baptismal, suffused with those Goethean echoes that reverberate the lyrical tristesse of the high-minded loner; its contemplative splendor broken only by an occasional spray of sun-rays, like 'fitful light-flecks playing in their shadow-filled volume,' as writes our Dr. Spengler. Indeed, if God made man in His image, one may say that Nature had her say and added three elements of her own: the Sea, the Stone and, above all, the Forest. The Sea—representing that which is rational, clear, enlightened in a man’s soul; Stone—to express his need to give shape to history, experience and memory. But most profoundly, the Forest—the darkness within him; a silent summons from deep within the murmur of trees giving rise to a man’s discovery of his own, authentic voice[...]"
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THE LOST SOUL OF MR. WILLIAM FIFE III TIC February 17, 2017
"To the civilized few among us for whom it is still important to reflect upon such things, the moving passage in the Odyssey where Odysseus is confronted among the shades by his companion Elpenor, who has just died, may be considered one of the most poignant scenes in all of classical literature. Odysseus asks Elpenor: 'How came you in this murky gloom? Faster you come on foot than I in my black ship.' Elpenor tells Odysseus of his death and begs his lord to erect “on the shore of the foaming sea” the memorial of an unhappy man, that future times may remember him. “Do this for me and fix upon my grace the oar with which in life I rowed among my comrades.” The vision here is that of the sea of life, the immensity of the unknown: human perseverance through a vast ocean of tribulations, propelled by the awe and the dread with which Classical—or “Apollonian,” in Spengler’s formulation—man referred to the 'violet-hued deep.'
"The sea has been a stimulus to every imagination at all susceptible to the magic call of its waters, “ever since man overcame his primitive superstitions of the boundless main and sought to tame the ocean in venturesome ships,” The Lotus Magazine, a beautiful yesteryear sporting journal, editorialized in May 1915. There is both glamour and melancholy that surrounds all things maritime, the poetic product of warring emotional factions, between man’s desire to conquer and his staggering anxiety at depths unfathomable[...]"
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QUIET DESPERATION AND THE ENGLISH WAY TIC July 1, 2014
The Nature of Man is the ultimate quest of Science.” —Sir John Carew Eccles
“Let us kill Mind!” Otto Neurath declared in 1921. Such was the mental death warrant the West went and issued against itself four centuries after the first modern philosopher declared the triumph of Mind as the only basis of the “I” to know its-Self. The morbid Mr. Neurath, high priest and patriarch of Viennese anti- Reason dogma, and his merry band of latter-day nihilists had stood waiting, grins wide and arms akimbo, at the finish line of Man’s Search For Himself as it came flying down the headless horseman path of post- Cartesian Western philosophy and straight into the twentieth century--hooves caked, cracked and bloodied with Dialectical Materialism, Positivist Marxism, Psychological Determinism and Behaviorial Reductionism greasing the gait. With that, the Mind, the Self, and the “I” were trampled out of existence...
...Mr. Eccles, for his part, could not completely stave off a growing pessimism with regard to the ideological state of mankind. At the end of The Human Mystery, he writes: “I repudiate philosophies and political systems which recognize human beings as mere things with a material existence of value only as cogs in the great bureaucratic machine of the state, which thus becomes a slave state. The terrible and cynical slaveries depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 are engulfing more and more of our planet.” He sought a renewed faith for humanity; a re-energizing of philosophy and religion.
“Each of us lives within the universe—the prison—of his own brain,” wrote the American neurologist Vernon Mountcastle in a dramatic summary of the Mind-Brain relationship that Mr. Eccles quotes in The Self and Its Brain. “Projecting from it are millions of fragile sensory nerve fibres, in groups uniquely adapted to sample the energetic states of the world about us: heat, light, force, and chemical compositions.” Mr. Mountcastle continues: “At the level of sensation, your images and my images are virtually the same […] Beyond that, each image is conjoined with genetic and stored experiential information that makes us uniquely private. From that complex integral each of us constructs at a higher level of perceptual experience his own, very personal, view from within...."
THE FOREST & THE FAUSTIAN SOUL TIC June 13, 2014
"It has been said that the Northern soul and the forest are one and the same thing: the mythological Forest that contrasts the splendid isolation of man in his solitude against the infinity of nature. Only this kind of soul could have such a word in its language as Waldeinsamkeit—”Forest-loneliness”—just as one of the most moving passages in Western literature is the Easter scene in Goethe’s Faust: 'A longing pure and not to be described/drove me to wander over woods and fields/and in a mist of hot abundant tears/I felt a world arise and live for me.' Northern legends have been built around certain species of trees—firs, ash, oak, elm—and in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the representative of German Romanticism at its height, dense walls of magnificent trees dwarf a lone Napoleonic soldier—a metaphorical relationship that is withdrawn, fortress-like, dark and impenetrable. The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm all took place in the woods, while Siegfried, Parsifal, Tristan, Hamlet, Faust—those quintessentially Northern heroes—all longed for the woods in which their inner lives were awakened...
"The Forest: so invigorating and baptismal, suffused with those Goethean echoes that reverberate the lyrical tristesse of the high-minded loner; its contemplative splendor broken only by an occasional spray of sun-rays, like 'fitful light-flecks playing in their shadow-filled volume,' as writes our Dr. Spengler. Indeed, if God made man in His image, one may say that Nature had her say and added three elements of her own: the Sea, the Stone and, above all, the Forest. The Sea—representing that which is rational, clear, enlightened in a man’s soul; Stone—to express his need to give shape to history, experience and memory. But most profoundly, the Forest—the darkness within him; a silent summons from deep within the murmur of trees giving rise to a man’s discovery of his own, authentic voice[...]"
*
THE LOST SOUL OF MR. WILLIAM FIFE III TIC February 17, 2017
"To the civilized few among us for whom it is still important to reflect upon such things, the moving passage in the Odyssey where Odysseus is confronted among the shades by his companion Elpenor, who has just died, may be considered one of the most poignant scenes in all of classical literature. Odysseus asks Elpenor: 'How came you in this murky gloom? Faster you come on foot than I in my black ship.' Elpenor tells Odysseus of his death and begs his lord to erect “on the shore of the foaming sea” the memorial of an unhappy man, that future times may remember him. “Do this for me and fix upon my grace the oar with which in life I rowed among my comrades.” The vision here is that of the sea of life, the immensity of the unknown: human perseverance through a vast ocean of tribulations, propelled by the awe and the dread with which Classical—or “Apollonian,” in Spengler’s formulation—man referred to the 'violet-hued deep.'
"The sea has been a stimulus to every imagination at all susceptible to the magic call of its waters, “ever since man overcame his primitive superstitions of the boundless main and sought to tame the ocean in venturesome ships,” The Lotus Magazine, a beautiful yesteryear sporting journal, editorialized in May 1915. There is both glamour and melancholy that surrounds all things maritime, the poetic product of warring emotional factions, between man’s desire to conquer and his staggering anxiety at depths unfathomable[...]"
*
QUIET DESPERATION AND THE ENGLISH WAY TIC July 1, 2014
The Nature of Man is the ultimate quest of Science.” —Sir John Carew Eccles
“Let us kill Mind!” Otto Neurath declared in 1921. Such was the mental death warrant the West went and issued against itself four centuries after the first modern philosopher declared the triumph of Mind as the only basis of the “I” to know its-Self. The morbid Mr. Neurath, high priest and patriarch of Viennese anti- Reason dogma, and his merry band of latter-day nihilists had stood waiting, grins wide and arms akimbo, at the finish line of Man’s Search For Himself as it came flying down the headless horseman path of post- Cartesian Western philosophy and straight into the twentieth century--hooves caked, cracked and bloodied with Dialectical Materialism, Positivist Marxism, Psychological Determinism and Behaviorial Reductionism greasing the gait. With that, the Mind, the Self, and the “I” were trampled out of existence...
...Mr. Eccles, for his part, could not completely stave off a growing pessimism with regard to the ideological state of mankind. At the end of The Human Mystery, he writes: “I repudiate philosophies and political systems which recognize human beings as mere things with a material existence of value only as cogs in the great bureaucratic machine of the state, which thus becomes a slave state. The terrible and cynical slaveries depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 are engulfing more and more of our planet.” He sought a renewed faith for humanity; a re-energizing of philosophy and religion.
“Each of us lives within the universe—the prison—of his own brain,” wrote the American neurologist Vernon Mountcastle in a dramatic summary of the Mind-Brain relationship that Mr. Eccles quotes in The Self and Its Brain. “Projecting from it are millions of fragile sensory nerve fibres, in groups uniquely adapted to sample the energetic states of the world about us: heat, light, force, and chemical compositions.” Mr. Mountcastle continues: “At the level of sensation, your images and my images are virtually the same […] Beyond that, each image is conjoined with genetic and stored experiential information that makes us uniquely private. From that complex integral each of us constructs at a higher level of perceptual experience his own, very personal, view from within...."