Commentary is what we are all engaged in. We are all striving to make texts readable (the word 'text' is to be understood here in its broadest possible sense). We are all involved in the business of explicating, expounding, explaining, expressing, and generally doing things described by Latinate verbs beginning with ex- (exculpating? excluding? excommunicating?). Why are we doing this? What the hell is a 'commentary' anyway?
In the abstract sense a 'commentatio' is not a written study of a book, but 'a diligent meditation upon something, a studying, a careful preparation' [Lewis & Short].
Cicero translates the famous words of Socrates from the Phaedo thus:
Tota philosophorum vita commentatio mortis est.
The whole life of philosophers is the meditation of [a commentary upon?] death.
— Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, ii. 30.
What is the purpose of commentary? To fashion a mould, a matrix, from which the object text might have taken its form. To delineate with great precision and distinction the shape of a text, so that, were the text itself to disappear, it would still be distinguishable from its outline. The form of commentary is not in the lines, but in the curvature of empty space that is defined by those lines – just as dark matter is not directly observed, but defined by its gravitational effects, by the curvature of space-time. A commentary is an act of negative creation.
Understood thus, perhaps written commentary, commentary in the proper sense, approaches the kind of commentary Cicero is talking about. A philosopher's life is a commentary upon death. Death, like the absent text, can only be defined from the outside: it can never be experienced, never understood, never known. Life is a commentary on death, because death is the void at the centre of life, the impossibly dark point that has no shape or form. It is only 'there'. Life – the examined life, at least – gives form to death.
If we are to subscribe to this notion of commentary as that which makes it possible to discern a text in outline, it ought to be possible to 'reverse engineer' any text from its commentaries. It is not, of course, and that is because the process of meaning-making in language is not deterministic. Implications are there to be unfolded (etymology tells us so); but that unfolding can be done in many different ways, and an implication, once unfolded, cannot easily be folded back up again.
So let us take another run at the question. Perhaps the ideal commentary would exactly replicate the object text: it would describe exactly every idea, every image, every detail that was expressed in the original text. Commentary then, becomes a matter of copying out. It sounds ridiculous, for what value could there be in empty repetition? Copying out, though, is, literally, a powerful process. Copying can be strong, forceful, effective, full, abundant (all senses bound up in the Latin 'copia'). But it can also betoken death and decay, as in Borges' little fable about the cartographers' efforts to map a territory by replicating its features exactly, on the same scale.
But commentary can never satisfy itself with repetition, reduplication. It must deviate too; it must digress.
The rest is commentary...but commentary is never at rest. I'm sure you will excuse the pun – because punning itself is a legitimate operation, a basic function of commentary. After all, to unfold the implications of words, to unpack the involutions of concepts, is it not necessary to have an eye for the peculiar slants given to words in writing, to trace their usages, to place their origins and to chase their offshoots; in short, to seek out their points of commonality, their intertexts?
Montaigne, who lived at the arse-end of a period that witnessed perhaps the greatest proliferation of commentaries the world has ever known, naturally had some quite insightful things to say on the matter. I shall permit myself to quote a couple of passages excerpted from his essay 'On experience' (where else?), to which I shall append my own commentary.
The first, oft-quoted, its substance not diminished:
Il y a plus affaire à interpreter les interpretations, qu'à interpreter les choses : et plus de livres sur les livres, que sur autre subject : Nous ne faisons que nous entregloser. Tout fourmille de commentaires: d'autheurs, il en est grand cherté. Le principal et plus fameux sçavoir de nos siecles, est-ce pas sçavoir entendre les sçavants ? Est-ce pas la fin commune et derniere de touts estudes ? Nos opinions s'entent les unes sur les autres. La premiere sert de tige à la seconde : la seconde à la tierce. Nous eschellons ainsi de degré en degré. Et advient de là, que le plus haut monté, a souvent plus d'honneur, que de merite. Car il n'est monté que d'un grain, sur les espaules du penultime.
There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity. Is it not the principal and most reputed knowledge of our later ages to understand the learned? Is it not the common and final end of all studies? Our opinions are grafted upon one another; the first serves as a stock to the second, the second to the third, and so forth; thus step by step we climb the ladder; whence it comes to pass that he who is mounted highest has often more honour than merit, for he is got up but an inch upon the shoulders of the last, but one.
— trans. Charles Cotton.
This commentary on the phenomenon of the uncontrolled proliferation of commentaries upon commentaries ends up sounding quite upbeat, not least because Newton co-opted the image of shoulder-standing (as did many later generations of logical positivists, intent on effecting the apotheosis of the ideal of progress) to speak of the scientific advances his thought made possible. The climbing of ladders, too, to the modern ear, cannot but sound a lot like an indicator of progress, onward and upward, a reaching for greater and better things. And that phrase, 'Tout fourmille de commentaires'...well, we now know that ants in a colony work pretty well together, and the sum of all their efforts is a unity, a neat model for the functioning of the human mind.
Let's jump back a bit, to a passage that comes just before in the same essay:
Qui ne diroit que les gloses augmentent les doubtes et l'ignorance, puis qu'il ne se voit aucun livre, soit humain, soit divin, sur qui le monde s'embesongne, duquel l'interpretation face tarir la difficulté ? Le centiesme commentaire, le renvoye à son suivant, plus espineux, et plus scabreux, que le premier ne l'avoit trouvé. Quand est-il convenu entre nous, ce livre en a assez, il n'y a meshuy plus que dire ? Cecy se voit mieux en la chicane. On donne authorité de loy à infinis docteurs, infinis arrests, et à autant d'interpretations. Trouvons nous pourtant quelque fin au besoin d'interpreter ? s'y voit-il quelque progrez et advancement vers la tranquillité ? nous faut-il moins d'advocats et de juges, que lors que cette masse de droict, estoit encore en sa premiere enfance ? Au contraire, nous obscurcissons et ensevelissons l'intelligence. Nous ne la descouvrons plus, qu'à la mercy de tant de clostures et barrieres. Les hommes mescognoissent la maladie naturelle de leur esprit. Il ne faict que fureter et quester ; et va sans cesse, tournoyant, bastissant, et s'empestrant, en sa besongne : comme nos vers à soye, et s'y estouffe. Mus in pice.
Who will not say that glosses augment doubts and ignorance, since there's no book to be found, either human or divine, which the world busies itself about, whereof the difficulties are cleared by interpretation. The hundredth commentator passes it on to the next, still more knotty and perplexed than he found it. When were we ever agreed amongst ourselves: "This book has enough; there is now no more to be said about it"? This is most apparent in the law; we give the authority of law to infinite doctors, infinite decrees, and as many interpretations; yet do we find any end of the need of interpretating? is there, for all that, any progress or advancement towards peace, or do we stand in need of any fewer advocates and judges than when this great mass of law was yet in its first infancy? On the contrary, we darken and bury intelligence; we can no longer discover it, but at the mercy of so many fences and barriers. Men do not know the natural disease of the mind; it does nothing but ferret and inquire, and is eternally wheeling, juggling, and perplexing itself like silkworms, and then suffocates itself in its work; "Mus in pice."--["A mouse in a pitch barrel."]
— the translation, which is here pretty spiny in places, is again by Charles Cotton.
This is much chewier stuff: it's something to really get your teeth into. Glosses increase doubt and ignorance. Commentaries do not succeed in unthorning, descaling the texts they explicate; on the contrary, they hand on something 'plus espineux, et plus scabreux' for their efforts. But make no mistake: this is not anti-intellectual demagoguery. Montaigne makes it clear that what he is writing for is not a retreat from knowledge, not an plea for simplicity of thought nor for a commonsensical, natural mode of expression. No, this mania for commentary is in the natural cast of men's minds, 'la maladie naturelle de leur esprit', and we do not have access to a non-gloopy, un-sticky form of expression. Notions of naturalness and artifice are, of course, immensely problematical in the Essais; but what comes through here, according to my (utterly scabrous) reading at least, is that the stickiness of human language, the black tar in which the mouse gets trapped, is not something to be escaped, but something we need to wade through, to get stuck into, to get involved in. And if we get all glued up in it, so much the better.
April 29, 2006
Empty rhetoric
The metaphor of the emptiness, vacuity, inanity of words is used all the time in denouncements of rhetoric. Emptiness is one of the most effective metaphors in the rhetoric of anti-rhetoric. It is favoured in particular, I think, in religious contexts, where it is meaningful to speak of words being empty in the sense that they are devoid of the substance of grace or faith; and, conversely, to speak of the plenitude of the divine Word made flesh. This rhetoric is deployed again and again in the New Testament, against hypocrisy: the words of hypocrites are empty, or else they are whited sepulchres, not empty, but full of dead men's bones – bones that are rotting away, and so empty on the inside. The emptiness is displaced onto the thing inside.
But the play of emptiness and fullness is not to be taken lightly, and hoc est corpus might be so much empty hocus pocus, depending of the hearer. Charity is a virtue of full-fill-ment, but it is etymologically the same as carity: lack, emptiness.
The metaphor is not, to be sure, the sole preserve of religious discourse. It has a rich history in poetry, in satire, in polemical writing. Plato denounced the emptiness of the Sophists' rhetoric, and throughout antiquity the principal charge levelled against sophistical rhetoric continued to be its emptiness; Persius satirized the inanity of bad poetry; Juvenal the empty words of flatterers and panders. Cicero, in the De Oratore, writes that speech without learning is but empty chatter ('est enim et scientia comprehendenda rerum plurimarum, sine qua verborum volubilitas inanis atque inridenda est'). In the Renaissance, they were full of it: an anxiety about the emptiness of words, that is. Du Bellay wrote against the empty poetry of his contemporaries, in particular the pétrarquisants (emptiness is a charge often levelled against love poetry especially); Erasmus wrote against the empty rhetoric of the ciceronians. Glory is an empty word, according to Montaigne (and many others). Fame, too, is an empty word; and Fama lives in a hollow house of ringing bronze, according to Ovid: bronze makes a lot of empty noise. But it can be a paradox too for an empty vessel to be full of noise. If life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, it is at least full of sound and fury, not empty.
According to the logic of this metaphor, words are figured as receptacles that may be empty or full of intent, sincerity, learning. So emptiness seems to equate to absolute lack of sincerity, or the absence of intention behind a word's meaning.
But, then: Ovid's Echo returns the words of Narcissus in what seems to be empty repetition. They have meaning nevertheless, because they are invested with an emotional truth, which Narcissus does not recognise (Flaubert's Rodophe has the same problem: 'Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions'). The emptiness behind the utterance is transfigured by some paradox of thought into plenitude of meaning, even though it is not apparent on the surface of things. The words are empty, but the intention behind them is full.
And then there is music: woodwind and brass instruments work on the principle of air being forced through confined empty spaces. The clarion call can be used as an image for the poetic word, and that carries not a connotation of empty noise, but of resounding clarity. And clarity is the ultimate end towards which all poetry tends. The difference between empty noise and fullness of sound is all in the attunement of the instrument. Hollowness can also be resounding, resonant. Hollow words can ring true. Emptiness can be beautiful. In Mallarmé, emptiness makes for sonic beauty, 'aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore'; in Shelley, emptiness makes for visual beauty: 'Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.'
The nineteenth century, struggling anew with the age-old anxieties bound up with empty words, came up with a new poetics of emptiness and plenitude. I have two main reference points here, and I think they are worth quoting in full.
First, Baudelaire:
La Cloche fêlée
Il est amer et doux, pendant les nuits d'hiver,
D'écouter, près du feu qui palpite et qui fume,
Les souvenirs lointains lentement s'élever
Au bruit des carillons qui chantent dans la brume.
Bienheureuse la cloche au gosier vigoureux
Qui, malgré sa vieillesse, alerte et bien portante,
Jette fidèlement son cri religieux,
Ainsi qu'un vieux soldat qui veille sous la tente!
Moi, mon âme est fêlée, et lorsqu'en ses ennuis
Elle veut de ses chants peupler l'air froid des nuits,
Il arrive souvent que sa voix affaiblie
Semble le râle épais d'un blessé qu'on oublie
Au bord d'un lac de sang, sous un grand tas de morts,
Et qui meurt, sans bouger, dans d'immenses efforts.
'Tis bitter joy, as winter evenings wear
before a smoking hearth which flames aghast,
to hear slow memories mounting from the past,
while church-bells pierce the pall of misty air.
Blessèd the flawless bell, of metal rare,
the full-toned bourdon, void of rift and rust,
which like a guardsman faithful to his trust
hurls forth unfailingly its call to prayer!
My soul's a riven bell, that timidly
would fill the frozen night with melody,
but oft it falters, whisperingly weak
As, echoing over lakes of blood, a shriek
muffled by mounds of dead, from one who lies
moveless as they, though struggling till he dies.
— trans. Lewis Piaget Shanks (it's a faithless, cracking translation, but better than most – Baudelaire so often comes out in English translation as overwrought prose)
Baudelaire makes much of that ancient image of the cracked bell. He seems to hear the solid, true-ringing bell as an echo of a memory of a faith in God, a faith no longer possible. The un-cracked bell rings true; emptiness might also be faithful to the truth. But the imperfection in that emptiness, the crack in the bell, produces a faltering sound. The cracked bell is a cracked soul, whose voice is weak, a death rattle. But the poet seems to be asking: might not that death be more beautiful than the clarity of the faithful ring? Poetry supplies the answer.
Flaubert uses a similar image in this justly famous passage from Madame Bovary:
Emma ressemblait à toutes les maîtresses; et le charme de la nouveauté, peu à peu tombant comme un vêtement, laissait voir à nu l’éternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les mêmes formes et le même langage. Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions. Parce que des lèvres libertines ou vénales lui avaient murmuré des phrases pareilles, il ne croyait que faiblement à la candeur de celles-là; on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres; comme si la plénitude de l’âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exacte mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions, ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles. (II. 12.)
Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.
— trans. E. M. Aveling
Again, that anxiety about emptiness in the discourse of love and sentiment. The image of the cracked kettle is supremely affecting, but I am more interested in the part that comes before. Can the 'fullness' of the soul overflow sometimes in the emptiest of metaphors? Rodolphe thinks that fullness of soul cannot be expressed in empty words, 'comme si la plénitude de l'âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides'; but we know that it can. This is the tragedy of Madame Bovary: the tragic truth of the fullness of sentiment behind the emptiness of words.
But the play of emptiness and fullness is not to be taken lightly, and hoc est corpus might be so much empty hocus pocus, depending of the hearer. Charity is a virtue of full-fill-ment, but it is etymologically the same as carity: lack, emptiness.
The metaphor is not, to be sure, the sole preserve of religious discourse. It has a rich history in poetry, in satire, in polemical writing. Plato denounced the emptiness of the Sophists' rhetoric, and throughout antiquity the principal charge levelled against sophistical rhetoric continued to be its emptiness; Persius satirized the inanity of bad poetry; Juvenal the empty words of flatterers and panders. Cicero, in the De Oratore, writes that speech without learning is but empty chatter ('est enim et scientia comprehendenda rerum plurimarum, sine qua verborum volubilitas inanis atque inridenda est'). In the Renaissance, they were full of it: an anxiety about the emptiness of words, that is. Du Bellay wrote against the empty poetry of his contemporaries, in particular the pétrarquisants (emptiness is a charge often levelled against love poetry especially); Erasmus wrote against the empty rhetoric of the ciceronians. Glory is an empty word, according to Montaigne (and many others). Fame, too, is an empty word; and Fama lives in a hollow house of ringing bronze, according to Ovid: bronze makes a lot of empty noise. But it can be a paradox too for an empty vessel to be full of noise. If life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, it is at least full of sound and fury, not empty.
According to the logic of this metaphor, words are figured as receptacles that may be empty or full of intent, sincerity, learning. So emptiness seems to equate to absolute lack of sincerity, or the absence of intention behind a word's meaning.
But, then: Ovid's Echo returns the words of Narcissus in what seems to be empty repetition. They have meaning nevertheless, because they are invested with an emotional truth, which Narcissus does not recognise (Flaubert's Rodophe has the same problem: 'Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions'). The emptiness behind the utterance is transfigured by some paradox of thought into plenitude of meaning, even though it is not apparent on the surface of things. The words are empty, but the intention behind them is full.
And then there is music: woodwind and brass instruments work on the principle of air being forced through confined empty spaces. The clarion call can be used as an image for the poetic word, and that carries not a connotation of empty noise, but of resounding clarity. And clarity is the ultimate end towards which all poetry tends. The difference between empty noise and fullness of sound is all in the attunement of the instrument. Hollowness can also be resounding, resonant. Hollow words can ring true. Emptiness can be beautiful. In Mallarmé, emptiness makes for sonic beauty, 'aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore'; in Shelley, emptiness makes for visual beauty: 'Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.'
The nineteenth century, struggling anew with the age-old anxieties bound up with empty words, came up with a new poetics of emptiness and plenitude. I have two main reference points here, and I think they are worth quoting in full.
First, Baudelaire:
La Cloche fêlée
Il est amer et doux, pendant les nuits d'hiver,
D'écouter, près du feu qui palpite et qui fume,
Les souvenirs lointains lentement s'élever
Au bruit des carillons qui chantent dans la brume.
Bienheureuse la cloche au gosier vigoureux
Qui, malgré sa vieillesse, alerte et bien portante,
Jette fidèlement son cri religieux,
Ainsi qu'un vieux soldat qui veille sous la tente!
Moi, mon âme est fêlée, et lorsqu'en ses ennuis
Elle veut de ses chants peupler l'air froid des nuits,
Il arrive souvent que sa voix affaiblie
Semble le râle épais d'un blessé qu'on oublie
Au bord d'un lac de sang, sous un grand tas de morts,
Et qui meurt, sans bouger, dans d'immenses efforts.
'Tis bitter joy, as winter evenings wear
before a smoking hearth which flames aghast,
to hear slow memories mounting from the past,
while church-bells pierce the pall of misty air.
Blessèd the flawless bell, of metal rare,
the full-toned bourdon, void of rift and rust,
which like a guardsman faithful to his trust
hurls forth unfailingly its call to prayer!
My soul's a riven bell, that timidly
would fill the frozen night with melody,
but oft it falters, whisperingly weak
As, echoing over lakes of blood, a shriek
muffled by mounds of dead, from one who lies
moveless as they, though struggling till he dies.
— trans. Lewis Piaget Shanks (it's a faithless, cracking translation, but better than most – Baudelaire so often comes out in English translation as overwrought prose)
Baudelaire makes much of that ancient image of the cracked bell. He seems to hear the solid, true-ringing bell as an echo of a memory of a faith in God, a faith no longer possible. The un-cracked bell rings true; emptiness might also be faithful to the truth. But the imperfection in that emptiness, the crack in the bell, produces a faltering sound. The cracked bell is a cracked soul, whose voice is weak, a death rattle. But the poet seems to be asking: might not that death be more beautiful than the clarity of the faithful ring? Poetry supplies the answer.
Flaubert uses a similar image in this justly famous passage from Madame Bovary:
Emma ressemblait à toutes les maîtresses; et le charme de la nouveauté, peu à peu tombant comme un vêtement, laissait voir à nu l’éternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les mêmes formes et le même langage. Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions. Parce que des lèvres libertines ou vénales lui avaient murmuré des phrases pareilles, il ne croyait que faiblement à la candeur de celles-là; on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres; comme si la plénitude de l’âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exacte mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions, ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles. (II. 12.)
Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.
— trans. E. M. Aveling
Again, that anxiety about emptiness in the discourse of love and sentiment. The image of the cracked kettle is supremely affecting, but I am more interested in the part that comes before. Can the 'fullness' of the soul overflow sometimes in the emptiest of metaphors? Rodolphe thinks that fullness of soul cannot be expressed in empty words, 'comme si la plénitude de l'âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides'; but we know that it can. This is the tragedy of Madame Bovary: the tragic truth of the fullness of sentiment behind the emptiness of words.
April 23, 2006
I have been studying how I may compare...
Since it is St. George's Day, and the anniversary of Shakespeare's birthday and deathday too, I'll permit myself to post my favourite of Shakey's soliloquies. There's so much in this, and it can be performed in so many different ways (the last performance I saw played it for laughs, at least in part; and that works, too – 'yet I'll hammer it out' is quite funny, I'll give 'em that). If ever we need a working definition of literary genius, this little speech will supply the criteria. Plenty of mixed and over-stretched metaphors, weird ideas and convoluted turns of phrase that 'set the word itself against the word' – but they work somehow, and that's what makes it so great. Anyway, enough preamble: here's the prison speech from Act V Scene V of Richard II:
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world:
And for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it; yet I'll hammer it out.
My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father; and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humours like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented. The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine, are intermix'd
With scruples and do set the word itself
Against the word:
As thus, 'Come, little ones,' and then again,
'It is as hard to come as for a camel
To thread the postern of a small needle's eye.'
Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot
Unlikely wonders; how these vain weak nails
May tear a passage through the flinty ribs
Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls,
And, for they cannot, die in their own pride.
Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves
That they are not the first of fortune's slaves,
Nor shall not be the last; like silly beggars
Who sitting in the stocks refuge their shame,
That many have and others must sit there;
And in this thought they find a kind of ease,
Bearing their own misfortunes on the back
Of such as have before endured the like.
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by and by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing. Music do I hear?
[Music]
Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To cheque time broke in a disorder'd string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours: but my time
Runs posting on in Bolingbroke's proud joy,
While I stand fooling here, his Jack o' the clock.
This music mads me; let it sound no more;
For though it have holp madmen to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad.
Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me!
For 'tis a sign of love; and love to Richard
Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world.
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world:
And for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it; yet I'll hammer it out.
My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father; and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humours like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented. The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine, are intermix'd
With scruples and do set the word itself
Against the word:
As thus, 'Come, little ones,' and then again,
'It is as hard to come as for a camel
To thread the postern of a small needle's eye.'
Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot
Unlikely wonders; how these vain weak nails
May tear a passage through the flinty ribs
Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls,
And, for they cannot, die in their own pride.
Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves
That they are not the first of fortune's slaves,
Nor shall not be the last; like silly beggars
Who sitting in the stocks refuge their shame,
That many have and others must sit there;
And in this thought they find a kind of ease,
Bearing their own misfortunes on the back
Of such as have before endured the like.
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by and by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing. Music do I hear?
[Music]
Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To cheque time broke in a disorder'd string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours: but my time
Runs posting on in Bolingbroke's proud joy,
While I stand fooling here, his Jack o' the clock.
This music mads me; let it sound no more;
For though it have holp madmen to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad.
Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me!
For 'tis a sign of love; and love to Richard
Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world.
April 21, 2006
Snookered
Excerpt from The Enantiodromic Psychopathology of Ball Games by Diogenes Teufelsdrockh (Thélème: Editiones Grobensianae, 2006).
The Metaphysics of snooker
The shifting configurations of the balls might furnish a model for the configurations of elementary particles in the Laplacean universe. Everything depends on collisions. Each shot is not an isolated event, but a fundamental reconfiguration of the elements in a closed system. The skilful player will 'cannon' or 'disturb' other balls as he pots the object ball. The game changes, always. But the cue ball always takes the role of 'efficient cause'. The white never deviates from this course; but the white, at the same time, is the only ball that may deviate from its proper course. It can be made to screw back, to follow through, to swerve. Its motion can only be satisfactorily defined with reference to the contact of cue to ball: the cue is the primum mobile of the snooker system.
Snooker definitively proves that Pascal was right to ridicule Descartes' conception of a universe that requires a divine 'chiquenaude' ('flick') to set things in motion. In snooker, the 'flick' is not a primordial cause but a constantly renewed force that acts repetitively upon the elements of the system. The snooker universe resembles the Leibnizian universe governed in its every motion by an ever-watchful, constantly intervening God. The skill of snooker resides not in the potting of balls but in the control of the cue ball. The game is all in the point at which the cue strikes the cue ball: top, side, screw.
But there is a possibility for deviation. The 'kick' is the name given to the effect caused by minuscule particles of extraneous dirt becoming attached to the balls. This can cause a 'bad contact', or an unpredictable deviation in the path of the balls. This is the Lucretian 'clinamen', the 'swerve' that introduces an element of pure chance into the system.
In snooker, a 'miss' is called when the player fails to strike the object ball and the referee judges that the attempt made was not sufficiently good. When a 'miss' is called and taken, all balls must be replaced in their original positions and the shot must be taken again. The game phase resets to its zero point. This is a temporal anomaly. The reset configuration is supposed to replicate identically the configuration of balls that occasioned the 'miss'; but of course it does not, and an element of human error is introduced into the system. The snooker system is therefore not absolutely deterministic.
The snooker system is basically entropic. The balls only return to their original position (the state of minimal entropy and maximal order) by an intervention at the end of the frame. It can never happen as a result of the game's natural development. The snooker game definitively disproves Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence.
The Ethics of snooker
The cue ball is homo sacer. The cue ball is the only ball that has no value attached to it and can never have value: it is blank, undefined, fundamentally Other. The white is the only ball the cue touches, but it is in a sense 'untouchable' since it must not be potted; it must not sink. If ever it does sink, it is replaced on the playing surface, not at a given point (as with the colours) but within the confines of the 'D', at any point within that area. It has no designated spot on the table. The 'D' very obviously delineates the space of Death, and in this sense the cue ball is the 'living dead', the something that must be killed but which cannot be killed by the agency of Law.
The Aesthetics of snooker
The table layout at the start of each frame is an archetype of aesthetic purity. The fifteen reds disposed in an equilateral triangle with the pink at its apex and the black positioned at a remove from the base, describing a line that bisects the triangle. Yellow, brown and green on the baulk line, in perfect alignment along the base of the D, a syzygy of Mercury, Earth and Venus. The blue, isolated in the perfect centre of the baize, "blue like an orange".
The Economics of snooker
In snooker, value is fixed, absolute. It is inextricably tied to colour. Red=1, Brown=4, Black=7. This cannot change; except in one limit case, that of the 'free ball'. A free ball is awarded when a player has left his opponent snookered by committing a foul. In this case, any ball can be nominated to take on the value of the object ball. The free ball is the transferable value that disrupts the regulation of a system whose basis is in intrinsic value; it momentarily allows balls to exchange value. Balls must be potted in a predetermined order, except where a free ball is awarded. The free ball allows one ball to stand for another, and it is that single anomalous event that changes everything. In order for the system to function according to a rule of fixed value, there must be floating value that confers worth per negationem upon the established order of things. The free ball fulfils precisely the function that gambling fulfils in the work/commodity-driven economy.
The 'Pataphysics of snooker
The aim of 'pataphysical snooker is to create the conditions under which the ideal configuration of balls might become possible. This is done by using an implement (the 'cue') to regulate the ambient conditions by causing small changes in temperature and atmospheric pressure in the space surrounding the cue ball. The most efficient way to do this is to strike the cue ball with the tip of the cue. Different atmospheric effects (eddies, turbulence, etc.) can be achieved by striking the cue ball at different loci on its surface and by causing the cue ball to collide with the other balls on the table. Balls may be removed from and/or replaced upon the playing surface in an effort to regulate air flow and pressure. Once the ideal atmospheric conditions have been achieved (usually by removing as many balls as possible from the playing surface), the balls may be positioned in the ideal configuration.
Note: sections of the foregoing were originally published in Intellectual Impostures 17.4 (Fall 1998), and are reproduced here by permission of the editors.
The Metaphysics of snooker
The shifting configurations of the balls might furnish a model for the configurations of elementary particles in the Laplacean universe. Everything depends on collisions. Each shot is not an isolated event, but a fundamental reconfiguration of the elements in a closed system. The skilful player will 'cannon' or 'disturb' other balls as he pots the object ball. The game changes, always. But the cue ball always takes the role of 'efficient cause'. The white never deviates from this course; but the white, at the same time, is the only ball that may deviate from its proper course. It can be made to screw back, to follow through, to swerve. Its motion can only be satisfactorily defined with reference to the contact of cue to ball: the cue is the primum mobile of the snooker system.
Snooker definitively proves that Pascal was right to ridicule Descartes' conception of a universe that requires a divine 'chiquenaude' ('flick') to set things in motion. In snooker, the 'flick' is not a primordial cause but a constantly renewed force that acts repetitively upon the elements of the system. The snooker universe resembles the Leibnizian universe governed in its every motion by an ever-watchful, constantly intervening God. The skill of snooker resides not in the potting of balls but in the control of the cue ball. The game is all in the point at which the cue strikes the cue ball: top, side, screw.
But there is a possibility for deviation. The 'kick' is the name given to the effect caused by minuscule particles of extraneous dirt becoming attached to the balls. This can cause a 'bad contact', or an unpredictable deviation in the path of the balls. This is the Lucretian 'clinamen', the 'swerve' that introduces an element of pure chance into the system.
In snooker, a 'miss' is called when the player fails to strike the object ball and the referee judges that the attempt made was not sufficiently good. When a 'miss' is called and taken, all balls must be replaced in their original positions and the shot must be taken again. The game phase resets to its zero point. This is a temporal anomaly. The reset configuration is supposed to replicate identically the configuration of balls that occasioned the 'miss'; but of course it does not, and an element of human error is introduced into the system. The snooker system is therefore not absolutely deterministic.
The snooker system is basically entropic. The balls only return to their original position (the state of minimal entropy and maximal order) by an intervention at the end of the frame. It can never happen as a result of the game's natural development. The snooker game definitively disproves Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence.
The Ethics of snooker
The cue ball is homo sacer. The cue ball is the only ball that has no value attached to it and can never have value: it is blank, undefined, fundamentally Other. The white is the only ball the cue touches, but it is in a sense 'untouchable' since it must not be potted; it must not sink. If ever it does sink, it is replaced on the playing surface, not at a given point (as with the colours) but within the confines of the 'D', at any point within that area. It has no designated spot on the table. The 'D' very obviously delineates the space of Death, and in this sense the cue ball is the 'living dead', the something that must be killed but which cannot be killed by the agency of Law.
The Aesthetics of snooker
The table layout at the start of each frame is an archetype of aesthetic purity. The fifteen reds disposed in an equilateral triangle with the pink at its apex and the black positioned at a remove from the base, describing a line that bisects the triangle. Yellow, brown and green on the baulk line, in perfect alignment along the base of the D, a syzygy of Mercury, Earth and Venus. The blue, isolated in the perfect centre of the baize, "blue like an orange".
The Economics of snooker
In snooker, value is fixed, absolute. It is inextricably tied to colour. Red=1, Brown=4, Black=7. This cannot change; except in one limit case, that of the 'free ball'. A free ball is awarded when a player has left his opponent snookered by committing a foul. In this case, any ball can be nominated to take on the value of the object ball. The free ball is the transferable value that disrupts the regulation of a system whose basis is in intrinsic value; it momentarily allows balls to exchange value. Balls must be potted in a predetermined order, except where a free ball is awarded. The free ball allows one ball to stand for another, and it is that single anomalous event that changes everything. In order for the system to function according to a rule of fixed value, there must be floating value that confers worth per negationem upon the established order of things. The free ball fulfils precisely the function that gambling fulfils in the work/commodity-driven economy.
The 'Pataphysics of snooker
The aim of 'pataphysical snooker is to create the conditions under which the ideal configuration of balls might become possible. This is done by using an implement (the 'cue') to regulate the ambient conditions by causing small changes in temperature and atmospheric pressure in the space surrounding the cue ball. The most efficient way to do this is to strike the cue ball with the tip of the cue. Different atmospheric effects (eddies, turbulence, etc.) can be achieved by striking the cue ball at different loci on its surface and by causing the cue ball to collide with the other balls on the table. Balls may be removed from and/or replaced upon the playing surface in an effort to regulate air flow and pressure. Once the ideal atmospheric conditions have been achieved (usually by removing as many balls as possible from the playing surface), the balls may be positioned in the ideal configuration.
Note: sections of the foregoing were originally published in Intellectual Impostures 17.4 (Fall 1998), and are reproduced here by permission of the editors.
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