aesthetics
’Tis not enough, taste, judgment, learning join
The cone: Mr. Ruskin talks of quite other things
Contemplate, in the garden, the serpent. Become, in thought, the serpent.
Remorseless
A tiny moth was fluttering at the curtain. George leaped up from my bed, curved through the air, swallowed the moth in a single muscular ensemble, continued ascending for a moment, clawed himself, swinging, onto the curtain, and then jumped back down. He landed on my head, leaving my scalp gashed in two curving lines.
A few hours later, the rising sun revealed him to be remorseless.
There was nothing I could do except to make a record of the occurrence and then go pessimistic about its effect. Art tells everyone who tries to look into it, “Remember me all you want, but I won’t remember.” Then it adds: “Even if I were not a picture but a poem made of words appearing to speak, I wouldn’t speak. Unlike you who copied me down, I am gone from your memory. I am elsewhere in time now, and the chasm that opened between me and you at the moth-moment can never be bridged. Forever after, anyone who looks at me will become a casualty of the void. Art’s double function is first to fill the void with false memory and then to reforge that fiction into a tool for outliving with.”
Also Daguerre
First edition:
Supplement:
Par exemple:
Photography shows this:
if we can attain to becoming an image, we can attain to becoming a self — that is, an object of perception knowably independent of its perceiver. What an idol communicates is only between itself and the god that speaks to itself through it. Before the idol, we perceivers are to learn to stop knowing and only see.
A steamroller, a cat, five judgments, and Miss Moore
1.
2, as posted yesterday.
3. About (2),
— Yong Ju writes, “Cute!”
— Jane writes, “Amazing eyes!”
— Cora writes, “Darling!”
— Susan writes, “Hooray for kittens!!!”
— Fran writes, “Scary . .”
4. Within duly qualifying quotation marks, Miss Moore tentatively concludes in her “To a Steam Roller” that
Therefore (5),
Seen, the real lights its own way into meaning
Airship with airboat
If they’re to continue bearing our consciousness through the restlessly changing universe, the forms of our knowledge will also have to change. The men of this image, for example, are enclosed in a form shaped for the knowledge of earth and water. Soon, but not yet, it will be reshaped for the knowledge of air.
But not yet because the men don’t yet have a new name for their old form. They are still bound to earth and water by the old name, and they haven’t realized yet that the form’s impending ascent into air has left the name’s primary referent behind and reduced what is left to metaphor.
The name is Gondola. On earth, Gondola signifies transit through narrow waterways in a city delimited by history and language. But when this gondola ascends through limit-disdaining air, the men it bears within will learn that it needs a new name. With that revelation, the renamed form will be changed. It will no longer be made of boat-wood and boat-rope and sailcloth, and so it will no longer have to be thought of as boat-shaped. The men in the image can’t yet speak the new form’s new name. They are still under tuition in the Venetian dialect of the old form, a dialect that includes the term gondola. But between the student Venetians and us an educational caption at the image’s front plane promises that the new name will, in time, be taught. If the men there on the other side of the caption won’t have time to learn it, at least we on our side have already been taught that it will be learned.
For now, too, the caption teaches us something we can say in our own language about the language of the men in their gondola. It has to do with the limited time available for them to learn in, it’s in history’s own aesthetic form, and in that form it repeats once more history’s own unchangingly fascinating witticism: Little do they know.
Source: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. “Ausbildung von Zeppelin-Mannschaften an dem Schulschiff Hansa.” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47de-024d-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. Photoshopped. The caption translates as, “Training of zeppelin crews on the school ship Hansa.” Hansa’s period of service as a trainer (Wikipedia, “LZ 13 Hansa”) dates this photograph between early 1915 and August 1916.
With many thanks to the New York Public Library for its newly released collection of restriction-free digital images.