Imbibing the Reality of Metaphors Made Manifest

I will be Paris and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked.
- Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

Faustus declaims an impassioned identification, invoking a magical fusing of past and present, the fire of his emotion being hot enough to make the metaphor real.

On 7 February 1601, the evening before the abortive Essex Rising, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex and his supporters requested the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to perform a play on the matter of Henry IV, and the "deposing and killing" of Richard II.

We seek out art that "expresses" or makes manifest the swirl of inarticulate emotions within us. This is Aristotle's κάθαρσις - catharsis - the purgation of excessive feelings. But we see with Essex and with Faustus that the imitation is commutative: art represents life, and life would reinforce its patterns by imitating the art it selects. Instead of Richard, Elizabeth; instead of Troy, Wittenberg.

Plato had identified this danger of poetry, see Republic 3.395d ... (here starting back in the middle of 395c): ἐὰν δὲ μιμῶνται, μιμεῖσθαι τὰ τούτοις προσήκοντα εὐθὺς ἐκ παίδων, ἀνδρείους, σώφρονας, ὁσίους, ἐλευθέρους, καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα πάντα, τὰ δὲ ἀνελεύθερα μήτε ποιεῖν μήτε δεινοὺς εἶναι μιμήσασθαι, μηδὲ ἄλλο μηδὲν τῶν αἰσχρῶν, ἵνα μὴ ἐκ τῆς μιμήσεως τοῦ εἶναι ἀπολαύσωσιν. ἢ οὐκ ᾔσθησαι ὅτι αἱ μιμήσεις, ἐὰν ἐκ νέων πόρρω διατελέσωσιν, εἰς ἔθη τε καὶ φύσιν καθίστανται καὶ κατὰ σῶμα καὶ φωνὰς καὶ κατὰ τὴν διάνοιαν;

"But if they imitate they should from childhood up imitate what is appropriate to them — men, that is, who are brave, sober, pious, free and all things of that kind; but things unbecoming the free man they should neither do nor be clever at imitating, nor yet any other shameful thing, lest from the imitation they imbibe the reality. Or have you not observed that imitations, if continued from youth far into life, settle down into habits and (second) nature in the body, the speech, and the thought?"

The translation here is Paul Shorey's. I think "lest from the imitation they imbibe the reality" is an instance of the translator introducing a new metaphor that isn't in the original ἵνα μὴ ἐκ τῆς μιμήσεως τοῦ εἶναι ἀπολαύσωσιν. As much as I like the florid grandeur of "imbibe the reality", perhaps Benjamin Jowett's older translation is closer to the mark "lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate."

Jowett's version of this section runs: "if they imitate at all, they should imitate from youth upward only those characters which are suitable to their profession - the courageous, temperate, holy, free, and the like; but they should not depict or be skilful at imitating any kind of illiberality or baseness, lest from imitation they should come to be what they imitate. Did you never observe how imitations, beginning in early youth and continuing far into life, at length grow into habits and become a second nature, affecting body, voice, and mind?"

Mimesis and Memory

"Kinder spielen Soldaten. Das ist sinnvoll. Warum aber spielen Soldaten Kinder?" - Karl Kraus

Children play soldiers. That is sensible. But why do soldiers play children?

But there is no real puzzle here, when we consider the dual engines of mimesis and memory. Aristotle observed how humans are naturally mimetic and take delight in the recognition of what is represented. Our characters become defined through the way we imitate ourselves and repeat certain actions - so memory (its nostalgia for the self, and repugnance as well perhaps) plays a vital part in the way character moves forward and the person develops. So it is entirely natural for children to imitate soldiers, and for soldiers to replay one way or another the days of their childhood.

Félicité, Passion, Ivresse

Returning to that final sentence of Chapter 5 of Part 1 of Madame Bovary

"Et Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l’on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d’ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres."

In Geoffrey Wall's translation for Penguin Classics it is: "And Emma sought to find out exactly what was meant in real life by the words fidelity, passion, and rapture, which had seemed so fine on the pages of books." "Fidelity" here seems like a mistake.

Lydia Davis' recent translation offers: "And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words "bliss," "passion," and "intoxication," which had seemed so beautiful to her in books."

Frank McConnell explains the range of meanings of these three words in his essay 'Félicité, Passion, Ivresse: The Lexicography of Madame Bovary': "To understand fully the range and importance of the verbal motto félicité, passion, ivresse, it is necessary to examine their potential grammar. All three may be understood as both intransitive and relational terms, depending upon the sense in which we decide to take them. Fklicitk-"bliss, "luck," "joy," or a kind of benign capacity for grace, is either a serenely full good humor or a dynamic equilibrium of circumstance and spirit. Passion is both le grand passion, the English "passion," and also a "passive" suffering, a state of being painfully objective to another person or to the world. And Ivresse is both "ecstasy" and, simply, "drunkenness" or "intoxication": taken most generally, the use of an object-or the objectification of a subject-for the artificial transcendence of one's subjective consciousness." (Novel, Winter 1970, p.158)

In a footnote he also quotes a remark by Wittgenstein: "That is to say, whether a word of the language of our tribe is rightly translated into a word of the English language depends upon the role this word plays in the whole life of the tribe; the occasions on which it is used, the expressions of emotion by which it is generally accompanied, the ideas which it generally awakens or which prompt its saying, etc., etc.," Wittgenstein, The Brown Book (New York, lssue), p. 103.

Man is what he hides

« Pour l'essentiel, l'homme est ce qu'il cache ... Un miserable petit tas de secrets. » - André Malraux, Les Noyers de l'Altenburg.

"Fundamentally, man is what he hides ... A wretched little pile of secrets."

So it is up to the historian, the psychiatrist or the detective biographer to piece together the story.

Maths - the branch of physics where the experiments are cheap

With news of NASA cancelling LISA only a few months after FermiLab announced it will be turning off the Tevatron, one is tempted to feel a new Dark Ages may be approaching. But perhaps a renaissance of mathematics will be dawning. The mathematician Vladimir Arnold once said "Математика — часть физика — экспериментальчая, естественная наука, частьестествознания. Математика — это та часть физики, в которой эксперименты дешевы."

Translated, this reads "Mathematics is a part of physics. Physics is an experimental science, a part of natural science. Mathematics is the part of physics where experiments are cheap."

Too much food ?

«'On cite souvent, pour en rire, Schopenhauer qui faisait l'éloge du sui- cide devant une table bien garnie.» - Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942)

"Schopenhauer is often cited as a fit subject for laughter, because he praised suicide while seated at a well-set table."

«В сущности же, эта моя любовь была произведением, с одной стороны, деятельности мамаши и портних, с другой - избытка поглощавшейся мной пищи при праздной жизни» - Lev Tolstoy, Kreutzer Sonata.

"In actual fact, this love of mine was the product of on the one hand, the efforts of the girl's mother and dress-makers, and on the other, of the excessive quantities of food I had consumed during a life of idleness"

The Lord's Tokens

I notice that in the section of the Java Language Specification devoted to tokens the following line's from Love's Labour's Lost are quoted.

These lords are visited; you are not free,
For the Lord's tokens on you do I see.

The quotation seems a bit weird and obscure in isolation, particularly if one doesn't realize that the "Lord's tokens" referred to the black coin-shaped patches on the skin that signalled infection with the plague.

Yet I have a trick
Of the old rage: bear with me, I am sick;
I'll leave it by degrees. Soft, let us see:
Write, 'Lord have mercy on us' on those three;
They are infected; in their hearts it lies;
They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes;
These lords are visited; you are not free,
For the Lord's tokens on you do I see.

The word "token" derives from the Old English tæcean, to show, from which we more directly get the word "teach".

In a recent London Review of Books article, James Shapiro points out "It’s hard to decide what’s more disturbing about the exchange: the casual joking about spotting ‘the Lord’s tokens’ on her skin – as close to a death warrant as you could get – or the joke about inscribing the warning ‘Lord have mercy on me’ on the infected."

Starting with the shape

I've started reading Hilary Menos's début collection Berg and the first line of the first poem struck me.

I want to write you a small square poem

I think this captures something fundamental about artistic creation ... the initial impetus for a new poem or a new piece of music might be simply some vague notion of the form or shape you want to create ... a sonnet, an unrhymed epigram, a piano sonata, a waltz, or an étude.