Bellini, Le Christ Benissant (~1465)

There is a relatively simple and painless eye-operation which, nonetheless, involves a very unpleasant experience: under local anesthesia, i.e., with the patient’s full awareness, the eye is taken out of the socket and turned a little bit around in the air (in order to correct the way the eye-ball is attached to the brain) – at this moment, the patient can for a brief moment see (parts of) himself from outside, from an “objective” viewpoint, as a strange object, the way he “really is” as an object in the world, not the way one usually experiences oneself as fully embedded “in” one’s body. There is something divine in this (very unpleasant) experience: one sees oneself as if from a divine viewpoint, somehow realizing the mystical motto according to which, the eye through which I see God is the eye through which God sees himself. Something homologous to this weird experience, applied to God himself, occurs in the Incarnation.

Zizek, Only a Suffering God Can Save Us

Boethius in the 6th Century writing in prison and imagining the good lady Philosophy helping his soul out after he was deluded by the Muses of Poetry:

“Who,” she demanded, her piercing eyes alight with firs, “has allowed these hysterical sluts to approach this sick man’s bedside? These are the very women who kill the rich and fruitful harvest of Reason with the barren thorns of Passion.”

Milan Kundera in The Art of the Novel after speaking about the progression of the serious novel in the modern era from Cervantes onwards says the following:

‘Once upon a time I thought the future was the only competent judge of our works and actions. Later on I understood that chasing after the future is the worst conformism of all, a craven flattery of the mighty. For the future is always mightier than the present. It will pass judgement on us, of course. And without any competence. 
 But if the future is not a value for me, then to what am I attached? To God? Country? The people? The individual? 
 My answer is as ridiculous as it is sincere: I am attached to nothing but the depreciated legacy of Cervantes.’

‘An honest religious thinker is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it.’

Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

More from Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche is talking about the differences in Spirit between the Southern and Northern European and, in particular, in relation to music…

“…a Southerner not by origin but by BELIEF, if he should dream of the future of music, must also dream of it being freed from the influence of the North; and must have in his ears the prelude to a deeper, mightier, and perhaps more perverse and mysterious music, a super-German music, which does not fade, pale, and die away, as all German music does, at the sight of the blue, wanton sea and the Mediterranean clearness of sky—a super-European music, which holds its own even in presence of the brown sunsets of the desert…”

“…there is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on PLATO’S secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no “Bible,” nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic—but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life—a Greek life which he repudiated—without an Aristophanes!”

—Neitzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

What an opening scene!

“He perceived all the strangeness there was in being observed by a word as if 

by a living thing, and not simply by one word, but by all the words that were in 

that word, by all those that went with it and in turn contained other words, like 

a possession of angels opening out  to the infinite to the very eye of the absolute."

Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure

Anyone familiar with his critical work will recognise a lovely echo here of many of his deep interests in literature. What do words do when they are given a weight beyond their concept forming capacity? When their materiality is recognised and given space? One of his early, and enduring, beliefs was that ordinary language negated what it described because it replaced the actuality of the thing with a general concept: the living tree is called a tree and it immediately loses its particularity to a concept. In literature, however, where the materiality, texture, cadence, etc, of words is given weight then the substitution of thing for concept is partly broken. Instead of the word negating the actuality of the thing and replacing it with a positive concept, literature causes a word to negate the thing and resist that usual forming of the concept: a double absence. Some new space is formed where the words take on a new meaning, or life, in relation to the words around them and the form of the work. The encounter with the work—reading—is an encounter with the particular space this work creates and one that is always unique because of that quality of texture that is so particular.

“ A writer who is easy to imitate, deep down, does not deserve to be called a writer.”

from a new interview with Peter Handke (thanks Steve)

Berenice Abbott by Walker Evans ca 1930. Even at this age she saw the genius of Atget when no one else could.

 We do great injustice to Iscariot, in thinking him wicked above all common wickedness. He was only a common money-lover, and, like all money-lovers, didn’t understand Christ; — couldn’t make out the worth of Him, or meaning of Him. He didn’t want Him to be killed. He was horror-struck when he found that Christ would be killed; threw his money away instantly, and hanged himself. How many of our present money-seekers, think you, would have the grace to hang themselves, whoever was killed?

—From John Ruskin Lecture, The Crown of Wild Olive

“If you were like him, you would be a great artist.”

In Francoise Gilot’s Life with Picasso she tells of how another of Picasso’s ex-lovers used to write huge letters haranguing him everyday, when she wasn’t stalking him. And she would often include a picture of Rembrandt and write, “If you were like him, you would be a great artist.” Gilot says this used to trouble Picasso a lot. But it sounds like it would be a useful service to everyone. 

“VANITY bids all her sons be generous and brave,———-and her daughters chaste and courteous.———-But why do we want her instructions?———-Ask the comedian who is taught a part he feels not———-

Is it that the principles of religion want strength, or that the real passion for what is good and worthy will not carry us high enough———-GOD! thou knowest they carry us too high———-we want not to be,—but to seem——-”

—from a Laurence Sterne sermon, 1764