“O the ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil, such as hatred, or suffering, or death! The ultimate evil is that Time is perpetual perishing, and being actual involves elimination. The nature of evil may be epitomized, therefore, in two simple but horrible and holy propositions: 'Things fade' and 'Alternatives exclude.' Such is His mystery: that beauty requires contrast, and that discord is fundamental to the creation of new intensities of feeling. Ultimate wisdom, I have come to perceive, lies in the perception that the solemnity and grandeur of the universe rise through the slow process of unification in which the diversities of existence are utilized, and nothing, 'nothing' is lost.”
― John Gardner, Grendel
Open mind’s purpose is to process the eliminations.
Grendel’s open mind may have ouroboros’d all the way back round to eliminate itself.
An early, untrumpeted of course, use of openAI, perhaps.
Or maybe Beowulf & the boys sorts just drove him over the edge.
You are as reliable as the the sunrise, Andy. Just as bright and just as welcome. Thank you for the wonderful and humbling Gardner quote. That idea that everything is utilized and nothing is lost corresponds with my interest in and focus on the little things. In the demise -- the eliminations you reference -- is where we discover the grace and humility that gives life meaning. And from that meaning we might, on occasion, extract enough gratitude to justify and even celebrate the ouroboric nature of life, what we might confuse at times as linear progress in a universe where even light bends. Don't know: perhaps Beowulf, the boys of history, and AI exist precisely to drive open minds over the edge. Maybe that's where we discover ourselves in art and edifice as creators of our own little Big Bangs.
Or that its sunny complexion beaming down on ‘starstuff carbon getting back to the garden’ of certain sunny dispositions assembles in those patterner’s eyes as “reliability”? 🌞
I remember the line out of Goldblum’s mouth in Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.”
And Horace: “You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.”
Sounds, & looks, like stubbornness to me … & virtuous (to impose a meaning) - which is a due many would deprive ‘it’s a bird … it’s a plane … it’s Stubborn, man!’.
Maybe it’s those refuseniks who have been dosed with kryptonite.
I read Gardener’s Grendel a long time ago, but that particular quote has remained stubborn with me. What you wrote wore that quote-coat & so called it up in my memory.
But here’s where the interesting continues. Gardener said he based Grendel on Sartre.
Existentialism is a whole ‘nother stubbornness but the guy lumped into that vortex who disavowed it, instead sponsoring the fruit of the tree of knowledge Algerian-appellation “absurdism,” was Camus.
I think Camus was onto something.
I know I’ve been rolling that boulder for a long time. I even thought, briefly, I might like to live in Boulder … but sense & sensibility is … stubborn.
(I’d been nameless horsing around lower, sand & cactus, deserts for years. Feminine allure, alcohol, & much higher elevation desert traipsing had me seeing things that weren’t actually there, & not seeing things that were.)
So apropos somebody said he was an avowed dyed in the wool solipsist.
But if ol’ Sol IP’sism uses & misuses are inherent & innate as it seems to be, maybe dyes that are colorfast & dyes that bleach away in the lather-rinse-repeat cycles are all too often problematic?
Fundamentalist dyes & the hills those die on & unitarian dyes & their eroding away to Mohammed mountains … the sun shines down on all.
(Down in that hot desert Richard Bolles’ - who penned What Color Is Your Parachute? - brother, investigative journalist Don, was car-bomb murdered, in ’76, by the usual suspects ….)
So/and I see solipsism as a six-shooter that all too often stars in The Deer Hunter & its relentless never-ending sequels.
Dunno how its going for Chris Walken these days. But ‘no news’ as versus the De Niro nova-super seems to indicate that at least one of the “empty” chambers is loaded with silver bullet irony.
Currently reading Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail & she is convincing that canopy is a fundamental colorfast iron dome parachute-filter between life on earth & sunshine vitamin D-hormone photosynthesis …
And/but maybe your photo synthesis art lets a little more of those health-giving & healing rays penetrate the darkness at more or less constant noon.
True detection is a good thing, & I still think this ending washed out some better dye, but, speaks to the possibility:
In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote: “Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”
“O the ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil, such as hatred, or suffering, or death! The ultimate evil is that Time is perpetual perishing, and being actual involves elimination. The nature of evil may be epitomized, therefore, in two simple but horrible and holy propositions: 'Things fade' and 'Alternatives exclude.' Such is His mystery: that beauty requires contrast, and that discord is fundamental to the creation of new intensities of feeling. Ultimate wisdom, I have come to perceive, lies in the perception that the solemnity and grandeur of the universe rise through the slow process of unification in which the diversities of existence are utilized, and nothing, 'nothing' is lost.”
― John Gardner, Grendel
Open mind’s purpose is to process the eliminations.
Grendel’s open mind may have ouroboros’d all the way back round to eliminate itself.
An early, untrumpeted of course, use of openAI, perhaps.
Or maybe Beowulf & the boys sorts just drove him over the edge.
You are as reliable as the the sunrise, Andy. Just as bright and just as welcome. Thank you for the wonderful and humbling Gardner quote. That idea that everything is utilized and nothing is lost corresponds with my interest in and focus on the little things. In the demise -- the eliminations you reference -- is where we discover the grace and humility that gives life meaning. And from that meaning we might, on occasion, extract enough gratitude to justify and even celebrate the ouroboric nature of life, what we might confuse at times as linear progress in a universe where even light bends. Don't know: perhaps Beowulf, the boys of history, and AI exist precisely to drive open minds over the edge. Maybe that's where we discover ourselves in art and edifice as creators of our own little Big Bangs.
Thanks for your contributions to my art.
Thanks, Jeff. Nice compliment. Appreciate you.
Have you ever thought of the sun as stubborn?
Or that its sunny complexion beaming down on ‘starstuff carbon getting back to the garden’ of certain sunny dispositions assembles in those patterner’s eyes as “reliability”? 🌞
I remember the line out of Goldblum’s mouth in Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.”
And Horace: “You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, yet she’ll be constantly running back.”
Sounds, & looks, like stubbornness to me … & virtuous (to impose a meaning) - which is a due many would deprive ‘it’s a bird … it’s a plane … it’s Stubborn, man!’.
Maybe it’s those refuseniks who have been dosed with kryptonite.
I read Gardener’s Grendel a long time ago, but that particular quote has remained stubborn with me. What you wrote wore that quote-coat & so called it up in my memory.
But here’s where the interesting continues. Gardener said he based Grendel on Sartre.
Existentialism is a whole ‘nother stubbornness but the guy lumped into that vortex who disavowed it, instead sponsoring the fruit of the tree of knowledge Algerian-appellation “absurdism,” was Camus.
I think Camus was onto something.
I know I’ve been rolling that boulder for a long time. I even thought, briefly, I might like to live in Boulder … but sense & sensibility is … stubborn.
(I’d been nameless horsing around lower, sand & cactus, deserts for years. Feminine allure, alcohol, & much higher elevation desert traipsing had me seeing things that weren’t actually there, & not seeing things that were.)
So apropos somebody said he was an avowed dyed in the wool solipsist.
But if ol’ Sol IP’sism uses & misuses are inherent & innate as it seems to be, maybe dyes that are colorfast & dyes that bleach away in the lather-rinse-repeat cycles are all too often problematic?
Fundamentalist dyes & the hills those die on & unitarian dyes & their eroding away to Mohammed mountains … the sun shines down on all.
(Down in that hot desert Richard Bolles’ - who penned What Color Is Your Parachute? - brother, investigative journalist Don, was car-bomb murdered, in ’76, by the usual suspects ….)
So/and I see solipsism as a six-shooter that all too often stars in The Deer Hunter & its relentless never-ending sequels.
Dunno how its going for Chris Walken these days. But ‘no news’ as versus the De Niro nova-super seems to indicate that at least one of the “empty” chambers is loaded with silver bullet irony.
Currently reading Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail & she is convincing that canopy is a fundamental colorfast iron dome parachute-filter between life on earth & sunshine vitamin D-hormone photosynthesis …
And/but maybe your photo synthesis art lets a little more of those health-giving & healing rays penetrate the darkness at more or less constant noon.
True detection is a good thing, & I still think this ending washed out some better dye, but, speaks to the possibility:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmdPY-hFSt0
In 1891, Oscar Wilde wrote: “Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.”