The Chestnut-Seller

Here's a story by one of my favourite writers. It's called 'The Chestnut-Seller' and it's by Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Choral Evensong

I officiated at Choral Evensong in College on Tuesday evening and m'colleague, Frost, sang. All part of my regular duties. But this time I took a recording device with me. You can listen to a five-minute clip here. The choir were on top form! Responses by Leighton, if anyone's interested.

Kierkegaardian Depression

Thought I would share a rather poignant quotation from Kierkegaard which I found in last Saturday's Guardian Review:

I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; wit poured from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me – but I went away – and the dash should be as long as the earth's orbit and wanted to shoot myself.

Since K is hailed as the Father of Existentialism, it's perhaps not surprising that it has a reputation for being miserable.

AudioBoo

Listen to my AudioBoos here. They are posted to Twitter, as well.

Plan B

I have often considered the possibility of becoming one of those bearded men in pubs who drinks heavily and shouts at anyone who will listen. Seems like a sound Plan B to me. I am much better at drinking and shouting than I am at writing. On second thoughts, that might not be true. But I do the former more regularly.

I need to immerse myself in the double-suicide world of Karl Jaspers. (He had a Jewish wife in Nazi Germany and was prepared to kill himself if anything should happen to her.) Here are some of his words which speak to me:

Never to approach the hidden God directly is the fate which a philosophical Existenz must bear. Only the ciphers speak, if I am ready [...] only seldom will an eye seem to look at me in the dark. Day in, day out, it is as if there were nothing. In his eerie abandonment man seeks a more direct access, objective guarantees, and firm support; he takes God's hand in prayer so to speak turns to authority, and sees the Godhead in personal form - and only in this form is it God at all, while as the Godhead it maintains its indefinable distance . (Philosophy, Vol. 3, p. 133)

However attractive this philosophical world - whose attractiveness is probably enhanced by Redon's hallucinogenic visions - the world of theology imprisons me. S. John will not let me 'scape! B. S. tomorrow. I've also got to write a f*cking sermon for next Sun. Like I say, Plan B seems much more congenial!

There are stirrings in connection with Charlotte Gainsbourg's new album, IRM. You can download the first track for free here (perfectly legally, I might add). In my opinion it's a great song. And here is a video insight into the creative process. Better stop now before my better half gets jealous...

Charlotte Gainsbourg - IRM from Charlotte Gainsbourg on Vimeo.

Displacement

May the proliferation continue!

I have recently decided that the free OpenOffice programme, though valuable, is not sufficient to my paranoid needs. The programme was never particularly responsive but it was whilst looking into possible alternatives that I read a remark that put the Fear of God into me from the NeoOffice web site.

NeoOffice is not perfect. Although we try very hard to make NeoOffice free of bugs and crashes, our users still find new bugs and new cases that cause NeoOffice to crash. So, if you feel that you need software that has been heavily tested, we recommend that you use a commercially-supported product like Microsoft Office or Apple iWork.

If this is true of NeoOffice, I reflected, so it might be true of OpenOffice. So, with thoughts of losing my entire thesis (thus far) buzzing around in my brain, I heeded their advice. Microsoft or Apple was the choice: Protestant or Catholic? The fact that I already have a Mac, together with the very reasonable cost of iWork (with student discount), led me to choose the latter. And Pages is very nice. I especially like its full-screen feature which, theoretically at least, blacks out all distractions from the almost ritualized colour and movement of one's Mac's display.

Some might wish to accuse me of indulging in displacement activity and, of course, there would be some truth in that. When it is disagreeable to focus on bringing about the ends, why not focus on the means? Form and method instead of content; surface instead of depth.

Lethargy prevented me from going to Hatfield to hear the legendary John Cottingham speak at the University of Hertfordshire. That and the fact that I downloaded a typescript of what he was going to say (I assume this since the paper bears the same title as the talk) from his website. I was in no mood to heckle.

Next week I plan to write up my observations on Karl Jasper's periechontology with a dual focus on his notion of 'ciphers' and his views on the role of the subject-object dichotomy. His ideas on both create ambiguity: on the one hand, ciphers are the 'language of being', they embody what is beyond the subject-object dichotomy to human Existenz - a way of being that is existential, where subject is not separable from object. But he also claims that the subject-object dichotomy is essential to the existence of human consciousness. If we are not in the dichotomy, he argues, we are unconscious. This appears to place equal weight on scientific ways of engaging with the world and 'spiritual', broadly religious, ones. The question is, How do the two relate? His concept of Existenz doesn't seem adequately to bridge the other two categories of his tripartite system: ordinary consciousness (in the subject-object dichotomy) and Transcendence (or God). I hope, at any rate to draw from him a better account of the relation of human consciousness to what is beyond itself than that provided by Tillich's account of symbols which can never escape the subject-object dichotomy. Jaspers provides us with that possibility, though perhaps not without inconsistency or ambiguity.

Why I Don't Trust Wikipedia

The picture speaks for itself.

The number of posts I am making is nearing a proliferation!